channel and cause greater depth in the Ohio and Upper Mississippi. These have proven only partially successful. There are many who believe that the Mississippi River will again become a great highway of commerce and argue for a 14-foot channel from Chicago via the Illinois River and the great river to the Gulf. A barge line was started in the summer of 1927 on the Mississippi above St. Louis. It will be some time before we can predict success or failure for this and other traffic programs planned to renew transportation on the river and its tributaries.

FLOOD CONTROL

The second great problem of vital interest to those living on the flood plains of the Mississippi and its tributaries is that of flood control. The great flood of 1927 - the most distinctive of all was one of some fifteen very serious floods that have occurred in about 50 years. Fernando de Soto's party found the river at flood, and many seasons of high water have been known since, notably those of 1785 and 1844. Although the people who live in the valley of the

Mississippi have many valuable resources, they also have a continental climate, usually changeable, but sometimes very erratic. Untimely rains, combined with melting snows or a long period of wet weather, followed by heavy rains over much of the valley, cause high water in the flood plain areas.

It should be emphasized that the area affected by floods is only a small part of the Mississippi Valley (shown by accompanying map). It is advocated by many that parts of the area so often submerged and so sparsely populated should be abandoned and all efforts be combined on attempts to protect the more populous and prosperous areas. If loss of life can be prevented, this would seem logical, for there is no more reason to ask the Government to protect an area subject to overflow and whose owner takes a chance than to ask that same Government to protect from drought or frost. However, the Mississippi is the great drainage artery of the Mississippi Valley and as such must ever be of great interest to the inhabitants of most of the area between the Alleghany and Rocky Mountains.

IN

N the past three years I have addressed many in support of further development of our inland waterways. In fact the Secretary of Commerce is enjoined by the organic act creating that office to foster and promote the development of transportation. It is a subject that can interest only the serious-minded, for any contribution to public thought must be by economic reasoning, not by oratory.

I am concerned with this improvement because it will contribute to the wealth and economic progress of every section of the Union. It will contribute to the unity of the nation. It is of concern to every one of our millions of farms and homes. The Mississippi Valley Association, representing all parts of the Mid-West, has been long devoted to the promotion of flood control and inland waterways; it has a record of great accomplishment. But the work is far from complete, and that work and mine requires that we should formulate and support plans not only for tomorrow but with vision of the distant future, for the day is here when we must look to the welfare of not alone 115,000,000 Americans of our generation, but we have a responsibility toward the 150,000,000 Americans who will be living in our children's time.

MISSISSIPPI FLOOD CONTROL

The most important event in our national life during the past year has

1An address before the Mississippi Valley Association, St. Louis, Missouri, Monday evening, November 14, 1927.

Seldom do we reprint addresses in The Annals. But this address is too good to miss.-C. L. K.

been one which bears directly upon the development and control of our great rivers that is, the Mississippi Flood. Sad and heartrending as it has been in its human aspects, severe and discouraging as have been the economic losses, it at least serves to bring home to the American people the increasing dangers to a growing population which lurk in our great streams if they be not adequately controlled.

I had the honor to be chosen by President Coolidge to organize and direct the relief activities which were supported so generously by our Government and the people at large through the Red Cross. No man could occupy that responsibility and have witnessed its scenes without being deeply moved to the human necessity of immediate and final prevention of its ever recurring again.

I have little need to dwell upon the causes of the great flood and its destruction. But there is an aspect of the flood that has perhaps not been sufficiently emphasized. The destructivity of this flood was partly due to the rapidly increasing settlement of the flood area. This increase will continue, and such dangers to our country will increase as years go on unless we establish adequate controls. The great delta of the Mississippi River, which in reality extends from Cairo to the Gulf, has been for untold centuries the spillway for our interior rivers. They spread their annual floods over these

richest of alluvial lands for a thousand miles long and from 20 to 150 miles wide. With the pressure of population, our people have, more especially

in the past quarter of a century, invaded the flood region. With courage and resolution they have overcome the swamp and forest, they have converted it into homes and productive farms. And in so doing, they have of necessity crowded out the annual floods with peace until finally they have forced the river in flood time to confine itself to its own channel.

