CHAPTER II - TRANSPORT AND MARKETS

Summary

“Science and Art urge on the useful toil;

New mould a climate, and create the soil.

On yielding Nature urge their new demands,

And ask not gifts, but tribute, at her hands.”

Barbauld.

Nature has done so much for the United States in this article of their economy, and has indicated so clearly what remained for human hands to do, that it is very comprehensible to the traveller why this new country so far transcends others of the same age in markets and means of transport. The ports of the United States are, singularly enough, scattered round the whole of their boundaries. Besides those on the seaboard, there are many in the interior; on the northern lakes, and on thousands of miles of deep rivers. No nook in the country is at a despairing distance from a market; and where the usual incentives to enterprise exist, the means of transport are sure to be provided, in the proportion in which they are wanted.

Even in the south, where, the element of wages being lost, and the will of the labourer being lost with them, there are no adequate means of executing even the best-conceived enterprises, more has been done than could have been expected under the circumstances. The mail roads are still extremely bad. I found, in travelling through the Carolinas and Georgia, that the drivers consider themselves entitled to get on by any means they can devise: that nobody helps and nobody hinders them.