ships, the study of winds and currents, and the construction of charts, there is no limit to the improvements which are being made, and which are still possible. Prodigious advancements have been made during the present generation, and greater ones are, doubtless, in store for the future. It is not impossible, perhaps not improbable, that the construction of ships of such size as to be as little affected by the waves of the ocean as ships now are by the waves of rivers, about to be tested by the gigantic iron steamer now nearly completed in Great Britain, may prove as successful in practice as it seems to be flattering in theory. Should this happen, harbors now adequate to the draught of merchant vessels, would cease to New York might sink to the rank of a second-class city, and Newport, upon Narragansett Bay, might again assert that maritime importance which it enjoyed before the Revolutionary War. One of the certain results of the success of this experiment would be to hasten that commercial development, which is the assured destiny of Portland, as the winter port of the great and rich valley of the St. Lawrence.

be so.

Commerce has no necessary connection with navigation. It may exist in countries entirely inland. Water carriage is only one mode of transport, although doubtless the best, and for the greater distances reached by modern commerce the only practical one. In the East Indies and in China exist great and opulent cities, in which the sound of the caulker is never heard. Palmyra, that "City of the Desert," half fabulous and half historical, through which the commerce of the East once found its channel to the countries of the Mediterranean, was an inland city. The trade of Asia and Africa has always been carried on by land transport; by the horse, the bullock, and especially the camel. The caravans of Oriental traffic are familiar objects of description. The eastern races have, many of them, great aptitude for mercantile pursuits; but for the most part, neither taste nor capacity for the navigation of the seas. This is true of that race best known to all the world-the Jews.

The ocean was the last and crowning conquest of our race. To the savage man an object of helpless terror-to all men an object of awe-it was to the ancients an unfathomable mystery, since they knew not whither led its world of waters. The hearts of the bold men who followed the fortunes of Columbus failed within them as they sailed westward day by day upon the trackless waste, leaving the world behind them. With infinite difficulty did he persuade them to proceed, now by entreaty, now by authority, and at last by a promise to return unless he reached land within a certain time. The alarm and terror which agitated his little fleet, three vessels, the largest of only ninety tons, surpassed description. The heart of the great admiral failed not. His notions of the magnitude of the earth, with the limited information of that period, must have been indefinite, but its form was clearly pictured in his mind. In the statue which adorns the eastern front of our national capital, he is represented as holding the globe in his hand-no unfit emblem of the firm grasp in which his intellect comprehended it. Bating no jot of heart or hope he still sailed towards the setting sun, until he was able to cheer, not himself, but his followers, with unmistakable signs of that new world, the discovery of which has opened the crowning era of the destinies of his race.

Only in modern times can commerce be truly said to be "the golden girdle of the globe."

Only in the fulness of time, only after nearly six thousand years of de

lay, did man know the limits of the planet he inhabits, and thereby really acquire that dominion of the land and of the sea promised to him by his Creator. Requiring not merely great perfection in the mechanic arts but a knowledge of the abstruse sciences, the navigation of the ocean could only be possible at an advanced stage of human civilization. Requiring the highest combination of intelligence, moral courage, and physical hardihood, it could only be possible to superior races of men. Not only must it be confined to the superior races of men, but in its full development to such races inhabiting the colder climates. There only is found the sturdy muscle which can build the wooden leviathans which plow the deep. There only is found that bodily endurance which can brave the buffetings of the ocean. The mastery of the winds and waves requires rougher training than is found under genial suns and on benignant soils. To the frozen north belongs the dominion of the seas, and in modern times the dominion of commerce follows the dominion of the seas. Nations without sailors and without ships may control their own trade, but the wealth and productions of any single country are small, compared with those of the great world which lies open to those to whom the ocean is a familiar highway.

Southern countries, under any tolerable organization of labor and government, far surpass Northern countries in raw productions. The imports and exports of Cuba exceed threefold the imports and exports of the United States, in proportion to population. Yet Cuba has no tonnage, and can have none. The staples of our own Southern States are transported in ships built in New England. This happens because they have comparatively no tonnage of their own, and because they can employ New England ships at more advantageous rates than other ships, taking into account the superior manner in which the service required is performed by them. It does not arise, in any appreciable degree, from the political connection of the States of this Union. With the exception of the coasting trade, a ship from Maine has no legal advantage at New Orleans over a ship from England or Norway, but obtains business there, as it does at Havana, upon the same principles which control other mercantile transactions.

The writers and orators of the Southern States have failed to perceive the true causes which have given a Northern direction to modern commerce. The fact of this direction they see clearly—and, indeed, it is impossible for anybody to be blind to it.

