Your Memorialists deem it unnecessary to specify further in detail, the advantages that the general government, as well as the States and Territories west of the Mississippi river, would derive from or the necessities that require the accomplishment of such an enterprise.

Your Memorialists therefore respectfully urge upon your Honorable bodies, the importance of providing for a survey and location of a route for a railroad leading from St. Paul to intersect a road at such point on the southern line of this Territory, as shall be deemed advisable; and that a grant of land, of every alternate section for ten sections wide, on each side of the line of said proposed road, be made for the construction of said railroad.

Missouri and Iowa Railroad.

We find in a late issue of the "North-East Reporter," published at Canton, Mo., an able and spirited address from a committee appointed at a meeting of the citizens of Canton and Tully, on the subject of the Missouri and Iowa Railroad. The region through which this road is proposed to be located is represented as an excellent agricultural district, and remarkably favorable to the construction of a railroad. The direction of the route also conforms to the true system of trade and travel. But while we commend the public spirit of our friends of the Northeast, it is proper to remark that our knowledge of the resources of the country through which their road is proposed, is not sufficient to enable us to form a judgement in respect to its profitableness as a dividend paying enterprise. There are, however, inducements to the construction of public works of more importance than the dividends accruing from their operations; and if a railroad can be built by means raised in just proportions from the people to be benefitted—as by county subscriptions-the wealth and prosperity of a community may be greatly promoted even though the dividends should fall below the ordinary rate of interest; and we doubt not that such would be the case in respect to the work under consideration. We desire to see the resources of the country developed, and trust that Northeast Missouri will find no difficulty in raising the means necessary to the construction of a work calculated to develop the wealth of that interesting region.

Superior Social Advantages of the Mississippi Valley Railroad.

BY EDWARD WYMAN, OF ST. LOUIS.

There are many points of view presented in the great project of a railroad stretching out its iron arms far to the North and South of us, which are interesting to contemplate, and, which should not, we think, be altogether overlooked by us in our contemplation of the enterprise. We purpose, briefly, to allude to but one or two of these, leaving the detail of thought which they suggest to be carried out by individul minds, to whatever extent they may be disposed to exercise their reflective powers.

We have long been accustomed to contemplate, with great satisfaction, our position in this vast central valley of the Republic; and it is with reason too that we have indulged in bright anticipations of our future prosperity and importance, as we have seen by a single glance at our maps how fortuitous is our geographic location, midway, as it is, between those to great highways of the world, the oceans which wash our Eastern and Western shores. More especially, has this been the case since the tide of Emigration, rolling westward, has poured its enterprising multitudes into the vast fertile regions which lie upon the west of the Mississippi, redeeming them from barbarism; and California too, disclosing her hidden treasures, has invited a world to the reaping of her bountiful harvest. Such has been the course of events for the past few years, and such must it continue to be for years to come, that we may reasonably conclude the day is not far distant when our centrality will be not only geographic, but social and political-when we shall no longer feel as we have felt, that we are a mere out-post upon the verge of civilization, but are its central seat-not a mere extremity of the body politic but the very heart of it.

Hitherto the eye of expectation has been turned to but one quarter -the East-and we have felt that the elements of our commercial growth lay almost solely in that direction. But a new order of things has arisen. Already have we begun to feel the reflux influence of that vast wave of population which has dashed past us and diffused itself upon the far-off shore of the Pacific; and already too have we commenced the reaching out of a strong and mighty arm, which shall gather to us and carry past us the rich treasures of that prolific soil. Indeed, it is but recently, that we have really begun to feel where we are and what we are. Suddenly, and we may say almost unexpectedly, do we find ourselves neither in the East nor the West, neither at the North nor the South; but completely surrounded by the four quarters of the Republic, all of which not only may but must be made tributary to our ultimate wealth and pre-eminence among the Cities and States of the Union.