I need not recount to you that, with the unprecedented volume of water of this year, these barriers crumpled up and the river spread itself again over its old flood area. Some 750,000 of our people were compelled to flee their homes in jeopardy of their lives. Damage to their farms and villages amounted to hundreds of millions.

Such a flood 25 years ago would have wrought far less destruction simply because there were fewer people and less property in its track. If we look into the future but a quarter of a century, we can envisage even far greater dangers than those past. We may not have so great a flood again for many years to come. But the richness of these soils and the pressure of our growing people will some day see 5 or 10 million of them settled under these levees. No one can contemplate these millions of our fellow citizens living in such jeopardy without adequate and final protection.

I believe the whole of the United States is unanimous in that we must undertake such engineering works as will give security-not only now but for the future. Our people have arrived at this conclusion because of their warm sympathy for the welfare of their fellow citizens. But, viewed from the more narrow point of view, the destruction of property is the loss of the entire nation-it is not solely the loss of the individual sufferers. The loss of several millions of acres of crops in this flood deprived the American people of

just that much goods which they might have otherwise consumed or exported, and again every worker and every farmer in our country to some degree was a loser through the decreased buying power of flood sufferers themselves. Every investor in railways and industry of the South lost something.

Our able engineering staff under the leadership of General Jadwin will in a few weeks have consummated their plans by which these floods can be controlled. And it devolves upon my colleague, Secretary Davis, to present them to Congress as the basis for legislation.

I am confident of the outcome that we shall as a nation within the next few months have taken such action as will not only give assurance of safety to the whole of our fellow citizens in the flood territory, but that will give such security as will guarantee the continued development of this great region.

INLAND WATERWAYS

But, in our necessity to remake and energetically construct such flood control works as will guarantee protection against these calamities, we must not be diverted from our march to the improvement of our inland waterways. That is as important to the suffering flood states as it is to our people elsewhere. Indeed, we have made great progress in the past year in this great improvement of our national estate, both in actual construction and in advancement of public support.

It is perhaps unnecessary to recount that every great national development in transportation must pass through many stages. There must be a situation to be remedied, there must be compelling cause for action; there must be a determination of the remedies that are available; there must be a definite plan conceived; the works must be constructed; and finally they must be used.

THE SITUATION TO REMEDY

The urgency of the situation to be remedied, to a large degree, grows from the economic shifts due to the war which have brought a new setting to all our mid-Continent. The necessarily large advance in our railroad rates as a result of higher wages and cost of materials since the war serves to set a row of tollgates around the Middle West. There is thus a charge, new with the war, against all goods coming into the Mid-West and all goods going out. It is not as if all parts of the country and all parts of the world had been placed under a similar tax, for that is not the

case.

You will find that ocean rates have returned to a prewar basis—and thus the folks of seaboard countries do not pay these additional tolls to and from market, and therefore they have today a greatly increased competitive advantage over their fellows in the interior. This, together with the completion of the Panama Canal, the full effect of which was not evident until after the war, all combine to distort the economic setting of this whole Mid-West.

Mid-West agriculture and Mid-West industry have been placed in a new relationship to different parts of our country and to the world markets as a whole. If we would restore these former relationships, we must find fundamentally cheaper transportation for our grain and bulk commodities which we export and the raw materials which we import into the Mid-West.

I can possibly make this problem of economic shifts more clear by example: a great part of the agriculture which competes with our farmers lies to a considerable degree in Argentina, Australia, Eastern Europe and India. Those agricultural areas are all nearer to seaboard and their ocean rates to the common markets remain the same as

prewar, while our rail rates to seaboard on wheat, for instance, have increased about 8 to 18 cents per bushel. Therefore foreign farmers reach European markets at a less cost in proportion to prewar than can our Mid-West American farmer. In actual figures, the competing farmers from the Argentine, for instance, have felt an increase in rates of only 2 cents per bushel.