De Bow says:—

Almost all the great maritime and commercial people of ancient and modern times have been Southerners, and many under suns more burning than ours.

Col. James Gadsden, of South Carolina, says:

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It was the spirit of enterprise of these Southeastern and luxurious people which reared to greatness and power and wealth the Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Median, Persian, and Arabic empires; extended over Greece and Italy, passed the Pillars of Hercules, and explored more distant regions. It was Phoenicia which planted her Carthage on the burning sands of Africa. It was commercial enterprise in the South that reared Venice amid the very waters of the Adriatic, and made the silks of Persia and the spices of Arabia tributary to her luxurious grandeur. Alexandria, too, midways between the Indian and Mediterranean seas, once held its high place among the great commercial marts of the world. Its decline is to be attributed to the discovery of the

passage round the Cape of Good Hope. To adventurous Southern spirits, to Portuguese navigators, is the world indebted for that new avenue to the Eastern Ocean and the Chinese Seas. Genoa should not be overlooked in the enumeration of ancient Southern cities reared by Southern enterprise.

This is eloquence; as intended to prove the present capacity of Southern regions to contest the palm of commercial supremacy, it is, to a certan extent, logic; nevertheless, it is defective logic, because it omits the consideration of the circumstances which decisively distinguish ancient from modern times. History does prove that civilization, letters, and the arts had their origin in the rich regions of the lower latitudes-where nature is kindly, where the fruits of the earth are abundant, and where population, even in a rude condition of life, may become dense. Philosophy teaches how all this must necessarily be so; but both history and philosophy point to the Northward progress of the human race, as its fuller development multiplies the means by which cold is resisted, and even converted into an ally, and by which cultivation is made to supply the place of spontaneous fertility. History does prove that Southern nations may exhibit the finest genius in war and in letters; may found opulent cities; and may excel in both the luxurious and useful arts. History does not prove them to possess those more rugged characteristics, that rougher strength which command the ocean, and, through the ocean, command universal commerce.

The acute intellect of Italy discovered the New World; the fervid enterprise of Portugal circumnavigated the Old World; but where they sowed, others have reaped. The careers they opened have been entered upon, and at length monopolized, by more sturdy competitors. The Hollander, the Dane, the Norwegian, the Swede, the North German, the Englishman, and, finally, the Northern States of this Union, have become the masters of navigation, of the carrying trade, and of the world's commerce. This is not accident, but the result of those prominent principles which secure to Northern races the trident of the seas. It is not accident that the Russian empire draws its sailors from Finland; that the seat of the French whale fishery is at Havre, and not at Marseilles; that Cape Cod is the nursery of seamen, while Virginia is the mother of orators. The dangers, hardships, and privations of seafaring life, do not attract those who bask under genial suns, and receive, almost without labor, the abounding fruits of kindly soils. It is only a certain ruggedness of nature which drives men from the land to the ocean. In ancient times, it was not the Egyptians, enriched by the endless fertility of the Nile, but the Phoenicians, surrounded by sterile hills, who became the first navigators. In the middle ages, it was the Venitians, struggling for a foothold upon marshes rescued from the Adriatic-it was the Genoese, hemmed in upon a narrow strip of territory between the sea and the Appennines, who contended for maritime ascendancy. In our own times, from the gloomy and rock-bound coast of New England issue forth those swift and stately ships which carry the American flag into every clime. It is Nantucket, a desolate sand bar, with but a single harbor, and that a poor one, and without agricultural capacity exceeding the support of twenty families, which breeds that indomitable race, of whom Burke said :

While we follow them among the trembling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits;

while we are looking for them beneath the Arctic Circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries-no climate that is not witness to their toils.

