Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0142/01422.txt

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$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Appendix B}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
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$Subject{river
country
states
captain
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general
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levees
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$Date{1917}
$Log{See Slaves*0142201.scf
See Mark Twain*0142202.scf
}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Appendix B

     The condition of this rich valley of the Lower Mississippi, immediately
after and since the war, constituted one of the disastrous effects of war most
to be deplored.  Fictitious property in slaves was not only righteously
destroyed, but very much of the work which had depended upon the slave labor
was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the levee system.

[See Slaves: Work Depended On Slave Labor]

     It might have been expected, by those who have not investigated the
subject, that such important improvements as the construction and maintenance
of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several states.  But what
can the state do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest
ranging from eighteen to thirty per cent., and are also under the necessity of
pledging their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the
privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at one hundred per cent. profit?

     It has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious that the
control of the Mississippi River, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken by
the national government, and cannot be compassed by states. The river must be
treated as a unit; its control cannot be compassed under a divided or separate
system of administration.

     Neither are the states especially interested competent to combine among
themselves for the necessary operations.  The work must begin far up the
river; at least as far as Cairo, if not beyond, and must be conducted upon a
consistent general plan throughout the course of the river.

     It does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the
elements of the case, if one will give a little time and attention to the
subject; and when a Mississippi River commission has been constituted, as the
existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life, may
it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted as
conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control can be
considered conclusive?

     It should be remembered that upon this board are General Gilmore, General
Comstock, and General Suter of the United States Engineers; Professor Henry
Mitchell (the most competent authority on the question of hydrography) of the
United States Coast Survey; B. B. Harrod, the State Engineer of Louisiana;
Jas. B. Eads, whose success with the jetties at New Orleans is a warrant of
his competency, and Judge Taylor of Indiana.

     It would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled,
to contest the judgment of such a board as this.

     The method of improvement proposed by the commission is at once in accord
with the results of engineering experience and with observations of nature
where meeting our wants.  As in nature the growth of trees and their
proneness, where undermined, to fall across the slope and support the bank
secure at some points a fair depth of channel and some degree of permanence;
so, in the project of the engineer, the use of timber and brush and the
encouragement of forest growth are the main features.  It is proposed to
reduce the width, where excessive, by brushwood dykes, at first low, but
raised higher and higher as the mud of the river settles under their shelter,
and finally slope them back at the angle upon which willows will grow freely.
In this work there are many details connected with the forms of these shelter
dykes, their arrangements so as to present a series of settling basins, etc.,
a description of which would only complicate the conception.  Through the
larger part of the river works of contraction will not be required, but nearly
all the banks on the concave side of the bends must be held against the wear
of the stream, and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points.
The works having in view this conservative object may be generally designated
works of revetment; and these also will be largely of brushwood, woven in
continuous carpets, or twined into wire netting.  This veneering process has
been successfully employed on the Missouri River; and in some cases they have
so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with
willows, that they may be regarded as permanent.  In securing these mats
rubblestone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the
dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more or less paved
with stone.

     Any one who has been on the Rhine will have observed operations not
unlike those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the rivers
of Europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar treatment in
the interest of navigation and agriculture.

     The levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not
necessarily in immediate connection.  It may be set back a short distance from
the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet.  The flood
river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and compelled to
unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel, without a complete
control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise must be provided
against, because this would endanger the levee, and once in force behind the
works of revetment, would tear them also away.

     Under the general principle that the local slope of a river is the result
and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is evident that a narrow and deep
stream should have less slope, because it has less frictional surface in
proportion to capacity; i. e., less perimeter in proportion to area of
cross-section.  The ultimate effect of levees and revetments, confining the
floods and bringing all the stages of the river into registry, is to deepen
the channel and let down the slope.  The first effect of the levees is to
raise the surface; but this, by inducing greater velocity of flow, inevitably
causes an enlargement of section, and if this enlargement is prevented from
being made at the expense of banks, the bottom must give way and the form of
the waterway be so improved as to admit this flow with less rise.  The actual
experience with levees upon the Mississippi River, with no attempt to hold the
banks, has been favorable, and no one can doubt, upon the evidence furnished
in the reports of the commission, that if the earliest levees had been
accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete, we should have to-day a
river navigable at low water and an adjacent country safe from inundation.

     Of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river
can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary, but it is
believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river as a conduit may be so
improved in form that even those rare floods which result from the coincident
rising of many tributaries will find vent without destroying levees of
ordinary height.  That the actual capacity of a channel through alluvium
depends upon its service during floods has been often shown, but this capacity
does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods.

     It is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving the
Mississippi River floods by creating new outlets, since these sensational
propositions have commended themselves only to unthinking minds, and have no
support among engineers.  Were the river-bed cast-iron, a resort to openings
for surplus waters might be a necessity; but as the bottom is yielding, and
the best form of outlet is a single deep channel, as realizing the least ratio
of perimeter to area of cross-section, there could not well be a more
unphilosophical method of treatment than the multiplication of avenues of
escape.

     In the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense in as
limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit, the general
elements of the problem, and the general features of the proposed method of
improvement which has been adopted by the Mississippi River Commission.

     The writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on his
part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise which calls for
the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter which interests every citizen
of the United States, and is one of the methods of reconstruction which ought
to be approved.  It is a war claim which implies no private gain, and no
compensation except for one of the cases of destruction incident to war which
may well be repaired by the people of the whole country.

