LOCKS

When the Louisiana purchase gave New Orleans to the Unite States the general expectation was that the Louisiana ort would become a clearing house for the whole Mississippi Valley and in time become one of the greatest cities of the world. But since popular expectation does not follow the imagination of Poe or Jules Verne it could not foresee that its prophecies would fall short of fulfillment thanks to the railroads. Sometimes, however, prophets are unwittingly right; the present chaotic condition of those railroads may yet result in the lifting of New Orleans to greatness while the natural course of events left her in peace.

The first step upward is the new nineteen million dollar canal which connects the Mississippi with the Gulf and opens the inner harbor and some hundred thousand vacant aces of adjacent harbor land to ocean going vessels. Curiously enough the project originated more than a hundred years ago in the epidemic of artificial waterways which produced the Eric canal and several others less famous in New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Then as now there was heed of increased facilities; then because the railroads were not yet in existence--now because the increased costs, embargoes and the like, have brown them into disrepute.

Nor is New Orleans canal the only result of the growth of shipping. The same dissatisfaction which indirectly brought that about has so augmented coastwise shipping, particularly Pacific, Atlantic, transportation by way of Panama, that a second canal connecting the two oceans was seriously discussed in a Cabinet meeting few days ago. With Panama traffic quadruped since 1914 and the fruit growers of the West turning more and more to the sea to avoid the prohibitive price required to pay the overland carriers, experts forecast that the locks of Gatun and Miraflores will be used to the limit of their capacities within the fifteen years necessary to complete a second passageway.

To be sure the plan is still etherial. Costa Rica, Salvador, and Honduras must give consent and grant rights similar to those bought from Nicaragua under President Wilson, before work can even be started. The suggested plan calls for the use of the Panama tolls, a million and a half dollars a month, to defray the cost of building; and the investment seem valuable particularly as the proposed route would shorten the time required from coast to coast by four or five days.

Thousand foot locks and a necessary depth of thirty to forty-five feet have not simplified canal building in the last century. But when governments, state or national, consider it profitable to appropriate millions to such purposes it seems that some optimists still have hopes of riches from a merchant marine, be it American or European.