The canal connecting the Mississippi with the Lakes runs through the town, and is here finished in a most admirable and substantial manner. It is identified with the River Des Planes, which has been circumscribed by a wall to prevent its overflowing. There are here two locks, and a basin, equal to any I have ever seen, and indeed, all the permanent stonework of this canal appears to have been done in the most substantial and perfect style. A canal completing a line of inland water communication to the extent of from three to four thousand miles, by a cut of scarcely more than a hundred, through a region which is almost an apparent level, and presents perhaps fewer natural obstructions than any other of the same extent to be found elsewhere, is not only a noble, but a feasible undertaking. Its advantages are too obvious to require enumeration; it is in fact, essentially a national work, and stands a monument of rational foresight, among a thousand visionary schemes of sanguine folly, or selfish fraud. It is already more than two-thirds completed, and I conceive that New York is almost as deeply interested in the final issue as Illinois. Leaving this fair and flourishing town, which still affords me many agreeable recollections of natural beauty and kind hospitality, I visited in my way to Chicago, the village of Lockport, which has grown up in anticipation of the completion of the canal. The descent of the River Des Planes is here sufficient to afford ample water-power for mills and manufactories, and this, in a country so level that the water half the time does not know which way to run, is quite enough to excite the sanguine adventurers to this promised land to a degree of delirium, and set them “kalkilating,” as Sam Slick has it, a hundred degrees beyond the ratio of geometrical progression. There is little reason to doubt that Lockport will become a considerable manufacturing town in process of time, after the canal is finished; but the far-sighted seekers into futurity would perhaps do well to bear in mind, that there must be people before there are cities; that these latter are the children, not the parents of the country, and that it is not good policy to wait so long for the grass to grow that two or three generations of steeds starve in the meantime. It is well to look a little to the present as well as the future, and not be for ever gazing at the shadowy mountain in the distance, least we fall into the ditch directly under our noses.