These are the two things already mentioned.  But you cannot understand, friendly reader, what an effort it has cost me to treat them so briefly, The experienced critic will discern at a glance that the author could easily have made sixteen pages out of the material you have here in two.  The author takes his stand upon this,—­that there are few people who can beat out thought so thin, or say so little in such a great number of words.  But I remember how a very great prelate (who could compress all I have said into a page and a half) once comforted me by telling me that for the consumption of many minds it was desirable that thought should be very greatly diluted; that quantity as well as quality is needful in the dietetics both of the body and the mind.  With this soothing reflection I close the present essay.

AMERICAN NAVIGATION: 

ITS CHECKS, ITS PROGRESS, ITS DANGERS.—­THE BIRTH OF THE NAVY.—­THE EMBARGO.

In these palmy days of Commerce it is difficult to conceive the distress which attended the Embargo.  To form some idea of its effects at a period when the nation engrossed most of the carrying trade of the world, let us imagine a message from Washington announcing that Congress, after a few midnight-sessions, has suddenly resolved to withdraw our ships from the ocean, and to export nothing from New York, or any other seaport; that it requires the merchant to dismantle his ships and leave them to decay at the wharves; that it calls upon two hundred thousand masters and mariners, who now plough the main, to seek their bread ashore; that it forbids even the fisherman to launch his chebacco-boat or follow his gigantic prey upon the deep; that it subjects the whole coastwise trade to onerous bonds and the surveillance of custom-house officers; that it interdicts all exports by land to Canada, New Brunswick, or Mexico.

Imagine for a moment five million tons of shipping detained, thousands of seamen reduced to want, the trades of the ship-builder, joiner, rigger, and sail-maker stopped, the masses of produce now seeking the coast for shipment arrested on their way by the entire cessation of demand, the banker and insurer idle, the commissioners of bankruptcy, the sheriff, and the jailer busy.  Imagine the whole country, in the midst of a prosperous commerce, thus suddenly brought to a stand.  Imagine the navigation, the produce, and the merchandise of the nation thus suddenly embargoed by one great seizure, upon the plea that they might possibly be seized abroad, and some faint idea may be formed of the alarm, distress, and indignant feeling which pervaded the entire seaboard under the Embargo of 1807.  At the period in question the distressed seamen and ruined merchants had no railways, scarcely an ordinary road to the West.  Manufactures were almost unknown, the mechanic arts were undeveloped, and consequently the exclusion from the sea was felt with double force.