The present difficulty is exaggerated by the peculiar fact that the transportation business is done principally by the owners of the mines; the mining companies and railroad corporations are substantially identical. The following illustrates the mode by which this state of things was brought about: In Elk County, Pennsylvania, until within a few years the lumber business engrossed every thing. In 1858, however, Mr, Joseph Veazie, a young man from Boston, a graduate of the Lawrence Scientific School, heard that there were bituminous veins of coal in Elk Coun ty. He induced his father to come out with him and "prospect" a little. In a few days they discovered quite a number of out-croppings, which confirmed all that had been reported of the property. At that time the geological survey of the State of Pennsylvania, made by Professors Rogers and Lesley, had not been published. That report describes the coal lands thus prospected by Mr. Veazie as the fourth bituminous coal basin of Pennsylvania. Soon after discovering the coal property and learning its value, Mr. J. A. Veazie of Boston and some of his wealthy friends secured a title to six thousand nine hundred acres of these lands, lying in a compact body. At first a company called the Pennsylvania Coal Company was organized under the laws of Pennsylvania; then followed the organization of the Shawmut Company; then of a railroad company; and finally all these companies were consolidated, under a special . charter, into one company, called the Pennsylvania Cannel Coal and Railroad Company, with a capital of $1,500,000; thirty thousand shares of fifty dollars each. There are now seven different coal companies in the county of Elk, not one of which existed seven years ago.

A correspondent writing last Fall, shows the way in which the Cannel Coal & Railroad Company manage to realize large profits. Their railroad, 14 miles long, connected with the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad, two and a half miles east of Ridgeway, is completed to an opening which now produces about 100 tons a day, and, when fully manned, will produce 200 tons a day. It is graded 1,300 feet to another opening, which can turn out 150 tons a day, and from which a tramway of 1,200 feet leads to still another opening, also capable of turning out 150 tons a day. The railroad-tramway and all-will be completed by Christmas, when the company will be able to fill orders for 500 tons a day. These coal people will not tell their most hidden secrets, but the coal costs the company not over $1 25 to mine and deliver at the terminus of their road near Ridgway, and As they are selling it for $4 50, it will be seen they have a solid margin of at least $3 per ton; so that by January next they can count a daily profit of $1,500 a day, or $450,000 a year. All this from three openings in one vein. But there are twelve veins of bituminous coal and two of cannel coal. About 30 openings have been made, some of them 800 feet in length and reaching through the hill some 600, and reaching through in the same way, but all deep enough to show the inexhaustible supply of coal on the estate.

The operation of mining is very similar in all mines. In the one referred to above, visitors are allowed seats in the little cars in which the coal is sent out of the mine. The driver is a boy, with a small lamp hung to his cap, in front. Another miner, called a pusher, whose business it is to get coal out of the mines, accompanies. The bank of earth about the entrance is neatly sloped, and well-fitted timbers protect the roof and sides.

The roof is of coal, and the sides of coal down for three feet, where a layer of fine clay comes in, followed by slate. Through the slate water penetrates, and so renders the passage wet and sloppy. A light rail is laid all through the mine for the cars to run upon. Every 25 feet occurs the entrance to a side room or chamber. These penetrate 25 feet, and are then enlarged to the size of 18 feet. Leaving the car and walking into a chamber, we find the miners at work. They lie flat on their backs or on their sides, and dig in the shale under the coal, thus undermining it. Then with wedges they split off great pieces, as large as possible, sometimes several feet long and two feet thick. Thus the miners work until late in the afternoon; the work is excessively dirty, but they earn good wages. Returning from the mines, we must walk out, for the car is needed for business. The laden coal cars descend with their own gravity to the platforms, through which it is dropped upon a screen or sieve which allows the smaller pieces and the dust to pass and separate; the rest runs directly into the car, and in an hour or so is delivered to the dealer at the junction. Mining in all the other bituminous, and even anthracite coal mines, the same as pursued here, only that in all the anthracite mines and mauy of the bituminous the coal lies below the watercourses, and so wells have to be sunk, shafting put down, and a vast amount of pumping done, thus enhancing the cost of mining and of the coal.

The former practice, in opening a vein of coal, was to begin at the outcroping " and clear away the earth, or make a large number of openings. This was found to be too expensive and laborious. Now the more convenient method has been adopted of making an opening on an inclined plane or slope," and laying upon it the two tracks before mentioned-one for the loaded cars, which are drawn out by an engine, and the other for empty cars to descend into the mine. The dimensions of these articles are generally five feet in length by three in breadth.

