while the lead production of Missouri was 15,000, and that of Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin only 5500 tons.

The silver production of the United States was altogether insignificant until 1861, when the Comstock lode gave $2,000,000 of silver, since which time there has been a steady increase to $36,500,000 in 1873, giving a total production of $189,000,000. It is probable that for some years to come the supply of silver from the mines of the Cordilleras will be much greater than in the past. Already within the last four years the immense production of silver in this country has considerably reduced its price in the markets of the world, and the effect of recent discoveries can not fail to be a still farther depreciation of its value.

The history of the mining of our gold and silver would be imperfect without a notice of the quicksilver of California, as it is by its aid that nearly the whole of these precious metals, with the exception of the silver of the lead ores, is extracted. Quicksilver ore was discovered in California as early as 1849, and the mines opened soon after have not only continued to supply the wants of the immense gold and silver industry of the West, but since 1852 have furnished large quantities for exportation to Mexico, South America, China, and Australia. This amounted in 1865 to 44,000 flasks of seventy-six and a half pounds each, or 3,366,000 pounds of quicksilver. The increased demand for this metal for the treatment of our silver ores, and the diminished production of the mines, have since reduced considerably the exportation. In no other region of the globe, however, is the ore of quicksilver so widely distributed as in California, and there is reason to believe that from the opening and working of new deposits the production will soon be much increased—a result which will be stimulated by the present high price of quicksilver and its scarcity in foreign markets.

We have noticed the falling off in the yield of gold from California which began

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in 1853. It was not until 1860 that supplies of this metal from other districts appeared, rising from $1,000,000 in that year to $28,000,000 in 1866, since which time there has been a gradual falling off from these also, so that while for 1873 the gold of California equaled $19,000,000, that from other sources in the Western United States was $17,000,000, making a production of $36,000,000, that of the entire world being estimated at $100,000,000. Dr. R. W. Raymond, to whom we are indebted for these figures, gives the entire gold product of the country from 1847 to 1873 inclusive at $1,240,750,000; and if to that we add his calculation of the silver produced up to that date, equal to $189,000,000, we shall have $1,429,750,000. Adding to this the figures for 1874, which exceed a little those of 1873, we have a grand total of over $1,500,000,000 of gold and silver as the production of the territory between the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific since the opening of the mines of California in 1847.

There are many mineral resources in the United States besides those already mentioned which might justly claim a place in a sketch like the present. Among them are the ores of chrome, zinc, lead, and nickel, now extensively mined; the extensive salt deposits in New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia, which now supply to a great extent the markets of the country; the mineral phosphates of the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina, which are not only manufactured into fertilizers for domestic consumption, but largely exported to Great Britain; and the granites, marbles, sandstones, roofing slates, and other materials of construction, which are now the objects of large and profitable industries. We have, however, selected, in preference to any of these, coal, petroleum, iron, copper, silver, and gold, which, from their great pecuniary value and their direct connection with material progress, have been among the most important elements in our national growth and prosperity.

W

HOEVER desires to understand the commerce of this and other lands, and to perceive its true order and meaning, must first consider what words stand for-what commerce and manufactures really are in their simplest form. One to whom the word "manufactures" brings only the conception of vast factories for the working of cotton, wool, or iron has but the faintest idea of what constitute the true manufactures of the nation; and one to whom the word "commerce" brings up only the image of an ocean steam-ship laden with goods and wares from distant ports, or a train of cars drawn by a powerful engine bearing many tons of merchandise to faraway places, has an equally faint impression of the vast scope even of our inland traffic.

Commerce is an occupation in which men serve each other; it is an exchange in which both parties in the transaction gain something which they desire more than the thing they part with. It may sometimes be that the desire which is satisfied on the one part or the other is one that had better not be served: that is a question of morals with which we are not now dealing. Such exchanges are, however, the exception. The traffic in commodities that work permanent injury constitutes but an insignificant proportion of the vast exchanges of the world; true commerce in useful things lies at the very foundation of human welfare. Unless a good and wholesome subsistence is possible there can be neither spiritual, intellectual, nor æsthetic culture, and such a subsistence is only possible to the mass of men by means of an exchange of products. All commerce is the aggregate of small transactions. The milkman who brings the daily portion of milk to him who dwells in city or town represents a commerce of vast proportion, almost equal in this country, in its aggregate value, to the whole sum of our foreign importations. The value of dairy products consumed in the United States or exported in the form of cheese and butter is more

than four hundred million dollars. The milkman is the representative of one of the branches of commerce which has grown to this vast proportion during the century, and in which the people of the United States have shown the greatest originality. The cheese factory represents a manufacture born of thrift and enterprise only, and our exports of cheese exceed ninety million pounds a year.

How little the true function of commerce has been understood may be proved by the fact that only within the century has it been admitted among English-speaking people that there can be any mutual service in the matter. In this country even to this day this truth is but obscurely perceived, and hence the nation with which we have our largest transactions, our mother country, is often called our natural enemy by otherwise intelligent persons, because she tries to supply some of our needs at a low cost to us; yet had the true nature of commerce been comprehended a hundred years ago, war between us and England would have been as impossible then as it would now be infamous and absurd. It was a want of knowledge as to the true function of trade that caused the Revolution.

