deavored to persuade me that he was selling the half of his "fatted pig" under the market price, at 14 cents a pound.) Beef, in barrel, at Chicago is worth $9; here it is worth $18-double again. Butter, a choice article, which I suppose can be bought at Chicago at 12 cents, will wholesale here at 22 to 25 centsthis, too, about double the price. I have paid 32 cents a pound for butter, which I could have bought at Chicago, when I left, at 10 cents.

These are all among the common articles of subsistence, and their prices above the indispensable cost of living, which cannot be shirked by even the poorest classes. Perhaps they are not usually quite as high as at present, but there cannot be much reduction from the prices so long as the general order of things remains as it does. For some time to come the general average must rule high compared to the prices in Chicago. Does it not show how sadly the laws of trade are out of joint when there is such a great disproportion? There is a power of self-interest that ought to attract the attention of Chicago merchants and shippers to equalize this unequal balance of things. Illinois wants higher prices-England wants lower-and the shipper wants a fair price for transportation. Thus all will be benefited. Those who take the initiative I hope will be doubly rewarded for their pains and risks. It must be absurd to believe that it will cost as much to transport our western produce from Chicago to Bristol, as it does for the farmer to raise and send it to market. The great interests of the west call for an investigation into the cost of transportation, and such plans perfected as will insure the transportation of her surplus produce into European markets at a remunerative price, and not a robber price. Last fall, when the price of flour rose in the English market, your railroads immediately clapped on one dollar a barrel for transportation, and the western farmer got no benefit from the rise; he still has to sell his grain at a starvingly low rate, while in England, to the laboring man, it was starvingly high. Thus men were ruined at each end, while the shipper made no more than he should have done by carrying it at a reasonable rate, and receiving back a paying freight.

The item of lumber is another product from Chicago and the lakes, in which a good paying business can be done. In Bristol lumber of the common grade (the lowest sold in this market) sells at three times the Chicago price; the upper grades five times the Chicago rates. But Chicago lumber is not adapted to an English market. The habits of the people and the style of manufacture are so different, that they will not, at first, readily receive our western lumber; and, if we would have them buy our timber, we must bend to their customs. I hope to furnish a description of the lumber trade here after closing this item of my subject, by saying, that when lumber, which is a dead article in Chicago at $8 to $12, will bring ready cash from $30 to $60 per 1,000 feet, it is time some enterprising man should settle the matter whether or not there is anything to be made in lumber trade with England. If there is an honest penny to be turned here, then let us see what there is on the other side. While England needs our corn, wheat, pork, &c., and we want to sell them, she has many things which we want, and which she wants to sell. It is a fair exchange to take the product of her mines and shops for the product of our prairies and the labor of our farmers. It is said that the Morrell tariff lies directly across the path of this mutual benefit. But the Morrell tariff is not a perpetual institution. The Chicago business man will be better able to judge then, if he cannot now trade with England, and pay the honest revenue to the government, which it now needs, (if it ever needs a revenue,) and look to the future for an amendment of the tariff. It is my business to report the facts. Let more practical men see if they can dovetail them to a profitable conclusion.

These facts are, that there are here large quantities of crockery ware made especially for the American market, now on hand, which has no demand in any other market, and can now be purchased at a deduction equal to the percentage of the tariff. The same is, probably, true of cutlery. There are many kinds of

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paints, indigo, flax, oil-cloths, carpets, block and plate tins, which are now steadily exported to the United States, notwithstanding the tariff. From many or all of these several cargoes could be taken in exchange for our own and other western products, in a single season, for the Chicago market alone. But there is another item, of which I can tell only half the truth, as I know its value in Chicago. This is railroad iron. In the British channel is a celebrated place for the manufacture of iron. It is worth here now $25 to the ton of 2,240 pounds. The tariff on this is $12, making the cost, without freight, about $37. What is it worth in Chicago? That answer will fix the price of the freight, or whether it can now be imported profitably. There is a deduction on it in price of $6 since the tariff passed, which is half the tax this trade is subjected to for the war, and English manufacturers are ready to pay it.

