, when loaded in
the same manner, not more than two and a half. The Uruguay is equally
navigable for several hundred miles to the Salto Chico, (the little
leap), and if a short canal was cut, to turn that rapid and the much
more formidable one of the Salto Grande,[B] it would be navigable for
many hundred miles above the Falls. Several of the tributaries of these
gigantic streams are larger than the Rhine, the Elbe, or the Tagus, and
great numbers of them than the Thames or the Mersey, and the whole of
this vast net-work of waters is connected with the still more stupendous
river of the Amazons, by a short portage to the Madeira, one of the
principal tributaries of that king of rivers. The natural products which
these unrivalled lines of river communication might be made the means of
bringing to the ports on the Rivers Plate and Amazons are varied and
inexhaustible. In addition to the large supplies of hides, wool, tallow,
and provisions, which these countries now furnish, Paraguay and
Corrientes are capable of supplying the finest timber for ship-building
purposes, sugar the growth of free labour, the best kinds of tobacco,
cotton-wool, dyewoods, drugs, the tea of Paraguay, and the precious
metals from Bolivia and the back provinces of Brazil. It is now only
twenty or thirty years since steam navigation was introduced on the
Mississippi, and the consequence of its introduction has been an
extension of cultivation and population such as the world never before
saw. The natural resources of the great valleys of the Parana, Paraguay,
and Uruguay, merely require to be developed by the same means to make
Monte Video and Buenos Ayres as flourishing as New Orleans, and to make
the commerce of the River Plate rival that of the Mississippi. It is
perhaps vain to hope that anything will induce the present Governor of
Buenos Ayres to abandon the suicidal policy which is at once impeding
the intercourse with the interior, and depriving that city of the
principal benefits of its unrivalled position, but this only renders it
the more necessary to keep open the only other course, namely, that
through the Uruguay, by which the resources of these vast countries can
be brought into activity.

For another of the great advantages which has resulted from the
independence of Monte Video, has been the opening of a new channel for
the commercial intercourse between Europe and the central states of
South America, in peace as well as in war; and