THE SPLENDID TRIUMPHS OF STEAM: IT IS THE MOST EFFICIENT MEANS OF NATIONAL PROGRESS AND DEVELOPMENT: THE FORERUNNER OF CIVILIZATION: IMPORTANT TO THE UNITED STATES AS AN AGRICULTURAL, MANUFACTURING, AND COMMERCIAL COUNTRY: NATURE OF OUR PEOPLE: MARITIME SPIRIT: VARIOUS COMMERCIAL COUNTRIES: OURS MOST ADVANTAGEOUSLY SITUATED: THE DESTINY OF AMERICAN COMMERCE: OUR COMMERCIAL RIVALS: GREAT BRITAIN: SHE RESISTS US BY STEAM AND DIPLOMACY: OUR POSITION: MOST APPROVED INSTRUMENTS OF COMMERCIAL SUCCESS: PORTUGAL AND HOLLAND: ENGLAND'S WISE STEAM POLICY: LIBERAL VIEWS OF HER STATESMEN: EXTENT OF HER MAIL SERVICE: HER IMMENSE STEAM MARINE, OF 2,161 STEAMERS: OUR CONTRAST: OUR DEPENDENCE ON GREAT BRITAIN: THE UNITED STATES MAIL AND COMMERCIAL STEAM MARINE IN FULL: A MOST UNFAVORABLE COMPARISON.
The agreeable and responsible duty of developing and regulating the most important discovery of modern times, and the greatest material force known to men, has been committed to the present generation. The progress of Steam, from the days of its first application to lifting purposes, through all of its gradations of application to railway locomotion and steamboat and steamship propulsion down to the present time, has been a series of splendid and highly useful triumphs, alike creditable to the genius of its promoters, and profitable to the nations which have adopted it. However great the progress of the world, or the prosperity of commercial nations prior to its introduction, it can not be doubted that it now constitutes the largest, surest, and most easily available means of progress, prosperity, and power known to civilized nations; or that the development, wealth, and independence of any country will be in the ratio of the application of steam to all of the ordinary purposes of life. It has been canonized among the sacred elements of national power, and commissioned as the great laborer of the age. Every civilized nation has adopted it as the best means of interior development, and as almost the only forerunner of commerce and communication with the outer world. It has thus become an indispensable necessity of every day life, whether by land or by sea, to the producer, the consumer, the merchant, the manufacturer, the artisan, the pleasure-seeker, the statesman, and the state itself, to public liberty, and to the peace of the world.
The existence of an agent of so great power and influence, is necessarily a fact of unusual significance to a nation like the United States, which combines within itself in a high degree, the three most important interests, of large Agricultural and Mineral Productions, extensive and increasing Manufactures, and an immense Foreign Commerce and Domestic Trade. Our country is essentially commercial in its tastes and tendencies; our people are, as a result of our common schools, bold, inquiring, and enterprising; and our constitution and laws are well calculated to produce a nation of restless and vigorous merchants, traders, and travellers. Foreign commerce is a necessity of our large and redundant agricultural production. Our extended sea-coast, and necessarily large coasting-trade between the States, have begotten an unbounded spirit of maritime adventure. The ample material, and other facilities for building vessels, have also contributed to this end. As capable as any people on earth of running vessels and conducting mercantile enterprise, we have found foreign commerce a profitable field for the investment of labor, intelligence, and capital.
There is scarcely any field of trade in the world which we are not naturally better calculated to occupy than any other country. Most of the great commercial nations employ their ships as common carriers for other nations, and limit their exports to manufactures alone. Great Britain is an example of this. She exports no products of the soil, for very obvious reasons. The exports of France partake of the same general character, domestic manufactures, with a small portion of the products of the soil. So, also, with the German States and Holland. The United States, to the contrary, have an immense export trade in the products of the soil. These exports have the advantage of embracing every production of the temperate zone, and some few of the more profitable of those of the torrid. These constitute a large source of wealth, and are daily increasing in quantity, value, and importance. Combined with the manufactured productions of the country, and the yield of the mines, they require a large amount of shipping, which, extending to nearly all nations, opens a diversified and rich field of trade. The exchanges of production between our own and other countries, are, consequently, very large and general, and must continue to increase to an indefinite extent, as the States and Territories of the Union fill up, and as the various new and opening branches of domestic industry develop and mature.
The extent which this trade will reach in a few generations, its aggregate value, and the influence which it will wield over the world if judiciously and energetically promoted, and if wisely protected against encroachment from abroad, and embarrassment at home, no human foresight can predict or adequately imagine. With a larger field of operations, at home and abroad, than any nation ever possessed before, with the pacific commercial policy of the age, and with the aids of science, the telegraph, and steam to urge it on, American Commerce has opened before it a glorious career and an imposing responsibility.
