It would perhaps have been well, in the light of later
difficulties and failures, if the men who at Washington”s call
undertook to master the capricious rivers of the seaboard had
studied a stately Spanish decree which declared that, since God
had not made the rivers of Spain navigable, it were sacrilege for
mortals to attempt to do so
It would perhaps have been well, in the light of later
difficulties and failures, if the men who at Washington”s call
undertook to master the capricious rivers of the seaboard had
studied a stately Spanish decree which declared that, since God
had not made the rivers of Spain navigable, it were sacrilege for
mortals to attempt to do so. Even before the Revolution, Mayor
Rhodes of Philadelphia was in correspondence with Franklin in
London concerning the experiences of European engineers in
harnessing foreign streams. That sage philosopher, writing to
Rhodes in 1772, uttered a clear word of warning: ‘rivers are
ungovernable things,’ he had said, and English engineers ’seldom
or never use a River where it can be avoided.’ But it was the
birthright of New World democracy to make its own mistakes and in
so doing to prove for itself the errors of the Old World.
