cesses the old Caledonians found secure and impregnable asylums
from the Roman legions--except that they are richer in verdure and less
lofty, they form the grand natural rampart of the American Union. To use
the words of Lavallee, the French military historian and statistician,
"Mountains play the principal part in military operations: true ramparts
of states, they interrupt the development of strategic movements, and
render the greatest efforts necessary for their passage and possession.
They are the poetical part of the theatre of the art of war." If the day
ever comes, as come it may, when the kingly powers of the world combine
to crush the republican institutions of the United States, and swarm the
harbors and bays of our Atlantic seaboard with their allied navies, the
defiles of the Alleghanies will prove the Thermopylaes of the Union; and
against their eastern base the surging wave of invasion must be stayed,
if stayed at all. Like the Scottish peaks,

The grisly champions that guard
The infant rills of Highland Dee,

or the Spanish wall of the Pyrenean chain, on whose Sierras, in 1808,
Wellington's blazing lines of Torres Vedras arrested Massena's march,
the mountains that look out on our Atlantic sea-front must ever be of
the highest military importance.

To throw across their central ridges a great aqueduct is no mean
undertaking of merely local significance, but may take rank with the old
Roman aqueducts, with the magnificent roads constructed by Napoleon over
the Alps, and with the more modern and now triumphant tunnels through
Mont Cenis and the Hoosac Mountains, and the rapidly-progressing railway
over the Andes from Callao to the Amazon Valley.

The broad and national features of the proposed trans-Alleghany
water-way have so strongly commended themselves to President Grant that
in his last message he recommends preliminary Congressional action, and
in a more recent address to a number of distinguished visitors at the
Executive Mansion he used much stronger and bolder language in assuring
them that "he hoped Congress would give such encouragement to the
measure as to secure the completion of the canal." He has in these words
only repeated the sentiments of his illustrious predecessors, George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in behalf of the value of the work. We
have already alluded to Mr. Jefferson's early advocacy of a water-line
by the James and Kanawha Rivers. The first idea of this enterp