mous quantities of our chilled meats, which, they assert, are superior in quality to the frozen article. We are not compelled to freeze our meats to send them to Europe but the consignments are placed on steamships in chilled rooms whose low but not freezing temperature keeps them in good condition. When we remember that our foreign meat trade is a very important element in our commerce we can realize the inestimable advantage of not being compelled to carry this commodity across the tropics.

The United States, as well as all the other greatest commercial nations, fronts on the Atlantic making that ocean the preeminent highway of sea trade. A few years ago, a patient and laborious German set himself the task of ascertaining approximately the amount of business activity on the Atlantic. After collecting many facts he reached the conclusion that there are always afloat on that ocean about 50,000 vessels of one sort or another and that its floating population is constantly about 300,000 human beings. The value of the Atlantic for sea trade is increased by the fact that most of the great navigable rivers belong to the Atlantic drainage basin. All the great rivers of Europe, except the Volga, of Africa, except the Zambesi, and of America south of Alaska are tributary to the Atlantic. The Yangtse of China is the only river of the first class and of great commercial importance that is tributary to the Pacific. The Indian Ocean finds feeders for its trade in the Menam, the Irawadi, the Ganges and the Indus; but the great rivers of northern Asia are frozen two-thirds of the year and empty into seas that are likely to be ice-choked at all seasons. shall see a little later how wonderfully helpful are our rivers in contributing to our large share in the sea trade of the Atlantic.

We

HARBORS OF THE UNITED STATES

We are blessed with an abundance of good natural harbors to serve our com

merce on this highway. Most of the largest and best of them are exactly where they may best serve our trade-on our northeast coast fronting the greatest commercial nations of Europe, with whom we have the largest dealings. On the whole, our harbors are naturally better than those of Europe; the result is that though nearly all harbors require large expenditure to fit them for shipping and to make good the deterioration that is constantly in progress, our disbursements for these purposes are not nearly so great as they are in Europe. Since the Coast and Geodetic Survey was organized New York Bay has been resurveyed five times to indicate the positions of needed improvements. The work of deepening and extending the channels of New York Harbor in progress for several years past may cost from $7,000,000 to $8,000,000 before it is completed; but Liverpool Harbor has cost, from first to last, over $200,000,000, more than half of which has been expended in the last forty-five years.

The great distinction between our leading seaports and those of Europe is that we have only to improve our natural harbors while the nations over the sea must make their great ports. Europe can show no ports like those of Puget Sound and San Francisco which will admit the largest vessels without deepening the channel; and our other largest ports may attain the same degree of efficiency at a total cost that seems small in comparison with the vast sums spent at Liverpool alone. London, Newcastle and Cardiff, as seaports, are largely artificial creations, the result of improvements made at enormous cost. The port of London extends from London Bridge to the mouth of the Thames but no vessel drawing more than 26 feet can ascend to London except at high tide; at other times large ships must stop at Tilbury Docks, 35 miles down the river. Glasgow deepened and widened the little ditch of the Clyde till

it was transformed into a ship-floating river. All the Baltic ports of Germany are more or less obstructed by ice in winter, nor do her great North Sea ports always escape this inconvenience; for this reason Hamburg and Bremen require outports and Bremen must have an outport all the time because the larger vessels cannot ascend to the city. We have no port like that of Valparaiso, Chile-a splendid harbor save for the vital defect that the entrance from the sea is so wide that storms invade it and endanger shipping. We have no need for such a splendid example of engineering art as the great breakwater at Cherbourg which without this protection would be a dangerous roadstead. The North American seaboard shows no conspicuous example of the artificial harbor so common in other countries except at Vera Cruz which has just been turned by the labor of years into a good and commodious port.

TYPES OF HARBORS

Most of our Atlantic coast is low and presents all the prominent types of natural harbors. We know that large areas of the earth's surface are very slowly subjected to vertical movements, being uplifted above their former level or depressed beneath it; and that these movements are best observed along the margins of the sea. We speak, for example, of the uplifting of a part of the coast of Scandinavia, and of the sinking of the coast of New Jersey. In the course of the depression of the coast line the sea invades the valleys, widening and deepening them, and turning some of them into deep water harbors which are called Drowned Valley Harbors. When the sea burst over the barrier at the Golden Gate it turned the valley on which San Francisco stands into one of the finest drowned valley harbors in the world. New York is another example of a drowned valley harbor, which, wherever found, are among the best natural

harbors. We see another form of the drowned valley harbor in the fiords of the Maine coast, long, narrow and deep, with this disadvantage that, when their entrances are funnel-shaped, the incoming tide rises very rapidly and high so that the difference between mean high and low tide in some of our Maine ports is as much as 20 feet which is an inconvenience to shipping. The difference between mean high and low tide at New York is only a little over 4 feet.

The barrier harbor is also well represented on our eastern seaboard; thus we may speak of Boston harbor as being protected from sea storms by the cluster of islands at its mouth; and of the numerous smaller ports of the south Atlantic coast as sheltered from the ocean by the sand reefs that extend brokenly along the front of our coast from Long Island to Florida.

River ports such as Philadelphia and New Orleans and ports at the head of deep embayments, as Baltimore, permit ocean vessels to penetrate a considerable distance into the land which is an advantage because ocean freights are cheaper than those of the land routes. Baltimore, 140 miles from the sea, is nearer to the Mississippi valley than is New York.

Our Pacific coast, unlike our eastern seaboard, is high and rocky and has only four fine harbor centers but they are so distributed as to serve adequately all the purposes of our Pacific trade. Puget Sound, one of the most useful of inlets, has scores of miles of shoreline along which the water is so deep that docks might be built anywhere for the largest vessels. The fine river port of Portland supplements the Puget Sound ports in the northern trade, San Francisco is the great central gateway of the Pacific commerce and San Diego, at the extreme southwestern corner of the country, with a landlocked harbor in which the government has been making great improvements, is nearest to

those passengers are not going to seek gold should convince us that it is time to count scenery among the important assets of the country. Every year increasing crowds are drawn to Alaska by the mighty glaciers, the rugged fiords, the snow mountains and the splendid, bracing air in that part of our domain. Among our western mountains men are

Alps of Switzerland which bring into that country millions of dollars every year.

OUR COASTAL PLAINS

The United States, in the main, is a great central plain bordered on the east by mountains of no great elevation, and on the west by plateaus and mountains