any highway as a benign and
powerful agent in the political reconstruction and moral unification of
the American States.

After leaving Buchanan, the proposed route for the extension of the
James River and Kanawha Canal runs westward to the mouth of Fork Run, a
small mountain-river, and ascends that stream to the summit-level,
seventeen hundred feet above tide-water. It then pierces the main range
of the Alleghanies, passing under Tuckahoe and Katis Mountains by a
tunnel nearly eight miles long, and emerges into the valley of the
Greenbrier River on the western mountain-slope. Its water-line pursues
its course by slack-water navigation down the Greenbrier to New River,
and down New River to Lyken's Shoals on the Kanawha, eighty-five miles
above its mouth. The last distance of eighty-five miles will be
traversed by open navigation, as the Kanawha Valley permits it. Major W.
B. Craighill of the Engineer Corps, in his able report to General A. A.
Humphreys on this central water-line, says: "The recent completion of
the Mont Cenis Tunnel in Europe, and the rapid progress made with the
Hoosac Tunnel in this country, with the experience gained in these
works, and the improved facilities daily coming into use for carrying on
such operations, induce us to approach such an undertaking as the
Lorraine tunnel not only without apprehension of failure, but with a
feeling of assured certainty of success. It is no longer an
extraordinary, but an ordinary, undertaking."

The practical capacity of the water-line when completed will be of
almost unlimited extent, while the canal proper with its locks will have
a capacity of from fifteen to twenty millions of tons annually. In the
fall and early winter, after the harvests are over, and during the very
season that the highway is most needed, and when the northern routes are
blocked by ice, this trans-Alleghany water-way will be open.

The local trade in its path would alone justify its construction. It
will penetrate the finest mineral lands of Virginia and West Virginia,
which have been so long locked up from the world. The great Kanawha
coal-fields and iron- and salt-mines are unsurpassed by any now known in
any part of the globe. In the large demand from England and Europe for
coal, which is finding expression in the large orders sent to
Philadelphia and Baltimore for Pennsylvania and Maryland coal,[D] there
is the best possible evidence that the local trade of the national canal
wou