COST OF CARRIAGE BY WATER AND BY RAILWAYS. 461

reasons. The capacity of water transport was limited at the eastern side of the Valley by the necessity of using canals; greater speed and elasticity of accommodation was found in the railroads, combined with great cheapness where an immense business was concerned; only that system could accommodate trade at all seasons; and the bars at the mouth of the Mississippi, the heated waters of the gulf, and the perils of the Atlantic coast, with the length of the route, turned the vast products of the northern Valley eastward by rail.

Other things being equal, water transportation must be cheapest for gross freight which is not required to hurry. The value of all the shipping required to accommodate a foreign commerce amounting annually to about $1,300,000,000 has been estimated at $200,000,000; while the cost of all the railroads, conveying values ten times as great, is stated at about $4,500,000,000, or more than twenty-two times as much, and the annual losses and repairs required are many times greater in proportion. While there were large margins to permit disregard of this greater dearness of railroad transportation and other imperative reasons for overlooking the water routes, the rivers and lakes were necessarily neglected. It is, however, apparently but a question of time when their fullest use will be resumed.

It is a constant law, arising from the imperfection of human wisdom and foresight, that business shall tend to lose. its equilibrium-to fall into excesses that derange it greatly. There is another law, however, that takes care for its readjustment from time to time. It is like machinery that should be in the long run self-adjusting, but permits disturbances to accumulate to a certain point before the restorative process is commenced. These periods of readjustment of disturbed balances are commenced by what is called a financial crisis, and while the restorative work is going on the machinery moves languidly. It usually requires some years of depres

sion to conquer the difficulty, but when it is overcome there is a new series of situations; harmony is more exact and a fresh period of great prosperity follows. During the periods of oscillation, the particular laws more especially violated become clearer; men learn what they are and how to avoid their penalties, and so progress goes on. In due time these disturbances will become more rare and, perhaps, in the distant future will cease altogether.

There has been vast loss on railroads in the Valley because of their excessive cost and the inability of their business to meet, immediately, all the conditions of corporate prosperity. Greater economy will be employed in the end, and they will, perhaps, be confined to the kinds of transportation that will pay best. Yet they now pay in some form and public aid comes, very largely, to the rescue of individual capital. But a gradual revision of methods and change of economy must be made when large new sources of wealth cease to be found and waterways, which transport in larger masses with less capital and cost for repairs, will lend all the aid to commerce of which they are capable. The amount of trade movement, vast as it now seems, is but a trifle to what it will be in years to come, and while railroads will continue to multiply, they will require the aid of every available water channel to keep the passages to and from the Valley from choking up.

It is highly probable that the true growth of commerce on the lakes and rivers has not yet commenced. From 1820 to 1850 it was a mere trial; after 1850 it was continued as a collateral of railroad transportation, and so it still remains. Its future may be supposed to have the massiveness and grand proportions which the lakes, the rivers and the Gulf bear to the Valley whose uses they were designed to serve. The uses to which natural forces were destined may lie unimproved while the corresponding development of mankind and their interests fail; but still these forces are a prophecy of what is yet to be, and their time of service will ultimately come.

THE FUTURE OF WATER-WAYS.

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These valuable natural channels will some day bear the heavy burdens of commerce and the railways will transport its lighter, more costly, frail and less bulky materials, and collect from the interiors, to the streams, the general fruits of industry. All obstructions in the river channels will be set aside, ample outlets from the lakes eastward will be provided, and scores of billions of value in merchandise will be found floating out of and into this fruitful region.

But this great result has still, apparently, to wait for generations before it can be fully realized. The South must reach. her natural development—so long delayed; the West Indies, Mexico, the Central and South American States, must reach the degree of general prosperity, of social order and industrial activity assigned them by the resources they can command; the rich traffic of the Pacific and Eastern Asia must pour through the ship canal which is to join the great ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. When all this great industrial development has been acquired in the neighboring countries the Mississippi will, perhaps, be too small for the vast burden of values with which the immense trade then existing will have to deal. The passengers, the fruits, the delicate goods and materials required in haste, will then seek the railroad; but the river will float an unimagined quantity of the more solid results of agriculture and manufactures to the sea.

The 9,000 miles of navigable streams, the 3,000 miles of lake shore, and the long line of Gulf coast, will then serve the same purposes of foreign commerce that the Atlantic and Pacific coasts do now. These waterways, so large and long, will then join the interior of the continent with the active world without, as they were designed to do, and the center of the Valley will be, industrially and commercially, the center of the country.

CHAPTER XIII.

DIRECT FOREIGN COMMERCE OF THE VALLEY.

The Mississippi Valley has been the providence of the American Republic. Binding it together through a common ownership, common settlement and a common development of its vast wealth, all classes in the East, but especially the manufacturers, the traders, the capitalists, and the shrewd speculators, have been enriched by it. Few walks in the general business life of the East have failed to draw a large part of their profit, directly or indirectly, from the overflowing abundance of this region. The people of the West supplied cheap provisions to the manufacturing classes and bought their wares with the price heightened by a protective tariff. Merchants imported foreign goods, re-sold them at a profit in the interior, and bought agricultural products to export-with a profit. Capitalists and bankers invested and loaned to reap hundreds of millions in interest and the rise of values.

But in no way has the country been more benefited by the Valley than in its contributions to commerce. The bulk of the exports which were to pay for imports have been from the northern or southern Valley. The cotton, which long formed fully one half of the exports, was largely produced in the lower Valley, and half the remainder of the values exported was from the grain regions of the West. In more recent times, manufactures enter largely into export trade; but the increase in articles of food has gained in still larger proportions. The most of that which produced balances in European exchange, or drew money from abroad, was due to the Valley.

So great has been the favorable reaction of the West on the East by the impulse given its manufactures, commerce and

THE RELATIONS OF THE EAST AND THE WEST.

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trade, that Eastern cities have increased in population since 1830, at about one half the ratio of the cities of the West, although millions annually emigrated from East to West. Almost one half the capitalized wealth of the country has accumulated in the Eastern and Middle States, although they have but little over one fifth of the population. As they are owners of much property in the Valley the difference is much greater than appears from the census.

The surplus produce of the West has gone to the East and through it to foreign markets and paid a heavy profit to the East for handling; this profit has been reinvested in, or reloaned to, the West at extraordinarily high rates with the effect of compound interest. The West has been in so great a hurry to lay its foundations and reach its true productive period and the advantageous condition of an old country that it has not stopped to calculate and bargain, in the interest of economy, for its own section. It has hastily taken all the aid it could get at whatever usurious rates. By so doing it has gained many years of progress but poured the larger part of its earnings into the lap of the East. The child has richly endowed the parent in this process; it now remains for it to attend more shrewdly to its own interests.

This it is partly prepared to do by producing a considerable portion of its own manufactures, and the next step is to carry on as much of its own commerce as possible. As an interior region, it can do this only in part, the superiority of the Atlantic ports being absolute; yet it has great outlets on the north and south which have been almost unused for purposes of foreign trade. It has furnished about four fifths of the exports of the whole country and will, perhaps, keep up that proportion; if it do its own business on its own capital it will, in time, become as superior in accumulated property as it is in population and compass of resources.

The changes that are preparing to this end lie partly in the transfer of manufactures which enable it to accumulate float