23 if placed in barrels, would encircle the globe. Such is its present magnitude. We leave it to statistical science to discern and truly estimate the future. One result is, at all events, apparent. A general famine is now impossible; for America, if necessary, can feed Europe for centuries to come. Let the statesman and the philanthropist ponder well the magnitude of the fact and all its far-reaching consequences, political, social, and moral, in the increased industry, the increased, happiness, and the assured peace of the world. IV. The great metalliferous region of the American Union, is found between the Missouri river and the Pacific Ocean. This grand division of the Republic embraces a little more than half of its whole continental breadth. Portland, in Maine, is in the meridian 70° west from Greenwich; Leavenworth, on the Missouri river, in 95° ; and San Francisco, on the Pacific, in 123°. By these continental landmarks the Western or metalliferous section is found to embrace 28°, and the Eastern division between the Missouri and the Atlantic at Portland, 25° of our total territorial breadth of 53° of longitude. It has been the principal work and office of the American people, since the foundation of their Government, to carry the machinery of civilization westward from the Atlantic to the Missouri, the great confluent of the Mississippi. So far as the means of rapid inter-communication are concerned, the work may be said to be accomplished, for a locomotive engine can now run without interruption, from Portland to the Missouri, striking it at St. Joseph just below the 40th parallel of latitude. In the twenty years preceding 1860, a net-work of railways, 31,196 miles in length, was constructed, having the terminus of the most western link on the Missouri river. The total cost was $1,151,560,829, of which $850,900,681 was expended in the decade between 1850 and 1860.
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