coal in the world for the distance it has to come to get a market. Great floats, of which dozens are hauled by a small tug or tow boat, go down the Ohio to its mouth, and pass on to New Orleans and are there so easily discharged that the lumber in them finds a market with the coal. Besides, the railroad projectors, without other inducement than their own sagacity, have concurred in running all their railroads to New Orleans, for the country at the mouth of the Mississippi is neither so healthy nor so strategical for trade as this old town which was founded by the French under the direction of their government when they picked slowly and carefully the sites of future trade and military empire. These same French located St. Louis, and it has not been found advisable by any succeeding generation to try a better situation. We may ask whether New Orleans has as great an antiquity as our own English cities? It is not as old as Philadelphia by almost thirty years, and is somewhat younger than Charleston, and is about fifteen years older than Savannah. Of course it does not compare in antiquity with the colonial cities of the northeast, such as New York, Albany, Boston, Montreal and Quebec. But it is nearly a century older than any of our important Anglo-Teuton cities of the West. It is more than half a century older than Cincinnati, and we may almost call it a century older than Chicago. St. Louis was its Albany, or upstream neighbor, and was under the same political domination. Mobile was the parent place the French established on the Gulf, and Governor Bienville made New Orleans his capital as late as 1723, or about nine years before the birth of General Washington.