Mr. Bird says lie never had any communication or correspondence with, and never received a dollar from, any person connected with the Western Railroad. That may be; but it is well known that Mr. D. L. Harris, president of the Connecticut River Railroad, has been for years the "_fidus Achates_" of Mr. Bird in "fighting the Tunnel," his colleague in the "Third House," his companion at the Hoosac Mountain, and the guide of his inexperienced feet in the wilderness of facts and speculations of civil engineering. It is not so well known, but nevertheless true, that Mr. Harris is made director and president of the Connecticut River Railroad by the influence and vote of Chester W. Chapin, president of the Western road. His zeal in the service of his benefactor has been manifested by an active hostility to the Tunnel, as persistent and unscrupulous as that of Mr. Bird; and, were it possible for that gentleman ever to act from other than disinterested motives, or a sense of public duty, his intimate relations with Mr. Harris might justify a suspicion that the "sinews of war" might be supplied through that channel. At all events, we may be permitted to say that, if these two men have organized and led the opposition to the Tunnel every winter for the last ten years, printed thousands and thousands of pamphlets, and spent a considerable part of each year in the lobby, and all this at their own cost, from a sense of public duty, then they have better deserved statues in front of the State House than Webster or Mann; and the Western Railroad management is even meaner than it has been generally considered. A corporation must indeed be without a soul, which can look upon such sublime virtue, and suffer it to pay its own expenses. But enough of Mr. Bird and his motives. The statements we have made in regard to the necessity of a new route are, in every particular fully confirmed by a memorial which has been recently addressed to our Legislature from the Albany Board of Trade, through a committee of seven of their number. The gentlemen comprising this board are not theorists, but practical, clear-headed and reliable business men, who have been compelled by the urgent demands of yearly increasing business, to appeal to the people of Massachusetts for aid and relief. From a table in their memorial, it appears, that, while the increase, during the last fifteen years, of miles of railroad in eleven other States through which Western products press to the seaboard, averaged 169 per cent, that of Massachusetts was only 26 per cent. But we proceed to quote from the memorial:--