struck with the very high social position, considering the nature of their employment, of the teachers, male and female; he will observe with pleasure their polite and courteous bearing, of such importance as an example of good manners to the children; he will admire the complete order, quiet, and regularity with which the whole system of instruction is conducted by the exercise of mild, temperate, and, generally speaking, judicious authority; and he will perceive how great an amount of elementary secular instruction is given to those who stay a sufficient length of time to derive the full benefit of the opportunities of improvement there afforded. And I must confess that he will be likely to feel it as a just subject of reproach to his own country, that her very tenderness and zeal in the cause of religious truth, her very apprehension lest in her desire to attain an acknowledged good she may be betrayed into a step fraught with evilor, to descend to lower ground, her religious jealousies and animosities—should interpose to keep all education, both secular and religious, from the minds of tens of thousands of our fel

low-citizens at a time, too, when secular education is more than ever needed as a means of temporal prosperity and advancement, and when socialism and a vast and dangerous flood of "revolutionary literature" of the worst kind is occupying the ground left bare for its reception by the absence of all culture, secular or religious. How long, it may well be asked, is the Government of this country to be paralyzed by sectarian jealousies? and to what further extent are the very foundations of religious truth and social order to be undermined while the dispute rages as to the best method of preserving them ?*

* See further on this subject, pp. 235-262.

RAILWAYS.

WE are in the habit of hearing from time to time of the number of miles of railway completed and projected in the United States, the cost of their construction, and other particulars relating to them; we hear also of the comprehensive system of railway communication projected in Canada, and probably soon to be carried into effect. The fine series of canals in Canada, and the great public works of the same kind in the United States, are also occasionally brought to the notice of the public in this country. I am not aware, however, that, considering the full development which they will have attained in the course of the next few years, their probable bearing upon two questions that most nearly concern us in England-the increase and transport of agricultural produce, and emigration—has yet been adverted to with the particularity and distinctness which the subject deserves.

In passing over the countries through which these main routes take, or are about to take, their course, I was much impressed with the considerable amount of influence that they were likely to exercise in a few years on those interests. Up to the time of my leaving the United States (19th November last) no railway map had been published giving a complete idea of this subject, and I accordingly collected for my own information the maps of various companies, by which I ascertained what were to be the main arteries through which the cities of the Atlantic sea-board were to communicate with the vast West, and to what distant points in that wide and magnificent region they were to penetrate. From those materials, including the imperfect railway maps now in use, I have caused the annexed map to be prepared, showing also the principal lines in Canada, in progress and proposed. The lines of latitude are given as on a globe, in order the better to exhibit the relative positions, in point of latitude, in reference to this country, of our own possessions in North America.

Let any one take this map in hand and trace the lines, completed and projected, communicating from the sea-board with the interior.

Beginning with the South, he will find a line. projected from Mobile, on the Gulf of Mexico, to take up the trade of the Mississippi at Cairo, and to be continued in a direct line north to Chicago, on Lake Michigan; thus opening a line of country comparatively unsettled, but full of resources, and affording another inlet for manufactures to the great West.

Next, on the Atlantic sea-board, from Savannah in Georgia, and Charlestown in South Carolina, converging lines (meeting in the northern part of Georgia) run through those territories, the "Upper Country" in each of which, or the district removed from the sea, is capable of a great increase of production; thence through the highly fertile but still comparatively thinly-peopled States of Tennessee and Kentucky, to Evansville on the Ohio, and across the lower portion of Illinois to St. Louis—that great and increasing entrepôt for the trade of the West, situated just below the junction of the