With such unexampled rapidity has this state of things been effected, and so great has been the apathetic security we have felt in our local advantages, our natural resources and the superiority of our geographic position, and so restless and so strenuous too all the while has been the spirit of enterprise which is abroad in the land, that we have been almost surprised into a crisis in our condition—a

crisis demanding of us a more thorough appreciation of the spirit of the age, and a better understanding of the great popular agencies and instrumentalities, by which social and commerciel prosperity are now to be retained and augmented. Casting our eyes about us, we have seen that human ingenuity and human industry have found substitutes for natural facilities, where such facilities do not exist; and that human enterprise and human perseverance have triumphed over natural obstacles, where such obstacles do exist; and though we have been slow to comprehend and feel the importance of the lesson taught us, we have at last, we trust, begun fully to realize its truths, and are awaking to the emergencies and necessities which press us from all directions. So far as these exist to the East or West of us, our attention has been arrested, the determination fixed, the resolve made and our energies roused to meet them. Eastward we have already projected and commenced the construction of railways, extending from us in various directions; and one, full of promise in the future we are now pushing forward to our western frontier, destined we hope not only to keep pace with the tide of emigration but to anticipate and outstrip it, and ultimately link us to the great concourse of our brethren who have already gathered, and the greater one yet to be gathered in that vast region, which lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. This is undoubtedly a wise policy, the fruits of which will ere long be matter of general observation and rejoicing. That there is yet to be not only a vast amount of commercial but also an equal amount of social good from these great undertakings, no one, who understands. the civilizing and harmonizing potency of an easy and rapid transit from one section to another, can for a moment doubt. We are, perhaps, sufficiently awake to whatever interests we may have which lie in an Eastward or Weastward direction; and we rejoice in the increasing evidence that we are taking new views also of our relations to the North and the South, and are propounding the inquiry, how we may not only retain but may multiply the benefits to be derived from both. This great project of a railway which shall unite the northern and southern extremes of the Mississippi Valley, novel and immature as it yet is, is neverthless in our opinion the grandest conception and the noblest of its kind which has yet engaged our attention. It is one promising not only to us but to the country at large an incalculable amount of good, some of which we will attempt, though imperfectly, to make appear. We know that the great question in all enterprises of this nature is, cui bono?" what good will it do? We know too that there are different kinds of good, and that among them the pecuniary good is almost the only one which receives the consideration of men; and we further know and admit, that in the very nature of things, it is the pecuniary good that must after all determine the expediency of commencing, prosecuting and completing such stupendous undertakings. This great work, now attracting the attention of many minds, if it is ever accomplished as we believe it will be, will be accomplished, because men have faith in the pecuniary good which is to result from it; because, in the speculative parlance of the times, it can be made to pay. That it will do this I think the evidence already spread before the readers of the Journal fully conclusive. It is another kind of good-a collateral good, to which we wish to call

attention; and if the question be raised whether such good can appropriately have place in our considerations upon the subject, we answer that we wrong ourselves, and do violence to the nobler sentiments of our nature, unless we give it place. There are undertakings which men combine to accomplish, and to which they cheerfully lend their aid, when no pecuniary good is to follow, and when no appeal can be made to the more sordid passion of a lust for lucre. When our arms are victorious in battle, and we celebrate with costly magnificence a great military achievement, we stop not to enquire whether it will pay. It would sully our patriotism to do so. When a great and good man dies, and it is proposed to perpetuate his memory in an enduring monument as a testimonial of our esteem and our love, we stop not then to enquire whether it will pay. We should debase ourselves to do so. And even in the proposal before us, so widely different in its character, although as we have admitted, the grand and leading inquiry must be, is there a pecuniary good in it, still if this question can be satisfactorily answered in the affirmative, it cannot be regarded as inapt or unprofitable to inquire further if there be collateral good also.

