This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
484
STRICTURES

some of the northern free States; not because the one were free, and the other slave States, but because of a want of experience in the construction of such works, the sparseness of the population, the greater natural difficulties to be surmounted, and the much greater length to which those improvements must necessarily be extended, to form connecting links between important commercial points. Yet, notwithstanding all these opposing circumstances, the fact is clearly established, that the construction of rail-roads, and other works of internal improvement in the slave States, may be made both practicable and profitable; and we believe the time is not far distant, when these iron bands of commercial intercourse will traverse the sunny regions of the South, as well as the sterile plains of the North — when the world's thoroughfare, connecting the Atlantic with the great Pacific, upon which will concentrate the combined commerce of the earth, all tending to that modern Ophir, whose exhaustless treasures have already aroused the cupidity of the most powerful nations of the globe — we say, the time is not far distant, when this mighty triumph of American enterprise, together with the world's great speaking trumpet, the magnetic telegraph, will be extended from the Mississippi to the Californians, from the Atlantic to the Pacific shore, mostly, if not wholly, upon slave territory. This we speak of, not boastingly, but as a natural result of the present existing state of things, which the combined efforts of abolitionists and free-soilers, and all the heterogeneous mass of conflicting elements and powers,