should undertake this work, and I hope a beginning will be made in the present Congress; and the greatest of all our rivers, the Mississippi, should receive especial attention.  From the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi there should be a deep waterway, with deep waterways leading from it to the East and the West.  Such a waterway would practically mean the extension of our coast line into the very heart of our country.  It would be of incalculable benefit to our people.  If begun at once it can be carried through in time appreciably to relieve the congestion of our great freight-carrying lines of railroads.  The work should be systematically and continuously carried forward in accordance with some well-conceived plan.  The main streams should be improved to the highest point of efficiency before the improvement of the branches is attempted; and the work should be kept free from every faint of recklessness or jobbery.  The inland waterways which lie just back of the whole eastern and southern coasts should likewise be developed.  Moreover, the development of our waterways involves many other important water problems, all of which should be considered as part of the same general scheme.  The Government dams should be used to produce hundreds of thousands of horsepower as an incident to improving navigation; for the annual value of the unused water-power of the United States perhaps exceeds the annual value of the products of all our mines.  As an incident to creating the deep waterways down the Mississippi, the Government should build along its whole lower length levees which taken together with the control of the headwaters, will at once and forever put a complete stop to all threat of floods in the immensely fertile Delta region.  The territory lying adjacent to the Mississippi along its lower course will thereby become one of the most prosperous and populous, as it already is one of the most fertile, farming regions in all the world.  I have appointed an Inland Waterways Commission to study and outline a comprehensive scheme of development along all the lines indicated.  Later I shall lay its report before the Congress.

Irrigation should be far more extensively developed than at present, not only in the States of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, but in many others, as, for instance, in large portions of the South Atlantic and Gulf States, where it should go hand in hand with the reclamation of swamp land.  The Federal Government should seriously devote itself to this task, realizing that utilization of waterways and water-power, forestry, irrigation, and the reclamation of lands threatened with overflow, are all interdependent parts of the same problem.  The work of the Reclamation Service in developing the larger opportunities of the western half of our country for irrigation is more important than almost any other movement.  The constant purpose of the Government in connection with the Reclamation Service has been to use the water resources of the