There is then, we think, a vast amount of this kind of good to be reasonably looked for from the construction of this great national highway-a good which every lover of social harmony and every individual desiring the stability and permanency of this Union will delight to contemplate. We base it upon the theory which we advance, and which, had we the space, we think we could fully establish that in a Republic, occupying such a vast territorial space as we do, the strongest intersectional ties are the great thoroughfares of human life and industrial products which assume a North and South direction. This theory arises from certain fixed and immutable laws of nature, and the consequent physical peculiarities and developments which characterize different portions of the earth's surface. In all ages of the world, a wide difference of latitude seems to have been marked by no greater diversity of soil, climate and productions, than is the contrariety of human pursuit, human sympathy and human sentiment. Congeniality of mind, community of thought, fraternal feeling and identity of social and political interest, seem all to have been limited by the same isothermal lines, and to have extended Eastward and Westward along the same parallel of latitude, rather than North and South along the same meridian. We believe that historic truth will justify the assertion that national antipathies and sectional prejudices have almost invariably settled, like the magnetic needle, in a North and South direction. Certainly the most bitter warfare of olden times was between nations widely separated in that direction, rather than the other; and the most bitter prejudices of modern times exist between communities whose juxta-position is on the same meridian and not on the same line of latitude. Even our own country may be instanced in exemplification of the theory. How much less of asperity of feeilng and collision of sentiment is there between the East and the West, than there is between the North and the South. That this is the case, none, we think, will deny; and that it is natural and unavoidable too we must also admit. But great and deplorable as this evil is, it is by no means of such magnitude as it might have been under a different structure and arrangement of the prominent features

of our territorial domain. It seems to us as though a special superintending Providence had so directed the configuration of that part of this Continent which was to become the abode of Republicanism, at least to preserve the bond of social Union. So completely are we surronnded on almost every side by the largest bodies of water, that our boundary is all but a continuous shore, and our country may almost be circumnavigated; while the general course of our great inland streams, our great mountains and valleys, most happily for us, is North and South. Certainly we have not half an eye to the beneficent arrangement of Providence if we cannot in this discover_great good. It was an English not an American Poet who said-" Lands intersected by a narrow frith abhor each other; mountains interposed make enemies of nations that had else like kindred drops been mingled into one." The sentiment is no doubt just, applied to many countries but certainly not to our own. And yet, so much of general truth is there in it, that we are inclined to the belief that it would have been applicable to us, had the general direction of our mountains and our streams been Eastward and Westward rather than Northward and Southward. As it is, the bond of brotherhood has scaled the mountains and crossed the streams, and these have proved no greater barriers to the flow of fraternal feeling than to the transmission of the Electric current. But otherwise, who can say it would have been thus? Had our own Mississippi, for instance, instead of bisecting our country longitudinally from North to South, taken a direction from West to East, and had our two great ranges of mountains, the Alleghany and the Rocky, run parallel to it on either side, sending out tributaries to the North and South only to swell the current Eastward, who can say that it would not inevitably have become what it has sometimes been feared a Mason and Dixon's line was destined to be? Who can say that instead of being as we now are, a united, happy and prosperous people, we might not have been a discordant, factious, miserable one? Who can say that our energies and our resources would not have been consumed in border warfare, and that the flow of fraternal blood would not have resulted in unrelenting hostility and perpetual alienation? There is that in the records of our past history, and there is that still existing in the constituent elements of our social condition, which warrants the presumption that such would have been the case. Had we the power to analyze that combination of influences, by which in times of great peril and a threatened disruption of the Union, we have been saved from the horrors of such a catastrophe, we believe it would be found that there had been physical, as well as moral agencies conspiring for our safety and that among them was the fortuitous arrangement of the great natural features of our territorial surface. Along the borders of our own river, from one extreme to the other, there have been uninterrupted peace and good will; and in times of angry strife and impending ruin, the unanimity and harmony of this great range of States have exerted a powerful influence in rebuking and quieting discordant factions in other quarters. We believe then, most fully, that there is a fraternizing influence in this mighty stream, flowing as it does in a meridional channel. So fully do we believe it, that had we the power, by a single word, to check its rapid current and send it with all its burden of commerce