selves, to be readily distinguished from the bona fide real estate agent. The town plot drawn out in front of the hotel, or in one of its parlors; the feverish muttering between the two or three projectors by whom it is hung up; the utter absorption of all other topics in this one-will serve, not imperfectly, to indicate those whom this passion has seized.

I pass from this class of speculators without stopping to notice those in whom fraud, as well as frenzy, is the motive power. It is enough for me to say that whatever may be the principle on which this kind of speculation is framed, the mechanism of Western town-building is that of a gigantic lottery. Nine out ten of the tickets draw only blanks. I can not illustrate this better than by the statement that there is no section of one hundred miles on the Missouri bank between Kansas City and Council Bluffs that has not now four times as many paper towns laid out on it as we can find on any equal section in the East. In most of these towns (though sometimes there is not a house finished in it) the nominal price of town lots ranges higher than in any similar portions of the towns of Trenton, of Burlington, of Bristol, of Rahway, of New-Brunswick. At White Cloud, for instance, in 1857, almost an imperceptible town near the northern line of Kansas, where then no government title had been obtained, lots for residences were placed at a higher rate than in that charming, and, at the same time, to the literary man most advantageously seated of all Massachusetts residences-the ancient city of Cambridge.

It is not pretended that any but a small fraction of these towns will rise to an importance sufficient to justify their present valuation. To sustain them, in fact, would require a population twice as dense as the densest portion of England. It would require a population of twenty millions to live in the towns, and a back population of a hundred millions on which the towns are to live themselves. It would cause, in fact, the Missouri River to be hedged in by two continuous cities, each five hundred miles long. Such a result as this the proprietors of no one "city" calculate upon. What they claim is, that their town is to be the favored one, and that it is by invest

ments with them that the great prize is to be drawn. The argument in each case is very much the same. "The M. and M. Railroad," or "The Great Pacific Railroad," or "The Davenport and Council Bluffs Railroad," or, "The Hannibal and St. Joseph's Railroad," or, "The Dubuque and Sioux City Railroad," or "The Keokuk and Des Moines Railroad," or "The Great California Central," "will certainly terminate at this point." "Such a site as we have, also!" "No crumbling bank," cries one city, "to be washed away before your foundations are finished." "No low bottom," retorts another, "to be submerged by the first freshet." "No unapproachable bluff," screams a third, “which will require all the horse-power of the territory to surmount, and all its wealth to level." Upon one thing all agree, and that is, that nine-tenths of the "cities" now laid out will be blanks. The only point on which they differ is as to which shall draw the prize.

Now to the two classes I have just mentioned-those employed on the rivers and the speculators-religion, if it be introduced at all, must be introduced by other than our present missionary instrumentalities. Preaching to such classes is like preaching to a railway car at a depot. All is hurry. Scarcely is a sentence finished before the train starts. If you wish to be heard, you must take the course the world takes. It sends its news-agents and its advertisement-venders into the cars, to hand a notice to one passenger, or to sell a book to another. The Church should do the same. I can not but think that no agency could be more effective than the dissemination of such tracts as Mr. Ryle's in the same way that the world's tracts are disseminated. Nor do I see that the expense would be great. The wages of the boys who form the world's colporteurs do not exceed two hundred dollars annually. They take passage on a particular train or steamboat, and distribute as they go. So also must we.

But the service, and the preaching! Now, as to the service. To a population such as that of whom I speak, our service is of no use as an arrestive police. When these fevered speculators; when these wild and undisciplined boat-hands; when these restless traders and trappers-themselves, like the

Zouaves, capable of becoming the most splendid auxiliaries— when such men are converted, then the service will be to them a solace and a pride. But as, with quick pulse and eager eye, they hurry to and fro in these great thoroughfares, how can this grand, but stationary engine arrest them? Can the clergyman reach them, if it be essential to the exercise of his office that his audiences should be first captured and brought to his church, and then, before he can speak to them in those quick, earnest words which are called for by their wants and his mission, that the morning or evening service should be read through? It is true that at each place where a congregation is to be collected, the services of the Church should be performed, and sermons delivered calculated to instruct the young and ignorant, to awaken the thoughtless, to reclaim the backslider. But after all, as things now are, this does not reach the evil. We all know well enough how to treat our congre gations when collected. The difficulty is how to collect them. How is the arrestive power of religion to be brought to bear upon this vast throng that hurries to and fro in the towns and thoroughfares of this great valley? There is an answer to this question; but, before considering it, let us see what other elements unite in forming the basis of examination.

