The Metal Crop of the World [pp. 228-229]

228
THE METAL CROP OF THE WORLD.
Your road is a section of the great through route between New-York, Califor nia, and New-Orleans. Its completion is essential to the perfect performance of
the common service. Every road, city and community upon that great route is in terested.
Why not, then, call upon them to give you the moderate aid you need, in in dorsements and assurances to capitalists, machinists, and ironmasters?
Your road is a part of theirs. Every day that you delay to iron and stock it is a
positive loss of reveinue to them. Your line may be essential to take the merchan dise between New-York and New-Orleans, as against the coastwise trade. Sup pose a through express for merchandise passing between those points in five days,
without transhipment, would it not take the $25,000,000 of merchandise that now
risks the reefs of Florida and the delay of winds and currents 1 Suppose the
Tehuantepec connection completed, would not the forty-five millions of gold pre fer a time of sixteen days to twenty-six, and an insurapce of lI to the present rate
of 3 per cent.. Suppose your line becomes a section of the doublle-daily mail
route between New-York and New-Orleans, at a compensation of $300 a mile?
Would not all or any one t f these justify your associates in giving their guarantee
upon the small sum necessary to complete your improvement?
This is no new theory. Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, have
furnished, in great part. the means necessary to extend their lines into the West ern States. Why should not the roads and cities interested in and connected with
your own do likewise?
I know most of the men connected with your railroad system. They have given
the highest proof of practical capacity and resource; they have laid down a railroaj of one thousand miles, from Norfolk to the Mississippi; they have laid down
another, of little less length, from Charleston and Savannah to the same point;
they have filled the interior of the South with works of internal improvement,
which gratify and astonish all who view thetm. You have labored very faithfully
yourselves, and have a right to " call upon Hercules." Your call will not be unheeded. Very truly and respectfully. yours,
WM. M. BURWELL.
DEPARTMENT OF MINING AND MANUFACTURES.
THE METAL CROP OF THE WORLD.
AN examination of the crop of metals produced in the great harvest field of
our globe leads to some striking and interesting facts. Until the discovery of
the gold fields of Australia and California, the crop of precious metals throughout the world maintained as uniform a production as the cereal or other crops, and
even since these discoveries the rate of production. so suddenly and enormously
expanded, has subsided into regularity. The amount of glittering dust shipped
yearly from San Francisco, Melbourne, and Sydney is now as accurately estimated as cotton, wheat, tobacco, or any of the great staples.
Tile value of precious metals produced per annum in the United States as
compared with Europe is estimated, in round numbers, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, thus: United States, sixteen millions of pounds sterling; Great Britain,
twenty millions of pounds sterling; Russian Empire, five millions; Franee, only
three millions; the Austrian Empire, less than half a million; Prussia, a little
upwards of four millions; Belgium, nearly two millions; Spain, a million and
a half; Sweden and Norway, a million; Saxony, three hundred thousand; the
Hartz District rather more; and Italy considerablyless than half a million; and
Switzerland, only seventy-eight thousand pounds sterling. The annual average
of precious metals in Australia is put down at eight millions two hundred and
fourteen thousand and one hundred and sixty-seven pounds sterling; Mexico and
Chili foot up about nine millions sterling, and the rest of South America, exclusive of Chili, gives less than three and a half millions. According to this estimate, the grand total crop of precious metals produced annually in Europe and
America, including Australia, is nearly seventy-six millions of pounds sterling,
in exact numbers ~75,785,000.