UNITED STATES MAIL AND COMMERCIAL STEAM MARINE IN FULL: A MOST
UNFAVORABLE COMPARISON.

The agreeable and responsible duty of developing and regulating the
most important discovery of modern times, and the greatest material
force known to men, has been committed to the present generation. The
progress of Steam, from the days of its first application to lifting
purposes, through all of its gradations of application to railway
locomotion and steamboat and steamship propulsion down to the present
time, has been a series of splendid and highly useful triumphs, alike
creditable to the genius of its promoters, and profitable to the
nations which have adopted it. However great the progress of the
world, or the prosperity of commercial nations prior to its
introduction, it can not be doubted that it now constitutes the
largest, surest, and most easily available means of progress,
prosperity, and power known to civilized nations; or that the
development, wealth, and independence of any country will be in the
ratio of the application of steam to all of the ordinary purposes of
life. It has been canonized among the sacred elements of national
power, and commissioned as the great laborer of the age. Every
civilized nation has adopted it as the best means of interior
development, and as almost the only forerunner of commerce and
communication with the outer world. It has thus become an
indispensable necessity of every day life, whether by land or by sea,
to the producer, the consumer, the merchant, the manufacturer, the
artisan, the pleasure-seeker, the statesman, and the state itself, to
public liberty, and to the peace of the world.

The existence of an agent of so great power and influence, is
necessarily a fact of unusual significance to a nation like the United
States, which combines within itself in a high degree, the three most
important interests, of large Agricultural and Mineral Productions,
extensive and increasing Manufactures, and an immense Foreign Commerce
and Domestic Trade. Our country is essentially commercial in its
tastes and tendencies; our people are, as a result of our common
schools, bold, inquiring, and enterprising; and our constitution and
laws are well calculated to produce a nation of restless and vigorous
merchants, traders, and travellers. Foreign commerce is a necessity
of our large and redundant agricultural production. Our extended
sea-coast, and necessarily large coasting-trade between th