behalf alone I am acting here,
would not be benefited by its passage one particle more than they would
be by a project to cultivate an orange grove on the bleakest summit of
Greenland's icy mountains. (Laughter.)

Now, sir, as to those great trunk lines of railway, spanning the
continent from ocean to ocean, I confess my mind has never been fully
made up. It is true they may afford some trifling advantages to local
traffic, and they may even in time become the channels of a more
extended commerce. Yet I have never been thoroughly satisfied either of
the necessity or expediency of projects promising such meagre results to
the great body of our people. But with regard to the transcendent merits
of the gigantic enterprise contemplated in this bill I never entertained
the shadow of a doubt. (Laughter.)

Years ago, when I first heard that there was somewhere in the vast
_terra incognita_, somewhere in the bleak regions of the great
Northwest, a stream of water known to the nomadic inhabitants of the
neighborhood as the river St. Croix, I became satisfied that the
construction of a railroad from that raging torrent to some point in the
civilized world was essential to the happiness and prosperity of the
American people, if not absolutely indispensable to the perpetuity of
republican institutions on this continent. (Great laughter.) I felt
instinctively that the boundless resources of that prolific region of
sand and pine shrubbery would never be fully developed without a
railroad constructed and equipped at the expense of the Government, and
perhaps not then. (Laughter.) I had an abiding presentiment that, some
day or other, the people of this whole country, irrespective of party
affiliations, regardless of sectional prejudices, and "without
distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," would
rise in their majesty, and demand an outlet for the enormous
agricultural productions of those vast and fertile pine barrens, drained
in the rainy season by the surging waters of the turbid St. Croix.
(Great laughter.)

These impressions, derived simply and solely from the "eternal fitness
of things," were not only strengthened by the interesting and eloquent
debate on this bill, to which I listened with so much pleasure the other
day, but intensified, if possible, as I read over this morning the
lively colloquy which took place on that occasion, as I find it reported
in last Friday's "Globe." I will ask the indulge