We have been put in possession of the advance sheets of several reports, to be made to the various State legislatures in 1969, on “The Absence of Legislative Corruption,” from which it is manifest, that nothing with money in it ever reaches the capitals of that day, and that the members are left to the tedious business of practical legislation, their spare time being amused with antiquarian researches into the capital chances for money-making between 1860 and 1870. It is also apparent from these coming reports that great amusement is to be afforded by a study of the severely virtuous styles of examinations, conducted by committees of our time, into alleged briberies of fellow-members; while the hotel bills of the cautious investigators are to be regarded as inimitable specimens of the gastronomic abundance of their predecessors in America. We also take for granted, that the railway system of the United States will be wonderfully simplified. We now make it a matter of boasting that since the beginning of our railways, in 1829, we have extended them until, in forty years, they have reached a length of 38,500 miles, or a circuit around the earth one and a half times; costing in their construction and equipment $1,700,000,000, or a sum equal to two thirds of the debt of the United States; employing 8,000 engines and 135,000 cars, or enough, if placed side by side, to reach from New York to Chicago, and carrying annually 145,000,000 of passengers, or a number more than four times the whole population, men, women, children, and John Smiths put together. We are jubilant over the completion, in four years, of the Pacific Railroad, 1,900 miles in length, forming a line from New York to San Francisco of 3,353 miles, straining across prairies, chasing off herds of buffalo, spitting Utah with a skewer, climbing the Sierras 8,000 feet high, and levelling the Rocky Mountains with iron maces. All these performances are, in the absence of anything better, and in our poor beginnings, not disdainful topics of conversation or newspaper comment. But in the near future we take it, that a single consolidation of all lines in the hands of one man,—whose name at present we mercifully withhold,—replacing our wooden depots with stone structures tastefully decorated with waving flags and live eagles, our tressel-work bridges with solid granite buttresses, spanned by iron girders,—the old ones being kept under glass cases for curious exhibition,—will so prolong, carry around, and multiply iron ways, that the entire population of the United States, excepting, perhaps, newspaper reporters and members of Congress, will be invited several times a year to take a pleasure trip, gratuituously, to every town having a thousand inhabitants, and be entertained six months on the suspended dividends, made palatable by watered stock. [Illustration: THE AMERICAN LAOCOÖN. (p. 547) ]