it will create the greatest inland trade ever witnessed. The most
fertile and extensive regions of America will avail themselves of
its facilities for a market. All their surplus productions, whether
of the soil, the forest, the mines, or the water, their fabrics of
art and their supplies of foreign commodities, will concentrate in
the city of New-York, for transportation abroad or consumption at
home. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, trade, navigation, and
the arts, will receive a correspondent encouragement. That city
will, in the course of time become the granary of the world, the
emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great
moneyed operations, and the concentrating point of vast, disposable,
and accumulating capitals, which will stimulate, enliven, extend,
and reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity, in all their
processes and exhibitions. And before the revolution of a century,
the whole island of Manhattan, covered with habitations and
replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city."
[Footnote: View of the Grand Canal (N. Y., 1825), 20.]

Sanguine as were Clinton's expectations, the event more than
justified his confidence. By 1825 the great canal system, reaching
by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, and by way of the
Mohawk and the lakes of central New York to Lake Erie, was opened
for traffic throughout its whole length. The decrease in
transportation charges brought prosperity and a tide of population
into western New York; villages sprang up along the whole line of
the canal; the water-power was utilized for manufactures; land
values in the western part of the state doubled and in many cases
quadrupled; farm produce more than doubled in value. Buffalo and
Rochester became cities. [Footnote: J. Winden, Influence of the Erie
Canal (MS. Thesis, University of Wisconsin); U. S. Census of 1900,