s beginning to
assume important proportions, when the war put a stop to it, as it has
to so much of our foreign commerce.

While the present article was in preparation, the bill for the
construction of these canals passed the House of Representatives, as
also one for the deepening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal,
concerning which the report of the Hon. Isaac N. Arnold of Illinois,
chairman of the committee of the House on the defence of lakes and
rivers, thus remarks:--"The realization of the grand idea of a
ship-canal from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, for military and
commercial purposes, is the great work of the age. In effect,
commercially, it turns the Mississippi into Lake Michigan, and makes an
outlet for the Great Lakes at New Orleans, and of the Mississippi at New
York. It brings together the two great systems of water communication of
our country,--the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, and the canals
connecting the Lakes with the ocean on the east, and the Mississippi and
Missouri, with all their tributaries, on the west and south. This
communication, so vast, can be effected at small expense, and with no
long delay. It is but carrying out the plan of Nature. A great river,
rivalling the St. Lawrence in volume, at no distant day was discharged
from Lake Michigan, by the Illinois, into the Mississippi. Its banks,
its currents, its islands, and deposits can still be easily traced, and
it only needs a deepening of the present channel for a few miles, to
reopen a magnificent river from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi."

It is a very important point, in considering this question of the
enlargement of existing canals and the construction of new ones, that
they have, under the new conditions of naval warfare, come to be an
important element in the harbor defences of the Lakes. We have the
testimony of Captain Ericsson himself, whose Monitor vessels have
already done so much for the country, as to this availability. He
writes,--"An impregnable war-vessel, twenty-five feet wide and two
hundred feet long, with a shot-proof turret, carrying a gun of fifteen
inch calibre, with a ball of four hundred and fifty pounds, and capable
of destroying any hostile vessel that can be put on the Lakes, will
draw, without ammunition, coal, or stores, but six feet and six inches
water, and consequently will need only a canal wide and deep enough to
float a vessel of those dimensions, with locks of sufficient size to
pass it."