A few hours ride in a delightful morning, partly over rich cultivated prairie lands, brought me to Chicago, at the southern extremity of Lake Michigan. It is a fine town, and notwithstanding the blight of speculation which has swept the land from Dan to Beersheba, continues steadily on the increase. This is the best possible proof of innate constitutional vigor, and affords sufficient augury of its future growth and prosperity. To all these sanguine young cities and citizens, might I assume the universal privilege of giving advice, I would recommend the maxim of the wise Emperor Augustus, though I confess it is somewhat anti-republican to cite such an authority—_festina lente_—hasten slowly—be not in too great a hurry to grow big and to get rich, and do not crow before daylight, like ambitious young roosters, who aspire to be beforehand with the sun. After remaining three or four days at Chicago, and making several agreeable acquaintances, among which was an enterprising old gentleman of four score, who had come there, as he said, “_to seek his fortune_,” I bade farewell to the State of Illinois, bearing on my mind the impression that there was not in any country of the known world, a region of the same extent combining within itself a greater portion of the elements of substantial and enduring prosperity. At the same time, I could not help lamenting that blessed as it is in its soil, its climate, its geographical position, and its industrious population, it had been precipitated from the summit of hope to the lowest abyss of debt and depression, by turning its back on the advantages which nature had gratuitously bestowed, to snatch at others that Providence had withheld. Though the immediate source of these pressing difficulties of the state, is without doubt improvident legislation, yet let not the good people of Illinois lay all the blame on their law-makers and rulers. They were chosen by their own free voices, and in many cases, for the express purpose of carrying out those very projects which in their vast accumulation have created these embarrassments. It was the feverish anxiety, the headlong haste, the insatiable passion for growing rich in a hurry, independently of the exertions of labor and the savings of economy, that brought them and other states where they are now standing shivering on the verge of bankruptcy.