have hitherto had with the outer world. Our
knowledge of foreign lands has pointed out innumerable wants hitherto
unknown, and suggested innumerable channels of their supply. Nations
have learned to depend on each other as formerly neighbor depended on
his neighbor for any little necessary or luxury of life. The luxurious
spirit of the times requires the importation and exportation of an
immense list of articles with which foreign countries were formerly
unacquainted, but which have now become as indispensable as air, and
light, and water. And if it is not necessary that these many articles
shall be transported from land to land with the speed of the telegraph
or the fleetness of the ocean steamer, it is at any rate necessary
that the facts concerning them, their ample or scarce supply, their
high or low price, their sale or purchase, their shipment or arrival,
their loss, or seizure, or detention, should be made known with all of
the combined speed of the telegraph, the lightning train, and the
rapid ocean mail steamer. If we possess ourselves these facilities of
rapid, regular, and reliable information to an extent that no other
nation does, we will be the first to reach the foreign market with our
supplies, the first to bring the foreign article into the markets of
the world, and the proper recipients of the first and largest profits
of the cream of the trade of every land.

If we neglect these precautions, and refuse to establish these
facilities, because their cost is apparent in one small sum of
expenditure, while their large returns in profits diffused among the
whole people are not so palpably apparent to the common eye; if we
leave to the genius and enterprise of the people that which private
enterprise and human skill unaided can never accomplish; in a word, if
we fail to keep up with the world around us, and to progress _pari
passu_ with our wise, acute, and experienced commercial rivals, then,
as a matter of course, the information which we receive from the
foreign world must come through others, and those our rivals, and must
be deprived of its value by the advantage which they have already
taken of it. It is idle to suppose that any commercial nation on earth
will not so arrange her foreign post as to exclude others than her own
citizens as much as possible from its benefits. This is a paramount
duty of the government to the citizen. It is therefore apparent that
our commerce must of necessity greatly suf