Excerpt from The Nicaragua Canal; Would It Pay the United States to Construct It?: Remarks of C. P. Huntington, at the Seventh Annual Banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of Galveston, Texas, March 16, 1900

Benjamin Franklin, in one of his letters when he was Post master-general, wrote that he believed the time would come when the mail would be carried between Washington and Boston in ten days with considerable regularity. To-day, if it is not carried in about the same number of hours, there is sharp inquiry why the mail is so delayed. What would Franklin say to-day if he could be here to see the changes that time and genius have wrought? If he could emerge from his crude laboratory to-day, step into a telephone office, and, while he watched with astonished eyes the rapid progress through the streets of loaded trolley cars drawn by no visible force, could hear a friend at Chicago describe to him, in a well-recognized voice, the electrical wonders of the nineteenth century, would he not have a right to say to himself with a thrill of justifiable pride Certainly, when I drew the lightning from the clouds, I builded better than I knew.

To cheapen, improve and quicken transportation, so as to make the old ten-day trips from Washington to Boston and the method of locomotion by means of oxen, horses and mules crude things of a primitive past, the canal was established, and this was found to be a great advance indeed, not only in the carrying capacity, but in the speed secured but the canal of to-day is as far behind the best methods of transportation as that was better than the man, the mule and the ox, and the canal, too, should be relegated to the old scrap heap of the past but the idea is dying slowly, and there are a few people even to-day who are looking forward from the canal to the ox, and thinking, perhaps, that it would be a good thing to let well enough alone, and that the canal can still compete with the locomotive, or, at least, be a check upon its encroachments; and they look about them without fully realizing the inevitable trend of the new forces that are sure to make the canal impossible in modern life, as the canal uprooted the old notions which tended in the single direction of getting there, without much regard to the time of arrival.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.