"In considering this question we are not left to mere conjecture. The wonderful history of the Erie Canal, and a comparison of the circumstances connected with the operations of that great work with those under which this enterprise will be inaugurated and accompanied, furnish sufficient data for reliable conclusions." When we consider that the Erie Canal, though frozen up and useless for half the year, has not only long since paid for its construction out of its tolls, but makes a present of itself to the State, with _about thirty millions of dollars_ of net profit, and that it does more than five times the business of the great New York Central Railroad, transporting annually over five million tons of cargo (which exceeds the total foreign commerce of New York City), and yet is "choked" and gorged with freight, the close figuring of the engineers does not appear to be questionable. The immense saving in the cost of water-carriage as compared with that of railway-transportation is hardly conceived by the public mind. Many of the railroads carry produce at very low and reasonable rates, but they cannot afford to take it at much if any less than _three times the amount_ charged by the canals. It appears from the report of the New York State Engineer for 1868 that the average receipts per ton per mile on the New York Central Railroad and the Erie Railway was 2.92 cents and 2.42 cents respectively; while on the New York State canals it was 1 cent only, tolls included. But a trans-Alleghany canal would, after getting fully into operation, be able to transport produce more cheaply than the New York canals, which are frozen over about five months of the year, and during the very period when the great tide of Western freightage and the ingathered crops is pressing most heavily for an outlet to the East.[C] There are many products of the West and the Mississippi Valley that will not bear the cost of transportation to the Eastern cities, either by rail, Gulf or Lake route, because they would consume _in transitu_ for freight between sixty and seventy per cent. of their market value in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. These views have been ably and earnestly pressed time and again upon Congress by Eastern and Western statesmen, merchants and citizens of all classes, by the press of all parties, and by the boards of trade and commercial conventions. The surveys cover every foot of the proposed James River Canal extension to the Ohio Valley, which, by general consent, seems to be regarded as the most eligible because it is the most direct central route, and because the State of Virginia has most munificently offered to remand the half-completed work to the general government on the sole condition of its _nationalization_. If, as history has always testified, it be true that Mountains interposed Make enemies of nations, which had else, Like kindred drops, been mingled into one,