velopment of the immense potential water-powers in New York State, for example. But the case is worse than that, according to the New York inland waterways committee. New York and New England will pay the entire cost! Why? The answer is somewhat complicated. In the first place, it must be explained that critics charge the international joint commission with enormously underestimating the cost of the canal. To provide a twentyfive-foot channel and create 1,464,000 horse-power will, they assert, cost not $252,000,000, but $1,000,000,000 or even $1,500,000,000. Now, assuming that this would be so, and assuming further that the navigation improvement must be paid for by current generated at the dams, it is of course easy to show that the power development will be saddled with an excessive burden, and that the current must be sold at a high price. Assuming still further that New York State and New England would meekly dig down and pay for this high-priced current, they would of course be paying for the canal.

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But the year 1920, say the enemies of the canal, was abnormal. The railroads were in chaos as a result of the war and government operation. The New York commission in opposition to the St. Lawrence ship canal and power project declares that it is not even a probability that the shortage will continue when normal conditions return. Yet I know that in my journeying through the Middle West in 1922 I found plenty of complaint of the shortage of railroad cars, and on October 6, 1922, the New York "World" said in a despatch from Washington:

"One of the moves made by the railway heads today was to apply an embargo on the shipment of wheat from some of the Middle Western states. This is to relieve the congestion at Buffalo and on the lines eastward which are being glutted with wheat for export."

On October 20, J. R. Howard, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said in a speech in Chicago:

"Not less than 12,000,000 bushels of grain are held up today from their normal movement toward the consumer. The result is, of course, that the elevators are choked, first at the seaboard, then at the terminal markets, and finally at the country point of production and shipment.

"And because of these railroad troubles our waterways are jammed. Canadian lines seem to be in even worse shape than the American, with the result that millions of bushels of Canadian wheat have been diverted down the lakes to the Buffalo elevators for reshipment to New York. Since it is impossible to haul this grain away from Buffalo fast enough, the elevators there are full to overflowing. Lake boats fearing delay there have raised their rates from two cents per bushel to eight cents. The New York Barge Canal rates have been raised from eight or nine cents to fourteen cents from Buffalo to New York. Rates from Buffalo to Montreal during the summer were four or five cents-now they are fifteen cents.

"Recently there has been an increase of five cents in the price of wheat at Liverpool. Not one cent of this was reflected on the great Middle Western markets. Still later another increase of three cents which was only partially reflected here. Between the

increase in lake carrying charges and the failure to secure the advanced price the loss to the farmer has been tremendous."

Any one who reads the newspapers in any year will find scores of similar news stories. Far from being abnormal, the shortage of cars, congestion at terminals, seem to have become a normal condition on American railroads, and particularly, as was stated above, on the lines between the Middle West and the Atlantic.

It is not in the province of this article to discuss the blame for this condition. The railroad heads have their theory. In a speech before the Railway Business Association in New York on November 9, 1922, Charles H. Markham, president of the Illinois Central, calling attention to the fact that the number of freight-cars and locomotives on American railroads has steadily failed to keep pace with the increase of freight offerings, and in the last five years has actually decreased, asserted that "Government regulation as it has been practised for fifteen years is almost wholly responsible for the decline of railroad development and for the existing shortage of transportation."

Then there is the adverse argument about the declining export of grain. "It is declining," says the opponent of the canal, "because of our increasing population and decreasing fertility of soil, and soon it will cease altogether. In the twenty years from 1880 to 1899 inclusive we exported thirty-one per cent. of our wheat production as wheat or flour. In the fifteen-year period from 1900 to 1914 inclusive we exported only twenty-one per cent. Yes, it is true that in the last seven years we have exported twenty-nine

per cent., but this has been due to the extraordinary demands of war and the breakdown of Russia. When Russia comes back, our export will revert to its normal decrease toward zero. Therefore your canal can't possibly be justified, for it 's on grain and grain export that you base most of your estimates."

