fer when its conduct is at
all dependent on foreigners and competitors, and that it is
exceedingly desirable, for the avoidance of such a calamity, that we
should have independent and ample foreign mail facilities of our own,
wherever it is possible for our people to trade and obtain wealth.

It is clearly impossible that other nations should afford these
facilities, or that our people should have confidence in them if
attempted, or that they could be in any sense reliable in those many
cases of exigency, national disputes, war, and accident, which usually
afford us our best chances of speculation and profit. A dependence on
foreigners for this supply of information, which never reaches us
until it is emasculated of its virtues, is extremely hazardous. It
fails just at the point where it is most desirable. Foreign nations,
especially the commercial European nations, are constantly at war, and
are constantly interrupting their packet service. The late Crimean and
the present Indian wars are a good illustration. Our country, isolated
from the contending nations, and fortified against continual ruptures
by a policy of non-intervention, is peculiarly blessed with the
privilege and ability to regularly and unintermittingly conduct her
commerce and reap her profits, even more securely, while her rivals
are temporarily devoting their attention to war. Such being the fact,
it is wholly desirable and necessary to the end proposed that our
steam post should on all such occasions regularly come and go, even
amid the din of battle, and the conflict of our rivals, who for the
time are powerless to oppose our peaceful and legitimate commerce, and
are generally but too glad to avail its offerings.

There are many instances of the desirableness and the necessity of the
transmarine steam post on important lines of foreign communication
where we have a large trade, and yet no postal means of conducting it.
Our immense trade with Brazil and other portions of South-America,
which if properly fostered would increase with magic rapidity, sends
its news and its freight by the same vessel, or is compelled to use
the necessarily selfishly arranged, and circuitous, and non-connecting
lines of Great Britain. A letter destined for Brazil, four thousand
miles distant, must needs go by England, Portugal, the Coast of
Africa, Madeira, and the Cape de Verdes, a distance of eight thousand
miles, in a British packet. One destined for the Pacific Coast