the country; but to
Mr. Greeley's solitary vision it is only a curse.
Q, and his friends are cozy old-fashioned merchants in Boston city,
who own one hundred and seventy-nine vessels (see Consular Reports,
1865), which trade between foreign ports and away from the United
States altogether. These vessels have an aggregate burden of one
million tons, are worth forty dollars, gold, per ton, and earn a net
profit per annum of ten per cent. on their cost. Although in this kind
of carrying trade we are wofully behind other nations, yet it yields,
in twelve years (the average age of the vessels engaged in it), the
neat little profit of $48,000,000, which is invested by Q in tea,
coffee, and sugar, and imported into the United States at a net profit
of ten per cent. Although an unquestionable gain to Q and the country
at large of $52,800,000, Mr. Greeley, with his contracted views, only
regards it as a dead loss on the import side of our Commerce and
Navigation Returns.
R, was a bank which had a defaulting cashier, who ran away in 1857
with $500,000 of its funds. (Sch*yl*r carried off a million of New
Haven Railroad bonds). These funds were recovered and converted into
gold, which was shipped to the United States. According to Mr.
Greeley, who could find no record of exports to counterbalance it, the
same was a dead loss to the country.
S, and his friends own 76,990 tons of whaling ships (see Commerce and
Navigation Reports, 1866), worth $40 per ton, gold, or $3,079,600.
These ships are sent annually to the Arctic regions and earn for S and
his friends ten per cent., or $307,960 net profit each year. Five
years' profits, consisting of whale oil, bone, etc., which, after an
active and profitable trade at the Sandwich Islands, they returned
with this year, were valued at $1,655,659, and were duly entered among
the imports, furnishing to Mr. Greeley an indubitable proof that the
country was losing money in this business, and that the attention of
Congress should at once be directed toward supplying a proper remedy.
T, was a South American refugee, who brought with him a million of
dollars in gold doubloons. After living here for many years, by which
time, through foreign trading, his capital had doubled, he invested
the entire avails in United States bonds, as a last and striking
evidence of his faith in our institutions, and departed to his native
country, there to rest his bones. This man clearly prospered, and so
did t
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