The year 1776 witnessed the publication of two documents of very great importance to the welfare of humanity, one of a purely public character-the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America; the other, the work of a single man, a poor Scotch professor, a treatise on the causes of the wealth of nations, by Adam Smith. It may be affirmed almost with certainty that had the book been printed fifty years earlier, the Declaration of Independence would never have been issued, because the wrongs which made it necessary would have been remedied without resort to war. Had the simple principle of mutuality of service been accepted, had it only become a part of the common knowledge of the English and the colonists that all commerce, whether among the people of the same state or between dif

ferent states and nations, only exists and can only be maintained because it is profitable and beneficial to both parties, no English ministry could have been supported in the measures which were undertaken to prevent the establishment of manufactures and to restrict the commerce of America. It was the enforcement of these measures through a long series of years that gradually sapped the allegiance of the people of America, and finally led to the violent resistance of acts of minor importance, which in themselves would have been insufficient to provoke rebellion. The colonists were ready to pay money, but resisted the perversion of the power of taxation.

Viewed from a commercial stand-point, the war of the Revolution, therefore, was a terrible blunder, caused by a series of erroneous theories as to the true nature and function of trade on the part of the English statesmen who had controlled the government of Great Britain during the previous century.

They were imbued with the false idea that in commerce what one nation gained another must lose, and their policy in dealing with their colonies was controlled by the same false assumption. Their great navigators had been many of them only buccaneers under another name, their merchants and ship-owners found no infamy in the slave-trade, and their conquests in the East had begun in motives of personal and selfish aggrandizement. Throughout their history it had become apparent only to a few obscure students or to one or two enlightened merchants that there could be greater gain in liberty than in restriction or slavery. How much of the true spirit of liberty our Puritan ancestors gained from the Dutch among whom they dwelt so many years might be a question well worth investigating. The policy of the rulers of England in regard to their own people was of the same character as toward us, and it may not be charged against them that they enforced upon us any more injurious or unjust measures than they inflicted upon themselves. To the student of political science no lesson is more clearly indicated by the acts of Great Britain during the eighteenth century than the extreme danger and unfitness of restricting the control of government

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and the right of suffrage to the possessors of property only. Through a long series of years England was governed by those whose claim to rule was based mainly upon the possession of property; during this period war was chronic, the profession of arms the one that gave the most influence and distinction, and the theory of government was the rule of the few for the alleged protection of the many, but the result was the privation of the many and the aggrandizement of the few.

The profession of the merchant and the tradesman was considered ignoble, and many of the great commercial and manufacturing cities were not represented in the government. Even the rude lesson imposed upon England by the success of the American colonies in achieving their independence was not at once comprehended, and for fifty years more she struggled with economic error, and under a false system of social philosophy sought to regulate and control the commerce of the world by restrictive statutes, carrying on gigantic wars, and burdening the English nation with the larger part of that enormous debt which even to this day retards its progress, and is one of the main causes of the poverty of so large a portion of the inhabitants of the British Isles. Not until 1824, or nearly fifty years after the publication of the Wealth of Nations, did its truths become so well understood as to cause even the beginning of reform; at that date, under the lead of Huskisson, began the series of changes which have relieved English commerce from the shackles of meddlesome legislation, but only within ten years has even her commerce been truly free and prosperous. In 1820 there were over two thousand acts on the statute-book of Great Britain unrepealed, which had been enacted at various dates for the regulation of commerce. It seems passing strange that England should have maintained her false theories in the face of such evidence as was presented in the history of the Dutch Republic. A century before Adam Smith's work was published the great merchant of London, Sir Josiah Child, gave his list of reasons why the Dutch were more prosperous than the English. His reasons sound strangely modern, and are even in advance of our thought. He gave them in the following order:

Firstly. "They," the Dutch, "have in their greatest councils of state trading merchants that have lived abroad in most parts of tho world, by whom laws and orders are contrived and peaces projected, to the great advantage of all men."

Have the United States yet learned this first rule of prosperity during our first century of life as a nation?

Secondly. "Their law of gavelkind, whereby all the children possess an equal share of their father's estate."

Thirdly. "Their exact making of all their native commodities, and packing of their herrings, cod-fish, and all other commodities."

Fourthly. "Their giving great encouragement and immunities to the inventors of new manufactures and the discoverers of new mysteries of trade, and to those that shall bring the commodities of other nations first in use and practice among them."

Fifthly. "Their contriving and building of great ships to sail with small charges." Sixthly. "Their parsimonious and thrifty living."

Seventhly. "The education of their children, as well daughters as sons; all which, be they of never so great quality or estate, they always take care to bring up with perfect good hands, and to have the full knowledge of arithmetic and merchants' accounts; and in regard the women are as knowing therein as the men, it doth encourage their husbands to hold on to their trades to their dying days, knowing the capacity of their wives to get in their estates or carry on their trades after their death."

