The canal connecting the Mississippi with the Lakes runs through the town, and is here finished in a most admirable and substantial manner. It is identified with the River Des Planes, which has been circumscribed by a wall to prevent its overflowing. There are here two locks, and a basin, equal to any I have ever seen, and indeed, all the permanent stonework of this canal appears to have been done in the most substantial and perfect style. A canal completing a line of inland water communication to the extent of from three to four thousand miles, by a cut of scarcely more than a hundred, through a region which is almost an apparent level, and presents perhaps fewer natural obstructions than any other of the same extent to be found elsewhere, is not only a noble, but a feasible undertaking. Its advantages are too obvious to require enumeration; it is in fact, essentially a national work, and stands a monument of rational foresight, among a thousand visionary schemes of sanguine folly, or selfish fraud. It is already more than two-thirds completed, and I conceive that New York is almost as deeply interested in the final issue as Illinois.
Leaving this fair and flourishing town, which still affords me many agreeable recollections of natural beauty and kind hospitality, I visited in my way to Chicago, the village of Lockport, which has grown up in anticipation of the completion of the canal. The descent of the River Des Planes is here sufficient to afford ample water-power for mills and manufactories, and this, in a country so level that the water half the time does not know which way to run, is quite enough to excite the sanguine adventurers to this promised land to a degree of delirium, and set them “kalkilating,” as Sam Slick has it, a hundred degrees beyond the ratio of geometrical progression. There is little reason to doubt that Lockport will become a considerable manufacturing town in process of time, after the canal is finished; but the far-sighted seekers into futurity would perhaps do well to bear in mind, that there must be people before there are cities; that these latter are the children, not the parents of the country, and that it is not good policy to wait so long for the grass to grow that two or three generations of steeds starve in the meantime. It is well to look a little to the present as well as the future, and not be for ever gazing at the shadowy mountain in the distance, least we fall into the ditch directly under our noses.
A few hours ride in a delightful morning, partly over rich cultivated prairie lands, brought me to Chicago, at the southern extremity of Lake Michigan. It is a fine town, and notwithstanding the blight of speculation which has swept the land from Dan to Beersheba, continues steadily on the increase. This is the best possible proof of innate constitutional vigor, and affords sufficient augury of its future growth and prosperity. To all these sanguine young cities and citizens, might I assume the universal privilege of giving advice, I would recommend the maxim of the wise Emperor Augustus, though I confess it is somewhat anti-republican to cite such an authority—festina lente—hasten slowly—be not in too great a hurry to grow big and to get rich, and do not crow before daylight, like ambitious young roosters, who aspire to be beforehand with the sun.
After remaining three or four days at Chicago, and making several agreeable acquaintances, among which was an enterprising old gentleman of four score, who had come there, as he said, “to seek his fortune,” I bade farewell to the State of Illinois, bearing on my mind the impression that there was not in any country of the known world, a region of the same extent combining within itself a greater portion of the elements of substantial and enduring prosperity. At the same time, I could not help lamenting that blessed as it is in its soil, its climate, its geographical position, and its industrious population, it had been precipitated from the summit of hope to the lowest abyss of debt and depression, by turning its back on the advantages which nature had gratuitously bestowed, to snatch at others that Providence had withheld. Though the immediate source of these pressing difficulties of the state, is without doubt improvident legislation, yet let not the good people of Illinois lay all the blame on their law-makers and rulers. They were chosen by their own free voices, and in many cases, for the express purpose of carrying out those very projects which in their vast accumulation have created these embarrassments. It was the feverish anxiety, the headlong haste, the insatiable passion for growing rich in a hurry, independently of the exertions of labor and the savings of economy, that brought them and other states where they are now standing shivering on the verge of bankruptcy.
In the United States the people are the sovereign, and all power either for good or evil emanates from them. If they allow their own passions, or the seductions of others, to lead them astray, it is but a weak evasion to cast the blame on those who were only enabled to perpetrate the offence by the power which they themselves delegated. Let them then set about retrieving the consequences of their adherence to mischievous maxims and habits, by returning to those which if firmly adopted and steadily pursued, will be speedily followed by returning prosperity. Let the contest be, not who is to blame for the evil, but who shall be foremost in proposing an effectual remedy and contributing all in his power to bring it about. In short, let them only save as much in the next, as they wasted in the last twenty years, instead of resorting for relief to the very measure which produced the disease, and place their affairs in the hands of clear-sighted honest men, instead of great financiers, whose only expedient for paying one debt is contracting another, and my life on it, they will redeem themselves in less time than it took to enthral them. But we who live in glass houses should never throw stones. Illinois has enough of the sisterhood to keep her in countenance.
| [1] | Charleroix, vol. ii. p. 102, 103. |
| [2] | Charleroix, vol. ii. p. 73. |