Lake Erie is additional proof. How strong the inducement to western merchants to use the line that will afford them superior advantages and save this risk. A great inconvenience connected with the dangers on the lakes is the uncertainty felt by the merchant. His purchases east are made with care and taste to suit his own market, and the receipt of this merchandise as purchased is of consequence to him. Will he not avail himself of that line free from risk, and affording the certainty of receiving his merchandise as purchased?

5th. Availibility of the line at all seasons. Herein is a great desideratum. It is against the policy of Americans to remain locked up by ice one-half of the year. We have rendered time tributary to our benefit; we have made the electric fluid subsidiary to our wants, and can we stop our whole machinery from natural causes? Not so. There must be a continual communication throughout the United States. This desideratum is afforded in the proposed line of railroads. The present course of commerce runs thus:-the collection of large amounts of produce at the dif ferent shipping ports in the West during five months. On the opening of navigation in the spring, and prior to the closing in the fall, there is a rush, forcing every nerve and using every means to forward produce, each one being anxious to secure the first chance of the market, and to pour as much produce as possible into the market during the fall; the effect being to depress the markets below the actual value, and thus injuring the producer. Any rise in the markets east during the winter is not available to the western people, and the consequence is, an unhealthy rise in the eastern market, elevating the prices east and west when the canals open; a depression follows, and loss and ruin often ensues.

What a revolution in this ill-formed trade will the opening of a continuous railroad produce! It will be a governor to the commerce of the country, enabling the producers to forward their produce as prepared, to take every advantage of the market, prevent any great fluctuations, and make their purchases as they require, thus making all trade more regular in its movements.

In a financial view, it will be of great benefit; an inference from the foregoing remarks. The system of making advances to western millers and merchants, so extensively pursued in New York and other cities, is a very bad one; and the reverses of last spring furnish a profitable lesson. This will be reduced to proper bounds, and if the factor advances to the miller to purchase wheat, he can have the flour in market in a few days, and thus at no time be much in advance. And the fact that merchandise will not be purchased in such large amounts at one time, will tend to relieve the purchasers West and the merchants in eastern cities. The whole influence will thus be salutary.

The aid of the telegraph will be brought into requisition, and large. amounts of flour and produce be sold through its medium. Sales of flour may be made in the West to-day, and promises of delivery in three or four days, thus bringing the western millers on nearly equa! ground with those located near the seaboard.

6thly. In the present movements of western trade, the cities on the lakes become the depots, and to secure the trade this must be the course; but by observing the locations of the routes above indicated, this course of trade will be altered; and to obtain the trade, we are not forced to go to Cleaveland, Sandusky, or any lake city, but every depot along the net-work

of railroads and canals become the points at which we aim. This line is the great Mississippi, and will have its branches reaching every point in the West. We then obtain our trade in the heart of the producing country, and thus save to the western people the expense of sending their produce to the shipping city, and receiving their merchandise therefrom, which amount of freight serves to lessen our rates and to add to the expenses of other lines. It is certain, then, that this line will secure the entire trade of the West for the fall, winter, and spring months, at least during the time the lakes and canals are locked up with ice. The balance of the year we would more than have equal chances. These are some of the advantages connected with this line.

The winter trade of the West now seeks New Orleans as a market, being completely debarred from the North. Take away the cotton and sugar trade of that city, and the balance is entirely derived from the up-country, and mostly received during the winter.

There are so many changes incident to this trade, and so many drawbacks to its successful prosecution, that produce will not be shipped there when other avenues are open. Here, then, we open the avenue, and secure, at the least calculation, a trade worth twenty millions of dollars. It is unnecessary to make any remarks in reference to passengers. The advantages in this case are so decided that there is no doubt that two-thirds of the whole travel will be secured to this line.

In writing of the effects of these lines of trade, I am led on almost against my own judgment in speaking of rival lines. To look ahead at the progress of the western country, conceive its population doubled in fifteen years, its vast resources constantly developing, the great increase of trade consequent, and it seems idle to write of rival lines. There is enough for all, and many more such lines. True, some peculiar locations will command certain trade, and with that impression have I written, to show the trade that will inevitably be secured to this city. That it will be a greater amount than any other point, I cannot doubt, but that other cities will in consequence be ruined cannot be believed.

If all my premises are correct, the conclusion is unassailable. And how strong the arguments thus adduced to the people of Philadelphia to enter at once upon the construction of a road offering so great inducements; the effect being to elevate the city, and thus enable her to enter the field a bold and successful competitor for commercial ascendancy.