We turn, then, to the class which forms the real material for the future prosperity of the Missouri and Mississippi Valleys. Let me stop for a moment, to notice the wonderful empire of prairie and of woodland which the former of these rivers drains. It is, indeed, an empire whose splendor can scarcely be over-estimated. Its soil is both varied and rich. It is watered on one side by numberless springs, on both by an abundance of rivulets and creeks. Its climate, if it be intense in both its heat and cold, finds the summer relieved by a perpetual breeze, and the pungency of the winter mitigated by a freedom from the dampness which in the East acts with such acuteness on the lungs and nerves. It has now, what are so rarely united, an unlimited supply and an unlimited demand. Elsewhere an excess of supply produces a deadness of demand, and an excess of demand a scarcity of supply. Here, by the influence of the wonderful stream of population, we have the

usual laws of trade reversed; and a glut of population appears periodically, to absorb the glut of produce.

The population of the prairies is sparse, energetic, and intelligent. Let it be recollected, in the first place, over how great a sweep of territory this population spreads. Nebraska contains 333,866 square miles; Kansas, 73,000. It is true that of the former territory one half is not arable; but after making this deduction we have an area remaining forty times the size of the State of Connecticut. On several accounts this great country is destined to take a leading position in the future. history of North-America. Its soil, like that of Illinois and Iowa, is eminently adapted to the cultivation of breadstuffs. For centuries the best kind of manure has been periodically worked into it through the burning of prairie grass. For centuries the tough canvass which the roots of this grass weave, has protected the rich alluvial soil below from the washing of rain, and the approach of a ranker and more exhausting vegetation. Nowhere do we find the materials for manufacture so abundant; nowhere the future demand for them likely to be so great. Here the layers of bituminous coal, as they crop out on the tilled bluff, strike the eye, even of the casual traveller, by their alternations with the rich brown mould. Here, particularly among the tributaries of the Kansas and the Yellow-stone, we find a water-power fully capable of working mills surpassing those of Lowell. Here, in close juxtaposition, lie iron and lime. And here is perhaps the most remarkable line of water-conveyance in the world. The Missouri, far less impeded by bars than the Mississippi, piercing, for navigable purposes, at least five hundred miles further inland, is propelled by a current which shoots freight down towards the gulf of Mexico at the rate of from five to ten miles an hour. Never was a greater producing country brought into closer proximity with a greater market.

But this is not all. Nebraska and Kansas will occupy a future position of great commercial importance, from the fact that within them lies the coast line of Central North-American agriculture. Arable land stops from about two hundred to three hundred miles west of the Missouri, and there the great

plains commence. I shall not touch upon the peculiar properties of these vast rainless, but by no means desert tracts. There the buffalo grass grows in rich luxuriance in summer, and is cured in the winter into an edible farinaceous hay, well calculated for the nourishment of the countless troops of buffaloes which find in these plains their last refuge. These elevated parks, therefore, will form the great nursery of the future, from which furs and pelts will be produced. A trade of leading importance will thus be thrown into the hands of the inhabitants of these Central American frontiers. And what is more to my present purpose, nomadic traders and trappers will be multiplied, whom only an itinerary can reach.

But we may go further in estimating the importance of the commercial destiny of the western valley of the Missouri. "To their west lie California and Oregon, great producing, and yet not capable of becoming great manufacturing countries; the former containing the finer, but not the coarser metals— together with breadstuffs abundant for her own support; the latter eminent for her wheat-growths, her fisheries, and her lumber. But in neither California nor Oregon is to be found the coal capable of working, nor the iron for framing those great machines by which the wool of a country can be turned into clothing, by which the hides of the millions of cattle that range the prairies can be used for the shoes and the furniture of the nations on either side, by which the buttons can be turned and the nails forged. On the other hand, on the eastern coast of the great desert-sea will lie Kansas and Nebraska, of all countries the best suited for the sites of vast manufactories. There run rivers whose descents and whose copiousness adapt them as well to turn the wheel as to irrigate the land; there, underneath a soil which can support a million of workmen, are spread layers of coal, which will form the fuel for tens of thousands of square miles; there is the iron which is to form both the engine and the staple, the arm that strikes, as well as the material that is struck; there, in fact, are the great furnishing warerooms, where the people of California will exchange their gold and quicksilver, and those of Oregon their fish and lumber, for the hardware, the clothes, and the