track, she should have had political as well as physical and
mechanical obstacles to overcome. The conquest of the natural
difficulties alone required superhuman effort and endurance. But
Baltimore had also to fight a miserable internecine warfare in
her own State, for Maryland immediately subscribed half a million
to the canal as well as to the newly formed Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad. In rival pageants, both companies broke ground on July
4, 1828, and the race to the Ohio was on. The canal company clung
doggedly to the idle belief that their enterprise was still of
continental proportions, since it would connect at Cumberland
with the Cumberland Road. This exaggerated estimate of the
importance of the undertaking shines out in the pompous words of
President Mercer, at the time when construction was begun:

"There are moments in the progress of time, which are counters of
whole ages. There are events, the monuments of which, surviving
every other memorial of human existence, eternize the nation to
whose history they belong, after all other vestiges of its glory
have disappeared from the globe. At such a moment have we now
arrived."

This oracular language lacks the simple but winning
straightforwardness of the words which Director Morris uttered on
the same day near Baltimore and which prove how distinctly
Western the new railway project was held to be:

"We are about opening a channel through which the commerce of the
mighty country beyond the Allegheny must seek the ocean--we are
about affording facilities of intercourse between the East and
West, which will bind the one more closely to the other, beyond