Thomas Rainey

“ The question is no longer whether certain individuals shall be saved from loss or enabled to make fortunes, but whether the American shall succumb to the British lines, and Great Britain be again permitted to monopolize ocean mail steam transportation, not only between Europe and America, but throughout the world. We are aspiring to the first place among the nations of the earth, in a commercial point of view—a place which belongs to us as a matter of right—and are we to suffer ourselves to be overcome by British commercial capitalists under the auspices of the British crown? ”

“ It is idle to suppose that any commercial nation on earth will not so arrange her foreign post as to exclude others than her own citizens as much as possible from its benefits. This is a paramount duty of the government to the citizen. It is therefore apparent that our commerce must of necessity greatly suffer when its conduct is at all dependent on foreigners and competitors, and that it is exceedingly desirable, for the avoidance of such a calamity, that we should have independent and ample foreign mail facilities of our own, wherever it is possible for our people to trade and obtain wealth. ”

“ We are at this very hour commercially enslaved by England, France, Brazil, and the East. How is it that the trade of the world is in the hands of Great Britain; that she absorbs most of every nation's raw material; and that she and France supply the world with ten thousand articles of industry, that should furnish work to our manufacturers, and freight to our ships? There are some who will say that it is because of her manufacturing system. ”

“ It will ever be just as impossible to hurry gross freights across the ocean in a healthy state of commerce as it will to prevent rapid mails, or forego the comforts of quick passenger transit.
To say nothing of a vessel which is half filled with its own power, attempting to compete, in the ordinary freights of the world, with one which fills every square foot with paying cargo, it is equally important that we should look at the question of fuel. The coals of the world are not so plentiful or so cheap that we should consume whole pits in a year in unnecessary and unproductive service. ”

“ Every civilized nation has adopted it as the best means of interior development, and as almost the only forerunner of commerce and communication with the outer world. It has thus become an indispensable necessity of every day life, whether by land or by sea, to the producer, the consumer, the merchant, the manufacturer, the artisan, the pleasure-seeker, the statesman, and the state itself, to public liberty, and to the peace of the world. ”

“ Our Pacific possessions have been shorn of half their glory and power by the refusal of those steam aids which would by the present time have converted half the commerce of the fields mentioned into the new channels of American enterprise and transport. The injustice has operated equally against the people of California and Oregon, and against ourselves of the East; while there is no good and valid reason for thus making the Pacific coast the ultima thule of civilized, steam enterprise. The people of the United States, of whatever class, are far from being misers. ”

“ When a fictitious value is given to every thing, and every globule of air which one has breathed comes puffing out, a splendid bubble, a magnificent speculation, and when men have to go so fast that they need a telegraph to ride them through the world lest they get behind the heated times, no wonder that the shipper can not sit quietly down in his office and wait thirty days for a load of corn to reach England, or a load of iron to appear in the harbor in return. ”

“ Our foe is a wary, well-scarred, and well-tried old warrior, who has the unequalled wisdom of experience, and the patient courage that has triumphed over many defeats. The field has been in his hands for ten generations, and he knows every byway, every marsh, every foot of defense, and the few inassailable points to be preserved and guarded. Great Britain, particularly, knows how essential is a large general commerce for opening a market for her manufactures. She is dependent on those manufactures, and upon the carrying trade of the world for a living ”

“ The few ships that we possess are among the fleetest and the most comfortable that traverse the ocean, and have excited the admiration of the world wherever they have been seen. But their number is so small, their service so limited, their field of operation so contracted, that our large commerce and travel are dependent, in most parts of the world, on British steam mail lines for correspondence and transport, or on the slow, irregular, and uncertain communications of sailing vessels. ”

“ We have laid no broad foundations for a system which should extend itself wherever our trade extended, and work equitably with all of the large interests of the American people. When, by a spasmodic effort, we opened communication in one direction, and found that we had a few steamers running, we became self-complacently satisfied with our action, shut our ears to all other equally urgent claims and appeals, forgot that we had simply commenced instead of having finished, and contented ourselves with the appearance of a mail system rather than its realization. ”