As between the two sections of our own country, there is another fact, besides the difference of climate, which disables the South from entering into commercial competition with the North. Its laboring population consists of slaves, and those slaves of an inferior race. The slaves of the Phoenicians, of the Greeks, and of the Romans, were equal, or nearly equal to their masters, in natural capacity. This difference is, in some respects, advantageous to our Southern States. The negro is easily subjugated, and not dangerous as a slave; but the same characteristics which make him less dangerous, make him less useful. White slavery is compatible with a high degree of perfection in the mechanic arts, in manufactures, and in commerce. Black slavery is fatal to it, as proved by the unvarying experience of every people which has tried it. It is quite certain that we shall never see ships built or sailed by negro slaves. The pursuits of our Southern States are, and always were, mainly agricultural. The era of their commercial prosperity and opulence, which they fix prior to the revolutionary war and down to the commencement of the present century, is only a pleasing fable, although reported so often as to be accepted as fact by the careless. Even Col. Benton pays a pious tribute to the past glories of the Carolinas, from which he sprung. A closer examination will show that in this case, as in many others, distance of time" lends enchantment to the view," as well as distance of place. The products of our Southern States were formerly, and still are, exported from their own ports. The whole change which has occurred within sixty years, is that the imports consumed by them, and which were formerly made principally at their own ports, are now made at New York-the difference being substantially this, that their factors, who are now Northern merchants, were then English or Scotch agents. In commerce or navigation they never themselves participated in any considerable degree, although furnishing, as the Cubans do, abundant commodities and employment for both.* The holders of the public debt, at the close of the revolutionary war, were found north of the Potomac. During the war of 1812-15, while the North loaned to the government $43,000,000, the South loaned only $2,000,000; and this from want of means, and not from any want of patriotism or lack of disposition to sustain government in that struggle. These facts show clearly enough where mercantile capital was located at these periods.

Virginia and the Carolinas had their epoch of prosperity; but it was

* "Our last exports did not exceed £1,000,000. Our export trade is entirely in the hands of foreigners. We have no manufactures-depend for supplies on other nations, and so far are we from having any carrying trade, that, as I have already said, our exports are in the hands of foreigners." -GOVERNOR RANDOLPH, in the Virginia Convention, (1788,) “On the adoption of the Federal Constitution."

"From Virginia their exports are valued at a million sterling per annum; the single article of tobacco amounts to seven or eight hundred thousand. How does this come back? Not in money; for the Virginians are poor to a proverb, in money. They anticipate their crops; they spend faster than they earn; they are even in debt. Their rich exports return in eatables, in drinkables, and in wearables."-OLIVER ELLSWORTH, in the Connecticut Convention, (1788,) "On the adoption of the

Federal Constitution."

in no just sense commercial.

It was agricultural, and only lasted while they were wearing out the natural fertility of their lands by a wasteful and exhausting cultivation.

It is a common idea that commercial prosperity is fleeting and transitory beyond the degree of mutability incident to all human things. That idea inspired the poet, when he said:

"Trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay."

I am not satisfied that this idea is well founded. Commercial cities have flourished and decayed, and so have, and with quite as much rapidity, empires, kingdoms, and even races. Notable instances are not few, at any rate, where commerce, or superiority in some special manufacture, has clung to particular spots with wonderful tenacity. When St. Paul journeyed to Damascus, it was a city of immemorial age, and is a flourishing city at this day. Alexandria survives twenty-three centuries; Marseilles was an old and opulent city before the Christian era; London is older than the English language, and was a considerable town in the time of the Cæsars. Most of the towns composing the Hanseatic League of the twelfth century still hold an important commercial rank. Damascus excels in steel at this day, as it did during the Crusades; the laces of Brussels have delighted the fair during five centuries; the violins of Cremona and the silks of Lyons have been long famous, and are still unsurpassed. If the shoes of Lynn and the clocks of Connecticut enjoy a duration of prosperity to be measured by these examples, their career is yet only in its commencement.

In the history of Europe, the dominion of trade has exhibited more stability than either political or military power. During the centuries which witnessed only two transfers of commercial ascendancy-from the Mediterranean to Holland, and from Holland to England-what numerous and vast changes took place in dynasties, in the limits of kingdoms, and in the balance of political power!

Many changes, spoken of as such, are so only comparatively, and not positively. The commerce and wealth of the Dutch, the manufactures of Belgium, the Flanders of the middle ages, have undergone no decay. They are, indeed, greater than ever before, although now overshadowed by the more colossal proportions of British capital and British industry.

In the philosophy of things, commerce and the arts must be as prominent as the national characteristics out of which they spring; while military and political power, often the result of the genius or fortune of individuals, may be as fleeting and capricious as life or chance. "Trade's proud empire," the poet to the contrary notwithstanding, cannot be "swift," either in its rise or in its fall.

The subject matter of commerce often changes, when there is no change in that national genius and aptitude to which material objects are only secondary. Consider the great part now performed in English commerce by cotton fabrics. They constitute one-half of the enormous aggregate of English exports. Yet the cotton manufacture is wholly the creation of the last eighty years. In the reign of James I., little more than two centuries ago, nine-tenths of English commerce was in woolen manufactured goods. Yet the commerce of England does not consist of cottons or woolens. It would have existed without either. It has its substantial and enduring basis in her national genius and enterprise, in her well