The lion's share of the carrying business of the State is in the hands of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, and with them are closely identified the hopes of the city of Portland. This company owns two of the steamers plying between Portland and San Francisco--the Oregon and the Columbia. With these two steamers, or with the George W. Elder as the predecessor of the Columbia, they carried from the 1st of July, 1879, to the 30th of June, 1880, 17,333 passengers, and 101,661 tons of freight. The gross receipts were $636,888; the net profits, $286,459. As we know from the published circular of Mr. Villard, the president, that the cost of the Columbia was $400,000, and the Oregon is a smaller and decidedly less expensive ship, the proportion of net earnings of the vessels in question to their total cost will be seen to be about enough to pay ten per cent. per annum on their cost, and to buy the vessels out and out in three years and a half. The fare from Portland to San Francisco, even while these earnings were being made, stood at twenty dollars the first-class passenger. News has just arrived that these fares are to be raised to thirty dollars a head. If the same rate of expense is maintained as during last year, the earnings at the higher figure now put on will be increased by about $100,000, and enough will be realized to pay for the fleet in about two years and a half. With twenty-five steamboats (stern-wheelers) navigating the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, and twelve barges and two scows (several of the boats being old, and laid up in ordinary much of the time, reducing thus materially the fleet in real service), the company earned $1,992,836 gross, and $1,101,766 net profit. If $50,000 is deducted for the earnings of the barges, it will be seen that the average net earnings of the twenty-five river-steamers are positively $44,070 each. The fleet could be replaced for less than the sum of the net profit of one year. Like Oliver, "asking for more," they are positively raising these freights also! [Sidenote: _RAILROAD ALONG THE COLUMBIA._] The railroad possessions of the company for the year in question consisted of but forty-eight miles, and of these the line from Walla Walla to Wallula on the upper Columbia, a distance of about thirty miles, was the longest; the other two being short strips of portage railroad round the Cascades or rapids on the Columbia. The passengers carried were 12,588; the tons of freight, 72,149; and the net profits, $269,004, or $5,604 a mile.