land, is to be attributed the rapid emigration to, and settlement of, the west? Why, beyond all question, to the suc cessful application of steam-power to river navigation,that wonderful and magnificent development of mechanical science and art.

I have spoken of this invention as being an agent not only of civilization but of national union. The whole history of western settlement is illumined with the fact. This invention "annihilated time and space;" it brought the distant parts together; and it made the dwellers on the banks of the upper Ohio neighbors to the cotton and sugar growers on the Tennessee and the Mississippi. In effect, it changed the currents of the western rivers, and made them obedient to the will of man.

It was the one thing wanted; without it, the immense rivers of that region would never have been available as the highways of successful commerce. It was an invention peculiarly adapted to western navigation, and from it is to be dated the settlement and glory of our western world.

The dash of the paddle-wheel waked the enterprising spirit of our people, and the puff of the steam-pipe was heard in Europe. With it, arose the star of Western Empire, and men hailed with glory and delight its radiant brightness, and followed wherever it pointed the way.

The dwellers on our Atlantic seaboard, wearied with toiling upon a hard and ungenerous soil, sold off their farms, and, with their wives and children, scaled the rugged sides of the Alleghanies, and plunged into the wild forests of this new and glorious region, which the genius. of mechanical invention had laid open to the use of man.

They came from across the ocean, from England, and the "lowlands of Holland." The forest gave way before the axe of the settler, and let in the blessed sun to warm

the earth, and "to satisfy the desolate and waste ground, and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth;" to forever dispel the savage gloom and terrible solitude with which the land had been enshrouded since the birth of time.

The invention of the steamboat did more. It was not only a living, active agent, in western civilization, but it saved the settlers in those regions from being forever subject to a race of semi-barbarous boatmen.

The ever-ceaseless current of our western rivers, flowing onward to the ocean, rendered sailing vessels of no avail, and, until the introduction of steamboats, the rich products of those regions were floated to the seaboard on flat boats which drifted, like the ark of Noah, upon the face of the waters wherever the current might carry them.

Six months was considered a fair voyage from the falls of the Ohio to New Orleans and back again. The labor required was immense. On the return voyage, the boat had to be warped or polled up the whole distance,-fifteen hundred or two thousand miles,-against the current of two such mighty rivers as the Ohio and the Mississippi.

It was a dangerous and uncertain mode of navigation. The character of the employment engendered a spirit of wild recklessness and insubordination among those engaged in it. The boatmen were a peculiar race of men. Possessing some of the superior traits of character of the white race, they had likewise many of the characteristics of the red race. The desire for revenge, a love of unrestrained freedom, a contempt of law and civil authority, were leading traits of character. They lived in a world of their own, far removed from the humanizing influences of civilized society. It was a gorgeous and splendid world. They sailed amid islands and through a country clothed

with a richer verdure, than poet, in his wildest fancy, ever pictured. The winds that swept by them were laden with the odor of a hundred thousand flowering catalpas and magnolias, richer in perfume than the scented gales from "Araby the blest."

There was a wildness, a romance, in the boatman's life, well calculated to take captive the imagination of the western youth, and to lead him from those pursuits by which alone a new country can become prosperous and happy.

It requires but little effort of the imagination to understand the unfavorable influence which a race of men, like those I have described, must necessarily have exerted upon western settlement and civilization. Few of them had homes or settled habitations. By day, they floated lazily upon the surface of the mighty waters, and their nights were passed at some lone settlement, at a lagoon, amid wild revelry and dissipation.

These were the sole connecting links between the seaboard and the great interior heart of the west. They were the sole agents by which the commerce of that rich and inexhaustible region could find its way to the seaboard and a market. While this rude, dangerous, and slothful medium of intercommunication alone was available, the settlement and prosperity of the west would be of a like character.

But a new day dawned upon the world. A new era began. Those two poor mechanics, Watt and Fulton, arose. They carried, in their brains, an invention against which the waves of ocean, even when tempest-tost, could not prevail, and the spring currents of a thousand rivers were but as the weight of a child's hand.

From the introduction of steamboats upon the western

waters, the settlement and improvement of the country have been daily going on. Its population has doubled every ten years. Up to the year 1817, the period of the first introduction of steam upon the Mississippi, the whole commerce from New Orleans to the upper country was transported in about twenty barges, of an average of 100 tons each, and making but one trip a year. The number of flat boats on the Ohio was estimated at 160, carrying, say, 30 tons each. The total tonnage was estimated at between 6.000 and 7.000 tons.

The Mississippi River and its tributaries drain the great central valley of the North American continent, embracing twenty-one degrees of latitude and fifteen degrees of longitude, elven entre states, parts of two others, and two temacies. It amprises, within its limits, 1,200,000 square miles, ze `8 mins of acres, and nearly, if not quite, one half of the population of the United States, although, at the tue of the invention of the steamboat, the whole of 24 C C contained less than a million and a half

11 28. de number of steamboats on the Mississippi and us butaries was 230, measuring about 39,000 tons. 115, the number was 285, measuring 49,800 tons.

15, the number was 450, measuring 90,000 tons. 1848, the number was estimated at 672; tonnage,

Te number of steamboats now upon the western waters s about 1,800, with a tonnage of 260,000 tons, the net rsue of which is about $18,000,000.

In addition to this vast number of steamboats, there are also 4,500 keel or flat boats, which, in fact, owe their existmainly to the steamboats. They are built chiefly on the numerous small streams which flow into the great

rivers, and, in the spring and fall, are laden with the corn and pork raised in the vicinity. They are floated down to Natchez or New Orleans, where the produce is sold and the boat also. The men who navigated it return to their homes, in the upper country, by the first steamer that leaves the port.

It is estimated that each steamboat in the port averages twenty trips a year, and the annual cost of running the thirteen hundred boats, now in existence, exclusive of insurance, interest on cost, wear and tear, etc., is thirty-five millions of dollars.

It is not my intention to occupy your time, or weary your patience, with a repetition of statistics. The few which I have given are sufficient to show, in some degree at least, the magnificent results of this one great invention. These thirteen hundred steamers, which traverse the fifteen thousand miles of navigable western rivers and lakes, are so many living active intelligent agents of western enterprise and civilization. These agencies are, day by day, accumulating, and, like the population of the west, will double every ten years.

But it is not to the steamboat alone that western civilization owes its present prosperity. There are a thousand other agencies for which they are indebted to the genius and skill of the mechanic. The axe, the plough, the loom, are the products of our order. Indeed, every thing, from the delicate needle, in the soft fingers of a lady, to the anvil and hammer of the blacksmith, the world owes to the genius and labor of the mechanic.

It would be a pleasant, though laborious duty, to trace the connection which one article of manufacture, or one great discovery, bears to another, and thus to trace the progress of mankind, from the darkness of barbarism until