But now comes the most serious adverse argument. Assume the sea-track opened to the heart of the continent, assume the great lake wharves piled high with food and manufactured goods for all the world, what of ships? The present lake freighters can't serve. Long narrow ore-, coal-, and wheatboxes with an engine in one end, they have neither the structural strength nor the motive power to brave the open sea. Ocean steamship lines must divert ships to lake ports, or build new ships for lake and ocean service, and all the Middle West's claims are based on the assumption that they will do so and that the ships will carry cargoes at much the same rates that prevail on ocean routes for like distances.

"Most ocean vessels draw twentyfive or thirty feet," asserts the enemy of the canal, "and the projected depth of your St. Lawrence project is twentyfive feet, and your lake channels and harbors range between nineteen and twenty-two feet. How can any ocean vessels come?"

But the Middle West asks the critic to look at the vessels passing through the Panama Canal, for example. Here are the records for last year: general cargo ships from the United Kingdom and Europe, 118 vessels in all; only thirty-six drew over twentyfive feet; eighty-two less than twentyfive; thirty-seven less than twenty. Vessels from our principal coast and

gulf ports in the same period: 603 in all; 364 drew less than twenty-five; 177 drew twenty-one feet or under. As for the lake harbors and channels, they are to be dredged.

"It will cost you millions," warns the East.

"All right; we know it. And we expect to get those millions back in the use of larger lake boats, with consequently lower freight rates."

But granting that, when the canal is dug, the ocean ships can come; but will they come?

The other day a prominent shipping man in New York said to me:

"Our ships make a turn around between here and Liverpool in four weeks. But we figure that it would take us eight weeks to make a turn around between Duluth or any other upper lake port and Liverpool. The distance is only a thousand miles greater, but you must remember a ship's slower speed in canals and restricted channels. A ship's operating expenses are determined by time rather than by distance covered. Wages and interest on investment and depreciation go on piling up just as fast when a boat is moving at five miles an hour or lying at the dock as when she is steaming full speed. The only difference is coal. So we would have to charge almost twice the rate from Duluth to Liverpool that we get from New York to Liverpool. The St. Lawrence people seem to expect a rate from the lakes to Liverpool only a little more than that from New York."

"What about insurance?” I asked. "A man over here at the Merchants' Association told me yesterday that the insurance on cargoes from Montreal to Liverpool was about twice that from New York to Liverpool."

"No, that's wrong." He turned to some records. "From the opening of navigation on the St. Lawrence to October 15, the rate per hundred dollars of cargo is twenty-seven cents and a half, or only two cents and a half more than from New York. But after October 15, when the fogs begin, it jumps rapidly. Thirty-two cents and a half up to November 1, then forty-two and a half to the middle of November, and fifty-five from then to the close of navigation. Unfortunately, this jump comes just when there would be the greatest rush of grain for export. But that is a thing for the shipper to worry about.

"From the operator's point of view," he went on, "there are one or two other important considerations. One is return loads. The big export of the Middle West to Europe is wheat. But if we were carrying wheat to Europe from Lake Superior, we should have to get a return load to operate profitably, and I don't see just what it would be. The principal imports the Middle West expects up the St. Lawrence, I see by their pamphlets, are coffee and sugar and rubber and hides and bananas. The coffee would come from Brazil, sugar from Cuba, rubber from the East Indies, hides probably from the Argentine or South Africa, bananas from Costa Rica, and I suppose they expect to export manufactured goods to those countries. But there another difficulty comes in. There is no concentration point on the lakes. When a vessel sails out of New York for the East Indies it hardly ever carries a whole cargo of the same goods. It may have automobiles, talkingmachines, pumps and motors, rubber tires, agricultural machinery, and so on, and it can load all these in New

York, because this is the concentration point for the commerce of the country. But can you imagine a ship going up to the lakes and stopping at Detroit for a quota of automobiles, then around at Saginaw for talking-machines, on to Milwaukee for its pumpsets, down to Chicago for plows and binders, and then back to Cleveland for a few tons of automobile tires to top the load?"

