and the Uruguay to the merchant vessels of all nations.  In 1856 the Crimean War was closed by a treaty which provided for the free navigation of the Danube.  In 1858 Bolivia by treaty declared that it regarded the rivers Amazon and La Plata, in accordance with fixed principles of national law, as highways or channels opened by nature for the commerce of all nations.  In 1859 the Paraguay was made free by treaty, and in December, 1866, the Emperor of Brazil by imperial decree declared the Amazon to be open to the frontier of Brazil to the merchant ships of all nations.  The greatest living British authority on this subject, while asserting the abstract right of the British claim, says:  It seems difficult to deny that Great Britain may ground her refusal upon strict law, but it is equally difficult to deny, first, that in so doing she exercises harshly an extreme and hard law; secondly, that her conduct with respect to the navigation of the St. Lawrence is in glaring and discreditable inconsistency with her conduct with respect to the navigation of the Mississippi.  On the ground that she possessed a small domain in which the Mississippi took its rise, she insisted on the right to navigate the entire volume of its waters.  On the ground that she possesses both banks of the St. Lawrence, where it disembogues itself into the sea, she denies to the United States the right of navigation, though about one-half of the waters of Lakes Ontario.  Erie, Huron, and Superior, and the whole of Lake Michigan, through which the river flows, are the property of the United States.  The whole nation is interested in securing cheap transportation from the agricultural States of the West to the Atlantic Seaboard.  To the citizens of those States it secures a greater return for their labor; to the inhabitants of the seaboard it affords cheaper food; to the nation, an increase in the annual surplus of wealth.  It is hoped that the Government of Great Britain will see the justice of abandoning the narrow and inconsistent claim to which her Canadian Provinces have urged her adherence.

Our depressed commerce is a subject to which I called your special attention at the last session, and suggested that we will in the future have to look more to the countries south of us, and to China and Japan, for its revival.  Our representatives to all these Governments have exerted their influence to encourage trade between the United States and the countries to which they are accredited.  But the fact exists that the carrying is done almost entirely in foreign bottoms, and while this state of affairs exists we can not control our due share of the commerce of the world; that between the Pacific States and China and Japan is about all the carrying trade now conducted in American vessels.  I would recommend a liberal policy toward that line of American steamers—­one that will insure its success, and even increased usefulness.