Eighthly. "The lowness of their customs and the height of their excise, which last is certainly the most equal and indifferent tax in the world.”

Fourteenthly. "Their keeping of public registers of all lands and houses sold and mortgaged."

Lastly. "The lowness of interest on money with them."

The jealousy on the part of England of the prosperity of the Dutch had, prior to the date of the last publication by Sir Josiah Child in 1691, caused them to enact the navigation laws, and these laws had then already caused two wars, as the result of which the first funded debt of Great Britain took form. The same jealousy continued, and the same ignorance of the true theory of trade led to the enforcement of the navigation acts and the restrictions upon the trade of the American colonies. Resistance ensued, and the colonies became a nation. But the people of the mother country failed yet to see the error of their system, and again attempted to enforce the same bad laws against us, thus leading again to the last war with Great Britain. At last, slowly and surely, the English people learned the lesson that the malign effect of such restriction was as injurious to themselves as to the people whom these acts had made their enemies. One by one they were repealed, and with each repeal England went onward toward the end she had failed to compass before. In liberty she has supremacy over every sea.

We also have succeeded in what we aimed at; we have maintained our navigation laws; but our ships are few and scattered, our steam marine has mainly existed through subsidies, and our flag is unknown in harbors and cities where the flag of other nations daily comes and goes at the mast-head of a gallant ship or a noble steamer.

We have the lesson yet to learn. A hundred years hence, by which time it is to be

Tenthly. "Their use of banks, which are of so immense advantage."

Eleventhly. "Their toleration of different opinions in matters of religion."

Twelfthly. "Their law-merchant, by which all controversies between merchant and tradesman are decided in three or four days."

Thirteenthly. "Their law for the transference of bills of debt from one man to another."

intelligently grasped the simple theory of trade, it is not to be doubted that the declaration of principles by Adam Smith will be recognized as of supreme importance to the human race, while the Declaration of Independence will be looked upon even by the citizens of this country only as an important incident in the history of the Anglo-Saxon people, and the war which then ensued will be proved and acknowledged to have been caused mainly by a want of

knowledge of that economic science of which Adam Smith was the first great expounder. If the people of this nation could but now respond to the grand forecasting of that true and humane statesman W. E. Forster, who lately visited us, and form an AngloSaxon alliance for the liberty of commerce, for the repression of slavery, for the doing away of privateering or piracy upon the seas, the end of all war among civilized people would be at hand, and the grand vision of the prophet would be realized"They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks."

To him who shall among us succeed in making this vision a grand and living truth will come deserved fame as great as ever yet belonged to any one among us; but that good time has not yet come, and will not come until the simplest principles of political science are made a part of common education.

We do not undervalue the Declaration of Independence when we recognize the fact that the vast material progress in this country during the century now about ending has ensued from only a partial realization of the principles of liberty therein contained. Our fathers threw off the fetters of British domination, but continued the restrictions of English thought, and they thus hampered themselves and us from within with the very trammels they had resisted from without.

It was not until the framing of the Constitution in 1787, and the adoption of the provision that no State should enact any law restricting commerce between the States, that even a true union was established.

Never before that time had commerce upon a grand scale, and through vast regions differing widely in soil, climate, and condition, been freed from restriction. And because of this partial liberty has the material welfare of the people of this country been so well assured as to blind them to the evils of the system that has prevented an extension of our foreign commerce on an equally grand and profitable scale. Although the framers of the Constitution itself may not have fully comprehended the importance of this act, or the truly scientific basis on which they built, they did so organize and assure a system of absolute free trade be

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tween the States that even the corruption of slavery failed to break the union.

The Union exists to-day partly because the people of the West would not permit the traffic of the great Southern water-way of the continent to be under the control of a foreign nation, lest it should be obstructed by custom-houses. When they presently realize the other fact that it is as important to them to have the traffic of the great Northern water-way through Canada as free from obstruction as the Southern water-way now is, another onward step will be taken, and another barrier to our full prosperity will fall-not this time, however, by violent

means.

In treating the subject of our commercial progress during the past century, it is not worth while to waste time and space upon mere commercial statistics which any one may compile, but rather to note the changes in policy and method that have occurred, and to see how far we are behind the position we might have held had we not been in some measure blinded to our opportunity by the very ease with which we have achieved great though but partial success.

As was once said of the policy of Austria in its treatment of Hungary, the bad line of custom-houses with which we have surrounded ourselves has caused us "to be smothered in our own grease." Long anterior to the year 1776 the infant manufactures of America had come into existence, and had obtained such a vigorous growth as to cause the utmost jealousy in the mother country. In 1750 the production of iron and steel and the manufacture of steel tools and iron wares had become so well established in America as to induce hostile legislation, and England prohibited the erection of rolling-mills and steel furnaces, and attempted to stop the domestic commerce in and the export of their products. This was one of the many acts which culminated in the separation of the colonies from England. The records of the owners of the Cornwall Iron Mountain, in Pennsylvania, prove the working of the ores long anterior to the Revolution, and one of the carefully treasured documents now preserved in the office of the mine is the account current between the former owners and the commissary-general of the patriot army, wherein they are