seaboard as well as in the Mississippi Valley.

Even more: in another way they have made living cheaper. The
half-rail-and-half-water route from the Pacific coast to New York via
New Orleans, which the Jetties first made possible, forced the
transcontinental railways to cut down their time for shipping freight
over one half. The tonnage by this newer route has increased
enormously, and its competition has affected commerce by reducing all
rates from the Mississippi Valley and the West and the Pacific slope to
the Atlantic seaboard and to Europe. As a consequence bread has been
made cheaper to all the great populations that require the food
products of the central zone and the Pacific slope.

Another very different but curious change is probably largely due to
the Jetties. Before their construction only very light-draught ships
could safely reach New Orleans; but it was so favorite a cotton port
that many owners would build vessels of unusually light draught, in
order that they might make one trip a year to New Orleans with them,
although the rest of the time they sailed to deeper ports. As soon as
it became known over the shipping world that New Orleans was now open
to deep-draught vessels, a great many new ones were built. Thus the
Jetties, as much as any other cause, brought in the era of great ships.

It has been calculated from statistics, which it is not necessary to
give here, that the annual saving to producers of the Mississippi
Valley brought about by the fall of rates, the saving in marine
insurance, and the saving in time, due to the Jetties, is $5,000,000;
and it is furthermore calculated that the annual money value of the
Jetties to the people of the country at large is, by a very
conservative estimate, $25,000,000.

Even the Jetties, however, were not the end of Eads's efforts toward
the improvement of the Mississippi. For several years before their
completion he had been delivering addresses urging the application of
the same system to the entire alluvial basin of the river from the gulf
to Cairo. People were in despair as to what to do to prevent the
breaking of the levees (the results of which are as "terrible to the
dwellers on those flats as the avalanche to people who live on the
sides of steep mountains"), and the distress and prostration created by
the awful spring floods. Most people thought there were two possible
remedies,--to build more and higher levees, and to drain off some of
the volum