Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the completion of the Hoosac Tunnel, and the opening of another great route to the West, through, instead of over the mountains which lie between them and us. We trust that the obstructions which have existed, and still exist, in the channels of commercial intercourse between New England and the West will speedily be removed, never again to be manifested in freight blockades or threatened diversions of trade." The statements contained in these two articles are substantially true; and they are not only interesting, but important, as throwing much light upon a subject which will, doubtless, occupy much of the attention and time of the Legislature: for the Western Railroad managers have already opened their annual attack upon the Hoosac Tunnel, through their well known agents and tools, Bird, Harris and Seaver, who shamelessly advocate the entire abandonment by the State of an enterprise to the completion of which her word, and bond, and honor are irrevocably pledged. The Western Railroad Company was organized in January, 1836, and its road was completed in 1847, having received aid from the State, during the period of its construction, to the amount of five millions of dollars. The terms upon which State aid was granted were very liberal, as they should have been; for the opening of this line of road had become as much a necessity to the development of the commercial and industrial interests of Massachusetts and the wants of her whole population, as the establishment of schools and churches had ever been to her moral or educational welfare. The involvement of the State in so great an enterprise was strenuously resisted by timid and narrow minded legislators; but the representations of those sagacious and far seeing men who had devoted themselves to the work, prevailed, and Mas...