an express train can go from New York to San Francisco in four days, while the fastest steamer would take two weeks. But many of the emigrants from Europe, that now crowd into the tenements of New York, will probably sail through the Canal directly to the Pacific coast, where there is only too much room for them.
On the Atlantic coast, New Orleans plans to combine the traffic through the Canal with a great revival of the Mississippi River trade, while every port from Boston to Galveston claims to be in the most direct path to Panama and to have the best railroad facilities behind it. Over a hundred million dollars is being spent on each coast in dredging channels, building docks, and otherwise getting ready for Panama. The effects should be felt, in lower freight rates and prices, in the farthest inland parts of the United States.
The Panama Canal will bring our Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and the whole Mississippi Valley much nearer China, Australia, and New Zealand, all hungry for American steel and coal and manufactured goods. Then there is the trade with South America, which proved so much more valuable than that of the west coast of North America, in the early days of the Panama Railroad. But though the South Americans like our reapers and binders and other machinery, and are beginning to wear our ready-made clothes and shoes, they do not like our stupid, bad-mannered ways of doing business with them. We send them circulars and catalogues written in a language they cannot read, salesmen who cannot speak a word of Spanish, and goods packed in flimsy cases that usually go to pieces on the voyage. If
