the average citizen felt amply supplied with the necessaries of life, and could not well ask for more. He plowed his little piece of cleared ground with a “bull-plow,” having a wooden mold-board and cast-iron share; harrowed in his wheat, rye, oats, and turnips with a wooden-toothed harrow; dropped his corn by hand, and covered it with the hoe. Every spring he made enough maple-sugar for home consumption, and to exchange for tea, coffee, and salt; and if he had a few spare bushels of grain, they were taken to some one of the many copper-stills scattered over the country. And to him there was no encouragement for the improvement in wealth of state by establishing a commerce or trade that would sap the foundations of its home industries. And he feared for the future prospects of the North-west should the existing prohibitory tariff be removed between the East and West by cheap transportation, believing it would destroy home manufactures, diminish the price of labor, and produce “_panics_ and _paupers_” beyond state ability and charity to maintain. The “flax-breaker’s” occupation would be gone; carding-machines, spinning-wheels, and looms, would no longer be manufactured or used, and the vast multitude of laborers carrying on these “infant industries” would be thrown out of employment and be “obliged to _steal_ or _starve_.” Even the young woman, who makes an honest living by spinning sixteen “cuts” daily, at fifty cents a week and boarded, would be thrown upon the cold embraces of the world, and thousands of other honest poor would be ruined for want of _protection_ against such an influx of “pauper labor and foreign manufacture.” And the man of _one idea_ considered the condition of “home industries,” under contemplated internal improvements, as discouraging, as a “prospective repeal of a protective tariff.” As early as 1807, Jesse Hawley conceived the idea of a canal from the Hudson river to Lake Erie--a distance of three hundred and fifty miles--believing it would be a profitable investment for the state and nation, that it would populate the North-west and establish important commercial relations with western states. But the newspapers pronounced Jesse “_a crank_,” and refused to make public his thoughts upon the subject. But this did not change the opinions of practical business men, whose talk of canals and intersecting canals did not meet with much favor among legislators, which, perhaps, represented the sentiments of their constituents. And it took nearly half as long as it did the people of New York to build the Erie canal, for those of Ohio to understand that a canal, commerce and free trade, would increase labor and enrich a state. And for the timely commencement of the great work the people of Ohio are much indebted to W. Steele, of Cincinnati, for his trial surveys and intelligent letters upon the subject at an early day, when few persons entertained the practicability of such an undertaking.