     Edward Atkinson.

     Boston, April 14, 1882.

Appendix C

Reception Of Captain Basil Hall's Book In The United States

     Having now arrived nearly at the end of our travels, I am induced, ere I
conclude, again to mention what I consider as one of the most remarkable
traits in the national character of the Americans: namely, their exquisite
sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning
them.  Of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example I can give is the effect
produced on nearly every class of readers by the appearance of Captain Basil
Hall's Travels in North America.  In fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake,
and the vibration it occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one
corner of the Union to the other, was by no means over when I left the country
in July, 1831, a couple of years after the shock.

     I was in Cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it was not till
July, 1830, that I procured a copy of them.  One bookseller to whom I applied
told me that he had had a few copies before he understood the nature of the
work, but that, after becoming acquainted with it, nothing should induce him
to sell another.  Other persons of his profession must, however, have been
less scrupulous; for the book was read in city, town, village, and hamlet,
steamboat and stage-coach, and a sort of warwhoop was sent forth perfectly
unprecedented in my recollection upon any occasion whatever.

     An ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under
censure, have always, I believe, been considered as amiable traits of
character, but the condition into which the appearance of Captain Hall's work
threw the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to excess,
produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility.

     It was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects, were of
some judgment, utter their opinions upon this.  I never heard of any instance
in which the common sense generally found in national criticism was so
overthrown by passion.  I do not speak of the want of justice, and of fair and
liberal interpretation: these, perhaps, were hardly to be expected.  Other
nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have,
apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it
be tempered with adulation.  It was not, therefore, very surprising that the
acute and forcible observations of a traveler they knew would be listened to
should be received testily.  The extraordinary features of the business were,
first, the excess of the rage into which they lashed themselves; and,
secondly, the puerility of the inventions by which they attempted to account
for the severity with which they fancied they had been treated.

     Not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth
from beginning to end (which is an assertion I heard made very nearly as often
as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work to discover the causes
why Captain Hall had visited the United States, and why he had published his
book.

     I have heard it said with as much precision and gravity as if the
statement had been conveyed by an official report, that Captain Hall had been
sent out by the British government expressly for the purpose of checking the
growing admiration of England for the government of the United States - that
it was by a commission from the Treasury he had come, and that it was only in
obedience to orders that he had found anything to object to.

     I do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; I am persuaded that it is
the belief of a very considerable portion of the country.  So deep is the
conviction of this singular people that they cannot be seen without being
admired, that they will not admit the possibility that any one should honestly
and sincerely find aught to disprove in them or their country.

     The American Reviews are, many of them, I believe, well known in England;
I need not, therefore, quote them here, but I sometimes wondered that they,
none of them, ever thought of translating Obadiah's curse into classic
American; if they had done so, on placing [he, Basil Hall] between brackets,
instead of [he, Obadiah] it would have saved them a world of trouble.

     I can hardly describe the curiosity with which I sat down at length to
peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can I do justice to my surprise at
their contents.  To say that I have found not one exaggerated statement
throughout the work is by no means saying enough.  It is impossible for any
one who knows the country not to see that Captain Hall earnestly sought out
things to admire and commend.  When he praises, it is with evident pleasure;
and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint,
excepting where motives purely patriotic urge him to state roundly what it is
for the benefit of his country should be known.

     In fact, Captain Hall saw the country to the greatest possible advantage.
Furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the most distinguished
individuals, and with the still more influential recommendation of his own
reputation, he was received in full drawing- room style and state from one end
of the Union to the other.  He saw the country in full dress, and had little
or no opportunity of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with
all its imperfections on its head, as I and my family too often had.

     Captain Hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making himself
acquainted with the form of the government and the laws; and of receiving,
moreover, the best oral commentary upon them, in conversation with the most
distinguished citizens.  Of these opportunities he made excellent use; nothing
important met his eye which did not receive that sort of analytical attention
which an experienced and philosophical traveler alone can give.  This has made
his volumes highly interesting and valuable; but I am deeply persuaded that,
were a man of equal penetration to visit the United States with no other means
of becoming acquainted with the national character than the ordinary
working-day intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea of
the moral atmosphere of the country than Captain Hall appears to have done;
and the internal conviction on my mind is strong that, if Captain Hall had not
placed a firm restraint on himself, he must have given expression to far
deeper indignation than any he has uttered against many points in the American
character, with which he shows from other circumstances that he was well
acquainted.  His rule appears to have been to state just so much of the truth
as would leave on the mind of his readers a correct impression, at least the
cost of pain to the sensitive folks he was writing about.  He states his own
opinions and feelings, and leaves it to be inferred that he has good ground
for adopting them; but he spares the Americans the bitterness which a detail
of the circumstances would have produced.

     If any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve millions
of strangers is the origin of my opinion, I must bear it; and were the
question one of mere idle speculation, I certainly would not court the abuse I
must meet for stating it.  But it is not so.

     The candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for
irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from
whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation; and
although they must know right well, in their own secret hearts, how infinitely
more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to betray, they pretend, even to
themselves, that he has exaggerated the bad points of their character and
institutions; whereas, the truth is that he has let them off with a degree of
tenderness which may be quite suitable for him to exercise, however little
merited; while, at the same time, he has most industriously magnified their
merits, whenever he could possibly find anything favorable.

[See Mark Twain: Mark Twain at work in his study.]