provision of Providence; to do which it is necessary to calculate both sides of the rivers and the shores of the lakes, which, of course, must be of greater extent than double the length of the lakes:  nevertheless, if we estimate them at only double, we shall find that there are 40,120 miles washed by their navigable waters; and by the constitution of the Union these waters are declared to be “common property, for ever free, without any tax, duty, or impost whatever.”

The Americans are not free from the infirmities of human nature; and having got a “good thing” among them, in process of time it became a bone of contention, which it still remains:  the Whigs contending that the navigable waters having been declared by the constitution “for ever free,” are national waters, and as such, entitled to have all necessary improvements made at the expense of the Union; their opponents asserting, that rivers and harbours are not national, but local, and that their improvements should be exclusively committed to the respective States.  This latter opinion sounds strange indeed, when it is remembered that the Mississippi and its tributaries bathe the shores of some thirteen States, carrying on their bosoms produce annually valued at 55,000,000l. sterling, of which 500,000l. is utterly destroyed from the want of any sufficient steps to remove the dangers of navigation.[AX]

Mr. Ruggles has always been a bold and able advocate of the Whig doctrine of nationality; and, in a lecture delivered by him upon the subject, he states that during the recent struggle to pass the River and Harbour Bill through the Senate, Mr. Douglas, a popular democrat from Illinois, offered as a substitute an amendment giving the consent of Congress “to the levy of local tonnage dues, not only by each of the separate States, but even by the authorities of any city or town.”  One can hardly conceive any man of the most ordinary intellect deliberately proposing to inflict upon his country the curse of an unlimited legion of custom-houses, arresting commerce in every bend of the river and in every bay of the sea; yet such was the case, though happily the proposition was not carried.  How inferior does the narrow mind which made the above proposition in 1848 appear, when placed beside the prescient mind which in 1787 proposed and carried, “That navigable waters should be for ever free from any tax or impost whatever!”

One of the most extraordinary instances of routine folly which I ever read or heard of, and which, among so practical and unroutiney a people as the Americans, appears all but incredible, is the following:—­Congress having resisted the Harbour Improvement Bill, but acknowledged its duties as to certain lights and beacons, “Ordered, that a beacon should be placed on a rock in the harbour of New Haven.  The engineer reported, that the cost of removing the rock would be less than the cost of erecting the beacon; but the President was firm—­a great party doctrine was involved, and the rock remains to uphold the beacon—­a naked pole, with an empty barrel at its head—­a suitable type of the whole class of constitutional obstructions."[AY]