Action should be begun forthwith, during the present session of the
Congress, for the improvement of our inland waterways--action which
will result in giving us not only navigable but navigated rivers. We
have spent hundreds of millions of dollars upon these waterways, yet
the traffic on nearly all of them is steadily declining. This condition
is the direct result of the absence of any comprehensive and far-seeing
plan of waterway improvement, Obviously we can not continue thus to
expend the revenues of the Government without return. It is poor
business to spend money for inland navigation unless we get it.
Inquiry into the condition of the Mississippi and its principal
tributaries reveals very many instances of the utter waste caused by
the methods which have hitherto obtained for the so-called
"improvement" of navigation. A striking instance is supplied by the
"improvement" of the Ohio, which, begun in 1824, was continued under a
single plan for half a century. In 1875 a new plan was adopted and
followed for a quarter of a century. In 1902 still a different plan was
adopted and has since been pursued at a rate which only promises a
navigable river in from twenty to one hundred years longer.
Such shortsighted, vacillating, and futile methods are accompanied by
decreasing water-borne commerce and increasing traffic congestion on
land, by increasing floods, and by the waste of public money. The
remedy lies in abandoning the methods which have so signally failed and
adopting new ones in keeping with the needs and demands of our people.
In a report on a measure introduced at the first session of the present
Congress, the Secretary of War said: "The chief defect in the methods
hitherto pursued lies in the absence of executive authority for
originating comprehensive plans covering the country or natural
divisions thereof." In this opinion I heartily concur. The present
methods not only fail to give us inland navigation, but they are
injurious to the army as well. What is virtually a permanent detail of
the corps of engineers to civilian duty necessarily impairs the
efficiency of our military establishment. The military engineers have
undoubtedly done efficient work in actual construction, but they are
necessarily unsuited by their training and traditions to take the broad
view, and to gather and transmit to the Congress the commercial and
industrial information and forecasts, upon which waterway improvement
must always so largely rest. Furthermore, they have failed to grasp the
great underlying fact that every stream is a unit from its source to
its mouth, and that all its uses are interdependent. Prominent officers
of the Engineer Corps have recently even gone so far as to assert in
print that waterways are not dependent upon the conservation of the
forests about their headwaters. This position is opposed to all the
recent work of the scientific bureaus of the Government and to the
general experience of mankind. A physician who disbelieved in
vaccination would not be the right man to handle an epidemic of
smallpox, nor should we leave a doctor skeptical about the transmission
of yellow fever by the Stegomyia mosquito in charge of sanitation at
Havana or Panama. So with the improvement of our rivers; it is no
longer wise or safe to leave this great work in the hands of men who
fail to grasp the essential relations between navigation and general
development and to assimilate and use the central facts about our
streams.
Until the work of river improvement is undertaken in a modern way it
can not have results that will meet the needs of this modern nation.
These needs should be met without further dilly-dallying or delay. The
plan which promises the best and quickest results is that of a
permanent commission authorized to coordinate the work of all the
Government departments relating to waterways, and to frame and
supervise the execution of a comprehensive plan. Under such a
commission the actual work of construction might be entrusted to the
reclamation service; or to the military engineers acting with a
sufficient number of civilians to continue the work in time of war; or
it might be divided between the reclamation service and the corps of
engineers. Funds should be provided from current revenues if it is
deemed wise--otherwise from the sale of bonds. The essential thing is
that the work should go forward under the best possible plan, and with
the least possible delay. We should have a new type of work and a new
organization for planning and directing it. The time for playing with
our waterways is past. The country demands results.