SECTION VII.

WHAT IS THE DUTY OF THE GOVERNMENT TO THE PEOPLE?

RESUMÉ OF THE PREVIOUS SECTIONS AND ARGUMENTS: IT IS THE DUTY OF THE GOVERNMENT TO FURNISH RAPID STEAM MAILS: OUR PEOPLE APPRECIATE THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMERCE, AND OF LIBERAL POSTAL FACILITIES: THE GOVERNMENT IS ESTABLISHED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE PEOPLE: IT MUST FOSTER THEIR INTERESTS AND DEVELOP THEIR INDUSTRY: THE WANT OF SUCH MAILS HAS CAUSED THE NEGLECT OF MANY PROFITABLE BRANCHES OF INDUSTRY: AS A CONSEQUENCE WE HAVE LOST IMMENSE TRAFFIC: THE EUROPEAN MANUFACTURING SYSTEM AND OURS: FIELDS OF TRADE NATURALLY PERTAINING TO US: OUR ALMOST SYSTEMATIC NEGLECT OF THEM: WHY IS GREAT BRITAIN'S COMMERCE SO LARGE: CAUSES AND THEIR EFFECTS: HER WEST-INDIA LINE RECEIVES A LARGER SUBSIDY THAN ALL THE FOREIGN LINES OF THE UNITED STATES COMBINED: INDIFFERENCE SHOWN BY CONGRESS TO MANY IMPORTANT FIELDS OF COMMERCE: INSTANCES OF MAIL FACILITIES CREATING LARGE TRADE: THE PENINSULAR AND ORIENTAL COMPANY'S TESTIMONY: THE BRITISH AND BRAZILIAN TRADE: SOME DEDUCTIONS FROM THE FIGURES: CALIFORNIA SHORN OF HALF HER GLORY: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE NOT MISERS: THEY WISH THEIR OWN PUBLIC TREASURE EXPENDED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THEIR INDUSTRY: OUR COMMERCIAL CLASSES COMPLAIN THAT THEY ARE DEPRIVED OF THE PRIVILEGE OF COMPETING WITH OTHER NATIONS.

  1. Conceded ([Section I.]) that steam mails upon the ocean control the commerce and diplomacy of the world; that they are essential to our commercial and producing country; that we have not established the ocean mail facilities commensurate with our national ability and the demands of our commerce; and that we to-day are largely dependent on, and tributary to our greatest commercial rival, Great Britain, for the postal facilities, which should be purely national, American, and under our own exclusive control:
  2. Conceded ([Section II.]) that fast ocean mails are exceedingly desirable for our commerce, our defenses, our diplomacy, the management of our squadrons, our national standing, and that they are demanded by our people at large:
  3. Conceded ([Section III.]) that fast steamers alone can furnish rapid transport to the mails; that these steamers can not rely on freights; that sailing vessels will ever carry staple freights at a much lower figure, and sufficiently quickly; that while steam is eminently successful in the coasting trade, it can not possibly be so in the transatlantic freighting business; and that the rapid transit of the mails and the slower and more deliberate transport of freight is the law of nature:
  4. Conceded ([Section IV.]) that high, adequate mail speed is extremely costly, in the prime construction of vessels, their repairs, and their more numerous employées; that the quantity of fuel consumed is enormous, and ruinous to unaided private enterprise; and that this is clearly proven both by theory and indisputable facts as well as by the concurrent testimony of the ablest writers on ocean steam navigation:
  5. Conceded ([Section V.]) that ocean mail steamers can not live on their own receipts; that neither the latest nor the anticipated improvements in steam shipping promise any change in this fact; that self-support is not likely to be attained by increasing the size of steamers; that the propelling power in fast steamers occupies all of the available space not devoted to passengers and express freight; and that steamers must be fast to do successful mail and profitable passenger service:
  7. Conceded ([Section VI.]) that sailing vessels can not successfully transport the mails; that the propeller can not transport them as rapidly or more cheaply than side-wheel vessels; that with any considerable economy of fuel and other running expenses, it is but little faster than the sailing vessel; that to patronize these slow vessels with the mails the Government would unjustly discriminate against sailing vessels in the transport of freights; that we can not in any sense depend on the vessels of the Navy for the transport of the mails; that individual enterprise can not support fast steamers; and that not even American private enterprise can under any conditions furnish a sufficiently rapid steam mail and passenger marine: then,

