prairie, a meadow larger than the area of England and Wales, and as
fertile as the luxuriant vegetation of thousands of years decaying under
a semi-tropic sun could make it. Illinois is in round numbers 400 miles
from north to south, its greatest breadth being about 200 miles. The
Mississippi, running in vast curves along the entire length of its
western frontier for 700 miles, bears away to southern ports the rich
burden of wheat and Indian corn. The inland sea of Michigan carries on
its waters the wealth of the northern portion of the state to the
Atlantic seaboard. The Ohio, flowing south and west, unwaters the
south-eastern counties, while 5500 miles of completed railroad traverse
the interior of the state. This 5500 miles of iron road is a significant
fact--5500 miles of railway in the compass of a single western state!
More than all Hindostan can boast of, and nearly half the railway mileage
of the United Kingdom. Of this immense system of interior connexion
Chicago is the centre and heart. Other great centres of commerce have
striven to rival the City of the Skunk, but all have failed; and to-day,
thanks to the dauntless energy of the men of Chicago, the garden state of
the Union possesses this immense extent of railroad, ships its own
produce, north, east, and south, and boasts a population scarcely
inferior to that of many older states; and yet it is only fifty years ago
since William Cobbett laboured long and earnestly to prove that English
emigrants who pushed on into the "wilderness of the Illinois went
straight to misery and ruin."

Passing through Chicago, and going out by one of the lines running north
along the shore of Lake Michigan, I reached the city of Milwaukie late in
the evening. Now the city of Milwaukie stands above 100 miles north of
Chicago and is to the State of Wisconsin what its southern neighbour (100
miles in the States is nothing) is to Illinois. Being, also some 100
miles nearer to the entrance to Lake Michigan, and consequently nearer by