Domestic and British Exports-Loan of Foreign Capital. 527 ment for the loan, he adds: "We will expected of us, will be made with a view receive your lumber by way of the to conciliate that power first. All this Hudson, or through the port of Portland, is well; but it goes either too far, or not and land it on your sugar plantations far enough. Our interests, as we have ten per cent. cheaper than it can possibly remarked, are common. We must be delivered there now by way of New- avoid all sectional feeling, and all exOrleans. We will do more. We will travagant deferences to foreign governsend you Canadian wheat, and thus de- ments-whether England or Russiaprive our own farmers of so much of a where the object is to enrich one portion market, for what does it matter to us of the Union at the expense of the othwhether we ship to Boston, to New-York, er, and to conciliate a powerful state beor to Philadelphia, so long as we derive cause it condescends to purchase a comequal benefit from the transportation? modity from us which it can neither Then, again, as Canada wants pork and produce nor obtain elsewhere. hams, the provinces will receive these Let us come to figures. The domescommodities without the payment of cus- tic exports of the United States amount toms duties; and this will lower Cana- in value* to $196,689,718. Of this dian labor. We will go still farther. amount, England takes to the value of We will" But we will not pursue $105,121,921. Deducting $70,000,000 the thread of the argument. The next as the excess of her purchases of cotton we hear of this compromise of interests, over other nations, and $12,000,000 in is the advocacy of Canadian reciprocity gold and silver as a similar excess, there in the Congressional halls at Washington. is a balance left of $23,121,921. She The North has no wish to see the buys from us commodities to the value South assume an attitude of commercial of $23,121,921, all prime necessaries of independence. It has no intention, if it life and needful luxuries, which is less can prevent the alternative, of allowing than double the value of the prime nethe South to become its own burden-car- cessaries of life and luxuries which we rier, its own importer, and its own ex- export to the West Indies, the domestic porter. It cannot passively contemplate trade with which might be so greatly the withdrawal of the cotton, pork, to- augmented by a system of reciprocity. bacco, rice, or provision trade, which it The domestic export trade with the West now controls. While cotton continues Indies amounts in value to $12,600,875 to be the ruling staple of the continent, per annum, while the domestic export and England monopolizes the spindles trade with Canada does not exceed of the world, every national concession $5,835,000. Domestic and British Exports per Annum to all Parts of the World. perity, that to maintain and enlarge it, found. The products are the products we are almost willing at times to sow of every hemisphere; and the area the seeds of contention at home. England, on the contrary, has her trade well diffused over the globe; and by bold enterprise, and the exercise of a lofty spirit, she has pushed her conquests of peace, until her domestic exports now average $360,000,000 per annum. The figures in the foregoing table are in point. We have on this continent, and in the islands adjacent, an extensive market for the interchanges of commerce, that needs to be fostered to be profitable.From the frozen seas of the North, to the Straits of Magellan, it is one vast and elongated continuity of plateaus, valleys, table-lands, and protecting mountains, of intersecting lakes, and navigable rivers of rail-roads and canals-of contiguous cities-and of clustering isles, Every habitable zone is embraced within its extreme length, and heat and cold are regulated on isothermal as well as meridian lines. From latitude to latitude, every quality of cultivable soil is of habitable country yet to be occu pied by a population as dense as that of Europe, is greater than the whole of Afri ca. Bathed on one side by the Pacific and on the other by the Atlantic, the continent looks out on Europe and Africa and Asia on the East; and on Asia and Oceanica on the West. What destiny awaits this continent, none can tell; but this we may safely predict, that it will be through an American population and over our own soil, that the nations of the world will hereafter have intercourse and hold intellectual converse. We conclude this division of the subject by drawing the reader's attention to the subjoined table. It is prepared from official statements of the domestic trade of the United States with the countries named, the domestic exports of Great Britain thereto, the population and square miles thereof, and the number of souls to each square mile. We shall continue the subject more in detail hereafter. Pop. to sq. 7,200,000....1,100,000.... 7 .1,600,000.. 1,852,000.... 204,000.. 9 223,302. 149,856. 1,256,000 1,250,000. 774,000.. 2,200,000 330,000. 927,000.. 480,000. 256,000. 7,560,000 ..2,300,000 135,000.... 136,000.. 1 Commercial Value of the Mexican Gulf and the Mediterranean. 