Is it not, then, a practicable thing to sell our corn for four times the prices in Chicago, ship the same direct to Bristol, freight back with iron, crockery ware, &c., &c., and pay the duty as so much added to the war fund, rather than permit the corn to waste in the bins ?

Direct trade of Chicago with Bristol is a point to which I wish to call attention. I think I have stated facts as they exist. It is to be settled with you whether you can send the ship through and make it pay by freighting back as I have suggested. The time to be consumed by the voyage, the expenses of the ship, tolls, towage, pilotage, harbor dues, insurances, &c., will all have to be taken into account. Some of these can be better ascertained in Chicago; others must be ascertained here.

2. The butter and cheese trade have become, within a few years, so large and rapidly increasing as to make new articles of export.

3. Indian corn is another article of western produce little known here as an article of subsistence, but might be of great use. I have endeavored to call attention to it in both countries, to its value in that respect. The demand here for cheap food for the suffering poor is very urgent, and England, at this time, is going through a severe trial. It is almost a crisis with her, as with us. The English people feel the calamities of the war, so far as they affect labor and the rewards of labor, more than the people of the United States feel them, and it is getting rapidly worse. The cotton mills are closing, and this affects business in many ways. People, therefore, have no work and they have no wages, and nothing with which to buy bread; and the next step, no bread except the bread of charity; and with many it may speedily come to starvation. Illinois wants a larger market for her corn. England ought to enlarge her facilities for bread. She can much benefit herself by the use of Indian corn in flour as an article of food. It is but little known here-only regarded as a product for the sustenance of animals. This seems a little strange at first, that a product of nature so largely used as this is in the United States should be so little known in England; but when we realize the fact that this great natural food product of America is but half appreciated in the United States; that while we have been familiar with it since the Puritans found it in the Indian villages of the eastern coasts; and Sante, the companion of La Salle, discovered it in Illinois covered in pits in the earth, where he, for a time, camped on his journey from Chicago south to discover the Mississippi, (at a place on the Illinois river near the present town of La Salle;) yet we Americans have not learned to appreciate its value, especially as an article of food. If the people had developed all its worth, and then it were struck out of existence, its loss would be more severely felt than if wheat itself were annihilated. There is no product that can be raised in so wide a degree of temperature of climate, nor of such a number and variety of its species as a plant. It is a luxuriant crop in our extreme south, amidst cane and cotton, and not an unprofitable one in the short summer season of Canada, in a variety small and heavy, adapted to the cooler latitude and contracted season of growth of the northern country. Is it not wisdom, then, that we

should understand the extent of that blessing which God designed for the world in creating Indian corn? To my mind, there is an exceedingly interesting significance in the fact that He gave this blessing to mankind in the latter age of the world, and simultaneously with his giving to mankind the western continent as a new world. Indian corn is emphatically a new world blessing-an American product. It is yet to have a much wider sphere of use in the economy of human subsistence. We Americans will yet learn how to use it more acceptably as food, and love it as such. Europeans will learn the same lesson.

But is it not surprising that the English do not use English corn, when we see the condition the little we have here is in. Corn cannot be shipped across the ocean without injury. I have not yet seen any landed that would rate above rejected by Chicago inspection; and I conclude, if sent as meal, it would be worse still. As meal, prejudices are raised against it. The laws of the United States regulating exportation, some time ago in force, if not now, branded the Indian corn with disgrace for all foreign consumption, when they required every barrel to be branded "Indian meal." There is some sense in converting wheat into meal, for Dr. Graham says it is good for digestion-the coarse and glutenous part of the hulls of the wheat berry. But hulls in the meal of the Indian corn are a tough, indigestible, unpalatable hard substance, which spoil the meal for human food. Therefore, the first great fact which Americans must learn in preparing corn for food is to bolt it like wheat, and make flour of it, and not meal. Give meal to hogs and cattle, but introduce flour into the house for food; and, if properly cooked, we shall soon learn to love it.

