process, we could reestablish ours, if not paralyze theirs.
Neutrality is impossible. Indifference to the present posture of
affairs only leads to the ruin of our interests. We must advance and
contend with Great Britain and Europe step by step, and employ the
means of which we are generally so boastful, or we will be forced to
retreat from the field, and be harassed into ignominious submission."

As in the case of Brazil and La Plata so is it in that of the Pacific
South-American States, and the great fields of Australia, China, and
the East-Indies generally, as before noticed. The trade of Great
Britain with those regions has gone on at a rate of progression truly
astonishing. Ours has continued just as much behind it as the slow and
uncertain sailing vessel is behind the rapid and reliable mail
steamer. Our Pacific possessions have been shorn of half their glory
and power by the refusal of those steam aids which would by the
present time have converted half the commerce of the fields mentioned
into the new channels of American enterprise and transport. The
injustice has operated equally against the people of California and
Oregon, and against ourselves of the East; while there is no good and
valid reason for thus making the Pacific coast the _ultima thule_ of
civilized, steam enterprise. The people of the United States, of
whatever class, are far from being misers. They do not desire an
economy of two or three millions of dollars per year, which would give
them great opportunities of obtaining wealth and power, merely that
the sum so economized may be squandered, with twenty or thirty
millions more, on schemes of doubtful expediency, and of no real or
pressing necessity. They do not, indeed, ask that these mail
accommodations may be paid for simply because much money is uselessly
otherwise spent; but because these accommodations are necessary to
themselves, to the development of their enterprise and labor, and to
the general good of all the active and industrial, and, consequently,
all of the worthy classes. It is a question of little importance to
the great people of this country, whether the Government expends forty
millions per year or eighty millions. But it would be a delightful
consolation to them to know that while they might be paying ten,
twenty, or thirty millions per year more than strictly necessary,
three or four millions of it at least were so appropriated as to
better enable them to pay the large gener