Philadelphia is destined to be the coal and iron depot of our continent; the centre of the manufacturing system, and a vast warehouse for western trade. Capital will flow in from every quarter, and improvements extend to every portion of the State; and Pennsylvania, free from debt, will in truth be the Keystone of the Union, and be pointed to as an honor to the government, an honor to man, an honor to the world.

J. A. W.

Art. V. THE SEA RESOURCES OF THE COAST:

AND THE WHALE AND SHORE FISHERIES OF NEW LONDON.

STERILE as the rocky coast of Connecticut may be, in comparison with the fertile valleys of the West, and scanty as may be the product gathered from the rugged surface of its soil, Connecticut contributes her full quota to the national coffers, and furnishes her full share of material for the national defences.

It has become so fashionable to disparage her stony shores, and to ridicule the meagre amount of her agricultural resources, that her people have really seemed disposed to let judgment go against them by default, and to submit in silence to all the flippancy that has been let off upon them, and upon the honest old pilgrim soil which gave them birth. They have entered no counter-plea, and manifested no desire to do so.

Content with their own lot, they heed very little the estimate that may be put upon it by others; and being somewhat thick-skinned towards detractors, she has been quiet under their calumnies, and even ridicule has scarcely found itself effective in disturbing their sensibilities. Conscious, themselves, of a tolerable degree of comfort in the world, they have cared very little for what other people have had to say about it. Finding no great difficulty in maintaining their families, educating their children, and keeping their accounts square with their neighbors, it brings no special trouble to their minds that the land from which they gather the means of doing all this, will rarely yield them more than thirty bushels of corn to the acre, while their Indiana and Illinois friends can obtain two or three times as much from theirs, with perhaps one-half the labor. So long as they can keep their crops and their creditors upon tolerable terms with each other, it is matter of very little regret to them, that the former are not large enough to flatter them into factitious flourish, nor the latter numerous enough and exacting enough to tempt the debtor into repudiation. The Connecticut producer has less "chivalry," or, at any rate, it is rather less obtrusive, and abundantly less noisy, than that on the banks of the Santee and the Mississippi; but perhaps, after all, it is nearly as nice in its honor, and quite as convenient in its "high-mindedness;" for it consists, mainly, in a rigid adherence to principle-the principle of performing what it promises.

His land may not be so rich as that of his Western and Southern brethren--it certainly is not-and he may not himself be as individually rich as the great planters and farmers of Carolina and Pennsylvania, and he certainly is not, so far as the possession of great apparent wealth is concerned; but it will be our business to see whether the riches, as well as the personal comforts and individual independence of this people, are not fully equal in the aggregate.

The Yankee land is cold, bleak, and rocky; at least, large portions of it are so, and not more than half as good as that of Ohio, or western New York, for growing wheat; compared with that, it will rarely yield more than half a crop of potatoes, but it is good for something, nevertheless. It is no great thing for hemp or flax, but first-rate for building wharves upon;-not particularly productive in corn, but capital for cod-fishing from, and excellent for shelter to whale ships. The soil is rich enough, at any

rate, for raising raw material for ships, and the hardiest sailors that ever floated upon salt water, for navigating them.

It so chanced, a short time since, that we were thrown among some statistics touching the business and resources of a small section of Connecticut, and that, too, the very poorest portion of the State, so far as soil is concerned. The Collection District of New London, embraces only that portion of the Sound coast which lies between the mouth of the Con necticut River and the Western shore of the Mystic, a distance of less than twenty miles, and though the land lying immediately on the water is for the most part tolerably good, the productive soil does not reach more than a mile from the Sound, on an average; and back of that, for some distance into the interior, it is as poor and as unproductive as any part of New England-a considerable part of it too poor even to be cultivated— worth nothing but for wood, and for a scanty pasturage for sheep.

Now, let us see what this seemingly unpromising portion of poor old Connecticut really is worth to the owners and to the country.

Within that circumscribed district, there are owned, manned, and fitted out, 57 ships, 16 barks, 1 brig, 5 schooners, 1 sloop-total 80.*

These eighty vessels are engaged in the whale fishery, and cruise in every accessible quarter of the globe, and in some quarters which have proved inaccessible to all others; for, in the language of Burke, their sails whiten every water, "from the tropics to each extremity of polar cold," and it has not unfrequently occurred, that the bold and unflinching navigators of these ships have been found floundering among the mountain icebergs of the North and of the South, amidst which, even the daring enterprise of explorers, expressly fitted out for new discoveries, had become dismayed and turned back.

