he whole country,
by their immense consumption of wood for cross-ties, sills, fuel,
snow-sheds, bridges, etc., have wellnigh stripped the land of its
timber, leaving its bosom exposed to the biting blasts of winter and to
the fiery blaze of the summer sun.

The problem of more rapid canal navigation is speedily approaching
solution, and to give up the water-lines of the larger sections would be
fatal to their commercial development. "The Erie Canal," said a
distinguished citizen of New York a short time ago, "now conveys
one-fourth of the whole export of that vast interior region I have
described (the Mississippi drainage), and as much of it during its six
months of uninterrupted navigation as all of the trunk railways together
during the same time." "Every canal-boat," he added, "which comes to
Albany with an average cargo is more than the average of the New York
Central Railroad trains. In the busy canal season more than one hundred
and fifty such boats come daily to tide-water, and the New York Central
Railroad traffic never reaches thirty trains a day." Such a canal
traffic would make more than twenty miles of uninterrupted
railroad-cars, which could not, by any possibility, be handled by the
largest force of railroad employes with expedition or convenience. The
_furore_ which the steam-engine has excited and so long maintained in
the mechanical world is decidedly abating. Engineers are everywhere at
work studying the practicability of employing new forces. The solar
heat, the wind-power, the water-power of rivers, and even the tidal
energy of the sea, have been and are now being harnessed to the
machineries of Europe. These reservoirs of force are kept perennially
full by the sun and the moon, to whose action they are due, and at a
future period, when men have prodigally squandered their heritage of
coal and wood wealth, they will be invoked by the mechanic and
manufacturer to furnish their chief motive-power. As an economist of the
force-_capital_ deposited by the sun's influence in the bowels of the
earth during its carboniferous epoch, and as using, instead of it, the
force-_interest_ received annually from the sun through the medium of
rain and wind, the water-way will and must become one of the most
generally employed engines of the higher civilizations yet to be.

So long as the subject of trans-Alleghany water-communication was viewed
as one merely affecting individual States, it possessed no national
inte