of this Brazil trade, as we were
doing for the ten years from 1840 to 1850.

"It will hardly be necessary to suggest to the wise and reflecting
merchant or statesman the evident causes producing this startling
effect. It is the effect of steamship mail and passenger facilities,
so well understood by the wise and forecasting British statesmen who
established the Southampton, Brazil, and La Plata lines; not as a
means of giving revenue to the General Post-Office, but of encouraging
foreign trade and stimulating British industry. If England by steam
has overtaken and neutralized our clippers and embarrassed our trade,
then we have only to employ the same agent, and, from geographical
advantages, we feel assured that we will soon surpass her as
certainly, and even more effectually, than she has us. She sweeps our
seas, and we offer her no resistance or competition. Not satisfied
with the Royal Mail lines, it is reported that she is making a
contract with Mr. Cunard to run another line along by the side of the
Royal Mail, from Liverpool to Aspinwall, and from Panama to the
East-Indies and China. She gains in these seas an invaluable trade,
because she employs the proper means for its attainment and promotion,
while we do not. Hence, although much farther off she is practically
much nearer. Suppose that Great Britain had no steamers to the great
sea at her threshold, the Mediterranean; and we had the enterprise to
run a great trunk-line to Gibraltar and Malta, and nine branches from
these termini to all the great points of commerce in Mediterranean
Europe, Asia, and Africa. Would we not soon command the trade of all
Southern Europe, of Western Asia, and of Africa? But we find her
wisely occupying her own territory, and that it is impossible for us
to get possession. If we had been there, she would soon have given us
competition. But Great Britain did not wait for competition to urge
her to her duty to her people. She could easily have continued the
trade already possessed; but she could enlarge and invigorate it by
steam, and she did it; not from outside pressure, but for the
advantages which it always presents _per se_. For the same reason we
should have established steam to the West-Indies, Brazil, the Spanish
Main, and La Plata long since; to foster a trade naturally ours, but
practically another's. It is preeminently necessary now when steam,
under the system of Great Britain, is ruining our trade; whereas, by a
similar