power of moneyed corporations, she has already executed by private enterprise, works of "Internal Improvement," where the capital invested has been the thews and sinews of the stockholders; where direct benefits and productiveness far outstrip, in their results, any similar efforts of the States from which we spring, either on this continent, or in Europe.

Our tunnels amaze the scientific engineer, and he wonders whence the power came that built them. Our sunken shafts astonish the experienced miner of the old world, who never dreamed, that the arm of a freeman could possess such vigor. Our aqueducts and water-ways are, many of them, longer than most European canals, and though almost unknown to the world, seem to be commenced and completed with the rapidity of magic.

Recently, our whole domain was but one vast wild cattle-field; to-day it teems with population and the hum of industry, and the sound of labor is heard in all our valleys and on all our mountains.

Without being obliged, like other States, to manufacture, to produce, to exchange or barter, for the production of wealth, we lift it from the ground, and scatter broadcast. amongst the nations of the earth, a hundred millions of gold annually; and Atlas, like, single-handed, bear up commercial credit far above the shocks of commercial crises, and preserve the equilibrium of trade for a world. We repeat it, we have no parallel, either in our history or our condition. And these assertions, wild as they may seem, are stubborn facts, visible to all the earth, and not the offspring of vain and empty boastings.

The well known assertion of Bishop Berkeley, that "westward the course of Empire takes its way," is fulfilled in our destiny. The earliest annals of history testify to this migration as having occurred with the regularity of instinct. Asia impelled her living stream on Europe; Eastern Europe poured the melting mass along, until the mighty ocean hemmed it in, when Columbus drew his finger across the Atlantic, and followed by the living stream it reached our shores, and billow after billow has rolled on ever since, until the tide has burst over the confines of the Rocky Mountains, swept down the sides of the Sierra Nevada, and now, in the "fulness of time," the West, the "Far West," has ceased to exist!

That pent up flood of population now reacts upon the East, and like the glorious rays of the rising sun, as they burst the barriers of an intervening world, gild the mountain tops far away in the West, and thence rebound, and are given back in corruscations of light and life upon the valleys and the streams of the East: so that flow of empire, having reached its farthest bounds, it now returns its Lighty volume to endow with new energies and new resources the vast field it has passed, and thus it becomes, like mercy,

-"twice blessed;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

It is from California that this great enterprise we contemplate must spring: it is from her untiring energies that this movement must obtain its impulse. California must give nerve and power to this bold proposition. To say that there lives not the man who is capable of estimating the great results that are to flow from the construction of a railway across this continent, from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, is to assert what is obvious-to repeat what is

trite. We live at a period rife with mighty enterprises; at an age, when human energy is devoted, not to carnage, but to utilitarian instincts; when each nation is putting forth its nerves to their utmost tension in the race of improvement, because now "the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong." It is not now a contest of legs and arms, but one of brain, of intellect; when mind enters the arena with mind, and the stake is not cannon and colors and drums, but superiority in the useful arts of life. The Chinese Wall, fifteen hundred miles in length, has served for two thousand years no other purpose than as a monument of the cowardice of its projectors; its only use being a mere defence against the incursions of hostile tribes. The immense expenditure of wealth and labor in the Egyptian Pyramids, only gave a splendid mausoleum to the worthless carcass of some, perhaps, bloody despot; and the more worthy work of the Highway of the Incas on our South American continent, two thousand miles in length, and flagged with stone, covered with bitumen, was built for the benefit of an isolated and half civilized empire; whilst OUR enterprise will be the Highway of the World, and mark a stream on which will flow to all nations the blessings of mutual kindness and friendly relations,—a wide channel for Christian Light and Truth and Civilization,-on and by which the Arts and Sciences, and Republican Principles, will encircle a grateful world.

The common use of steam has renewed commerce, and communicated a new and accelerated vigor to all its currents. Time, now, more than ever, is money, and sailing ships "must keep the pace," or go out of use. So far, they have been successful in their efforts; and yet, it is easy to see that a few more improvements in steamers will place an immeasurable distance between them and sails; and whilst the latter may become antiquated, the former will open to us a new era in navigation.

Ocean steaming, authoritatively pronounced by the philosophers of the day impracticable, has proved eminently successful. A few well directed blows of the actual mechanic has exploded the imaginative ideas of the philosophizing theorist, and has proclaimed, as "settled law," that steam, or some other efficient substitute, must shortly drive the commerce of the world.

