Remarks at Cincinnati, Ohio, Celebrating the Completion of the Ohio River Improvement Project.

My fellow countrymen and women:

It is a great pleasure to me to share in the dedication of this monument glorifying for all time the completion of a 9-foot channel for the full length of the Ohio River. The engineering mind, about which I see so much in the newspapers, here does come to the surface, and luxuriates in appreciation of a great engineering job well done. This new instrument of commerce, from which untold blessings will come year after year, is an enduring monument to those patient men of my own profession whose lives are spent in devising means to increase the comfort and convenience of the world.

But men of every mould have wrought with equal bravery in this transformation of the wild beauty of the Ohio River into the not less beautiful but more tractable stream of today. The engineers found the practical means, but many others contributed to the vision, courage, and persistence needful to this accomplishment. Statesmen, rivermen, and businessmen may share the glory. The elders present may well regret the absence of such stalwart figures as Colonel William E. Merrill and Captain William B. Rodgers, whose ingenuity and dauntless faith bore so large a part in this achievement.

I personally feel deeply the absence of Senator Theodore Burton, at whose bedside in Washington I have recently stood. His work as Chairman of the historic Inland Waterways Commission, appointed by President Roosevelt in 1907, gave the foundation upon which this great development has been created. The report of that Commission in 1908 has been the bible of waterways improvement. Its first result was the Act of 1910, with which began the present project, now brought to successful conclusion. It reflected not only the clarity of mind with which the Senator has endowed public issues for a generation, but also the broad humanity of his spirit, that dwelt with especial concern upon the problems of equity involved and upon the welfare of the whole [p.345] body of men and women of the country for whose benefit the program was primarily undertaken.

Of Speaker Longworth, who fortunately is present, it should be recalled that he was one of the founders of the Ohio Valley Improvement Association and has both privately and as an officer of the Government worked indefatigably in the cause of this development for more than a quarter of a century. He and his associates deserve high remembrance in the records of this achievement.

But the whole Ohio Valley and the Nation as well should be congratulated upon this occasion. A new agency of service now begins its quiet labors for mankind. The towpath that led one Ohio boy to the White House has been modernized. But opportunity has been expanded by the abandonment of the towpath for the engine. It is the glory of our scientific age that its sooty processes in the end bring results that make childhood stronger and happier, and give to manhood and womanhood a life richer and more varied.

This monument will ever remind the people of a great accomplishment.