“ While the crowned heads of the Old World keep in constant pay vast armies and navies sustained by the heart's blood of the oppressed people, for the protection and preservation of their unhallowed power, it is the proud boast of our country that our soldiers are our citizens, and the sailors, who, in time of peace, spread the canvas of our commercial marine throughout the world, are the men who, in time of war, have heretofore directed, and will continue to direct, our cannon against our foes. ”

“ Indifference to the present posture of affairs only leads to the ruin of our interests. We must advance and contend with Great Britain and Europe step by step, and employ the means of which we are generally so boastful, or we will be forced to retreat from the field, and be harassed into ignominious submission."
As in the case of Brazil and La Plata so is it in that of the Pacific South-American States, and the great fields of Australia, China, and the East-Indies generally, as before noticed. The trade of Great Britain with those regions has gone on at a rate of progression truly astonishing. ”

“ Believing that no further arguments or facts are necessary to show that a rapid steam mail marine is desirable and essential to the successful government of the country, to our foreign commerce, and to the growth of individual interests and a general prosperity of the people, I shall now make some few inquiries concerning the Commercial Capabilities of steam, as the most effective agent for the rapid transit of the ocean, and the most expensive agent for the transport of goods. ”

“ We are to-day, and always must be, liable to a foreign war. We have a great boiling cauldron running over with excitement all along our southern and south-western borders. Central America, Cuba, the West-Indies, and South-America are far more foreign countries to us than Europe or the Mediterranean to England. Cuba will no doubt be at some day our most important naval station and possession. Even the defense of our own coast would require an immense transport service; for Texas is nearly four thousand miles from Maine, and California is seven thousand from the Atlantic seaboard. ”

“ Why shall we degrade ourselves by depending upon others for our mail facilities? It alway humbles and mortifies me to see one human being lick the hand of another; one who acknowledges himself a stupid drone that must needs have a master to direct and protect him. And so with our nation when she stoops to subserviency and begging, for even so much as the postal charities of other enterprising and commanding nations.
It has been suggested that the Government could secure the transit of the mails on the receipts, taking both ocean and inland postage ”

“ Her wise merchants and statesmen know that commerce can be accommodated only by rapid steam mails, which have regular and reliable periods for arrival and departure; and that, although these mails cost the Government and the people something more than those slow and uncertain communications which depend on sailing vessels and overland transit, yet they are enabled, by the facilities which they afford, to monopolize and control the commerce of the world, and divert it from even the most natural channels into the lap of British wealth. ”

“ We have pursued two system in this country, that of the lowest bidder, and that of Congressional contracts. Some have supposed that as the land mails are submitted to the lowest bidder, so those of the ocean ought to be also. But the cases are very unlike. The land service is a familiar thing, which every farmer understands, because running a wagon is one of the first things in life that he learns. Every body is familiar with the land service, and every body has more or less experimented in it, or in something very similar to it. But it is far otherwise with that of the ocean. ”

“ With a larger field of operations, at home and abroad, than any nation ever possessed before, with the pacific commercial policy of the age, and with the aids of science, the telegraph, and steam to urge it on, American Commerce has opened before it a glorious career and an imposing responsibility. ”

“ But if this is not sufficient, extend the inquiry to South-America, and China, and India, and see how enormous and useless a waste of money and interest is incurred in the many millions which by sailing vessels and slow steamers is fruitlessly gilding the ocean for months. Money is too valuable and interest too high to keep so many millions of it locked up from the world. At two and three per cent a month, the nation, or, what is the same thing, its commercial and mercantile classes, as representing the producing, would soon become bankrupt. ”

“ Between the freight cargo, and the correspondence which controls it there is a great difference. Rapid transport of letters, intelligence, and passengers, and leisure transport of freight, is the law of nature, and to attempt to reverse it is but to attempt that which will never be successfully done, simply because wholly unnecessary in any permanent economic sense. And not only is higher speed than that of clippers unnecessary in ordinary freight transport, but it is clearly impossible in any normal condition of trade. ”

