Ohio, crossed the Atlantic, and sailed into the Mediterranean.
His description of a possible insurrection of a western community
might well have been written later; it might almost indeed have
made a page of his diary after he became President of the United
States and during the Whiskey Insurrection in western
Pennsylvania. He approved and encouraged Rumsey's mechanical
invention for propelling boats against the stream, showing that
he had a glimpse of what was to follow after Fitch, Rumsey, and
Fulton should have overcome the mighty currents of the Hudson and
the Ohio with the steamboat's paddle wheel. His proposal that
Congress should undertake a survey of western rivers for the
purpose of giving people at large a knowledge of their possible
importance as avenues of commerce was a forecast of the Lewis and
Clark expedition as well as of the policy of the Government today
for the improvement of the great inland rivers and harbors.

"The destinies of our country run east and west. Intercourse
between the mighty interior west and the sea coast is the great
principle of our commercial prosperity." These are the words of
Edward Everett in advocating the Boston and Albany Railroad. In
effect Washington had uttered those same words half a century
earlier when he gave momentum to an era filled with energetic
but unsuccessful efforts to join with the waters of the West the
rivers reaching inland from the Atlantic. The fact that American
engineering science had not in his day reached a point where it
could cope with this problem successfully should in no wise
lessen our admiration for the man who had thus caught the vision
of a nation united and unified by improved methods of
transportation.