seventy millions of inhabitants, producing a very large proportion of
all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life, and all enjoying
the freest of free trade with each other. Few of these States are as
small as Great Britain, and many of them are immensely larger.
Collectively they contain nearly half the railway mileage of the
globe, besides an incomparable series of inland waterways. Over all
these is continually passing an immense amount of goods. The San
Francisco _News Letter_, a well-known weekly journal, points out that
of the 1,400,000,000 tons of goods carried for 100 miles or upwards on
the railways of the world in 1895, no less than 800,000,000 were
carried in the United States. Even if we add the 140,000,000 carried
by sea-going ships, there remains a balance of 60,000,000 tons in
favor of the United States as against the rest of the world. It is,
perhaps, impossible to ascertain whether or not the actual value of
the goods carried would be in the same proportion; but it seems
probable that the value of the 800,000,000 tons of the home trade of
America must considerably exceed that of the _free_ portion of the
trade of the British Empire, _i.e._, practically the whole of its
import trade and that portion of its export trade carried on with
free-trade countries or colonies. The internal commerce of the United
States makes it the most wonderful market on the globe; and Brother
Jonathan, the rampant Protectionist, stands convicted as the greatest
Cobdenite of them all!

We are all, it is said, apt to "slip up" on our strongest points.
Perhaps this is why one of the leading writers of the American
democracy is able to assert that "there is no country in the world
where the separation of the classes is so absolute as ours," and to
quote a Russian revolutionist, who lived in exile all over Europe and
nowhere found such want of sympathy between the rich and poor as in