they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other quarters of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most profitable part of our carrying-trade with all countries.  This result is more easily explained than the inroads made on our more ordinary foreign traffic, in sailing vessels, by the mercantile marine of second- and third-rate powers.  This is eloquently told by the annual government returns and the daily shipping-list.  While our coastwise tonnage increases, that employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines.  The bearing of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative question for our merchants and legislators.  The United States is benevolently and gratuitously building up a marine for each of half a dozen European states which possess little or no commerce of their own, and multiplying the ships and sailors of our chief maritime rival.  We have long since ceased to import locomotives, and have, within the past two years, almost ceased to import railroad iron.  Our iron-workers obtain coal at nearly or quite as low prices as do those of Birkenhead or the Clyde.  They have recently sent to sea some large screw-steamers that perform well.  No insurmountable difficulty appears to prevent the launching of more until we have enough to serve at least our direct trade with Europe and China.  That determined, it may be possible to ascertain whether we cannot assist Norway, Belgium and Sicily in carrying our cotton, wheat and tobacco to the purchasers of it.

[Illustration:  Interior of A postal car.]

This decline in American tonnage is, it must be added, only relative, whether the comparison be made with other countries or with our own past.  The returns show a carrying capacity in our ships more than twentyfold that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of 1829, twenty-two years later.  This interest is peculiarly subject to fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than the one it is now undergoing.  Another decade may turn the tables, and restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less shapely supplanters.  The steamer and the clipper are both American inventions.  Why not their combination ours as well?  The centenary of Rumsey’s boat, not due till December 11, 1887, should not find its descendants lording the ocean under another flag.

The monthly Falmouth packet of a century ago, sufficient till within the past two generations for the mail communication of the two continents, has grown into six or eight steamships weekly, each capable of carrying a pair of the old sloops in her hold, and making the passage westwardly in a fifth and eastwardly in a third of the time.  Can it be but ninety years ago that the latest dates at New York (February 14, 1786) from London (December 7, 1785) brought as a leading item from Paris (November 20) the news that Philippe Egalite