It will not, therefore, be without utility and interest, after the detailed notice which we have lately given of our own advances in the adaptation of steam to locomotion, to direct attention to the progress in the same department which has been simultaneously made in other and distant countries, and first, and above all, by our friends and countrymen in the other hemisphere.
The inland transport of the United States is distributed mainly between the rivers, the canals, and the railways, a comparatively small fraction of it being executed on common roads. Provided with a system of natural water communication on a scale of magnitude without any parallel in the world, it might have been expected that the "sparse" population of this recently settled country might have continued for a long period of time satisfied with such an apparatus of transport. It is, however, the character of man, but above all of the Anglo-Saxon man, never to rest satisfied with the gifts of nature, however munificent they be, until he has rendered them ten times more fruitful by the application of his skill and industry, and we find accordingly that the population of America has not only made the prodigious natural streams which intersect its vast territory over so many thousands of miles, literally swarm with steamboats, but they have, besides, constructed a system of canal navigation, which may boldly challenge comparison with any thing of the same kind existing in the oldest, wealthiest, and most civilized States of Europe.
It appears from the official statistics that, on the 1st of January, 1843, the extent of canals in actual operation amounted to 4,333 miles and that there were then in progress 2,359 miles, a considerable portion of which has since been completed, so that it is probable that the actual extent of artificial water communication now in use in the United States considerably exceeds 5,000 miles. The average cost of executing this prodigious system of artificial water communication was at the rate of 6,432_l._ per mile, so that 5,000 miles would have absorbed a capital of above 32,000,000_l._
This extent of canal transport, compared with the population, exhibits in a striking point of view the activity and enterprise which characterize the American people. In the United States there is a mile of canal navigation for every 5,000 inhabitants, while in England the proportion is 1 to every 9,000 inhabitants, and France 1 to every 13,000. The ratio, therefore, of this instrument of intercommunication in the United States is greater than in the United Kingdom, in proportion to the population, as 9 to 5, and greater than in France in the ratio of 13 to 5.