Thus, two hundred years of practice with the great American product has failed to teach people the first step in the progress of proper preparation of corn for bread or use in the family-that is, the separation of the hulls from the flour, or the hard substance which nature provides for the covering of the kernel. To bolt Indian corn as we do wheat is the only successful way to get people to love it. All know, too, that Indian meal, ground for family use in the usual manner, soon spoils-grows strong and musty. Therefore, family consumption has been confined to taking a few messes from the bag ground for the hogs, and waiting for the next milling before more meal can be used. We then learn the fact, that if we would provide Indian flour for common use as we would wheat flour, it must be kiln-dried corn. Kiln-dried before grinding, will grind more rapidly, will crumble more crisply into the natural particles or grains into which, as flour, it should be reduced. It does not follow that because we make flour of corn we necessarily make it as fine as wheat flour. Proper Indian flour will be in grains and feel gritty, like fine sand. Into this form it will come more completely when it has been kiln-dried.

The harsh, strong taste is mainly removed by the bolt in taking out the hull. The natural taste of corn may be found in the coarse hominy, from which the hull has been removed by the process of bruising and friction; it is also met with in parched corn, the sharp, skinny hull, curled up in the centre of the expanded berry, clinging to the chit, being pricked out and removed with the pin. As the Indian corn lacks gluten, it is advisable to mix with it a little wheat, which has a superabundance of gluten.

Then there are some common sense rules to be observed in the cooking; one particularly-cooking it a great deal. Indeed, meal is not generally half cooked; it wants more cooking than any other kind of meal or flour. Until North Americans have learned these simple yet important facts, Englishmen cannot be expected to have learned them. If we place Indian corn before them in this form, there will be no difficulty, in time, in creating a large and steady demand for it.

Now is the time to do something to this end. The Irish famine, a few years ago, was the occasion of the well-to-do farmers of the west sending corn meal to Ireland to keep the people from starving. A few of them then learned by force

to low Indian meal, bad as it must be in its best state, transported without kilndrying. Ever since there has been considerable demand for Indian corn in Ireland. For cattle feed there is a large exportation to that country, and some to England. Speak to an Englishman about eating Indian meal, and he exposes a prejudice, but confesses that the Irish eat it. There is an approaching demand for food, on the claims of famine, to the poor of England. The use of Indian corn will cheapen their bread food, and if sent to them, as we can now send it, they will receive it greedily as well as thankfully, and ever after they will have a love for Indian corn flour, and will be large purchasers.

IMMIGRATION.

OCTOBER 1, 1862.

Since receiving the circular from the State Department, and the copies of the National Intelligencer containing correspondence and articles on the subject of immigration from foreign countries to the United States, with the letter of the honorable Secretary of State in regard to the non-liability of foreigners to serve in the army, my mind as well as my efforts have been enlisted in encouraging this immigration; and I take the liberty of forwarding at this time, for your consideration, some practical suggestions, derived from familiarity with the condition of affairs in this country.

The distress among the laboring classes, in consequence of the war in the United States, is very great, as is well known everywhere, and it is getting rapidly worse, with no prospect of immediate relief. They not only realize now most sensibly the necessity of more certainty of employment and larger wages, not alone from present need, but as a precaution in the future, when business shall again be revived, or of placing themselves in a position where the rewards of labor shall not be so suddenly cut off. So far as they are now able to realize the facts, they perceive that, notwithstanding the calamities of the war in the United States, labor is there in great demand, is liberally paid, and that at the same time food is cheap, thus bringing the comforts of life within the reach of the humblest laboring man, and his greatest desires realized in the desideratum— plenty of work and high wages, with cheap food. They thus realize the fact that the United States is the country for the laboring man, and they would gladly be there now, in the midst of the turmoils of war, if they could but get there. Unfortunately, the extremity to which they are driven, and their present sufferings, are too patent of their inability even to leave the country and to shake themselves clear of the ruin that is fast encircling them. In their distress they are learning more important facts in regard to our country than they ever before felt interested to know, notwithstanding the concerted and persistent efforts of the newspapers and specially interested parties to misrepresent us. It is an astonishing fact to them, that war, which brings so many untold horrors, does not bring to the immediate participators in it the loss of food, while it brings starvation to them.

