influences of all such facilities, and knowing how essential they are to the proper development of enterprise and industry in whatever channel or field, boldly claim it as a right that easy postal communication shall be afforded them as well upon the high seas as upon the interior land routes. It is generally admitted that the government of a country is established for the benefit of the people; and constitutions conflicting with this purpose are simply subversive of justice and liberty. If labor is a thing so desirable and so noble in a people that the protection of its rewards in the form of property becomes one of the highest attributes of good government, then it is equally an indisputable attribute of that protecting and fostering government to afford those facilities to labor, which experience shows that it needs, and which the people can not attain in their individual capacity, or without the intervention of the government. It is idle for a government to say to the people that they are free, when it denies to them the ordinarily approved means of making and conserving wealth. The common experience of mankind points to commerce as the next great means to production in creating national and individual wealth. It equally shows us that foreign commerce can not flourish without liberal foreign mail facilities, and the means of ready transit of persons, papers, and specie. It also clearly indicates that the most successful means of accomplishing this, is the employment of subsidized national mail steamships. It therefore becomes obviously the duty of a paternal government to an industrious, enterprising, producing, and trading people, to give them the rapid ocean steam mails necessary to the profitable prosecution of their industry.