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Fulton determined to renew his experiment, on a large scale, on the waters of the United States. But no adequate

engines could be procured from any other quarter, than the establishment of Watt and Bolton. The vessel was not built, and the machinery in readiness, until the summer of 1807, when his steam boat commenced running on Hudson River, under Livingston's exclusive patent.

The Stevenses were but a few days later in moving a steam boat of their contrivance, with the requisite velocity. Being precluded from the waters of New York by the abovenamed patent, they conceived the bold idea of moving their boat round to the Delaware by sea. This was the first attempt to navigate the sea by steam power. The younger Stevens went on, steadily improving the models of his steam boats. The patent of Livingston and Fulton was set aside by an important legal decision, and Stevens put a boat in operation on the Hudson, which performed its trip with the astonishing velocity of thirteen and a half miles an hour! The three first boats, that ran on the Hudson, were called the Car of Neptune, Clermont, and Paragon.

It was five years afterwards, that steam boats began to be used on the waters of Great Britain. In 1816, the first steam boat crossed the British channel from Brighton to Havre. In 1815, a steam boat ran between New York and Providence; and in 1818, a steam ship plied between New York and New Orleans, touching on the way at Charleston, and Havana. In 1820, steam packets were established between Holyhead and Dublin. In 1825, the steam ship Enterprize made the immense passage between London and Calcutta! Steam boats were first introduced upon the waters of the Ohio and Mississippi in 1812. At present more than 200 run on these waters alone. The velocity, convenience and cheapness of this mode of conveyance by water have acquired an extent, which words are not needed to convey, as there are very few persons, who have not experienced them for themselves. As an instance of the degree of velocity, I cite the example of a steam boat,

that has made the trip from New Orleans to Louisville, estimated at 1450 miles, against the mighty current of the Mississippi and Ohio, in eight days and a few hours! Unhappily, either avarice, or rashness, or intoxication, or puerile and reckless ambition to make a quick trip, or the use of imperfect or worn out boilers, or all in conjunction, have produced many fatal explosions, by which hundreds of lives have been lost; and associations of terror, connected with travelling by steam have tended to diminish the number of passengers, and the sense of security in those, who still continue to travel in this way.

The imagination is lost in contemplating the simplicity and immensity of this blind and untiring power, which has been brought to produce results beyond even human intelligence and delicacy of touch. In one place a single engine draws water from a mine, with the power of 600 horses. In another place, it extends its long arms over an immense manufactory, giving motion to thousands of wheels. The whirl of picking, carding, spinning, weaving, weighing, and stamping cotton, is produced by a single wheel driven by steam. In another place, the steam-engine is seen in a brewery, pulling up the barley from wagons and grinding it, pumping cold water into some of the boilers, and despatching the boiling liquid into cooling pans from others, and performing most of the anomalous and indescribable labors of the establishment. In another direction, it is driving hundreds of vessels against the currents of the mightiest rivers, from the Mississippi to the Ganges, and the rivers and seas of China. In another direction, it is seen unharnessing the generous and docile steed, and sending him back to his pastures, and whirling carriages with many tons weight attached to them, far beyond the speed of carriages drawn by horses.

Who could have imagined that a power, locking up within itself such results as dismissing millions of hands from severe and heart-wearing toil, and of changing, by its numberless associated results, the whole face of society, could be raised

from that apparently simple and powerless element which flows from the hills, rolls in the streams, distils from the sky, and fills the ocean-bed; or that human invention would be able to evoke and direct this power from such an element ?

LECTURE L.

1

POLITICAL ECONOMY.

THE exact import of the much hackneyed modern term, Political Economy, may be best understood by tracing it to its primitive meaning. It is derived from Greek terms, which imply the domestic policy of communities. The latter part of the term signifies the law or regulation of the house. The same management which renders a household orderly, peaceable, thriving, and respectable, when enlarged and applied to the policy of a nation, causes it to become a respectable and flourishing nation.

Some families prosper and grow flourishing in their condition, apparently with as little management as the waters of a river require to move downwards. Others, wiser in their own estimation, labor and toil to no purpose. All their efforts seem to have no other result than misadventure, and a steady tendency towards decline. The most common mode of accounting for the difference, is to attribute it to the good or bad fortune of the two families. Destiny, or fortune, have in truth nothing to do with it. If the proper elements are rightly acted upon, the result of prosperity is sure. Bad fortune is generally bad management. The rules, of the right direction and fortunate issue of family management, are comprised in domestic economy. Political economy is no other than the same easy, quiet, simple prudence and knowledge of right management, applied to the The more numerous and extended household of a nation.

wisdom, good temper and firmness that conduce to the right management of a family, generalized and applied to the more extended relations of a nation, constitute political economy.

It has been the misfortune in popular and free-governments, and it has been eminently so in ours, that the public voice, in selecting the prime managers of the commonwealth, on a principle diametrically the reverse of this, has generally chosen men, to govern the national family, who were full of words and confidence in themselves, and who have founded their claims to public confidence on having made wreck of their private resources. Deprived of comfort and of means, and having proved their incompetence to manage their domestic concerns, they become subject to the yearnings of affection for the management of the public weal. Their having rendered the function assigned to them by God and nature a sinecure, their having proved their inability to manage small things of their own, seems to furnish them with claims upon a function of infinitely greater difficulty and combination, of the same kind. According to our political arithmetic, a man who has proved himself incompetent to steer a skiff, has, a fortiori, still more strongly proved his inability to manage a ship of the line. A man who has run his own private affairs to bankruptcy, in our view cannot reasonably urge any new claims, from that circumstance, to be entrusted with the financial concerns of a nation.

The danger of being flattered and beguiled by demagogues, the influence of the cunning over the weak, the power of controlling the majority by combinations of the corrupt and intriguing, such are the peculiar exposures of a country like ours, vast in extent, the citizens independent and self-willed, and yet, in their pride of opinion and freedom, generally ruled by a few plausible men, whose chief art consists in ruling without permitting their power to appear. But our object is not to discuss abstract principles of government, or to lament the evils that spring from the excess of freedom, but to lay down some of the more important doctrines and maxims of political economy.

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The external show of a country in splendid and populous cities, magnificent mansions, sumptuous theatrical exhibitions, great progress in the fine arts and general advancement in luxury, though commonly received as the imposing index of prosperity in a state, is a very deceptive criterion of it. Rome gave these evidences, beyond all countries that have figured in history, in the times of the monsters in the form of emperors, who were at once the cause and the effect of the approaching ruin of the empire. Greece gave them, as the last symptoms preceding her utter degradation. England and France exhibit them at the present day, and nothing but political regeneration can prevent the same results from following the same causes.

What then are the results of a wise political economy, and the evidences of a flourishing country? They are general competence, equality, comfortable subsistence, and contentment of the people. They are strong and wellformed men and women, with free and enlightened minds and vigorous wills. They are a flourishing agriculture, great numbers of good farm-houses, neat, not sumptuous edifices, excellent roads and canals, flourishing commerce and manufactures; the people simple-minded, strongly imbued with nationality, and, above all, frugal, industrious, and of good morals. Such was Rome, such were the Grecian States, such were the Swiss, in the healthful epochs of their national existence.

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The political disadvantages of a savage only a few men, spread over an immense surface, can find subsistence in it. It requires as much land to furnish game for one savage family, as would be adequate to support a thousand by tillage. In the savage condition, not only are advances in comfort and intelligence precluded, but the old, the feeble, and a great portion of the children, perish from exposure and hunger.

The next advance on the social scale, the pastoral condition, must have generated the necessity of property, and a body of municipal laws. The progress of civil society has been at once the cause and the effect of civilization.

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