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Show (OUR GREAT MINERAL OUTPUT. The figures of the mineral output for the United States for last year aggregated only a trifle less than $2,000,000,000. Not very many men have any conception of what that means. The agricultural prod act of the country Secretary Wilson gives at about $8,000,000,-000, $8,000,000,-000, but that includes all the grass that all the domestic do-mestic animals in the United States ate. It includes a . thousand other articles that are necessary in 'carrying 'car-rying on the old world, but they do not represent money. The mineral product of the country, even the base metals as well as the precious metals, represents repre-sents something that can be instantly converted into gold, and the country that can give $2,000,000,000 every year in gold, and silver, and copper, and lead, and iron, and coal, and the other minerals, is something absolutely unparalleled in all the history of the world; something that the nations of the earth will 6tudy, and naturally the expression will be, ""What is the uset "What nation can compete with a nation like thatt" The most disappointing feature of all the business busi-ness of the country is that notwithstanding we have nearly as much railroad trackage as all the rest of the world, the "Western roads (by which we mean the roads west of the Mississippi are absolutely swamped with business, and according to the estimates esti-mates of one of the foremost railroad magnates in the country, Jim Hill, a billion dollars a year will be needed for the construction and double-tracking of railroads to keep up with the annual appreciation of business. Even railroads that were built on speculation specula-tion through the old Northwest, through Minnesota, Minne-sota, northern Iowa and the Dakotas. built by men who expected to make a little money in the building build-ing of them, and that the roads would not be paying pay-ing properties for years, are just as badly swamped with business as the others. The menace is so great that even the railroad magnates are advocating such work as the makinc of a ship canal out of the Erie canal, and advocating, too, such changes as will make the Mississippi river a mightier carrier of the world's commerce. One of the biggest studies that confronts the American people today is how the products of the great Mississippi valley are to he transported t market, and the knowledge of that fat brings hark the prophetic words of (Jilpin. who almost sixty years ago pointed out that, whereas the Eastern continent is an apex in the center down which the rivers ran through diverse mouths to the soa and the valleys of the rivers have always been peopled by warring tribes, our country in the main renter is saucer-shaped, with all streams converged into a common point, with the result that eventually the whole great central valley will be filled with a homogeneous homo-geneous people which will control the ("nited States, and indirectly be a mighty factor in the control of the world. |