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The more common process, however, is to sink a shaft into the mine. Entrance and egress are by means of a bucket or carriage," which is let down and drawn up by a rope and wind ass. Accidents sometimes happen from the breaking of the rope, and sometimes a person in the carriage is seized with dizziness and falls from the carriage to the bottom of the mine. To prevent fatal results from the breaking of the rope, hooks are fixed to the carriage, which fasten, in such cases, to the sides of the shaft, enabling the rescue of the persons inside from their perilous situation.

At the Baltimore mines, at Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, two veins of coal, one immediately beneath the other, are worked at the same time. The upper one has been excavated clear to the "Black Diamond Mines," a distance of two miles. At first the coal was taken from the Baltimore mines by several cuttings, opening out upon a narrow gorge, at the bottom of which flows a little stream of water. Only a footpath lies between those cavernous portals and the edge of the descent, evciting our curiosity to learn how the coal could be removed in any considerable quantities. From this point the floor of the mine slopes gradually to the furthest extremity of the excavation. The miners may be seen in the distance, each with a little lamp in his visors, moving hither and thither, and appearing in the darkness like the shades of denizens of the wide world. In winter time the spectacle is fully as impressive-the evergreens in the little gorge

laden with snow, the streamlet flowing rapidly along, the entrances of the portals hung with icicles, the floor and roof inside covered as with stalag mites and stalactites, all of ice, colored by the carbonate of iron, the lights and shadows made by the pillars of coal which have been left to support the roof, and the lights of the dusky laborers gliding hither and thither far away down there beneath the earth.

Those pillars of coal, usually about six feet in diameter, are always left to support the roof of the mine; and when the vein is worked out they are removed, and wooden pillars having been put in to take their place, sometimes the roof falls, burying whomever may happen to be within the mine. The town of Pittston, at the confluence of the Lackawanna and Susquehanna, has been nearly undermined in this manner; but as yet few of those fallings in have taken place. A few years ago, however, the public school-house sunk down into one of these places.

These chambers, many of them within the mines, are really very fine. Some of them are so low that a person of medium stature must stoop to get through them, and so narrow that two persons can barely pass each other. Bat others are eighteen feet from floor to roof, and fifty feet in breadth; the roof consisting of slate smoothly polished, and beautifully indented with perfectly shapen fossils, and the walls being rough where the coal had been in contact with the slate, with boles of fossil trees here and there in half relief, from one to three feet in diamatar. A fossilised stump of a tree, four feet high, three feet across at the top, and six feet at the bow, was found in the Baltimore mine, and removed with great care to the Court House at Wilkes barre. The mines abound in beautiful and perfect fossils, principally stem of plants; quartz crystals are also found in the rock which covers the coal.

The anthracite coal is removed from its bed by blasting. It is then placed in cars and drawn away by mules. Sometimes it is taken to the. portal of the mine in this manner, but oftener is drawn up the slope by pulleys and "gravity cars" into the "cracker," a lofty building where it is unloaded, broken to peices, screened, and the slate picked from it by children. It is then poured into troughs or conductors of iron, which discharge it into railroad cars and canal boats for transportation. Among the piles of slate and "screenings" which are rejected by this operation are considerable quantities of good coal, which is generally given away to any one who will take the trouble to gather it out. It is no unusual thing to witness boys, and even girls and grown women, ragged and unclean, barefooted and bareheaded, gaunt and smutted, filling their baskets, bags and pails, lifting the dirty burden to their shoulders aud staggering away to their wretched homes.

These miners are paid by the quantity of coal got out by them. They seldom work later than three or four o'clock in the afternoon. Some of them, especially the Welsh, are frugal and industrious. Their homes are well kept, and their families interesting. Shelves of books, and newspapers, show that they are intent upon improvement; and in some of the larger towns, they have established reading societies and lyceums. In several instances they have in this way collected a valuable library and cabinets of geological specimens from the mines where they are employed. They have also strong religious tendencies, and do much to toward cor recting the disposition and manners of their ruder associates.

But too often the miners are of a different class, and spend as fast as they earn. In a time of scarcity, as during the late great "strike," they are reduced almost to want through their improvidence, although they may have been earning a hundred dollars a month. Yet they never seem

to besitate, however well they may be doing, to break off work and demand higher wages. They are organized into secret societies-a measure often necessary as a protection against the exactions of the companies, who are often unregardful of their rights and welfare; and when these strikes occur, they are thus pledged to stand by each other.

