3. The Raleigh and Gaston route was so decayed and impaired in its equipments that a whole day was consumed in the passage of a mail train over the eighty miles traversed. The Seaboard route to Portsmouth, Virginia, was prostrate and out of use. The Wilmington Road, though it was in somewhat better plight, was still served by feeble engines, which drew a few trains slowly along the track, ironed no more heavily than the wheels of a six- horse wagon. 4. The additional fact that no railway went further west than the village of Raleigh, also prevented the accumulation of such travel and traffic as to repay the outlay of construction and equipment. The Wilmington Road furnished the great route between the North and South, and in that way won richer returns than lines leading to the interior. 5. The long deferred hopes of Western North Carolina were at last to be realized. Ex-Governor Morehead and others besought the Legislature for the State's aid in a great line which should connect Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh and Goldsboro. This was to be called the "North Carolina Railroad," and was to be two hundred and forty miles long. 6. Eastern men, as a general thing, opposed this bill, but it was earnestly supported by William S. Ashe, of New Hanover, and others, in the House of Representatives; and, having passed that body, it was sent to the Senate. The vote in the upper House resulted in a tie. Calvin Graves, of Caswell, was Speaker. He had been a life-long Democrat, and knew that the people of his County were opposed to the State's aiding the proposed road, but he nobly discharged what he thought to be his duty, and, by his casting vote, the bill became a law. 7. This great step in building up the material prosperity of the Commonwealth did not satisfy the desires of this memorable Assembly. Measures that had been adopted at the previous session for the establishment of an institution for the education of the deaf, dumb and the blind children of the State were extended; and, at the earnest solicitation of Miss Dorothea Dix, of New York, a further appropriation was made for the erection of a hospital for the insane. 8. Miss Dix devoted her life to the amelioration of this unfortunate class of people. In North Carolina, as generally in the Republic, there had been no better disposition of lunatics than their confinement in the loathsome dungeons of county jails. Numbers who might have been restored to reason and usefulness were, in this way, condemned to the horrors of perpetual insanity. Instead of the comforts, kindness and restoration now to be found in the management of the Insane Asylums, the poor lunatic lay in chains in the murderer's cell and howled out his life amid the darkness and foetid exhalations of the hell to which he was doomed.