42 Benjamin Franklin [1760
intermixed territories and clashing interests of
princes.’
But when we consider that the inland parts of
America are penetrated by great navigable rivers,
and there are a number of great lakes, communicat-
ing with each other, with those rivers, and with the
sea, very small portages here and there excepted *;
that the sea-coasts (if one may be allowed the ex-
pression) of those lakes only amount at least to two
thousand seven hundred miles, exclusive of the
rivers running into them, many of which are navi-
gable to a great extent for boats and canoes, through
vast tracts of country;—how little likely is it that
the expense on the carriage of our goods into those
countries should prevent the use of them. If the
poor Indians in those remote parts are now able to
pay for the linen, woollen, and iron wares they are
at present furnished with by the French and English
traders, though Indians have nothing but what they
get by hunting, and the goods are loaded with all
the impositions fraud and knavery can contrive to
1 This was before the consolidation of Europe by the Bonapartes,
and when, as Sir C. Whitworth asserts in his State of Trade: ‘Each
state in Germany is jealous of its neighbours; and hence, rather than
facilitate the export or transmit of its neighbour’s products or manu-
factures, they have all recourse to strangers.”
2 From New York into Lake Ontario, the land-carriage of the several
portages altogether amounts to but about twenty-seven miles. From
Lake Ontario into Lake Erie, the land-carriage at Niagara is bub
about twelve miles. All the lakes above Niagara communicate by
navigable straits, so that no land-carriage is necessary to go out of one
into another. From Presqu’ Isle on Lake Erie there are but fifteen
miles land-carriage, and that a good wagon-road, to Beef River, a
branch of the Ohio, which brings you into a navigation of many thou-
sand miles inland, if you take together the Ohio, the Mississippi, and
all the great rivers and branches that run into them.—F.