Many of the miners are rude, ignorant, and even dangerous. Some of them speak a patois or dialect which requires interpreting to render it intelligible. The children acquire their vicious ways, swearing, insulting persons who happen to speak to them, throwing stones at animals, destroying fences, and doing mischief maliciously. Their appearance, coarse and ragged in dress, dirty and black with coal dust, corresponds with their manners. They seldom attend school or learn to read; and the indications of their future career are not very encouraging.

It is of the utmost importance, it will be seen, that this dying-out of industry shall be somewhat modified. The acts of this class have been able to create high prices of coal everywhere, in other mines as well as at home, and indicate possible consequences of the most serious character. The multiplication of companies would tend to ameliorate their conditions, also the construction of avenues of transit, the managers of which would not have their interests identified too closely with the mining as well as the production of coal.

WHAT FIXES A RATE OF INTEREST.

BY A. D.

A GOOD many otherwise well-informed people believe in the notion that a rate of interest is the result of law. For instance, if the legal rate of interest is six per cent, the market rate must be six per cent; and if the legal rate is then lowered to four, the market rate would necessarily become four. One of the wealthiest and most experienced merchants in New York was heard to express this opinion a few days ago, and none among those who heard him were prepared to refute his position. Yet such an utter lack of breadth is evinced in this notion, it seems extraordinary that any merchant who holds to it, should have been able to make his way successfully among the crowd of better informed men who must have been his competitors.

A particular rate of interest, is in great part an international affairit is primarily the result of the difference between the civilization of, or more correctly speaking, the security for capital afforded by various nations. The more perfect the security in a country the lower the rate of interest; and the higher the rate of interest, the lower the standard of credit compared with other cotemporaneous countries. However much this law of political economy may wound the self love of particular nations when applied to practice, a little further consideration must convince us of its truth with of course certain modifications.

The immediate cause of a rate of interest is the pressure of monied

capital for employment as compared with the pressure of employment for monied capital-in other words of the demand and supply of loanable funds. The pressure of capital (or wealth) being the immediate cause of the rate of interest, it follows that wherever the great bulk of capital flows to, must be that place where the rate of interest is lowest; and that wherever it flows from is where the rate is highest. Accordingly as we find that in London, Paris and the free cities of Germany and also in the cities of New York, Philadelphia and Boston the rate of interest is lower than anywhere else; and that in the barbarous countries of Asia and China the rate of interest is higher, this argues that capital is constantly flowing towards these cities and from those countries. And such is the fact. Indeed, the law we are illustrating is deduced from the very facts which are being used to illustrate it; so that instead of straining the facts to suit the law, we are simply stating the facts and leaving the law to unfold itself as we proceed.

Some persons, having in mind the extraordinary flow of specie from Europe to India, may be disposed to deny that capital habitually flows from uncivilized to civilized countries; but their doubts can easily be satisfied. The only authority for this doubt is Michael Chevalier in his work on "The Probable Fall in the Value of Gold," wherein the author says:-"The value of silver rises at present (1859) owing to the sudden demand for this metal for exportation to the remote East. According to the statement of Mr. James Low, and derived from the books of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, by whose agency nearly the whole of this precious freight is transported, the vessels of this company carried from England to Asia the sum of 12,118,985l. in silver in 1856, and of 16,795,232 in 1857. In 1851 it was only 1,716,0007. Besides, from the ports of the Mediterranean there have been sent to the Levant and the remote East (India, China, and the adjacent regions), in 1856, 1,989,6167., and in 1857 3,350,6897. This is for the year 1857, or a total of 20,145,9217.-that is to say, of more than doubte the yield of all the silver mines that supply the markets of the Western World. I mean of Europe and America. The efflux of silver is independent of an exportation of probably one-tenth of the above amount in gold, which has been going on during the last few years. It is true that we ought to deduct from the exportations of silver to the East a certain quantity of imports, because in these articles (i. e., in gold and silver), alongside of the general stream, there is always a certain counter current. But we have reason to believe that, for the last few years, it has been but a limited sum.

At any rate, the amount is unknown to us."

As Chevalier's essay has been read all over the world, the notion has prevailed that a steady stream of capital is constantly flowing from Europe to Asia, and has been flowing for a long time past, and will continue to flow for a long time to come. Now, this is all wrong. In the first place, as Chevalier himself admits, the flow of specie to the East has been a sudden movement. It amounted in 1851 to only 1,716,1007., and not until 1856 did it assume any proportion worthy of notice. Secondly, it has been accompanied by a counter current of "unknown;" but not necessarily for that reason of a limited extent. Thirdly, this movement almost ceased by 1860, and it was only set in motion again by the American war, which caused a demand for East India cotton, and necessitated