Speech #480137805

I should like to know it as early as possible. that I. too. may take my rest as the others do.- If the Senate decline to take further consideration of this bill. if they are ready to tell the country that all these great improvements shil languish. shall die. I want to know it. If the Senate are ready tonight or at any other time to say that these works which have done more to extend population and immigration and improvement and to build up our country clear through from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mottntains than all other means put together. I want to know it. Beginning with our Atlantic harbors and threading up the streams and the rivers and the lakes far up even to the Yellowstone and to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains this system has proceeded. and on the other side there are the improvements of the Columbia and the Snake which make the means of communication between the Pacific and the inferior portions of the Atlantic slope. thus becoming for a year or for ten years or for fifty years the means of unheard progress and comfort and growth and prosperity to the people and of cheapness of transportation and the means of immigration into the vast unsettled regions which yet demand assistance. The Senate of course can do it if they choose. I have no other interest in it than the rest of the Senate.