essed of ample means, and the completion of it can not fail to
open the way for a vast commerce, between the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans, and at the same time cause our fellow-citizens in
California and Oregon no longer to be regarded as exiles. This
road being once opened, the passage of the Isthmus, now so much
dreaded, will be effected with perfect ease and comfort in a
couple of hours, instead of two or three days, as at present, and
families, instead of individuals, will be enabled to seek homes in
the fertile valleys of our possessions on the Pacific coast. The
value of the lines of ocean steamers, of which your Committee have
been speaking, to the commercial and other great interests of our
country and the world at large, can not well be estimated until
this road shall have been finished and put into full operation.
When such shall be the case, the trade between California and
Oregon, as well as that of China and the islands of the Pacific
and Indian oceans and the Atlantic States and Europe, which now
passes around Cape Horn, a distance of some fifteen thousand
miles, will be enabled to take a direct course across the Isthmus
of Panama, the passage of which will require but two or three
hours. The United States mail, from San Francisco to New York, has
already been transported within the space of twenty-five days and
eighteen hours, a day less than the time claimed to have been
taken by any other route, at a period, too, when there were but
seven or eight miles of the road in operation. On a late occasion,
five hundred government troops were sent to California by this
route, and were placed at the point of their destination in a
little more than thirty-five days, without any serious desertion
or accident of any kind. A similar operation by the way of Cape
Horn would have occupied six months at least. The store-ship
Lexington, which sailed from New-York for San Francisco, during
the last year, arrived at the latter place on the last day of
February, 1852, after a passage of _seven months and one day_. In
a country the military establishment of which is so small as that
of the United States, facilities of concentrating troops at points
distant from each other, in a short time, are of incalculable
value, and may be said to add manifold to the efficiency of the
military force