Seaway Sighted

For a generation it has been the gilded dream of Midwest farmers and manufacturers that some day bigger, better boats would carry their goods down the Lakes, down the St. Lawrence, and across the sea. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt both pledged themselves to the development of a Lakes-to-Atlantic Waterway. Last week President Roosevelt moved to redeem his pledge by urging the Senate to ratify the ''so-called St. Lawrence Treaty" with Canada which President Hoover after long delay had wangled through to the signing stage in 1932.

Since it takes two-thirds of the Senate to ratify a treaty and since one-half the Senate does not want this Waterway, the President risked a humiliating rebuff.

Mississippi Valley Senators promptly plumped against the St. Lawrence waterway lest it give North Central Farmers an advantage in world trade and reduce tonnage down the Mississippi to the Gulf and to Europe. "Presidents Wilson, Harding and Coolidge did not favor the internationalization of Lake Michigan!" stormed Missouri's young Senator Bennett Champ Clark.

All the Atlantic seaboard Senators came out against ratification because tonnage would be diverted from their ports. For President Roosevelt, most painful disaffection of all was that of the two erstwhile loyal Senators from his home State, Messrs. Copeland and Wagner. Each was in favor of the power project section of the treaty, fondly fostered by Mr. Roosevelt when New York's Governor. But they remembered that New York has its own small Lakes-to-Atlantic waterway, the

Erie Canal. This sectional point was wisely not brought out in the minority committee report written by Senator Wagner. "The very core of the St. Lawrence plan," said he, "is the intent to face the railroads with competition, and thus to decrease activity in one industry as fast as it is created in another.'' The President anticipated all such arguments by stating in his special message: "It is, I believe, a historic fact that every great improvement to better commercial communications, whether in the case of railroads into new territory, or the deepening of great rivers, or the building of canals, or even the cutting of the Isthmus of Panama, have all been subjected to opposition on the part of local interests." And he added a warning: "I call your attention to the simple fact that Canada alone can, if desired, build locks at the Lachine Rapids and at the international sector and thus provide a seaway wholly within Canadian control." A 27-ft. channel from Duluth to the sea (see map) would not mean that luxury liners could dock east of Chicago's Wrigley Building. But 70% of the world's ocean-going cargo tonnage would have access to the Great Lakes. And six U. S. states would be given a maritime coast line --when, for six & one-half months a year, the channel is free of ice. Average time for the type of ocean-going cargo vessel which could use the waterway (up to 15,000 tons) from Duluth to the mouth of the St. Lawrence: nine days. Such vessels would require nine days more to reach Liverpool. Canada has already spent $130,000,000 on the Welland Canal around Niagara Falls. That is half of her half of the total cost.

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