rce. But the great mass of the
American people understand these questions, understand the reflex
influences of all such facilities, and knowing how essential they are
to the proper development of enterprise and industry in whatever
channel or field, boldly claim it as a right that easy postal
communication shall be afforded them as well upon the high seas as
upon the interior land routes.

It is generally admitted that the government of a country is
established for the benefit of the people; and constitutions
conflicting with this purpose are simply subversive of justice and
liberty. If labor is a thing so desirable and so noble in a people
that the protection of its rewards in the form of property becomes one
of the highest attributes of good government, then it is equally an
indisputable attribute of that protecting and fostering government to
afford those facilities to labor, which experience shows that it
needs, and which the people can not attain in their individual
capacity, or without the intervention of the government. It is idle
for a government to say to the people that they are free, when it
denies to them the ordinarily approved means of making and conserving
wealth. The common experience of mankind points to commerce as the
next great means to production in creating national and individual
wealth. It equally shows us that foreign commerce can not flourish
without liberal foreign mail facilities, and the means of ready
transit of persons, papers, and specie. It also clearly indicates
that the most successful means of accomplishing this, is the
employment of subsidized national mail steamships. It therefore
becomes obviously the duty of a paternal government to an industrious,
enterprising, producing, and trading people, to give them the rapid
ocean steam mails necessary to the profitable prosecution of their
industry.

We have for many years neglected many important fields of foreign
trade, and many profitable branches of industry and art, which we
could easily have nurtured into sources of income and wealth, by
adopting the foreign mail system, so wisely introduced and extended by
Great Britain. And in the absence of such efforts on our part, a large
and remunerative traffic has been swept from us, and this suicidal
neglect has been the means of our subordination to so many controlling
foreign influences. We are at this very hour commercially enslaved by
England, France, Brazil, and the East. How is it t