Consider, for example, the situation in the State of Louisiana.  Here control is, broadly speaking, in the hands of three separate bodies:  (1) the United States army engineer, who disburses the money appropriated by Congress for levees and bank revetment, working under direction of the Mississippi River Commission; (2) the State Board of Engineers, which disburses Louisiana State funds wherever it sees fit, and which, incidentally, does not use, in its work, the same specifications as are used by the Government; and (3) the local levee boards, of which there are eight in Louisiana, one to each river parish—­a parish being what is elsewhere called a county.  Each of these eight boards has authority as to where parish money shall be spent within its district, and it may be added that this last group (considering the eight boards as a unit) has the largest sum to spend on river work.

The result of this division of authority creates chaos, and has built up a situation infinitely worse than was faced by General Goethals when Congress attempted to divide control in the building of the Panama Canal.  It will be remembered that, in that case, a commission was appointed, but that Roosevelt circumvented Congress by making General Goethals head of the commission with full powers.

While the canal was in course of construction, General Goethals appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce.  When asked what he knew of levee building and work on the Mississippi, he replied: 

“I don’t know a single, solitary thing about the work on the Mississippi except that it is being carried on under the annual appropriation system.  If we had that system to hamper us, the Panama Canal would not be completed on time and within the estimate, as it will be.  That system leaves engineers in uncertainty as to how much they may plan to do in the year ahead of them.  Big works cannot be completed economically, either as to time or money, unless the man who is making the plan can proceed upon the theory that the money will be forthcoming as fast as he can economically spend it.”

In view of the foregoing, I cannot myself claim to be free from river theory.  It seems to me clear that the Mississippi should be under exclusive Federal control from source to mouth; that the various commissions should be abolished, and that the whole matter should be in the hands of the chief of United States Engineers, who would have ample funds with which to carry on work of a permanent character.

As one among countless items pointing to the need of Federal control, consider the case of the Tensas Levee Board, one of the eight local boards in Louisiana.  This board does not build any levees whatsoever in the State of Louisiana, but does all its work with Louisiana money, in the State of Arkansas, where it has constructed, and maintains, eighty-two miles of levees, protecting the northeastern corner of Louisiana from floods which would originate in Arkansas.  These same levees, however, also protect large tracts of land in Arkansas, for which protection the inhabitants of Arkansas do not pay one cent, knowing that their Louisiana neighbors are forced, for their own safety, to do the work.