I believe there is general agreement that the cost of transportation is a deduction from the price the farmer receives at the world's markets—and besides that the price at which he realizes his surplus in foreign and seaboard markets makes the price of his whole product at home, so that the effect of increased transportation rates to these markets is far greater than the bare amount as applied to exports only. It is an enormous sum when applied to our crops and is one of the contributing causes of the farmer's postwar difficulties. It is not all the farm problem, but it is a substantial part.

While the Panama Canal has carried great benefits to our people, we cannot ignore the fact that it has also contributed to distort the competitive relationships of the Mid-West and our seaboard business and industry. It has drawn the East and West seaboards much closer together by greatly decreasing transportation costs and therefore tends to draw an area of Pacific's business formerly enjoyed by the MidWest toward the Atlantic States. We can roughly visualize the combined effect of the canal and higher rail rates if we set up a new measuring unit in the shape of the number of cents which it takes to carry a ton of staple goods at present rates. Using that measuring rod and taking the cheapest routes, we find that before the war New York was 1904 cents away from San Francisco, while now it is only 1680 cents away. But a given Mid-West point, which

was 2600 cents away from the Pacific Coast before the war, is today 3114 cents away. In effect this Mid-West point has moved 514 cents away from the Pacific Coast while New York has moved 224 cents closer to the Pacific Coast. A similar calculation will show that in the same period this Mid-West point has moved 694 cents away from the markets of the Atlantic seaboard and South America.

All this causes certain types of MidWest business to migrate to seaboard. It steadily tends to establish manufacture nearer to seaboard and farther from the heart of agriculture, to the mutual disadvantage of both. It likewise has a tendency to limit the area of Mid-West wholesale distribution. Individual merchants and manufacturers in the interior can give you many instances of it all.

From all this serious shift in economic currents in its effect on agriculture and upon business we surely have something worthy of our best effort in remedy. And remedy lies as I have said in finding cheaper transportation in bulk products of agriculture and in raw materials.

THE REMEDY

With the higher cost of labor and materials, we cannot expect any consequential reduction in our railroad rates without ruin to that vital circulating system. Our railways have reached the highest efficiency in their history, and we must maintain them in that condition. We cannot close the Panama Canal. Nor can we raise Atlantic Ocean and other sea rates, because the standards of living in the rest of the world, unlike our own, have not increased over prewar, and therefore the cost of operating foreign overseas shipping is not far from a prewar basis.

In any examination of our country for remedy, we have naturally turned

to a consideration of the magnificent natural waterways which Frovidence has blessed us with. It is therefore our conception that we should deepen our rivers to permit modern barge transportation, deepen the outlet to the Great Lakes to permit ocean-going shipping, and to connect them all together into a definite transportation system.

THE PLAN

Your Association has for long years steadily fostered and forwarded the development of inland waterways. But the national mind perhaps, until in the past two or three years, has conceived waterways development as local projects of some immediate near by improvement, instead of in the wide vision of a comprehensive system of 12,000 miles of connected inland water transportation reaching from the Gulf to the Northern frontiers and from the Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

The plan can be simply stated:

It is to deepen the 9000 miles of the Mississippi and its tributaries to minimum depths of 6 to 9 feet so as to permit modern barge service-that is, the Mississippi system.

The construction of the St. Lawrence shipway from the Lakes to the Atlantic, thus opening every lake port to the vessels of the world over 3000 miles of deep waterways-the Great Lakes system.

There are other important waterway improvements of less size which bear directly and indirectly upon the MidWest. The stabilization of lake levels and deepening of the channels so as to permit full ship loading within the Lakes, the intracoastal waterways and the continuous development of our harbors are all works which must go forward some time but are not our par ticular subject tonight.

During the last year we have made