No. 199.] 336 



moral power, thus increased, will also yield greater protection to all 

 under the American flag ; and our own people will feel less inclined 

 to disregard a decree of one of our humblest courts, though reaching 

 Ihem in the farthest islands of the Pacific. Any of the crews of our 

 whalemen and sealers, if not of the " sea lions," fitted out by Cooper 

 and Deacon Huntington, must, by these causes, and increased care 

 and certainly in executing the laws, be made more and more sensible, 

 that he is as sure of redress for wrongs, or of punishment for crime, 

 on his return to New-Bedford or Stonington, as if a marshal was at 

 his elbow in Palmer's land, or a judge was holding his sittings in the 

 cabb of the whaler. Aided by all these ameliorating influences, this 

 invisible, but almost omnipotent power of the law, will, by commerce, 

 move on more steadily, and ere long will be felt in the darkness and 

 distance of remotest seas, almost as strongly as under our own eyes, 

 in the streets of this great metropolis. 



Beside the progress in foreign commerce, tending so much to im- 

 prove and make a brotherhood of all people, what vast advances can, 

 by proper attention to the subject, be made in the internal commerce 

 of a nation which possesses the immense territory of ours, with rivers 

 running through fifteen to twenty degrees of latitude, and with inland 

 seas, covered by steam and sails, to accommodate millions on and 

 near their borders ! 



See not only the steamboat, thus penetrating wherever navigable 

 water flows, but the rail-road car, disturbing the slumbers of our 

 mountain ravines, and carrying its shrill whistle through almost every 

 village, to increase the blessings of commerce among all who repose 

 under the banner of cur hallowed Union. 



I enter no debateable ground as to whose expense great internal 

 improvements should be made, under the restrictions belonging to our 

 political systems, nor whether much exists in such objections as I 

 once heard in the Senate, to removing a si>nd-bar at the mouth of the 

 Mississippi — the great Mediterranean Sea of some eight or ten sove- 

 reign states— -that " it had been placed there by God and Nature, 

 and hence should remain j" nor to what particular localities they 

 ought to be applied, except that they be those of national importance 