529 to Africa. If we can establish this point, then it must at once be admitted, that, as a matter of expediency, recipro city with the Canadas should be immediately followed or preceded by reciprocity with South America and its territorial appendages and islands, and with the West Indies, and the isles of the Pacific contiguous to the continent. That which should first be considered, as regards the commercial value of a sea, is its physical character, the protection its harbors afford to shipping, its form or configuration, the natural features and productiveness of the countries which bound it, its currents and climate, but mainly the number, navigable condition, and courses of the rivers that fall into it. Secondly, accessibility to the great ocean highway, distance to be passed over in going and returning; distances to be overcome in visiting from port to port; and, finally, contiguity to the markets of the world. The Red Sea, comparatively speaking, is of no commercial value: it is hardly sought as an interoceanic communication with the Mediterranean. It has no great rivers falling into it It drains no valleys, no basins, no lands, that might send forward their products to be borne upon its bosom to ready markets. Along its banks no cities have risen to maritime opulence; commerce would perish if planted there. Its waters are received from a mysterious source, and come and go but to feed the Indian ocean. Few vessels ride upon it, or are urged by its winds; and only such are impelled over its surface as bear the slaves of Massonah to Egyptian harems, or African pilgrims to the shrine of Mecca. How different would its uses be, if, from the hills of Abyssinia, the shores of the Persian Gulf, the valley of the Nile, or the basins of the Euphrates, an Amazon, a Mississippi, a Hudson, or an Orinoco, poured into it, and united the trade of three continents. Commerce and navigation have changed their principles and character with the revolutions of time, of states, and the spread and progress of population and civilization. Around the name of the Mediterranean there lingers a classic association, and we venerate it for its past services, when on its bosom rode the argosies of the world, and the trade of both hemispheres located on its shores. Cyprus and Syracuse, Carthage and Utica, Memphis and Tripolis, Antioch and Smyrna, Alexandria and Ptolemais, Tyre, Sidon and Joppa, are names as familiar for their commercial grandeur as for the glory of their arms, their conquests of peace, or the wealth, on which their civic greatness was founded.-But the commerce of antiquity, great as it was for the time or era, was nothing in comparison to the trade of a single city a few hundred years later. And great as was this latter trade, what was it, in all its vigor, to the trade of London, or Liverpool, or New-York now? The commercial magnitude of the ancient Mediterranean ports cannot be traced in their ruins; but one thing we are assured of, that the cities of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, together, do not afford employment for as much tonnage as does the port of New-York alone. But this has little to do with the question of the commercial value of the Mediterranean. Cities may crumble on its shores, its bays may fill with mud and vegetable aggregations; and states decay that once ruled it. All this may evince a degeneracy of people, a want of enterprise, the operation of unwise laws, a corrupting government-it may be a result of devastating wars, or a transfer of commercial power and dominion consequent upon the spread of population, and the discovery of new mediums of supply, and new channels of intercourse. But the countries remain. The rivers that poured their floods into the Baltic, into the Propontis, and into the Ægean, and which supplied the Mediterranean on the North, flow on still. The great arteries of three continents, the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Nile, which drained their valleys a thousand years ago, drain them now. It is because commerce has changed its principles, and navigation its character, that the Mediterranean is not what it was. Discovery has swept past the natural order and development of things. It has created necessities, and it has surmounted former obstacles. We traverse the ocean with steam and travel the earth with iron horses. Speed is everything, whether in the plow or the anvil, the common wagon or the rail-road carriage, the sail-rigged ship or the leviathan steamer. The Mediterranean is a sea of seasof peninsulas and headlands of archipelagos and deeply-indented bays. A 4 journey may be made by land from are the surplus of the products which Genoa to Venice in a few hours, and these countries reject. The local sup It is no departure from truth to aver, that the basins tributary to the Gulf of Mexico are more extensive, prolific in natural productions, and the productions more varied in character and of greater agricultural value, than may be said of all the basins in the world beside. The annexed table will serve to illustrate this fact, so far as square miles are con cerned: Basins in the World, drained by Rivers, having a Sea or Ocean Outlet. THE OLD WORLD. Nile 66 Indus... Ganges. Irawaddy 86 Others of India. 