21 population of 8,957,690 to at least thirty, if not forty millions of inhabitants, without inconvenience. The effects of this influx of population in increasing the pecuniary wealth, as well as the agricultural products of the States in question, are signally manifest in the census. The assessed value of their real and personal property, ascended from $1,116,000,000 in 1850, to $3,926,000,000 in 1860, showing a clear increase of $2,810,000,000. We can best measure this rapid and enormous accession of wealth, by comparing it with an object which all nations value—the commercial marine. The commercial tonnage of the United States, In 1840, was 2,180,764 tons. « 1850, “ 3,535,454 11 “ 1860, “ 5,358,808 “ At $50 per ton, which is a full estimate, the whole pecuniary value of the 5,358,808 tons, embracing all our commercial fleets on the oceans and the lakes and the rivers, and numbering nearly thirty thousand vessels, would be but $267,940,000 ; whereas the increase in the pecuniary value of the States under consideration, in each year of the last decade, was $281,000,000. Five years increase would purchase every commercial vessel in the Christian world. But the census discloses another very important feature in respect to these interior States, of far higher interest to the statisticians, and especially to the statesmen of Europe, than any which has yet been noticed, in their vast and rapidly increasing capacity to supply food, both vegetable and animal, cheaply and abundantly, to the increasing millions of the Old World. In the last decade, their cereal products increased from 309,950,295 bushels to 558,160,323 bushels, considerably exceeding the whole cereal product of England, and nearly, if not quite equal, to that of France. In the same period the
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