This commerce amounts at present to at least twelve hundred millions of dollars annually, and increases so rapidly that all estimates of its prospective value have hitherto fallen far short of the truth. It employs about two thousand vessels and twenty thousand sailors, besides four great lines of railroad. It sends to the seaboard one hundred million bushels of grain, two million hogs, and half a million of cattle, composing the principal part of the food of the Atlantic States, (it being well known that the wheat crop of New York would hardly feed her people for one third of the year, and that that of New England is sufficient for only about three weeks' consumption,) and affording a large surplus for exportation. In a memorial of the Hon. S. B. Ruggles of New York to President Lincoln, on the enlargement of the New York canals, he says,--"The cereal wealth yearly floated on these waters now exceeds one hundred million bushels. It is difficult to present a distinct idea of a quantity so enormous. Suffice it to say, that the portion of it (about two thirds) moving to market on the Erie and Oswego Canals requires a line of boats more than forty miles long to carry it." On the Lakes it requires a fleet of five thousand vessels carrying twenty thousand bushels each. If loaded in railroad-cars of the usual capacity, it would take two hundred and fifty thousand of them, or a train more than one thousand miles in length. The four great lines from the Lakes to the seaboard would each have to run four hundred cars a day for half the year to carry this grain to market. Speaking of the grain-trade, Mr. Ruggles says,--"Its existence is a new fact in the history of man. In quantity, it already much exceeds the whole export of cereals from the Russian Empire, the great compeer of the United States, whose total export of cereals was in 1857 but forty-nine million bushels, being less than half the amount carried in 1861 upon the American Lakes. It was the constant aim of ancient Rome, even in the zenith of its power, to provision the capital and the adjacent provinces from the outlying portions of the empire. The yearly crop contributed by Egypt was fifteen million bushels. Under the prudent administration of the Emperor Severus, a large store of corn was accumulated and kept on hand, sufficient to guard the empire from famine for seven years. The total amount thus provided was but one hundred and ninety million bushels. The product of 1860 in the five Lake States of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, was three hundred and fifty-four million bushels."