The inference is clear and unavoidable, and we come irresistibly to the conclusion, that it is the duty of the Government to its people to establish and maintain an extensive, well-organized, and rapid steam mail marine, for the benefit of production, commerce, diplomacy, defenses, the character of the nation, and the public at large; and as there is positively no other source of adequate and effective support, to pay liberally for the same out of any funds in the national treasury, belonging to the enterprising, liberal, and enlightened people of the Republic. There is no clearer duty of the Legislative and Executive Government to the industrious people of the country than the establishment of liberal, large, and ready postal facilities, for the better and more successful conduct of that industry, whether those facilities be upon land or upon the sea. It is sometimes difficult to extend our vision to any other sphere than that in which we move and have our experiences; and thus there are many persons who, while they would revolt at the idea that the Government should refuse to run four-horse coaches to some little unimportant country town, would be wholly unable to grasp the great commercial world and the wide oceans over which their own products are to float, and from whose trade the Government derives the large duties which prevent these same persons having to pay direct taxes. They do not understand the necessity of commerce, to even their own prosperity, or of the innumerable steam mail lines which must convey the correspondence essential to the safe and proper conduct of that commerce. But the great mass of the American people understand these questions, understand the reflex influences of all such facilities, and knowing how essential they are to the proper development of enterprise and industry in whatever channel or field, boldly claim it as a right that easy postal communication shall be afforded them as well upon the high seas as upon the interior land routes.

It is generally admitted that the government of a country is established for the benefit of the people; and constitutions conflicting with this purpose are simply subversive of justice and liberty. If labor is a thing so desirable and so noble in a people that the protection of its rewards in the form of property becomes one of the highest attributes of good government, then it is equally an indisputable attribute of that protecting and fostering government to afford those facilities to labor, which experience shows that it needs, and which the people can not attain in their individual capacity, or without the intervention of the government. It is idle for a government to say to the people that they are free, when it denies to them the ordinarily approved means of making and conserving wealth. The common experience of mankind points to commerce as the next great means to production in creating national and individual wealth. It equally shows us that foreign commerce can not flourish without liberal foreign mail facilities, and the means of ready transit of persons, papers, and specie. It also clearly indicates that the most successful means of accomplishing this, is the employment of subsidized national mail steamships. It therefore becomes obviously the duty of a paternal government to an industrious, enterprising, producing, and trading people, to give them the rapid ocean steam mails necessary to the profitable prosecution of their industry.

We have for many years neglected many important fields of foreign trade, and many profitable branches of industry and art, which we could easily have nurtured into sources of income and wealth, by adopting the foreign mail system, so wisely introduced and extended by Great Britain. And in the absence of such efforts on our part, a large and remunerative traffic has been swept from us, and this suicidal neglect has been the means of our subordination to so many controlling foreign influences. We are at this very hour commercially enslaved by England, France, Brazil, and the East. How is it that the trade of the world is in the hands of Great Britain; that she absorbs most of every nation's raw material; and that she and France supply the world with ten thousand articles of industry, that should furnish work to our manufacturers, and freight to our ships? There are some who will say that it is because of her manufacturing system. Grant it. But how did she establish that imperious, and overshadowing, and powerful system, and how does she keep it up? Her energetic people have ever had the fostering care of her government. Their steam mail system has been established for twenty-four years. It has furnished the people with the means of easy transport, rapid correspondence, the remittance of specie, and the shipment of light manufactured goods to every corner of the world; it has invited foreigners from every land to her shores and her markets; and it has been the means of throwing the raw material of the whole world into the lap of the British manufacturer and artisan, and enabling them thus to control the markets in every land.