“ The passenger traffic has increased with astonishing rapidity during the last eighteen years. Our smaller merchants can go abroad when mail steamers are plenty, and make their own purchases and sales, without paying heavy commissions and high prices to middlemen; do their business on less capital; and thus benefit themselves and reduce the prices to our consumers. Compared with sailing vessels, these few mail steamers become the forerunners of trade and commerce, and create an immense service for the sail. ”

“ He becomes disheartened; finds that the country neither appreciates nor desires honorable effort and enterprise; that it will not reward the citizen in his self-sacrificing attempts to benefit the country and himself together; and that it will look on with careless indifference while his almost vested, his equitably vested rights, are neglected or stricken down. This is certainly one of the practical and demoralizing effects of the lowest bidder system, which respects no rights, however sacred, simply because based upon a dogma which is technically true. ”

“ The existence of an agent of so great power and influence, is necessarily a fact of unusual significance to a nation like the United States, which combines within itself in a high degree, the three most important interests, of large Agricultural and Mineral Productions, extensive and increasing Manufactures, and an immense Foreign Commerce and Domestic Trade. Our country is essentially commercial in its tastes and tendencies; our people are, as a result of our common schools, bold, inquiring, and enterprising ”

“ The capacity of these great fields for development and expansion is indefinite and almost boundless. There is no doubt that an American trade could be developed in those regions within the next thirty years whose opulence and magnificence would rival and far surpass our entire commerce of the world at the present time, and give to our nation a riches and a power which would enable it to shape the destinies of the entire civilized world. ”

“ No one hears any complaint regarding the sum necessary to support the General Government, except by those in remote districts, who have but an infinitesimal interest involved, but an imaginary part of the sum to pay, and who, producing but little, and having nothing to do, assume the right to manage the affairs of those who really have something at stake. The American people are willing and anxious that their money shall be expended for their own benefit, for the benefit of those who are to come after them, and for the glory of our great country. ”

“ It excludes the honest workman, who knows the real value of the service to be performed, and is unwilling to undertake to do his duty well, at the expense of himself and family; while it lets in the needy and greedy speculator who, having nothing to lose in point of character or money, will readily undertake what he can not perform, and become dependent upon the magnanimity of Congress for remuneration for his losses, real or fictitious. An honest and fair liberality should characterize the dealings between the Government and individuals, just as much as those between private citizens ”

“ When the steamer runs with sufficient rapidity for the mails, the sailing ship has nothing to fear from competition, and has all the benefits of the more rapid correspondence. Thus, Government must pay only where there is a fast mail, whether it be in a side-wheel or propeller; otherwise it destroys individual competition and cripples private enterprise. ”

“ Now, it is a very extraordinary fact that, with such a field of commerce lying along the sunny side of our republic, and with such an array of facilities for converting it into European channels, our Government has done literally nothing to protect the rights of its citizens and give them the means, which they do not now possess, of a fair competition with other countries for this rich and remunerative trade. ”

“ Steam, from the days of its first application to lifting purposes, through all of its gradations of application to railway locomotion and steamboat and steamship propulsion down to the present time, has been a series of splendid and highly useful triumphs, alike creditable to the genius of its promoters, and profitable to the nations which have adopted it. ”

“ The steam marine of the United States, postal, mercantile, and naval, is to-day so insignificant in extent that we do not feel entirely certain that it is a sufficient nucleus for the growth of a respectable maritime power. ”

“ And a few more crises like the one through which we have just begun to pass, will open our eyes to the necessity of doing something ourselves to make money, and show that foreign trade in every form, and the sale of every species of product known to the industry of a skillful people, must be watched with jealous national and individual care, and nurtured as we would nurture a young and tender child. ”

“ When the almost unbounded capacity for trade of the basins of the La Plata and Amazon is taken into view, embracing as it does a great variety of useful products which may be advantageously exchanged for the manufactures and agricultural productions of our own country, the mind is at a loss what limit to assign to the trade to which civilization and the extension of commercial facilities must eventually give rise. Nor are the advantages of this great prospective commerce to be confined to the immediate intercourse between this country and the regions to which we refer. ”