silks and teas of China to Central and Western Europe. The very arguments of which the Californian merchants make use to show that the delicate goods of China need land transport, go to prove that shipping and unshipping in the Pacific, and a repetition in the Atlantic of each process, cannot be good for them. The political importance to America of the Pacific railroads does not admit of overstatement; but the Russian or English Pacific routes must, commercially speaking, win the day. For rare and costly Eastern goods, the English railway through Southern China, Upper India, the Persian coast, and the Euphrates is no longer now a dream. If Russian bureaucracy takes too long to move, trade will be diverted by the Gulf route; coarser goods and food will long continue to come by sea, but in no case can the City of San Francisco become a western outpost of Europe. The luster of the future of San Francisco is not dimmed by considerations such as these; as the port of entry for the trade of America, with all the East, its wealth must become enormous; and if, as is probable, Japan, New Zealand, and New South Wales become great manufacturing communities, San Francisco must needs in time take rank as a second, if not a greater, London. This, however, is the more distant future. With cheaper labor than the Pacific States and the British colonies possess, with a more settled government than Japan--Pennsylvania and Ohio, from the time that the Pacific railroad is completed, will take, and for years will keep, the China trade. As for the colonies, the voyage from San Francisco to Australia is almost as long and difficult as that from England, and there is every probability that Lancaster and Belgium will continue to supply the colonists with clothes and tools, until they themselves, possessed as they are of coal, become competent to make them. The merchants of San Francisco will be limited in the main to the trade with China and Japan. In this direction the future has no bounds: through California and the Sandwich Islands, through Japan, fast becoming American, and China, the coast of which is already British, our race seems marching westward to universal rule. The Russian empire itself, with all its passive strength, cannot stand against the English horde, ever pushing with burning energy toward the setting sun. Russia and England are said to be nearing each other upon the Indus; but long before they can meet there, they will be face to face upon the Amoor.