Mackinaw presents one of the most remarkable geographical positions on the earth. Constantinople on the Bosphorus, the Straits of Gibraltar, Singapore on the Strait of Malacca, and the Isthmus of Panama, are the only ones which seem to present a parallel. The two former have been for ages renowned as the most important in the commercial world. Singapore has rapidly become the key and centre of Asiatic navigation, at which may be found the shipping and people of all commercial nations, and Panama is now the subject of negotiation among the most powerful nations with a view to the exceeding importance of its commercial position. Geographically, Mackinaw is not inferior to either. From the northwest to the southeast, midland of the North American continent, there stretches a vast chain of lakes and rivers dividing the continent nearly midway. This chain of Lakes and rivers is in the whole nearly three thousand miles long. At the Straits of Mackinaw the whole system of land and water centres. The three greatest lakes of this system, Superior, Huron, and Michigan, are spread around, pointing to the straits, while between them three vast peninsulas of land press down upon the waters until they are compressed into a river of four miles in width. On the north is the peninsula of Canada, on the south that of Michigan, and on the west that of the copper region, all of which are divided only by the narrow Straits of Mackinaw. Here are three inland seas of near eighty thousand square miles and about five thousand miles of coast. From coast to coast and isle to isle of this immense expanse of waters, navigation must be kept up, increasing with the ever-increasing population on their shores till tens of millions are congregated around. Of all this vast navigation and increasing commerce, Mackinaw is the natural centre around which it exists, and toward which it must tend by an inevitable law of necessity. Superior, Huron, and Michigan have no water outlet to each other but that which flows through the Straits of Mackinaw, and its geographical position is unrivaled in America. Whoever lives twenty years from this time will find Mackinaw a populous and wealthy city, the Queen of the Lakes.