highest existing types of loyalty, optimism, financial skill, and
engineering ability.

Yet, on the other hand, the contrasts between these undertakings
were great. The two enterprises, one the work of the nation and
the other that of a single State, were practically
contemporaneous and were therefore constantly inviting
comparison. The Cumberland Road was, for its day, a gigantic
government undertaking involving problems of finance, civil
engineering, eminent domain, state rights, local favoritism, and
political machination. Its purpose was noble and its successful
construction a credit to the nation; but the paternalism to which
it gave rise and the conflicts which it precipitated in Congress
over questions of constitutionality were remembered soberly for a
century. The Erie Canal, after its projectors had failed to
obtain national aid, became the undertaking of one commonwealth
conducted, amid countless doubts and jeers, to a conclusion
unbelievably successful. As a result many States, foregoing
Federal aid, attempted to duplicate the successful feat of New
York. In this respect the northern canal resembled the Lancaster
Turnpike and tempted scores of States and corporations to
expenditures which were unwise in circumstances less favorable
than those of the fruitful and strategic Empire State.

In the conception of both the roadway and the canal, it should be
noted, the old idea of making use of navigable rivers still
persisted. The act foreshadowing the Cumberland Road, passed in
1802, called for "making public roads leading from the navigable
waters emptying into the Atlantic, to the Ohio, to said State
Ohio and through the same"; and Hawley's original plan was to