Lake Superior shipments.  An illustration of the fashion in which superior facilities at one end of a great line of travel compel improvements all along the line is afforded by the fact that since the canal at the “Soo” has been deepened so as to take vessels of twenty-one feet draught with practically no limit upon their length, the cry has gone up among shippers and vessel men for a twenty-foot channel from Duluth to the sea.  At present there are several points in the lower lakes, notably at what is called the Lime Kiln Crossing, below Detroit, where twenty-foot craft are put to some hazard, while beyond Buffalo the shallow Welland Canal, with its short locks, and the shallow canals of the St. Lawrence River have practically stopped all effort to establish direct and profitable communication between the great lakes and the ocean.  Such efforts have been made and the expedients adopted to get around natural obstacles have sometimes been almost pathetic in the story they tell of the eagerness of the lake marine to find an outlet to salt-water.  Ships are cut in two at Cleveland or at Erie and sent, thus disjointed, through the canals to be patched together again at Quebec or Montreal.  One body of Chicago capitalists built four steel steamers of about 2500 tons capacity each, and of dimensions suited to the locks in the Welland Canal, in the hopes of maintaining a regular freight line between that city and Liverpool.  The vessels were loaded with full cargo as far as Buffalo, there discharged half their freight, and went on thus half-laden through the Canadian canals.  But the loss in time and space, and the expense of reshipment of cargo made the experiment an unprofitable one.  Scarcely a year has passed that some such effort has not been made, and constantly the wonderful development of the ship-building business on the Great Lakes greatly increases the vigor of the demand for an outlet.  Steel ships can be built on the lakes at a materially smaller cost than anywhere along the seaboard.  In the report of the Commissioner of Navigation for 1901 it is noted that more than double the tonnage of steel construction on the Atlantic coast was reported from the lakes.  If lake builders could send their vessels easily and safely to the ocean, we should not need subsidies and special legislation to reestablish the American flag abroad.  By the report already quoted, it is shown that thirty-nine steel steamers were built in lake yards of a tonnage ranging from 1089 tons to 5125.  Wooden ship-building is practically dead on the lakes.  In June of that year twenty-six more steel steamers, with an aggregate tonnage of 81,000 were on the stocks in the lake yards.  Two of these are being built for ocean service, but both will have to be cut in two before they can get through the Canadian canals.  It is not surprising that there appears among the people living in the commonwealths which border on the Great Lakes a certain doubt as to whether the expenditure by the United States Government of $200,000,000 for a canal at the Isthmus will afford so great a measure of encouragement to American shipping and be of as immediate advantage to the American exporter, as a twenty-foot channel from Duluth to tide-water.