Water Works

Cabinet members must soon report on their year's work. Last week, busy with his report, Secretary of War Davis could not help brimming over about one of his subsidiary concerns, the Inland Waterways Corp. This Federal company operates barge lines on the Warrior River (Alabama) and on upper and lower reaches, of the Mississippi. It showed a $277,782 net income for nine 1928 months, compared to $45,507 at the same time last year.

Secretary Davis prepared to set off to inspect personally the progress of another thing in which his Department is concerned, Mississippi flood-control.

The idea of U. S. soldiers instead of sailors concerning themselves with waterways, is not paradoxical. Speaking before the New York State Chamber of Commerce last week, that sapient layman, President Leonor Fresnel Loree of the Delaware & Hudson R. R., pointed out that the Navy's "natural home" is the ocean. Nor was it paradoxical for a railroader like Mr. Loree to assert that, besides another trans-Appalachian railroad line, more inland waterways are needed by the U. S. for national defense as well as for commerce. He wants to see a coastal-lateral canal system from Boston to Norfolk, Va. A link needed to join up present. parts of this system is a 31-mile canal from the Delaware River to the Raritan across New Jersey.

Railroader Loree, a massive oldtimer with a beard like General Grant's, was emphatic about national defense. He said: "Perhaps no nation stands so much in need of a recognition of this necessity for armed protection as does the United States, and perhaps no nation has, since the warnings of Washington, turned so resolutely away from its serious consideration Let us remember the counsel of the Yellow Knife Indian--'It will be time enough for the warrior to throw away his gun when the squaw casts away her papoose.' "

He described "the greatest line of military weakness" of the U. S. as the line from Chesapeake Bay to Lake Erie. "Failure to hold that line would so divorce the manufacturing plants from the sources of raw material, would so separate those living in the Atlantic States from their food supplies as to virtually paralyze the nation."

He advocated erecting a system of inland fortifications similar to the French line that hinges on Verdun. "Such fortifications would, of course, be purely a defensive measure, but would be effective as nothing else could be in serving notice upon all that these United States are not an inviting object of buccaneering invasion. . . . Let us never forget the old proverb, 'Sweat saves blood.'

"I would not be understood as belittling the efforts of diplomacy in the avoidance of the causes of war--notably the anti-war treaties, which are so great a triumph of the present Federal Administration. Always we may count upon a saving remnant with strong and delicate imagination, moral sensitiveness and spirituality who in times of moral crisis, by their surer instinct, save us if we are to be saved. Let us give them our wholehearted support, but let us be wise in our day and generation and not put our trust in them alone."

Last week, President Coolidge officially "opened" the Atlantic Coastal Highway, a defensively strategic motor-road system composed of links otherwise named (viz., Boston Post Road, Lincoln Highway) and new links costing $100,000,000, connecting Calais, Me., and Key West, Fla.