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All the other requisites for the construction and maintenance of a road, and to give it employment when done, have been shown in the view of the country-wood, water, stone, coal, iron; rich soil to build up settlements and cities, to give local business and travel all along its course, as well as at the great terminating points, and to protect it without government troops. Add to this, picturesque scenery and an entire region of unsurpassed salubrity. This quality of the route, salubrity, requires a special notice. Frémont says of it, "It is a healthy route. No diseases of any kind upon it, and the valetudinarian might travel it in his own vehicle, or on horse, or even on foot, for the mere recovery of spirits and restoration of health." This is what Frémont says, and he ought to know, traversing the region as he has done for twelve years, and never having a physician with him, nor losing a man by sickness. And all his mountain comrades, sojourners, of 20, 30, 40 years in this wild domain, report the same thing. Salubrity, then, is one of the eminent recommendatory qualities of the central route. The whole route for the road between the States of Missouri and California is good; not only good, but supremely excellent; and it is helped out at each end by water lines of transportation, now actually existing, and by railways, projected or in progress. At the Missouri end there is a railway in construction to the line of the State, and steamboat navigation to the mouth of the Kansas, and up that river some hundred miles; at the California end there is the like navigation up the Bay of San Francisco and the San Joaquin River, and a railway projected. And thus this central route would be helped out at once by some 300 miles at each end, connecting it with the great business populations of California and Missouri, at which latter point it would be in central communication with the great business population of the Union.

People now travel it and praise it; buffaloes travel it, and repeat their travel, which is their praise. The federal government only seems to eschew it, and lean to outside routes-one by Canada, which the Canadian provincial parliament appears to be now adopting for its own; aud one through old Mexico, which Santa Anna might adopt, if he had any commerce; and upon neither of which is seen a buffalo track, or a voluntary white man's track going to California, where no white man goes to get to California, except under the orders and at the expense of government, and where no buffalo could be made to go, even by the power of the government. That sensible old animal would die before he would be made such a fool of as to be conducted to the Sacramento, or San Joaquin, or San Francisco, via the hyperborean region of Upper Canada and New Caledonia, or via the burning deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua. The central route is the free choice of men and buffaloes, and is good for all sorts of roads, and in all seasons. Its straightness of course will enable the car to more than double its speed, and consequently earn its money in half the time. The smoothness of its course is but little interrupted by its ascents or descents; for they are gradual, and distributed over long distances; and the whole country between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, is at the general leve. of 5000 feet, the greatest descent being from the Sierra Nevada to the level of the sea; and that may distribute itself for the road over some hundred miles.

And now I hold it to be in order of human events, in the regular progression of human affairs, that the road will be built, and that soon; not by public, but private means, by a company of solid men, asking nothing of Congress but the right of way through the public lands, and fair pay for good service in carrying mails, troops, government officials, and munitions of war. Such an enterprise is worthy of enlightened capitalists, who know how to combine private advantage with public good, and who feel a laudable desire to connect their names with a monumental enterprise more useful than the pursuits of political ambition, more glorious than the conquest of nations, more durable than the pyramids, and which, being finished, is to change the face of the commercial world, and all to the advantage of our America.

The road will be made, and soon, and by individual enterprise. The age is progressive and utilitarian. It abounds with talent seeking employment, and with capital seeking investment. The temptation is irresistible. To reach the golden California, to put the populations of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Mississippi Valley into direct communication, to connect Europe and Asia through our America, and to own a road of our own to the East Indies; such is the grandeur of the enter prise, and the time has arrived to begin it. The country is open to settlement, and inviting it, and receiving it. The world is in motion, following the track of the sun to its dip in the western ocean. Westward the torrents of emigration direct their course, and soon the country between Missouri and California is to show the most rapid expansion of the human race that the ages of man have ever beheld. It will all be settled up, and that with magical rapidity; settlements will promote the road, the road will aggrandize the settlements. Soon it will be a line of towns, cities, villages, and farms. And rich will be the man that may own some quarter section on its track, or some squares in the cities which are to grow upon it.

But the road beyond the Mississippi is only the half of the whole; the other half is on this side, and either in progress or completed. Behold your own extended iron ways, departing from this city to go west towards the lakes and the great rivers, to join the great western trunk, now almost finished through Cincinnati, Vincennes, St. Louis, there to find the P'acific road in progress to the western limit of Missouri. Behold the lateral roads from Pennsylvania, New England, New York, all pointing to the west, and converging to the same central track. And behold the diagonal central road of Virginia, to traverse the State from its southeast to its northwest corner, already finished beyond the Blue Ridge, and its advanced pioneers descending the Alleghany Mountain, to arrive at the mouth of Big Sandy, in the very latitude of St. Louis, San Francisco, and Baltimore, and there to join the same great central western trunk. And the Blue Ridge road of South Carolina, bound upon the same destination, and the roads of Georgia, pointing and advancing to the northwest. What is the destiny of all these Atlantic roads, thus pointing to the west, and converging upon the central track, the whole course of which lies through the centre of our Union, and through the centre of its population, wealth, and power, and one end of which points to Canton

and Jeddo, the other to London and Paris-what will those lateral roads become, in addition to their original destination? They will become parts of a system, bringing our Atlantic cities nearer to the Pacific coast than they were to the Blue Ridge and the Ohio in the time of canals and turnpikes. And what then? The great idea of Columbus will be realized, though in a different and a more beneficent form. Eastern Asia is reached by going west, and by a road of which we hold the key; and the channel of Asiatic commerce, which has been shifting its bed from the time of Solomon, and raising up cities and kingdoms wherever it went, (to perish when it left them,) changing its channel for the last time, to become fixed upon its shortest, safest, best, and quickest route, through the heart of our America, and to revive along its course the Tyres, and Sidons, the Balbecs, Palmyras, and Alexandrias, once the seat of commerce and empire, and the ruins of which still attest their former magnificence, and excite the wonder af the Oriental traveler.

