, or thrown bodily athwart the railroad tracks that on the south side
of the city border the lake. The writer has seen from a city street,
crowded with shoppers on a bright but windy day, vessels break to pieces
on the breakwater, half a mile away but in plain sight, and men go down
to their death in the raging seas. On all the lakes, but particularly on
the smaller ones, an ugly sea is tossed up by the wind in a time so short
as to seem miraculous to the practised navigator of the ocean. The shallow
water curls into breakers under the force of even a moderate wind, and the
vessels are put to such a strain, in their struggles, as perhaps only the
craft built especially for the English channel have to undergo. Some of
the most fatal disasters the lakes have known resulted from iron vessels,
thus racked and tossed, sawing off, as the phrase goes, the rivets that
bound their plates together, and foundering. Fire, too, has numbered its
scores of victims on lake steamers, though this danger, like indeed most
others, is greatly decreased by the increased use of steel as a structural
material and the great improvement in the model of the lake craft. Even
ten years ago the lake boats were ridiculous in their clumsiness, their
sluggishness, and their lack of any of the charm and comfort that attend
ocean-going vessels, but progress toward higher types has been rapid, and
there are ships on the lakes to-day that equal any of their size afloat.

For forty years it has been possible to say annually, "This is the
greatest year in the history of the lake marine." For essentially it is a
new and a growing factor in the industrial development of the United
States. So far, from having been killed by the prodigious development of
our railroad system, it has kept pace with that system, and the years that
have seen the greatest number of miles of railroad built, have witnessed
the launching of the biggest lake vessels. There is every reason to
believe that this growth will for a long time be persistent, that the
climax has not yet been reached. For it is incredible that the Government
will permit the barrier at Niagara to the commerce of these great inland
seas to remain long unbroken. Either by the Mohawk valley route, now
followed by the Erie canal, or by the route down the St. Lawrence, with a
deepening and widening of the present Canadian canals, and a new canal
down from the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, a waterway will yet be
provide