The remark is now a common one among these classes, that when the war is over they will emigrate to that land which, under the worst possible condition of affairs, furnishes such an astonishing supply of food. There are some signs, also, which the most reflective observe, that Europe may be the theatre of a sudden uprising, which will be more destructive to the welfare of the masses than the American war has been to them, or to ourselves even. I may then say that the general impression is, that the war closed in the United States, whichever way it may terminate, if the end is peace, that the event will usher in a period of immigration in extent unparalleled in our history. It is the common remark with the men who have to depend upon their labor, that as soon as the war is over they will make the United States their home, or that they would

do so now if they could but procure the means of their transportation. At the same time a class of men here occupying more influential positions are incessant in their representations of the dangers of living in the States, the uncertainty of life and the means of subsistence, and they make a great bugbear of taxation, which, by their logic, must bear heavily on the man who has nothing.

Is it not, then, a most favorable opportunity for all who have it in their power to do so, and who believe there is yet a valuable future for our country, to do all that is possible to remove these misapprehensions; cultivate, as far as possible, friendly sentiments among the people of both sections, and offer every inducement for the laboring men of England to come and make their homes with us? It seems to me that from these classes, occupying our extensive unsettled regions, filling up more densely the unimproved land of the older States, especially those of the slave States, when free labor shall be substituted for slave labor, we are to receive, as a nation, ample compensation for the losses and burdens of the present war. Slavery removed from our country, we shall have the entire sympathy of all the moral power of Europe, its industrial and most worthy classes; and the inclination to immigration from all sections will only be limited by the means to convey themselves and families to a better country, where men are respected for their worth, and not exclusively for their wealth. At the present moment, while there is here no demand for labor, and starvation stares many in the face, they turn to this prospect of a change with avidity, for the chance of a removal brings them the only hope of relief.

Therefore the object of this despatch is both to inquire and to suggest if something official, concerted and general, cannot be done at the present time to promote immigration to a much greater extent. The people most anxious to go, and those the most valuable when once in the country, have not the means. is their desperate condition here which impels them, or would impel them if they could succeed, to make the attempt to get away.

It

Some few shipmasters will consent to take two or three of the best that offer to work their passage. Others will give no encouragement to any suggestion of the kind. Some allow their prejudice against all foreigners to overrule their good sense. Most of the shipmasters complain of obstacles in the way at home, such as State laws designed to protect the State against an infusion of pauperism. Others speak of the danger of a fine in not reporting them as passengers, and in reporting the liability to be put under bonds that they will not become a charge to the State; also, that while they take them over for charity as seamen who can render but little service, they are subject to a tax of fifty cents as hospital money. These obstacles are urged by those who are easily disposed to be unwilling, while many, believing that good may be done, will carry all that would be prudent, notwithstanding the difficulties.

Some of the shipmasters, who think a patriotic service may be rendered the country in this way, have suggested that very much would be done, and a general interest aroused among shipmasters, if they were invited to interest themselves by the government, and these obstacles at home temporarily suspended, if not entirely abrogated. One captain says: The American ships do not carry more than half the complement of crew which the English carry; that the ships might double their crew on a return voyage, shipping those who propose to become emigrants at a nominal price of twenty-five cents a month, and entering them as ordinary seamen, which means, I believe, in nautical language, no seamen at all.

The ships now coming to this port-and it may be the case, probably, to most European ports-with grain and provisions from the United States, hardly expect a cargo back, many of them returning to New York in ballast. They might, each of them, carry a double crew, and even many more, at the bare cost of provisions, not over ten dollars to the head. If a fund were provided, by voluntary or public means, of ten dollars for each able-bodied man or woman