"We will develop a concentration point," I heard the Middle West replying. "Why won't Chicago or Cleveland be as good a concentration point for the Middle West as New York is for the East? They have better railroad facilities than New York, both of them. And don't talk to us about New York as a great concentration point. Congestion point is the right word."

"There is a third consideration," the shipping man resumed, "more serious than any other from our point of view. The St. Lawrence is a six or seven months' proposition. Suppose we build ships for the St. Lawrence route and get enough business to operate profitably through the summer. What should we do with these ships in the closed season? We might have no other runs for them, and yet an ocean vessel must operate all the year round to make a return on the investment."

"Lake boats seem to make a return on the investment in a seven months' season," I suggested.

"But they cost much less per ton to build," he countered, "and they load and unload much more rapidly than an ocean vessel can, and their operating expense is a good deal less."

All this should, I suppose, put a quietus on the Middle-Westerner and

his hopes. Will it? Not at all. He will say that any one who asserts that ships will not come is prejudiced; that the ships will inevitably come, and that if they do not come, then Congress or somebody must do something so that they will come.

As far as his waterway is concerned, he unquestionably will get that dug if he maintains his enthusiasm and determination and an agreement can be made with Canada. The MiddleWesterner can overwhelm New York and New England at Washington. New York knows that. "The plan is in imminent danger of adoption," cries the New York State Waterways Committee in a pamphlet of alarm, "because it has appealed powerfully to the imagination of the West."

There is, indeed, more than immediate economic need behind the MiddleWesterner's belief in the St. Lawrence waterway. There is ambition. Our eternal American ambition to become greater than we are the ambition of Duluth to grow as big as Milwaukee, of Milwaukee to outstrip Detroit, of Detroit to be a second Chicago, by some magic of water transport, of freedom to the markets of the world. There is pride. The Middle-Westerner wants to be able to say: "We take no second place to New York. We, too, are a seaport town." And there is the fascination of the sea itself, the pathway to the ends of the earth. He has a vision of the flags of Cuba and Holland and England and the Argentine and Japan coming over his horizons and of being able to go down to the dock and smell the smells of the Orient.

Yes, he must have his rightful outlet to the sea.

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OR whatever reasons, the universities in the United States no longer put such a shoulder to the wheel of creative literature as they put there half a century or so ago. No poet of the relative eminence of Longfellow, no wit of the relative eminence of Holmes, no critic of the relative eminence of Lowell, is now also a professor. The gulf which, in retrospect, appears to have divided these reputable citizens from Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau, as well as from Poe and Whitman, has grown wider and has caused new alinements, until creative writers and scholars alike seem often to forget that beyond the gulf from each of them there is another side concerned with letters. The scholars spend their talents, often admirable, on antiquarian research, but rarely know or care enough to encourage, interpret, or preserve the best that is being done from year to year. The creative writers know or care little about antiquarian research and not much more about those kinds of learning which alone can impart certain of the most solid merits to masterpieces. In creative circles it is regarded as singular that Robert Frost intermittently and Robert Herrick persistently hold professorships; in professorial circles it is commonly thought best, when an active poet or novelist is added to the staff of a university, to

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keep him below the salt with the instructors or among the side shows with the extension lecturers. Doubtless there is no cure for this division. Chaucer, Shakspere, Milton, Fielding, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hardy, were not professors; nor, for that matter, have many of the great critics been: Dryden, Johnson, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Emerson, Emerson, as against Arnold and Saintsbury, who both wore their academic mantles lightly. Doubtless the men of imagination will go on hacking at their own sweet wills, and the men of erudition will go on carefully gathering up the chips when they are dry. It seems a pity.

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In the United States, however, there is one professor who does not fit comfortably into this scheme. The experimenters who have felt the lash of Stuart P. Sherman, as most experimenters have at one time or another, might possibly like it better if they could accuse him of the common academic sins of dullness or of ignorance of what is current. Unfortunately, he commits neither of these sins. He is both a poet and a wit, with a robust and dramatic energy, and he can write as few of his contemporaries can. If he has slain Theodore Dreiser with a violent right hand, he has with a gentler left given the accolade to