Ohio Valley Hist. Ass'n, Fifth Annual
Meeting. 31
engaged strong and able men at all
points along the river. Pittsburgh,
ever at the front in enterprise, has
contributed her full share.
It is our good fortune to have homes in
this Valley, dear to many
of us as our birthplace, and to all of
us by fond memories and cherished
associations. We, who love the Valley
and the River, here pay tribute
to all who have labored for, and through
their labors have advanced.
the improvement of the greatest channel
of commerce in the world.
They have been governed by no selfish
purpose, but by a noble, un
selfish desire to benefit our homes, to
make more prosperous our Val-
ley, to leave to their children and to
generations yet unborn a heritage
rich in commerce, their valley teeming
with intelligence and populous
with contented men and women-with more
schools, more churches,
more of all that makes life desirable
and that adds to the sum of
human happiness.
Another speaker of the evening was the
nearest descendant
of Robert Fulton, Rev. C. Seymour
Bullock, of Fall River, who
spoke as follows:
Mr. Chairman: His Excellency, the
Governor, Your Honor, the
Mayor; Ladies and Gentlemen: I am happy
in bringing to you, unof-
ficially, the greetings of a New England
city that has just secured for
itself a State appropriation of one
million dollars to improve its al-
ready magnificent harbor.
More and more are we coming to realize
that the future of our
country depends upon the conservation of
its natural resources and
the development and utilization of its
waterways as avenues of trans-
portation. The total bankage of the
rivers of Europe is but 34,000
miles while the river banks of streams
east of the Rocky Mountains,
that are 100 miles long and navigable,
will total more than 80,000 miles.
On our Great Lakes in one year we
carried freight with a total ton-
nage sufficient to tax the carrying
capacity of a train of cars of or-
dinary size that would completely belt
the globe. If the engine of that
train were to pull out from Boston it
would pass thru San Francisco,
cover the Chinese Empire and Turkestan
and Persia, bridge the Med-
iterranean and the Atlantic and speed on
again almost to Salt Lake
City with its train of loaded cars
before the caboose left Boston. Mr.
Chairman, that is something of a freight
train!
With no such system of inland seas the
European countries are
fast outstripping us in the race for
commerce. France and Germany
have developed or are developing systems
of internal water communi-
cation on a basis of one mile of
waterway to each twenty-five miles of
territory. Already France has 3,021
miles of canals in operation, while
Germany, aside from the Kaiser Wilhelm,
has 15,011 miles of canals
and 1,500 miles of canalized rivers.