The United States differ from Great Britain, and from most other countries, in their economic circumstances. They have developed their trade with a rapidity that is perhaps unexampled in the annals of commerce. They have found such a demand for their produce, alike at home and abroad, that they have not had time to take heed of cheeseparing economies. The question with the agriculturists and the manufacturers alike has been to secure the largest possible deliveries in the shortest possible space of time. They found a practically unlimited market for their agricultural produce in Europe, at prices which, while they were working on a virgin soil, paid them sufficiently well. Of that price, transport was no doubt an important element. When the railways were receiving 30 to 40 cents per bushel for transporting wheat from Chicago to New York, the sellers were receiving 40_s._ to 50_s._ per quarter in London. The railway transport was therefore only one-fourth to one-fifth of the entire ultimate cost of the product. If the ocean transport cost 15_s._ more, the total cost of transport only absorbed about one-half of the price paid by the consumer, so that 25_s._ was left to the grower, minus other charges, and at much less than this price wheat could be profitably grown in the West. The difference between 24½ cents by canal and lake and 42½ by railway was not then of paramount importance. On the other hand the exporter had the supreme advantage of quicker deliveries, the absence of equal risk of having the material spoiled by damp, the certainty of being able to meet his engagements “on the nail,” and entire independence of the weather, which freezes up the canal and river navigation during one-half of the year. For the same reasons that the grower and exporter of wheat was willing to pay 9_d._ more per bushel to the railway in 1868, he has been willing to pay gradually diminishing differences since, until he has now to pay the railway no more than 3½_d._ per bushel in excess of the canal rate for more than a thousand miles of transportation.
All this, however, can hardly be said to prove anything against canals, although it undoubtedly proves that in the special circumstances of the wheat trade, and of the Erie Canal, the American freighter of cereals gives a preference to railroad transportation. In the case of heavier traffic, the position would probably be reversed, and especially if the navigation were open all the year round, as would be likely in a temperate climate like that of England, instead of being liable, as in the case of the Erie Canal, to be frozen up for one-half of the year.