And whilst this agent is doing its work so well at sea, it is by no means idle on the land. The Locomotive has a thousand eyes watching its motions, a thousand minds bent on its improvement, and a thousand hands experimenting on its action and compelling its simplification. Already its rate has been increased from four miles per hour to over a hundred; and no eye can yet see at what point of speed it will be limited.

During the stormy winter of 1836-7, all the "Liners," the best packet ships between New York and Liverpool, were detained by contrary winds until "eighteen mails" were due; and a large amount of commercial disasaster, which resulted in 1837 in a general break-up of American merchants in London, was solely occasioned by these "ruthless winds" which kept back their ships and their remittances; and when, in consequence of this, it was proposed in Europe to send a steam vessel across the Atlantic, the British Association for the Advancement of Science met, and gravely demonstrated, theoretically, that a steam voyage to New York was impracticable! It was shown that fourteen hundred tons of coal would be required for the Great Western, whilst her whole tonnage was but twelve hundred, and in

consequence, the voyage projected, was pronounced absurd! Nevertheless, she started, and when but three days out, passed a "Liner" under sail seven days out, and accomplished in fifteen days and twenty hours her whole voyage, consuming four hundred and fifty tons of coal only! That experiment was followed by others, still more successful, until ocean steaming has ceased to be an object of wonder, and the Atlantic is reduced to a mere ferry!

The passage around Cape Horn has long been the terror of navigators, and that by the Cape of Good Hope not less so, since the days of Vasco de Gama.

From the time when the dividing ridge on the Isthmus of Panama was first crossed down to the present, nation after nation has sought for a convenient and easy passage between the two oceans at that narrow Isthmus, the importance of which has been so ably and energetically set forth in the report of the Hon. T. Butler King, from the Committee on Naval Affairs to the House of Representatives at Washington. And now, when individual enterprise has almost accomplished that passage by rail-way, we yet find that that is by no means all that we want.

From the period when the bold buccaneers were the terror of both oceans, a water channel of communication has been sought for that would unite the Atlantic and Pacific, and recently in the rivalry of possession of one of the passages of this Isthmus our nation and its great ancestor have almost been embroiled by the question. Whilst at the same time public attention has been also attached to the great importance of the Tehuantepec route, and it has been sought to make it the subject of treaty stipulations, yet neither the Panama, the Nicaragua, nor the Tehuantepec routes, if all successful, will satisfy us, for whilst we wish well to each of these enterprises as we do to all that improves and facilitates communication everywhere, yet nothing will satisfy us but a way over our own soil, a road within our own jurisdiction, embosomed amongst our own people, safe from the reach of every foe, and grasping in one united bond the mystic arrows of the confederacy, and surrounding our glorious Union with a band of steel which shall hold it in place so long as governments shall be known on earth.

Fortunately for us in this grand and generous contest for improvement now inciting the world to rivalry, amongst the foremost in the race are our own countrymen; and when apparently their energies seemed to be taxed to the utmost limit California steps into the arena, and declares that her demands far out measure any requirements ever yet made upon the public capabili ties, and that her rewards to the enterprising shall far exceed the golden cups, the jewelled snuff-boxes, the ribbons and the rings of all the monarchs that have ever lived" since Nimrod ruled," and frankly and liberally, and nobly California throws open the field of contest to the whole world.

Numerous indeed are the motives which urge the immediate execution of this work upon our attention with irrisistible force with statesmen. Its nationality presses it, forming as it will the great belt of communication from ocean to ocean, and its side connections will bind together our large unoc cupied or sparsely settled territories, whilst at the same time it will command the trade of the wide Pacific, whether it be connected with the southern shores of this continent, the islands of the great ocean, or the commerce of the East Indies and of China, and the whaling business transferred to the ports of this State, the voyage reduced in time to one-eighth, and the dis

tance to one-seventh of that now required, must place these fishing grounds in the hands of our enterprising countrymen.

The track of this road will pass through cur vastly unsettled domain. It will subdue the forest, the prairie, and the desert, and offer them as homes to the oppressed of all nations, to whom with extended arms, we tender a resting place under our roof, free, where safety and peace will surround them, and the hand of sympathy and brotherhood sustain and protect them.

It will carry peace and civilization, and the useful arts amongst our savage tribes, whilst by it, at the same time, we shall enforce the world to make us their carriers; China and the East will, through us, stretch out their hands to Europe, and Europe by the same means, will return her blessings upon the Indies.

