The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-02-10
From the New York Sun.

-HE palm for the best speech in the
 debate in the House upon the fan-
 A anna canal exposition should be awarded to the Hon. William A. Roden- berg of Illinois, who led the forlorn hope for New Orleans. Few in number were the advocates of the Crescent City, but her case was presented with such engag- ing knowledge of the subject, such moder-e ation and grace of statement, with so much tact, and natural as distinguished from pumped up eloquence, that If MT. Rodenberg colleagues had not already made up their minds he might have car ried the day. The vacation argument was on the tip of every speakers tongue, and MT. Rodenberg was very happy in his use of it:
 If it be true that the public is no longer interested in expositions, then let us try the experiment of making the ex- position simply an incident of visit to the Panama canal itself, the thing to be celebrated, and whose completion every American citizen believes in celebrating. You cannot do that by locating the ex- position at San Francisco, but you can do it If you locate the exposition at New Orleans Let us give the people an op- portunity to visit the canal itself on which the government will haxe expended when completed over s4O0.000000. The av- craze American citizen who is in the habit of taking vacation cannot af- ford to spend more than $1O0 during the time that he absents himself from his reg ular employment. If he were given his choice of spending this money for trip | to San Francisco, with the monotony or four or five days confinement in stuny sleeper, or spending 1t for a trip to Pan anna, with an ocean voyage of six or seven days, giving him, perhaps for the first time, an opportunity to see an alien peo-
 pie, and above all enabling him to per sonally inspect this wonderful feat of engineering, which has been so thorough
 ly exploxed in all the magazines ana newspapers of the country, my judgment
 is that 99 out of every 100 would decide | in favor of the southern trip"
 1 It seems to be a rational idea that wis., l itors to a Panama canal exposition would
 like to view the great waterway connect | ing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and constituting a triumph of American en- gineering, the supreme wonder of an age
 of marvellous things, but "the average American citizen who is in the habit of taking a vacation seeks amusement
 more than information. The following appeal by the Hon. Joseph Russell Know
 land of California will strike more Ire sponsive chords" we fancy:
 Think of the things that men of on g vacation may see on the way to California and in California They can visit the Gar-
 den of the Gods; they can go over the
 Great Divide by Marshall Pass and the
 Grand Canon of the Arkansas. and they may see the Great Salt lake and it's sur
 roundings including Salt Lake City and
 the beautiful Wasatch mountains. They
 can see the Sierra Nevada mountains
 They can take in, if they choose, the
 Yellowstone National park. the beauti- full Cascade mountains, the Dalles and | Cascades of the Columbia river and the
 Puget sound country. Without leaving their seats in the train they may in pass | ing get many grand and inspiring views
 of those grandest of mountains, Rainier. l Hood and Shasta, at the very feet of
 which the train passes. They may view
 that wonder of nature, the Grand Canon
 of the Colorado. more than one mile deep. Once in California, there are the Yose-
 mite valley. the big trees. the ever-bloom- ing flowers, the delicious fruits and, every thing to bring delight to the senses and comfort to mind and body. To see these things when no exposition is in progress men make long journeys from all over the world. What will they do in 191b7 A very large percentage of the population