Address of President Roosevelt at St. Louis, Missouri, October 2, 1902

Excerpt: It is a very real pleasure to address this body of citizens of Missouri here in the great city of St. Louis. I have often visited St. Louis before, but always by rail. Now I am visiting it in the course of a trip by water, a trip on the great natural highway which runs past your very doors?a highway once so important, now almost abandoned, which I hope this nation will see not only restored to all its former usefulness, but given a far greater degree of usefulness to correspond with the extraordinary growth in wealth and population of the Mississippi Valley. We have lived in an era of phenomenal railroad building. As routes for merchandise, the iron highways have completely supplanted the old wagon roads, and under their competition the importance of the water highways has been much diminished. The growth of the railway system has been rapid all over the world, but nowhere so rapid as in the United States. Accompanying this there has grown in the United States a tendency toward the practically complete abandonment of the system of water transportation. Such a tendency is certainly not healthy and I am convinced that it will not be permanent. There are many classes of commodities, especially those which are perishable in their nature and where the value is high relatively to the bulk, which will always be carried by rail. But bulky commodities which are not of a perishable nature will always be specially suited for the conditions of water transport. To illustrate the truth of this statement it would only be necessary to point to the use of the canal system in many countries of the Old World; but it can be illustrated even better by what has happened nearer home. The Great Lakes offer a prime example of the importance of a good water highway for mercantile traffic. As the line of traffic runs through lakes, the conditions are in some respects different from what must obtain on even the most important river. Nevertheless, it is well to remember that a very large part of this traffic is conditioned upon an artificial waterway, a canal?the famous Soo. The commerce that passes through the Soo far surpasses in bulk and in value that of the Suez Canal.