AN HISTORICAL REVIEW OF WATERWAYS AND CANALS IN NEW YORK STATE BY HENRY WAYLAND HILL, LL. D. I. EARLY USE OF NATURAL WATERWAYS. A critical examination of the history of New York will disclose the predominance of the commercial spirit of its people, who derived their first impressions in the broad domain of statecraft from the Dutch. Its laws and institutions are an expression of this spirit and the embodiment of the political maxim of Hamilton, its greatest creative genius, that "a prosperous commerce is perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth." The early institution of the aggressive policies of the Dutch in the Province of New York gave it a commercial impetus similar to that of the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the modification of these policies thereafter by the English did not destroy their effectiveness. The commercial spirit of Great Britain, then reaching out to compass the entire globe, rather intensified the interest of the people of this Province in extending their domestic and foreign commerce to include a wider range of subjects, and to other countries, than those to which they were limited under the Dutch regime. The successive occupations of this territory by the aborigines, the Dutch and 3 |