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The reading of your paper on 'Railway Communication,' has given me great pleasure: your remarks about American railways are very well in the main, but the speed of travel is misstated, as it ranges from forty to fifty miles an hour; unless it be an omnibus railway, like the Haarlem, where they stop for passengers every few hundred yards. The Hudson River Railway, which passes by our mill at Yonkers, almost frightens my brother out of his wits by its speed, and he takes the steam-boat now to avoid it. The trains go very fast, but it is a superb road, and very safe, as the servants of the company, with their flags and lanterns, line the road the whole distance. They have twenty trains a day. The Erie Railway is also finished from New York to Lake Erie; the traffic on this line is immense, freight often lying two weeks before it can be put through. Its income is over three and a half million dollars. We have only one class of passengers, except emigrant trains: the fare generally ranges from a cent and a quarter to two cents a mile—on some of the shorter roads, as high as three or four cents. All the carriages are lined with mahogany and silk plush. The locomotives on our long roads weigh from twenty to forty tons. The fact is, that anything said about our physical development on data collected at any one period, is quite likely to be false or absurd within a twelvemonth. Though in the midst of it, and not one of the excitable kind, I am often astonished at it myself. I have several times mentioned that you would hardly know New York, or find any of your old landmarks; and yet New York would be comparatively a mean city, if you took away what had been built within a year. Steam-ships shew another phase of it: three years ago, we hardly had the shadow of one; now—and I have looked into the matter very carefully—I would not, as a commercial speculation merely, exchange forty of the best of our steam-ships for any other forty in the world: of course I don't refer to war-steamers. Some of the California steam-ships are perfect pictures in model, and put the Collins' Line into the shade. By the way, did you ever notice their passenger-list?—from 300 to 600 at a trip; and one vessel last year took 1125 passengers, paying very nearly half her cost in a single trip. In the summer, they slept about the decks like ants in a hill. A good education, including a college one to those who have the proper capacity, is open to every poor child in this city, free of cost. The immense sums necessary to pay for all this, are voted by the people themselves out of their own pocket.—Private Letter from New York.

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