WATERWAYS

Meantime our internal development should go on.  Provision should be made for flood control of such rivers as the Mississippi and the Colorado, and for the opening up of our inland waterways to commerce.  Consideration is due to the project of better navigation from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.  Every effort is being made to promote an agreement with Canada to build the, St. Lawrence waterway.  There are pending before the Congress bills for further development of the Mississippi Basin, for the taking over of the Cape Cod Canal in accordance with a moral obligation which seems to have been incurred during the war, and for the improvement of harbors on both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts.  While this last should be divested of some of its projects and we must proceed slowly, these bills in general have my approval.  Such works are productive of wealth and in the long run tend to a reduction of the tax burden.

RECLAMATION

Our country has a well defined policy of reclamation established under statutory authority.  This policy should be continued and made a self-sustaining activity administered in a manner that will meet local requirements and bring our and lands into a profitable state of cultivation as fast as there is a market for their products.  Legislation is pending based on the report of the Fact Finding Commission for the proper relief of those needing extension of time in which to meet their payments on irrigated land, and for additional amendments and reforms of our reclamation laws, which are all exceedingly important and should be enacted at once.

No more important development has taken place in the last year than the beginning of a restoration of agriculture to a prosperous condition.  We must permit no division of classes in this country, with one occupation striving to secure advantage over another.  Each must proceed under open opportunities and with a fair prospect of economic equality.  The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat.  Every business has its risk and its times of depression.  It is well known that in the long run there will be a more even prosperity and a more satisfactory range of prices under the natural working out of economic laws than when the Government undertakes the artificial support of markets and industries.  Still we can so order our affairs, so protect our own people from foreign competition, so arrange our national finances, so administer our monetary system, so provide for the extension of credits, so improve methods of distribution, as to provide a better working machinery for the transaction of the business of the Nation with the least possible friction and loss.  The Government has been constantly increasing its efforts in these directions for the relief and permanent establishment of agriculture on a sound and equal basis with other business.