But we can get along, it is said, without such a manufacturing system and such an ubiquity of trade. This is a mistake. The productions of our soil are not sufficiently indispensable to the outer world to bring us all of the money we need for importing the millions of foreign follies, to which our people have become attached. It is not right or best for us that while our "Lowell Drillings" stand preëminent over the world, we should so far neglect the Brazilian, La Platan, New-Granadian, Venezuelan, and East-Indian trade, that Manchester shall continue, as she now does, to manufacture an inferior fabric, post it off by her steamers, forestall the market, and cheat us out of our profits; and that, by means of the reputation which our skill has produced. And a few more crises like the one through which we have just begun to pass, will open our eyes to the necessity of doing something ourselves to make money, and show that foreign trade in every form, and the sale of every species of product known to the industry of a skillful people, must be watched with jealous national and individual care, and nurtured as we would nurture a young and tender child. There are many fields of trade which may be said to pertain naturally to this country, and which we have as wholly neglected and yielded to Great Britain, as if she had a divine right to the monopoly of the entire commerce of the world. No one can believe that the trade of the islands which gem the Carribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, or the great Spanish Main, or the Guianas, or the Orinoco and Amazon, or the extended coast of Brazil, the Platan Republics, or Mexico, and the Central American States lying just at our door, belongs naturally to Europe, or that their productions should be transported in European ships, or that their supplies come naturally five thousand miles across the ocean, rather than go a few hundred miles from our own shores, in our own ships, and for the benefit of our own merchants and producers. Yet, such is the impression which our apathy of effort in those regions would produce. We have acted as if our people had no right of information concerning the West-Indies and South-America, until it had gone to Europe and been emasculated of all its virtues.

The same thing is true of the Pacific South-American, the Chinese, and the East-Indian trade. That of the Pacific coast is not half so far from us, as it is from Europe; that of China, and the East-Indies, and Australia, is by many thousand miles nearer to us; and yet the greater portion of the commerce of all three of those great fields is triumphantly borne off by Great Britain alone. And why is all this? Why is her foreign trade sixteen hundred millions of dollars per year, while ours is only seven hundred millions? Causes can not fail to produce their effects; and prime causes, however little understood in their half obscure workings, are yet made manifest as the sun at noon-day by effects so brilliant and important as these. Here, as ever, the tree is known by its fruits. The tree of knowledge, of British wisdom, "whose mortal taste brought death into our world," our Western world of commerce, "with loss of Eden," and many a fair paradise of enterprise and effort, has filled the bleak little islands of Britain with the golden fruits of every clime, and scattered broadcast among its people the rich ambrosia of foreign commerce. When it was necessary to command the trade of the West-Indies, Central America, and Mexico, lying at our southern door, she established the Royal Steam Packet service with thirteen lines and twenty steamers, and paid it for the first ten years £240,000, and for the present twelve years £270,000 per annum. In addition to this she pays £25,000 per annum for continuing the same lines down the west coast of South-America to Valparaiso, and contracts to pay the Royal Mail Company an annual addition of £75,000 in the event of coal, freight, insurance, etc., being at anytime higher than they were at the date of the contract in 1850. This aggregate sum of £295,000, or $1,475,000, to say nothing of the increased allowance of £75,000 probably now paid to this one branch alone of the British service, is considerably greater than that paid for the entire foreign mail service of the United States.

Now, it is a very extraordinary fact that, with such a field of commerce lying along the sunny side of our republic, and with such an array of facilities for converting it into European channels, our Government has done literally nothing to protect the rights of its citizens and give them the means, which they do not now possess, of a fair competition with other countries for this rich and remunerative trade. Yet such is the fact; all of the petitions and memorials of the seaboard cities to the contrary notwithstanding. The same is the case with the Pacific and East-India trade before noticed. While we have a noble chain of communication between the Eastern States and California and Oregon, which is manifestly essential to the integrity of the Union and the continued possession of our rich Western territory; while California is admirably situated to command the trade of those vast regions and concentrate it in the United States; while the British have several lines to China, the Indies, Australia, and Southern as well as Western Africa; and while our citizens have petitioned Congress year after year for even the most limited steam mail facilities to those regions, which could be afforded at the smallest price, it is truly astonishing that these facts and petitions have hitherto been treated with contempt, and almost ruled out of Congress as soon as presented. Such has been the course of action that, instead of fostering foreign commerce and encouraging the enterprise and industry of the people, the Government has really repressed that enterprise, and practically commanded the intelligent commercial classes of this country to look upon foreign trade as forbidden fruit which it was never intended should be grown upon our soil.