al tax for the aggregate sum.
No one hears any complaint regarding the sum necessary to support the
General Government, except by those in remote districts, who have but
an infinitesimal interest involved, but an imaginary part of the sum
to pay, and who, producing but little, and having nothing to do,
assume the right to manage the affairs of those who really have
something at stake. The American people are willing and anxious that
their money shall be expended for their own benefit, for the benefit
of those who are to come after them, and for the glory of our great
country.

The many instances of our dereliction in the establishment of steam
mail facilities, and the failure to establish locomotive
accommodations for our merchants and other business classes call
loudly for a change in our affairs, and the establishment of a
national steam policy in the place of the accidental and irregular
support hitherto given to foreign steam enterprise. The nation demands
the means of competing with other nations. We have lost much of the
trade of the world without it. The commercial men of this country
complain bitterly that the Government gives them no facilities for
conducting our trade or cultivating the large fields of enterprise
successfully which I have named, and competing, on fair terms, with
foreign merchants. They see the West-Indies, the Spanish-American
Republics, Brazil, Central America, and Mexico, lying right at our
southern door, and the whole Pacific coast, the East-Indies, China,
the Mauritius, Australia, and the Pacific Islands but half as far from
California as from England, all much nearer to us than to Great
Britain and other European countries, and offering us a trade which
large as it necessarily is to-day, is yet destined within the coming
generation to transcend that of all other portions of the globe
combined, in extent, in richness, and in the profits which it will
yield. The capacity of these great fields for development and
expansion is indefinite and almost boundless. There is no doubt that
an American trade could be developed in those regions within the next
thirty years whose opulence and magnificence would rival and far
surpass our entire commerce of the world at the present time, and give
to our nation a riches and a power which would enable it to shape the
destinies of the entire civilized world.

Our commercial classes complain not so much that Great Britain has the
_monopoly_ of this trade,