FOOTNOTES:
[A] New York Times.
[B] From the 3d to the 6th of March, last year, the thermometer at Rochester was several degrees below zero; at Troy, New York, on the 5th it stood at -14° (below zero); at Ogdensburg, New York, at -32° (below zero); at Watertown, New York, -34° (below zero)! These intense colds recur as late as April.
[C] The average of twenty years shows that the James River and Kanawha Canal was closed annually by ice only fifteen days; the longest period in any one year was fifty-six days.
[D] A single English order for Cumberland coal, to be shipped by a Baltimore dealer last December, was for three hundred thousand tons.
[E] New York Nation, December 19, 1872.
[F] Last year's grain-yield in the Mississippi Valley was one billion and thirty-six millions of bushels. In many parts of the West, for want of transportation, corn is now sold for as little as eighteen and twenty cents per bushel, and the husks are worth, for fuel, nearly as much as the grain. One of the great newspapers of the West, the Chicago Inter-Ocean (January 8th) in discussing editorially "The Reason Farming does not Pay" in that country, forcibly says: "A charge of thirty cents per bushel for the carriage of corn, when the freight should be only fifteen cents, absorbs one-half the value of the crop; and this process, repeated from year to year during the whole period of a decade, exhausts what would otherwise become the surplus of the farmer, and finally impoverishes the entire agricultural community."