ing us the control
of the commerce of the world.

If Maryland would only initiate this policy, and come now to the rescue
of the Union from rebellion and foreign intervention, she would inscribe
her name first of all the States on the page of history and in the
gratitude of our country and mankind. The position of Maryland upon the
Chesapeake, the Potomac, the Susquehanna, and Atlantic, is most
commanding. She surrounds the Capitol. It was her own noble donation,
and she is its natural guardian and sentinel. Her waters, cutting the
Blue mountains and the Alleghany, flow into the Atlantic and
Mississippi, thus making her an eastern and a western State. Throughout
all her borders, not a citizen would lose anything by the change
proposed, but all would be enriched. Take down the barriers of slavery,
and a new and unprecedented current of population and capital would flow
into the State. Property would rise immensely in value, the price of her
lands would soon reach those of Pennsylvania, new towns and cities would
spring into life, Cumberland would soon equal the great manufacturing
sites of the North, and the railroad to Pittsburg would soon be
completed. Baltimore would fulfil her mighty destiny, and the present
canal _up the Susquehanna_, easily enlarged, so as to equal the grand
work of New York, would connect her with Lakes Erie and Ontario. That
canal already unites the Susquehanna from the Chesapeake with the lakes
by the Seneca route (as it should by the Chenango also), and only
requires to be enlarged to the extent of the Erie Canal, and the locks
also, as wisely proposed in regard to that great work. This would at
once develop the great iron and coal mines of the Susquehanna
(anthracite and bituminous), supply western and central New York, and
the great region of the lakes, and the Chesapeake with these articles,
so essential in war and peace. Let the locks of the Erie Canal be
enlarged as proposed, and the ship canal from the Illinois river to
Chicago constructed; but in justice to Pennsylvania and Maryland, as
vastly important for commerce and revenue, and as a war measure for the
cheap construction of iron-clad gunboats in the great coal and iron
region, and the defence of the lakes, the Chesapeake, the Delaware, the
Albemarle, and of the _capital of the Union_, let this canal be enlarged
also.

While this system of gradual emancipation would greatly promote the
material interests of Maryland, and of all the