pluck that is
the chief secret of the great celebrity attained by the merchants of
the "fast anchored isle" for commercial enterprise.

On the other side will be marshaled the forces of the "Grand Trunk"
lines of railroad leading to the Western States from the Atlantic
seaboard. The most prominent on the list is the New York Central
Railroad, with her natural allies, the Great Western of Canada, the
Hudson River Railroad, and the Western Railroad of Massachusetts. Next
in order, as parties in the struggle, are the New York and Erie, the
Pennsylvania Central, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, not to
speak of the local roads in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, that will be
affected more or less in the contest for supremacy.

The Grand Trunk will fight under one banner, and that banner will
carry on its broad folds the commercial prestige of the British
Empire, and will have the sympathy of the British people. This, which
will probably carry with it, as a coincident, plenty of the "sinews of
war," will be decidedly a vantage ground to stand upon.

The American interests will come into the field under different
leaders, having no unity of action, and hating and fearing each other;
who have never had confidence in each others' words or actions; who
have never displayed any generosity toward each other; whose dealings
with each other have been marked by cheating and bad faith, as the
breaking of all convention treaties has proved. Under such a load of
demoralization, all of them combined are perhaps not more than a match
for the Grand Trunk. One of the American roads will have to stand in
the van and sustain the first onset, and the elected one will be the
NEW YORK CENTRAL. In every point of view it is the one best able to do
so. It is managed and controlled by men of large experience and iron
will--men who do not know what defeat is, and who, come what may,
will show that their metal has the true ring.

The result of such a contest none can foresee; albeit after the smoke
of the battle is cleared away, the wreck will only show that it has
been a costly and useless fight for the stockholders, and the
conviction that God's highways are superior to man's will gain
strength, insomuch as to assume far more practical importance than it
has hitherto attained. The only method of carrying on a successful
trade between the Western States and the seaports of Europe, is by
water, and to this conclusion all must come, in the end, on