le seaboard and all its
cities. Bridgeport, New Haven, New London, Providence, Fall River, New
Bedford, Boston, Portland, Bangor, Belfast, and Eastport will all
transact an immense increased business with New York, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and the West. As the greatest American consumer of Western
breadstuffs and provisions, and of our iron and coal, and the principal
seat of domestic manufactures, the augmented reciprocal trade of New
England with the South and West will be enormous. Her shipping and
shipbuilding interests, her cotton, woollen, worsted, and textile
fabrics, her machinery, engines, and agricultural implements, boots and
shoes, hats and caps, her cabinet furniture, musical instruments, paper,
clothing, fisheries, soap, candles, and chandlery, in which she has
excelled since the days of Franklin, and, in fact, all her industrial
pursuits, will be greatly benefited. The products of New England in
1860, exclusive of agriculture and the earnings of commerce, were of the
value of $494,075,498. But, in a few years after the completion of these
works, this amount will be doubled. Such is the skilled and educated
industry of New England, and such the inventive genius of her people,
that there is no limit to her products, except markets and consumers. As
New York increases, the swelling tide of the great city will flow over
to a vast extent into the adjacent shores of Connecticut and New Jersey,
and Hoboken, West Hoboken, Weehawken, Hudson City, Jersey City, and
Newark will meet in one vast metropolis. Philadelphia will also flow
over in the same way into Camden and adjacent portions of New Jersey,
whose farms already greatly exceed in value those of any other State.
The farms of New Jersey in 1860 were of the average value of $60.38 per
acre, while those of South Carolina, the great leader of the rebellion,
with all her boasted cotton, rice, and tobacco, and her 402,406 slaves,
were then of the average value of $8.61 per acre. (Census Table 36.) And
yet there are those in New Jersey who would drag her into the rebel
confederacy, cover her with the dismal pall of slavery, and who cry
_Peace! peace!_ when there is no peace, except in crushing this wicked
rebellion. The States of the Pacific, as the enlarged canals reached the
Mississippi and Missouri, and ultimately the base of the Rocky
mountains, would be greatly advanced in all their interests.
Agricultural products and other bulky and heavy articles that could n