and were contributed weekly from October, 1807, to March, 1808. Hawley had thought out his problem with great seriousness and detail, and had splendidly planned a canal from Buffalo to Utica, where improved navigation on the Mohawk was to be depended upon. The cost he estimated at five millions. It is not at all unlikely that Hawley's attention was the more quickly attracted to this subject because of the celebrated message of President Jefferson to Congress in this fall of 1807, just when Hercules was writing his articles.
It was probably the general discussion of this great theme, more than the result of any one influence, which led to the crystallization of the movement, when on February 4, 1808, Joshua Forman, a member of the New York legislature, from Onondaga County, offered the following bill:
"Whereas the President of the United States by his message to Congress, delivered at their meeting in October last, did recommend that the surplus money in the treasury, over and above such sums as could be applied to the extinguishment of the national debt, be appropriated to the