66 Rhine & West. Europe 1,160,000 sq. m. 520,000 196,000 312.000 432,000 331,000 173,000 730,000 66 44 66 +6 64 44 46 market. Key West and Gibraltar are Basin of the Mississippi the gateways that interlock the granaries of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean. East and west of these is the Atlantic, and it is only on its heaving billows that the strife of rivalry begins. The seas locked within are The valley of the Amazon is but a the recipients of the elements of com- continuation of the valley of the Missis merce-nothing more-and that sea sippi; and its waters, by the laws which which has the advantage of proximity to govern tides, are caused to flow, not into the ocean, of greatest extent of bound- the ocean first, but into the gulf. The ing country, of variety and quality of Orinoco, which is an arm of that majes production, and superiority of inland tic flood, empties into the Caribbean navigation, is the sea that does, and al- direct. Hence the valley of the Amaways must, take precedence of all others. zon is but a continuation of the basin of Such is the Gulf of Mexico. There is, too, the Mississippi; and their draining rivers this point to be considered: The pro- all fall into the gulf before they flow ducts of Southern Europe, of Western out into the Atlantic. But it is needless Asia, and of Northern Africa, which to dwell longer on the external value of seek the ocean by the Mediterranean, the two seas. Any farther comparison Physical Character of the Mississippi Valley. 531 bowels-is reached and disseminated through the vast basins which thus stretch, on meridian and latitudinal lines far north and south of the tropics, into the temperate zones. may be confined to a few words. The productions brought down from the basins of the old world, do not return to them. The staples of the Indus and Ganges make long voyages to Europe or Eastern Asia; the surplus products of Whatever causes supervene to deprive the basins of Western Europe are borne the Mississippi, as a burden-route, of its to markets far beyond the Indian seas; proper downward share of the domestic and the products of the valleys drained products of the country-whether trade by the rivers that pour into the Mediter- is forced from its banks to the northern ranean, are conveyed oceanward thou- ports by enterprise and artificial mesands of miles to all hemispheres. The diums, or the foreign demand for our great basins of the Americas are all staples, by way of New-Orleans, is on drained towards the gulf; and the ocean the wane-of one thing we may be cermarket is then at hand. tain, that it needs but the effort to make We have next to consider the physi- that city one of the greatest entrepots cal character of the countries through on the globe. Its commercial position which our rivers course. The Missis is unrivaled, and its climate daily imsippi River, which is peculiarly our own, proves. The continent, south of it, is is the ventricle of the Union. It is capa- yet to be explored, its resources to be ble of absorbing and digesting all the developed, its riches and their variety products of labor that may be poured to be unfolded. Three hundred millions into it. Taking its rise in the lati- of people ask to be admitted to commutude of fifty degrees north, in the re- nion and intercourse with six hundred gion of snows and exalted mountains, millions west of us, who are shut out by where the climates are suited to the an isthmus, only twenty-six miles in growth of wheat and barley, and the width. A hundred millions of dollars hardy cereals-in the region of valuable have already been expended or devoted forests and animal furs-it runs south, to the work of leveling this barrier, of crossing thirty degrees of latitude, and constructing rail-roads from the Atlantic changing with every mile its tempera- to the Pacific, of tunneling mountains, ture and the character of the staples that digging canals, clearing out once naviare produced on its banks. "Having," gable streams, of building highways says an eloquent writer, in speaking of which are to penetrate into and traverse this noble river, "left behind it the re- the interior, and of laying the foundagions for peltries, wheat, and corn; for hemp and tobacco; for pulse, apples, whisky, oil and cotton; and having crossed the pastoral lands for hogs, horses, and cattle, it reaches, near the thirtieth degree of latitude, the northern verge of the sugar-cane. Thence expanding out in the gulf, with all these productions on its bosom, it passes on to Key West and the Tortugas, and delivers up to the winds and waves of the ocean the fruits of its teeming soil and multitudinous climes." Then comes in the valley of the Amazon. Taking up the agricultural productions and staples which the Mississippi had just reached, and pushing the variety beyond the equator, it increases, and far down in another hemisphere diversifies the wonderful assortment, until sugar and rice, coffee and indigo, drugs and spices, cocoa and cotton, cochineal and tobacco, india-rubber, dyewoods, peltries, flax and wool-everything, in short, that is grown on earth, or produced from its tions of Anglo-Saxon cities on the sites of Indian villages. Steam has commuted time, and brought about a speedier and nearer relationship of Europe with America, and both with the East, than could have been accomplished by the ordinary sailing-vessel for a hundred years later. By a census of the Central and South American states, the increase of Caucasian population thereof, for seventy years was not greater than has been the increase of pure white population within the three years last past. And the influences that will inevitably work a restoration of the political, moral, and social condition of the South American states (and they have much to redeem)—that will lead to advancement in the arts and sciences, and to physical progresswill operate with the same results in the West Indies and the islands which belong to the continent. Let once the seed of Anglo-Saxon enterprise be sown, as it has been, to some extent, in Central America and south of the Amazon, it |