t be
speedily applied. There is some difference of opinion as to the
comparative injuries and benefits arising from the bridge, but the fact
remains clear that this important river has suffered needless injury to
a degree that is deplorable. In the past, however, the fault has been as
much with the city as with Congress. That body cannot improve rivers
where there is no commerce to be benefited, nor give new facilities to
towns that do not make the most of what they have. But the gazer from
Fort Stanton--glancing beyond the Navy-yard and the shot-battered
monitors that lie there, across Greenleaf's Point and the Arsenal, made
tragic by the death of many a British soldier and of the Lincoln-Seward
assassins half a century later--overlooking the wharves of Washington
and dimly descrying the masts at Georgetown, now sees a traffic that has
earned a consideration it has not received. A few weeks ago we paused in
an after-dinner walk, down there on the Arsenal boulevard, to watch the
troubles of a crew and the labors of a tug which were altogether too
suggestive. A senseless fellow of a captain came sailing up the river
from a foreign port, his vessel laden with a valuable cargo, and
attempted a landing at Washington. He knew no better than to suppose
that the capital of this nation, on one of our finest rivers, possessing
all its days a navy-yard, would permit itself to be approached by a
merchantman. He stuck in the mud within a hundred yards of the wharf.
There he spent three or four days in anxiety and chagrin, and finally
got a tug to pull him back into navigable water. He swung about, made
haste down the river and took his vessel to another port, uttering some
natural oaths, no doubt, and wondering what kind of country he had got
into. A small vessel going from Washington to Georgetown heads for
Chesapeake Bay, passes up around the island of filth accumulated by the
bridge, and sails four miles in ascending two.

Bordering the broad belt of grass and trees which we see sweeping
gracefully through the heart of the city from the Capitol to the
President's, where rise the towers of the Smithsonian, the roof of the
Agricultural Bureau, and all that is built of the Washington Monument,
there stretched another calamity, which existed some fifty years, which
was at last extinguished during 1872 at an immense cost to the city,
which was one of the "improvements" of the past, which once employed the
public money and energy--we