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This great central trunk road from Baltimore to the mouth of the Kansas, along the parallel of 39°, is already almost finished, and for all the purposes of its continuation from Missouri to California, may be assumed to be now finished; for it will be completely so before any part of the other is ready to join it. It is now complete to the Ohio River, complete to Cincinnati, complete through the State of Ohio; complete half way through Indiana, and the other half in progress; complete half way through Illinois, and the other half in progress; complete (nearly) one-third of the way through Missouri, and all the rest under contract, and under the daily energies of two thousand laborers, led by a most energetic contractor. We may assume, then, the great western trunk road to be finished from Atlantic tide water to the western limit of Missouri; that is to say, half way to the Pacific, and to the commencement of that vast inclined prairie plain which spreads from the Missouri frontier more than half the distance of the remaining half, and which is nearly prepared by the hand of Nature for the immediate reception of the iror rails and their solid foundations. What a temptation for a company to begin the great work, when so much is done to their hand, and so much of the remainder is so easy to be done! and then, how advanced all the Atlantic and Mississippi Valley connections with this great western trunk! On the Atlantic side, from Maine to Georgia, from Bangor, on the Penobscot, in the State of Maine, to the State of Georgia, a man may now go by car to that central trunk in Ohio and Indiana; from the southern shores of the northern lakes he can do the same; from the borders of the southern gulf he can partly do it. Soon all will be complete, and every part of the Atlantic States and of the Mississippi Valley be ready to go. into communication with the Pacific Ocean as soon as the trunk is completed from Missouri to California.

Telegraphic lines are ready at both ends. In California they extend over the State, into the valleys of San Joaquin and Sacramento, and would be ready to meet the road at the State line. On this end, the wires now extend to the western limit of Missouri-to the mouth of Kansas-from which point intelligence can now be flashed to every part of the Union; so that, on this central route, there is only a gap to be

filled up to complete these magic communications between the shores of the two great oceans.

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This is the object! that road, compared to which, those "Alpian sad Flaminian Ways," which have given immortality to their authors, are but as dots to lengthened lines- as sands to mountains--as grains of mustard to the full grown tree. Besides the advantages to our Union in opening direct communication with that golden California, which completes our extended dominion towards the setting sun, and a road to which would be the realization of the Roman idea of annexation, that no conquest was annexed until reached and pervaded by a road; besides the obvious advantages, social, political, commercial, of this communication, another transcendental object presents itself! That Oriental com- * merce which nations have sought for, and fought for, from the time of the Phenicians to the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope-which was carried on over lines so extended-by conveyances so slow and limitedamidst populations so various and barbarous, and which considered the merchant their lawful prey-and up and down rapid rivers, and across strange seas, and through wide and frightful deserts; and which, under all these perils, burdens, discouragements, converted Asiatic and African cities into seats of wealth and empire-centres of the arts and sciences -while Western Europe was yet barbarian; and some branches of which afterwards lit up Venice, and Genoa, and Florence, and made commercial cities the match for empires, and the wives and daughters of their citizens (in their luxurious, Oriental attire) the admiration and the envy of queens and princesses. All this commerce, and in a deeper and broader stream than the "merchant princes" ever saw, is now within our reach! attainable by a road all the way on our own soil, and under our own laws; to be flown over by a vehicle as much superior in speed and capacity to the steamboat as the boat is to the ship, and the ship to the camel. Thanks to the progress of the mechanic arts! which are going on continually, converting into facilities what stood as obstacles in the way of national communications. To the savage, the sea was an obstacle: mechanical genius, in the invention of the ship, made it a facility. The firm land was what the barbarian wanted: the land became an obstacle to the civilized man, and remained so until the steam car was invented. Now the land becomes the facility again-the preferred element of passage-and admitting a velocity in its steam car which rivals the flight of the carrier pigeon, and a punctuality of arrival which may serve for the adjustment of clocks and watches. To say nothing of its accompaniment-the magnetic telegraph, which flashes intelligence across a continent, and exchanges messages between kingdoms in the twinkling of an eye; and compared to which the flying car degenerates into a lazy, lagging, creeping John Trot of a traveler, arriving with his news after it had become stale with age.

All this commerce, in a stream so much larger, with a domestic road for its track, your own laws to protect it, with conveyances so rapid, and security so complete, lies at your acceptance. That which Jew and Gentile fought for before the age of Christianity, and for which Christians have fought both Jew and Gentile, and fought each other, and with the

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Saracen for an ally; all this is now at your acceptance, and by the beneficent process of making a road, which, when made, will be a private fortune, as well as a public bencfaction-a facility for individuals as well as for the government. Any other nation, upon half a pretext, would go to war for such a road, and tax unborn generations for its completion. We may have it without war, without tax, without treaty with any nation; and when we make it, all nations must travel it, with our permission, and behave well to receive permission, or fall behind and lose the trade by following the old track; giving us a bond in the use of our road for their peaceable behavior. Twenty-five centuries have fought for the commercial road to India; we have it as a peaceable possession. Shall we use it? or wear out our lives in strife and bitterness, wrangling over a miserable topic of domestic contention, while a glorious prize lies neglected before us? Vasco de Gama-in the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and the opening of a new route to India, independent of Mussulman power-eclipsed, in his day, the glory of Columbus, balked in the discovery of his well-divined route by the intervention of a new world. Let as vindicate the glory of Columbus by realizing his divine idea of arriving in the east by going to the west."

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Within the last twenty years, our Republic has been the theatre of a pectacle unparalleled in the history of the world in its general aspect ad promised results. Two great migrations of people, from the bosom

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