■*■" ESSAY. 



of India had flowed instead of going around Cape Good 

 Hope, were ruined. A limb is lopped off, the sap flows 

 elsewhere supplying new shoots.* The commerce of 

 Salem has been drawn off by Boston, while Massachu- 

 setts is to-day boring the Hoosac to keep New York 

 from sucking the life-blood of her own metropolis. If 

 the arteries of trade are cut off, and from these alone 

 the nation is supplied, it dies. If the sinews of a state 

 are its manufactures, and its markets are destroyed by 

 a ruinous competition, it no less withers. Material has 

 been brought two thousand miles and has been made 

 into cloth in Lowell, to be worn out by laborers in 

 Southern cotton-fields ; Missouri with her Iron Moun- 

 tain, has gone to the East for her iron ware; and the 

 West, with coal and iron inexhaustible, has from time 

 immemorial cut her grain-fields with Eastern sickles, 

 and now cuts them with Eastern reapers. The citizen 

 of New Orleans sweetens his coffee with sugar refined 

 in Boston or Portland ; while New England does not 

 raise wheat enough to sustain herself a month. We 

 clo not wish to enter into any politico-economical 

 discussion, except as to points bearing upon this subject; 

 but the regeneration of the South by free labor may 

 make it more self-dependent. The West may yet turn 

 her wondrous resources to account, and manufacture 

 much of what is, or has been bought of New England. 

 She only waits for skilled mechanics. We have not yet 

 felt what changes this war may bring upon us. Labor 

 has been turned from the requirements of peace, to the 



* The shape of a tree depends upon the flow of sap. Pinch the end of a 

 limb and we send the sap from the production of wood to the formation of 

 fruit spurs. We cut an incision in a vine, below the cluster, the descend- 

 ing sap turns aside and the cluster doubles in size, but the branch is par- 

 alyzed. 



