THE ELEMENTARY CANAL

The project for constructing a through waterway from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes has had a curious history. One of its most ardent sponsors was William Hale Thompson, the former mayor of Chicago, who embroidered it to include the Mississippi River and make Dubuque and St. Louis great international ports. So many arguments have been put forward on both sides that the fundamental problem has been very effectively obscured; the winter closing of the St. Lawrence and the fact that the taxation might not fall primarily upon the beneficiaries are balanced against the export stimulation which cheap transportation would bring.

Yesterday the British-American treaty on the waterway was brought before the United States Senate. Political observers prophesied a long battle between Eastern and middle-western interests, with a new card in the hands of the latter through the Civil Works Administration's role in national improvements. But the longest, the most influential, and the most decided of the attacks on the treaty came from Senator James Hamilton Lewis of Illinois. Mr. Lewis said that the waterway would give Great Britain an important wedge into our boundaries, and that the United States could not afford this wedge at a time when Russo-Japanese affairs made a British-American war an ever present danger. Three thousand miles of unfortified boundary separate the United States and Canada. The military value of the waterway treaty, if war were declared, has no more than a scholastic importance; the military value of the waterway itself, concentrated and infinitely easier to defend than any Atlantic port, is negligible. The defeat of the St. Lawrence project on sectional grounds would be politically intelligible; Its defeat on grounds such as this, besides creating a difficult international situation, would be political bathos.