These vessels are manned by crews mostly made up of the hardy sons of the soil, and number, at present, a body of 2,295 men, many of them shareholders in the ships they sail in, and all of them interested in the voyages they make. Each man receives a pro rata proportion of the oil and bone taken on the cruise, and consequently has a direct incentive to the ample exercise of all his energies. The men engaged in a New Lon

The Collection District of Stonington, lying directly east of New London, and between that port and the State of Rhode Island, belonged, until within a few years, to New London. The length of coast, embraced in the new district, is less than nine miles; and the following statistics exhibit the flourishing state of the foreign and home fisheries within it :

Whaling ships at Stonington proper, 20; barks, 7; whaling ships at Mystic, 10; barks, 2; total, 39. The number of the crews manning these vessels, is 1,150.

The smacks over 20 tons, are, schooners, 4; sloops, 23; under 20 tons, 21; total, 48. One of these smacks is of 89.27 tons burden, another is 86 tons, another over 75, and there are several from 40 to 56 tons.

These vessels, like those of their class in the district of New London, are mostly managed on shares; the crew taking three-fifths of the whole "catchings," and the owners, the remaining two-fifths for the use of the smack.

It may as well be stated in this note, as in the body of the article, in which we overlooked the fact, that some of these small vessels, in both districts, generally go into southern latitudes during the winter, and return, in the spring, for the New England coast fishery. Some of them have even doubled Cape Horn, and cruised on the Chilian and Peruvian coasts, carrying their fish into Callao, and other South American ports for market. They have not, however, been very successful heretofore, in these enterprises. It is not at all uncommon to see a New London or Stonington smack, unloading her finny cargo, at Rio Janeiro, or Buenos Ayres.

don whaler, work hard and get rich slowly-but they get rich and bring riches into the country; and, what can be said of scarcely any other branch of nautical business, there is, in their case, a fair division of avails.

The officers share in proportion to the responsibilities of their grades, from master down to boat-steerer, and the men, proportionate to individual claim upon the common profits of the voyage-a claim, grounded upon the skill, experience, and bodily activity of each. Nothing could be more equitable than this apportionment, and nothing better calculated to secure the certainty of a profitable return to labor, so far as human exertion is capable of securing such a certainty.

The total return of these ships, in the different kinds of oil, and in the bone obtained from the whale, amounts to about $32,000, upon each voyage, as nearly as the average can be made out from the data in our possession. These returns are made, in one, two, or three years, according to the quarter of the world in which they cruise, and to the success met with in finding and capturing the oleaginous monsters in whose pursuit the whaleman goes.

The vessels employed in the whaling business, from this port, are generally from 250 to 350 tons, though a portion of them are much larger; and there are at this time several ships in the "fleet," which were built for European packets, and engaged for a number of years in the New York, London, and Liverpool lines. The average tonnage, however, is about the same as that from Nantucket, New Bedford, and the other whaling ports of New England; but New London has cruising, at this time, the largest and the smallest whalemen in the world-the ship Atlantic, being 699 tons burden, while the schooner Garland is only 49 tons. The latter little craft, mere cockle-shell as she is, is breasting the billows off Derotation Island, in the Indian Ocean, as a tender to the ship Charles Carroll; her sturdy crew as confident in the staunchness of their vessel, and as little dreaming of danger, as if they were cruising in a line-of-battle-ship within sight of their own shore.

This very general view of the whaling statistics of the district, is sufficient to rescue the twenty miles of sterile coast from the charge of utter worthlessness, and to enable the people inhabiting it, to hold up their heads with some confidence among their countrymen, amidst the jeers, with which some of those countrymen so much delight in disparaging them. But,

Their resources reach beyond their whaling operations, or, to speak more accurately, their riches are not confined to the wealth acquired in distant seas, and remote quarters of far-off oceans. They find a mine of wealth, as it were, at their own doors, and are actually educating hundreds of hardy seamen for the country's service, within sight of the rocky promontories, whose shingly shores and shallow soil are deemed so valueless by the lords of prairie-land, and the notables of the "Ohio bottoms." Nor is this noble school for furnishing the commerce of the country with its best sailors, without its present profits while in operation. It is making comfortable, and even securing competency, if not actually making rich, the families of its pupils, at the same time that those pupils are hardening themselves into a body of men, so invaluable to their country, not only for its maritime prosperity in peace, but for its defence and its security in war. It is unnecessary to say, that we refer to the coast fishery, and to the immense comparative amount of interest connected with it.