s.
When a fictitious value is given to every thing, and every globule of
air which one has breathed comes puffing out, a splendid bubble, a
magnificent speculation, and when men have to go so fast that they
need a telegraph to ride them through the world lest they get behind
the heated times, no wonder that the shipper can not sit quietly down
in his office and wait thirty days for a load of corn to reach
England, or a load of iron to appear in the harbor in return. And it
does not matter to him that it may not be used there in six months. He
wishes to finish the "operation," to close up the "transaction" before
he goes up town in the evening.

There is a rational distinction between the necessary and the
unnecessary which we must learn to make, and a limit which safety
assigns to every operation. There are some things which must be done
rapidly, and others which may be done at leisure. Between the freight
cargo, and the correspondence which controls it there is a great
difference. Rapid transport of letters, intelligence, and passengers,
and leisure transport of freight, is the law of nature, and to attempt
to reverse it is but to attempt that which will never be successfully
done, simply because wholly unnecessary in any permanent economic
sense. And not only is higher speed than that of clippers unnecessary
in ordinary freight transport, but it is clearly impossible in any
normal condition of trade. Circumstances may, and doubtless often will
exist, which will require some sluggish article to be transported a
long distance in a short time, as in the case of the famine in
Ireland, and which may insure rates at which steam vessels can take
small quantities of such freights; but such occasions will ever be
accidental, and the support of vessels depending on them the
questionable support of expedients, and capricious in the extreme. It
will ever be just as impossible to hurry gross freights across the
ocean in a healthy state of commerce as it will to prevent rapid
mails, or forego the comforts of quick passenger transit.

To say nothing of a vessel which is half filled with its own power,
attempting to compete, in the ordinary freights of the world, with one
which fills every square foot with paying cargo, it is equally
important that we should look at the question of fuel. The coals of
the world are not so plentiful or so cheap that we should consume
whole pits in a year in unnecessary and unproductive service. They