A prince's statue, or in marble carved, Or steel, or gold, and shrined, to be preserved, Aloft on pillars and pyramides, Time into lowest ruins may depress; _But drawn with all his virtues in learned verse, Fame shall resound them on oblivion's hearse, Till graves gasp with their blasts, and dead men rise._" OUR PACIFIC RAILROADS. Two thirds of the United States lie west of the Mississippi River. This vast domain has already exercised a tremendous influence over our political destiny. The Territories were the immediate occasion of our civil war. During an entire generation they furnished the arena for the prelusive strife of that war. The Missouri Compromise was to us of the East a flag of truce. But neither nature nor the men who populated the Western Territories recognized this flag. The vexed question of party platforms and sectional debate, the right and the reason of slavery, solved itself in the West with a freedom and rough rapidity natural to the soil and its population. Climatic limitations and prohibitions went hand in hand with the inflow of an emigration mainly from the Northern States,--an emigration fostered by political emotions and fevered by political injustice. While the South was menacing and the North deprecating war, far removed from this tumult of words the conflict was going on, and was being decided. And it was because slavery was doomed in the great West, and therefore in the nation, that rebellion ensued. It is worthy of note that the same generation which witnessed the growth of the Calhoun school of politics in the South, and of the Free Soil and (afterward) the Republican party in the North, and which followed with intense interest the stages of the Territorial struggle, witnessed also the employment of steam and electricity as agents of human progress. These agents, these organs of velocity, abbreviating time and space, said, Let the West be East; and before the locomotive the West fled from Buffalo to Chicago, across the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the desert steppes beyond, and down the Pacific slope, until it stared the Orient into a self-contradiction. It was on the part of our government a sublime recognition of the power of steam, that, while it was struggling for existence, it gave its sanction to the Pacific Railroad enterprise. Curiously enough, it is through Kansas and Nebraska--the Epidaurus of our Peloponnesian war--that the two great rival Pacific Railroad routes are to run.