Our whale-fisheries in the Pacific may also require more protection than they have hitherto done; and if we ever hope to have it in our power to obtain live alpacas from Peru as a new stock in this country, and at a rate cheap enough for the farmer to purchase and naturalize them, it must be by the way of Panama, by which route guano manure may also be brought over to us at one half of the present charges.  We are now sending bonedust and other artificial composts to Jamaica and our other islands in the West Indies, in order to restore the soil, impoverished by successive sugar-cane crops, while the most valuable fertilizer, providentially provided on the other side of the isthmus, remains entirely neglected.

The establishment of a more direct intercourse with the Pacific, it will therefore readily be acknowledged, is an undertaking worthy of a great nation, and conformable to the spirit of the age in which we are living—­an undertaking which would do more honour to Great Britain, and ultimately prove more beneficial to our merchants, than any other that possibly could be devised.  Nor is it to be imagined that other nations are insensible to the advantages which they would derive from an opening of this kind.  The feelings and sentiments of the French upon this subject have already been briefly noticed.  The King of Holland has expressed himself favourable to the undertaking, nor are the Belgians behind hand in their good wishes for its accomplishment.  If possible, the North Americans have a larger and more immediate interest in its success than the commercial nations of Europe.  Ever since their acquisition of Louisiana, a general spirit of enterprise has directed a large portion of their population towards the head waters of the Mississippi and Missouri—­a spirit which impels a daring and thrifty race of men gradually to advance towards the north-west.  Captain Clark’s excursion in 1805, had for its object the discovery of a route to the Pacific by connecting the Missouri and Columbia rivers, a subject on which, even at that early period, he expressed himself thus:—­“I consider this track across the continent of immense advantage to the fur trade, as all the furs collected in nine-tenths of the most valuable fur country in America, may be conveyed to the mouth of the Columbia river, and thence shipped to the East Indies by the 15th of August in each year, and will, of course, reach Canton earlier than the furs which are annually exported from Montreal arrive in Great Britain.”

This extract will suffice to show the spirit of emulation by which the citizens of the Union were, even at so remote a period, actuated in reference to the north-west coast of America—­a spirit which has since manifested itself in a variety of ways, and in much stronger terms.  The distance overland is, however, too great, and the population too scanty, for this route to be rendered available for the general purposes of traffic, at least for many years to come.