But the conquests of this commerce are not to be the bloodless victories of power unopposed; not the result of bold adventure without check, or of simply American enterprise without the Government's aid. Our foe is a wary, well-scarred, and well-tried old warrior, who has the unequalled wisdom of experience, and the patient courage that has triumphed over many defeats. The field has been in his hands for ten generations, and he knows every byway, every marsh, every foot of defense, and the few inassailable points to be preserved and guarded. Great Britain, particularly, knows how essential is a large general commerce for opening a market for her manufactures. She is dependent on those manufactures, and upon the carrying trade of the world for a living; and she fosters and protects them not alone by the reputed and well-known individual enterprise and energy of her people, but by a wise and forecasting policy of state, a mighty and irresistible naval and military array, a wisely concerted, liberal, well-arranged, and long-pursued steam system, and prompt, unflinching protection of British subjects in their rights throughout the world.
Great Britain is prepared to resist our commercial progress, as she has already done, step by step, by all the means within her power. She has wisely brought steam to her aid, and now has a system of long standing at last well matured. Her diplomacy has ever been conspicuous throughout the world, for ability and zeal, whether in the ministerial or consular service, and for its persistent advocacy of British rights in trade as well as for its machinations against the extension of the commerce or the power of this country. Such action on the part of any wise rival nation is naturally to be expected; and all that we can object to is that, seeing this policy and its inevitable tendency, our country should stand still and suffer her trade to be paralyzed and wrested from her, without an effort to relieve it, or the employment of any of those commercial agencies and facilities which experience shows to be all-efficient in such cases. It is utter folly for us to maintain a simply passive competition; we must either progress or retrograde. It is wrong to be willing to occupy a secondary place, when nature and the common wants of the world so clearly indicate that we should occupy the first; for if, as before assumed, foreign commerce is our destiny, and if we can not accomplish our highest capabilities except by commerce, then if we ever attain our true dignity and station as a nation, it must be by enlarging, liberalizing, strengthening, and encouraging our foreign trade, by all of the proper, efficient, and honorable means within our power. It is the duty of the Government, both to itself and to its citizens. (See [Section VII.])
The history of commercial nations admonishes us that no trading people can long maintain their ascendency without using all of the most approved means of the age for prosecuting trade. Portugal was at one time the most powerful commercial nation of the globe; and at another Holland was the mistress of the seas. But while the latter is now only a fourth-rate commercial power, the former has sunk into obscurity, and is nearly forgotten of men. At that time England and France had but a limited foreign trade and scarcely any commercial reputation. France could more easily maintain her existence without a foreign trade, than could England; and yet her matured manufactures and her products of the soil became so valuable that she sought a foreign market. England, to the contrary, had not territory enough to remain at home, and yet be a great power. She matured an immense manufacturing system, and needed a market, as well as the raw material, and food for her operatives. She began to stretch her arms to the outer world, and had made very considerable strides in foreign commerce side by side with France and the German States, and in the face of the steady young opposition of the American States.
It now became a contest for supremacy. Her large navy had enabled her to conquer important foreign territories, which with the supremacy of the seas would make her the mistress of the world. France was still her equal rival, and the United States were becoming formidable common carriers, although they had but little legitimate commerce of their own, and none that was under their positive control. The commercial men of England finding their statesmen ready to aid them in their efforts for national progress, wealth, and glory, directed their attention to steam as an agent of supremacy and power, both in the Navy and the Commercial Marine. They indicated and proved the necessity of drawing the bonds between them and foreign countries more closely; of shortening the distances between them; of providing the means of rapid, safe, and comfortable transit of English merchants between their homes and foreign lands; of regular, rapid, reliable British steam mails to every point with which Englishmen had business, or could create it; and of government agency as the only means by which this desirable, this essential service could be rendered to commerce and to the country. They readily saw that rapid and reliable passenger facilities, and the rapid and regular transmission of commercial and diplomatic intelligence would give to British merchants and to British statesmen the certain control of commerce, and the conformation of the political destinies of many of the smaller nations of the Eastern and Western hemispheres.
It was not a difficult task to convince the British statesman that it was his duty to encourage the commerce, on which the wealth, power, and glory of his country depended, by all the aids known to the constitution; and to uphold the hands of the merchant by the use of the money which his traffic had brought into the public coffers. There was no contest between North and South, East and West. It was the whole of England which was to be benefited directly or indirectly; and they were willing that it should be any part rather than none. The evident advantages which the United States possessed in her more numerous articles of export, (see [page 16],) as well as the rapid strides which her first clippers were making across the ocean, were reasons urgent enough for the forecasting statesmen of Britain; and they determined to continue or to obtain the profitable dominion of the seas, although it might cost a sum of money far beyond the postal income. They knew that these postal and passenger facilities were needed by every class of community, and that there was no one in the kingdom who would not be in some way benefited by them; and that the sums of money paid for them, although not apparently returned, were yet returned in a thousand indirect channels and by a variety of reflex benefits not calculable as a transaction of exchange.