In war it will give strength and union, and California will be placed under the wide spread wings of the American Eagle, instead of being as now, at the "ends of the earth!" Now we are dependent upon the peace of the world, and the permission of New Grenada, for the safe transit of our mails and treasure; then, we shall be independent of the former and released from this obligation to the latter, which is an obligation derogatory to our dignity and independence as a nation.

Who does not know, that a declaration of war with Great Britain would not only instantly stop the transit of our millions of treasure by the Isthmus of Panama, but also at the same time, our entire mail communication with the Atlantic States.

The lurking privateers that would then lay in ambush in the English West Indies, would cut off all intercourse by merchantmen and unarmed steamers, whilst squadron after squadron of their multitudinous navy would swarm in the Pacific, or shelter themselves in the harbors of those Islands, and nothing but squadrons of equal or greater force, which it would require years to build and equip, could open a passage, and that at uncertain and doubtful periods.

If then, a delay of six weeks in all mail communication between Liverpool and New York, in 1837, by reason of opposing winds, could bankrupt our merchants, how much more easily is it made obvious to the dullest intellect, that a total cessation of our communications and special transit to the States, caused by a declaration of war, would produce a cessation of specie payments by almost every bank in the Union, and a far more disastrous bankruptcy of our merchants, than has ever yet occurred. Yet such is now our imminent position.

Unfortified too, as we are here, incapable of receiving aid across the mighty desert that intervenes between us and our home government, the British forces kept in their portion of the East Indies, are now, by our settlement on this coast, within dangerously close proximity to us, and might lay us under contribution and disarrange our connexions most vitally, without the necessity of looking toward home for a single man, or a single ship beyond their usual force. Whilst our navy must fight at every inch, and conquer in every battle, through eighteen thousand miles of sea, without a harbor for shelter, or a point to refit or seek for supplies.

It is true, these things are not likely to occur. reason, to shut our eyes to the possibility.

But is it wise, for that

It is true, that at this moment, a better feeling exists between our government and that of Great Britain than ever existed before. It is true, prejudice is vanishing, that mutual respect is accruing, and that power is aggregating on our part, so that a conflict, when it does come-which may kind heaven avert will shake this earth from centre to circumference.

It is true, and acknowledged to be true, that these two governments at present look on each other with kindly eyes, as helper to the oppressed; as the homes of the politically destitute; as the known enemies of tyranny, and the acknowledged champions of liberty and of truth. Yet, who can say that the jealousy of rivalry, or angry passions, or real interest, or imaginary insult, shall NEVER again cause these nations to rush together in horrid conflict. That this may never occur, is the sincere ejaculation of every true friend of either, but that it shall not, is more than we can foretell or dare

aver.

If, then, California be designed to form an integral part of the Great North American Empire, and to occupy her proper position as such, in no way can that be effected so certainly and so efficiently, as by the construction of this important road.

It must be built too, not as an investment for moneyed profits, although it will yield them amply, but as a matter of duty by the government, just as we would construct a national defence or a ship of war, for its uses, its general benefits, the general safety, and the general prosperity. There is no State in the Union that is not deeply interested in it, both directly and indirectly. No county, town, or district which has not its representative residing in California.

Supposing then that' Independence, in Missouri, is the terminus of the at present most western road in the Valley of the Mississippi, and that by following some of the numerous branches of the Platte, the Kansas, or the Arkansas, the Great Desert may be crossed through a series of fertile valleys, and the dividing ridge which separates the waters of the Pacific from those of the Gulf of Mexico, be struck and passed by some of its numerous defiles, the head waters of the Colorado will thus be reached, and no matter where the road may strike our valley, lying between the coast range and the Sierra Nevada, from San Diego up, let it be carried on until it reach the bay of San Francisco, connecting all our cities and towns on or near its route, and giving to California a well defined system of roads through two thirds of her extreme length, and yielding to our General Government a consolidating power, which it does not now possess.

We freely admit that we cannot assume the correctness of explanation, or the certainty of actual survey, nor do we attempt to indicate routes or forestall opinions; all results must be submitted to the intelligent direction that Congress will no doubt submit the execution of this enterprise to. All that we propose at present is, to urge upon our Government the importance of this work and its immediate construction.

Several modes of execution have been devised. Mr. Whitney has suggested that it be built upon a grant of sixty miles in width to a private corporation, through the whole territory it should traverse, for which it should pay ten cents per acre-to have no land until they built ten miles, and then to receive five miles, and so on for every succeeding ten miles,