the Amazon to be open
to the frontier of Brazil to the merchant ships of all nations. The
greatest living British authority on this subject, while asserting the
abstract right of the British claim, says:

It seems difficult to deny that Great Britain may ground her refusal
upon strict _law_, but it is equally difficult to deny, first, that in
so doing she exercises harshly an extreme and hard law; secondly, that
her conduct with respect to the navigation of the St. Lawrence is in
glaring and discreditable inconsistency with her conduct with respect
to the navigation of the Mississippi. On the ground that she possessed
a small domain in which the Mississippi took its rise, she insisted on
the right to navigate the entire volume of its waters. On the ground
that she possesses both banks of the St. Lawrence, where it disembogues
itself into the sea, she denies to the United States the right of
navigation, though about one-half of the waters of Lakes Ontario, Erie,
Huron, and Superior, and the whole of Lake Michigan, through which the
river flows, are the property of the United States.

The whole nation is interested in securing cheap transportation from
the agricultural States of the West to the Atlantic Seaboard. To the
citizens of those States it secures a greater return for their labor; to
the inhabitants of the seaboard it affords cheaper food; to the nation,
an increase in the annual surplus of wealth. It is hoped that the
Government of Great Britain will see the justice of abandoning the
narrow and inconsistent claim to which her Canadian Provinces have urged
her adherence.

Our depressed commerce is a subject to which I called your special
attention at the last session, and suggested that we will in the future
have to look more to the countries south of us, and to China and Japan,
for its revival. Our representatives to all these Governments have
exerted their influence to encourage trade between the United States and
the countries to which they are accredited. But the fact exists that the
carrying is done almost entirely in foreign bottoms, and while this
state of affairs exists we can not control our due share of the commerce
of the world; that between the Pacific States and China and Japan is
about all the carrying trade now conducted in American vessels. I would
recommend a liberal policy toward that line of American steamers--one
that will insure its success, and even increased use