Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 January 1919 — FUTURE HIDDEN FROM CLAY. [ARTICLE]

FUTURE HIDDEN FROM CLAY.

Could the shade of Henry Clay, roused from the slumbers of more than threescore years by the pandemonium as 100 engineers tied down their whistle cords sind shrilled forth exultant shrieks, have trod the fltrtiospheric space from his haunts in the Blue* Grass country to Sault Ste. Marie a few weeks since, and looked with dull eyes on the newly finished engineering feat spread out before his astonished gaze, he would have been forced to admit that his declaration bapk in 1840 was at least shortsighted. “It is a work quite beyond the. remotest settlement of the United States, if not in the moon," said Henry Clay on that memorable occasion, when by the power of his silver-tongued oratory he influenced the congress of the United States to defeat a measure by which a canal Could be dug around St. Mary’s f<lls. He was believed, and the project that now in finished form ranks in world importance far greater than the Suez canal, and in some minds greater than the Panama canal, was condemned as impractical. It was not "until 12 years later that congress saw its mistake and yielded to the persuasion of influential citizens of Michigan and New York to grant an appropriation of land . whereby the state of Michigan could finance the excavation of a canal. —J. Paul Chandler in Detroit Free Press. - * ; -j- —7“"