we have already described, and it was Mackinaw and
not New Orleans or New York that the lines radiated from to the
earliest settlements of the west.

Mackinaw presents one of the most remarkable geographical positions
on the earth. Constantinople on the Bosphorus, the Straits of
Gibraltar, Singapore on the Strait of Malacca, and the Isthmus of
Panama, are the only ones which seem to present a parallel. The two
former have been for ages renowned as the most important in the
commercial world. Singapore has rapidly become the key and centre of
Asiatic navigation, at which may be found the shipping and people of
all commercial nations, and Panama is now the subject of negotiation
among the most powerful nations with a view to the exceeding
importance of its commercial position. Geographically, Mackinaw is not
inferior to either. From the northwest to the southeast, midland of
the North American continent, there stretches a vast chain of lakes
and rivers dividing the continent nearly midway. This chain of Lakes
and rivers is in the whole nearly three thousand miles long. At the
Straits of Mackinaw the whole system of land and water centres. The
three greatest lakes of this system, Superior, Huron, and Michigan,
are spread around, pointing to the straits, while between them three
vast peninsulas of land press down upon the waters until they are
compressed into a river of four miles in width. On the north is the
peninsula of Canada, on the south that of Michigan, and on the west
that of the copper region, all of which are divided only by the narrow
Straits of Mackinaw. Here are three inland seas of near eighty
thousand square miles and about five thousand miles of coast. From
coast to coast and isle to isle of this immense expanse of waters,
navigation must be kept up, increasing with the ever-increasing
population on their shores till tens of millions are congregated
around. Of all this vast navigation and increasing commerce, Mackinaw
is the natural centre around which it exists, and toward which it must
tend by an inevitable law of necessity. Superior, Huron, and Michigan
have no water outlet to each other but that which flows through the
Straits of Mackinaw, and its geographical position is unrivaled in
America. Whoever lives twenty years from this time will find Mackinaw
a populous and wealthy city, the Queen of the Lakes.

If any serious objection be made to the site of a city at this place,
it can only be that the cli