40 HOW TO GET A FARM, 



&quot;At $50 per ton, which is a full estimate, the whole pe 

 cuniary value of the 5,358,808 tons, embracing all our com 

 mercial fleets on the oceans, and the lakes, and the rivers, 

 numbering nearly thirty thousand vessels, would be but 

 $267,940,000 ; whereas the increase in the pecuniary value 

 of the States under consideration, in each year of the last 

 decade, was $281,000,000. Five years increase would pur 

 chase every commercial vessel in the Christian world. 



&quot; But the census discloses another very important feature, 

 in respect to these interior States, of far higher interest to 

 the statisticians, and especially to the statesmen of Europe, 

 than any which has yet been noticed, in their vast and rap 

 idly increasing capacity to supply food, both vegetable and 

 animal, cheaply and abundantly, to the increasing millions 

 of the Old World. In the last decade their cereal products 

 increased from 309,950,295 bushels, to 558,160,323 bush 

 els, considerably exceeding the whole cereal product of 

 England, and nearly if not quite equal to that of France. 

 In the same period the swine, who play a very important 

 part in consuming the large surplus of Indian corn, in 

 creased in number from 8,536,182 to 11,039,352, and the 

 cattle from 4,373,712, to 7,204,810. Thanks to steam and 

 the railway, the herds of cattle who feed on the meadows 

 of the Upper Mississippi are now carried in four days, 

 through eighteen degrees of longitude, to the slaughter 

 houses on the Atlantic. 



&quot; It is difficult to furnish any visible or adequate meas 

 ure for a mass of cereals so enormous as 558,000,000 of 

 bushels. About one-fifth of the whole descends the chain 

 of lakes, on which 1,300 vessels are constantly employed in 

 the season of navigation. About one-seventh of the whole 

 finds its way to the ocean through the Erie canal, which 

 has already been once enlarged for the purpose of passing 

 vessels of two hundred tons, and is now under survey by the 



