“They have done more to develop the wealth and resources, to stimulate the industry, reward the labor, and promote the general comfort and prosperity of the country than any other, perhaps than all other mere physical causes combined. There is probably not a man, woman or child whose interest or comfort has not been in some degree subserved by them. They bring to our doors the productions of the earth. They enable us to anticipate and protract the seasons. They enable the inhabitants of each clime to enjoy the pleasures and luxuries of all. They scatter the productions of the press and of literature broadcast through the country with amazing rapidity. There is scarcely a want, wish, or aspiration of the human heart that they do not in some measure help to gratify. They promote the pleasures of social life and of friendship; they bring the skilled physician swiftly from a distance to attend the sick and the wounded, and enable the absent friend to be present at the bedside of the dying. They have more than realized the fabulous conception of the Eastern imagination, which pictured the genii as transporting inhabited palaces through the air. They take a train of inhabited palaces from the Atlantic coast, and with marvelous swiftness deposit it on the shores that are washed by the Pacific sea. In war they transport the armies and supplies of the government with the greatest celerity, and carry forward, as it were on the wings of the wind, relief and comfort to those who are stretched bleeding and wounded on the field of battle.” He has not read well the history of his country, has not learned the intricate web of the commercial system of to-day, has surely not studied the developments of the third age of American transportation, who can believe that there exists any longer any considerable difference between the most widely separated parts of America in matters of the gentler life. The publisher of a noble periodical controls an agency the influence of which is as valuable and as much desired in the West as in the East, and which is felt as quickly and as sensitively in the one region as the other. The art and literature of the time belong to the West as much as to the East, and in its due time the West will produce as well as consume in the matters of art and literature. There were Western artists, Western painters, Western sculptors on the plains before the buffalo were gone.