ligent citizens begin to turn their attention to rail-roads and canals, as necessary facilities to get their produce to market. Churches, schools, seminaries, and various benevolent and useful institutions, spring up, on every hand; men who went there comparatively penniless, and who perhaps borrowed a few hundred dollars, at exorbitant interest, to commence the improvement of their farms, become shortly independent land-holders; and the land which a few years before cost them a dollar or two an acre, in fee, now yields them a clear income of as much or more than the original cost per annum. The same principle extends to the community, and developes the same increase of the aggregate wealth of the whole people.
The state being organized, and advancing rapidly in prosperity, issues its stock, or obligations to pay money, perhaps twenty or thirty years ahead, bearing interest at five or six per cent. per annum, and devotes the proceeds of the sale of these bonds, to making rail-roads, canals, and other improvements, which enhance the permanent value of lands, by opening facilities to market; and before the expiration of the twenty years, have added several times the amount of the debt thus contracted, to the substantial wealth of the state. It has also been proved, by abundant experience, that the income from tolls on these improvements, is sufficient to pay the interest on the debt incurred for their construction, even in the early stages of the settlement, before much of the country through which they pass is reduced to cultivation; and of course, as the settlement advances, with renewed vigor, under the fostering auspices of so wise a policy, the revenue from the works themselves must increase with proportionable rapidity. It has even been found, on some of the routes of these improvements, (we may particularly instance that of the Wabash and Erie canal, running through the states of Ohio and Indiana, and connecting the navigable waters of the Mississippi and its branches with those of the great lakes, and passing entirely through a wild country, where the lands, at the time of the undertaking, belonged almost exclusively to the government,) that the sale of one half of the lands embraced within six miles of each side of the canal, has amounted to enough to defray the whole expenditure, leaving the other half to the government, increased in worth four fold, beside the enhancement in value of the lands more remote. This is by no means a singular instance, but has proved true in relation to the grand Erie canal, the Ohio canal, and all the other great thoroughfares through extensive sections of the vast valleys of the lakes and of the Mississippi. The object of these great internal improvements through these fine valleys, of unexampled fertility, is to form a navigable water communication from them to the Atlantic sea-board, making a great entrepôt at Buffalo, the Constantinople of the West. All such improvements as are west of the state of New-York, connect these two valleys together, and bring their products into the great lakes, and through the lakes to the entrepôt at Buffalo. There these products meet the merchandise of the east, brought through the Erie canal, and there the warehousing and exchanges take place. Standing at the point of exchange between the merchandise of the east and the produce of the west, and reaching, by these channels, through a territory of a fertility never before equalled, and of greater extent
