and solved forever, with an open route from tide-water to Cumberland and the West—little wonder that the controllers of the canal had been only lukewarm in their attitude to the Eight Billion Dollar Act! Despite their efforts, the railway was winning its way; with every new invention the West was made nearer the East; the locomotive was solving Washington's old question how the Potomac Valley could hold the West in fee. As Fate would have it—or Fortune—the hard labor and the thousand perplexities of many men from Washington down, who had attempted first to get in commercial touch with the West by means of rivers, then by means of a canal, were being swept aside by one blast of that little locomotive's whistle. How changed now the situation. But a few years back the canal was master of the Potomac Valley; it had allowed the feeble rail road a passage-way through the Point of Rocks only on condition that not one foot of track should be laid above Harper's Ferry until the canal had been completed to Cumberland. Now the canal was to receive sufficient state backing to complete its line
