Trade of New Orleans.
--The following is condensed from an article in the New Orleans
Times:
‘
We no longer find the article of tobacco noticed in our commercial reports.
The Price Current gives it a place in its columns, but states that the trade in it is confined to an occasional sale of a hogshead to city manufacturers, and that the entire stock on hand does not exceed 250 hogsheads. In fact, there is at present no tobacco market in New Orleans, which was formerly the chief mart for the weed on this continent, and, perhaps we may say, the chief mart of the world.
The trade is gone.
The munificent revenues it formerly afforded to our citizens have ceased.--of the channels of our commerce it was among the deepest and broadest it gave employment to domestic capital and enterprise.
It attracted capital from abroad.
It enriched the factor and broker.
It enhanced the value of
real estate.
It gave employment to hundreds, of not thousands, in hauling it, in warehousing it, in handling it. It was one of the chief bases of exchange.
It swelled the portfolios of our banks and bankers with their most valuable signatures.
It gave employment to the commercial marine.
Its fruitful traces were seen everywhere throughout the wide deltas of our commerce.
Our most palatial residences, with their artistic gardens and spacious grounds, were the abodes of its magnates.
If there were merchant princes in
London or New York, the wealthy representatives of the Venetian nobles of old, we had, too, our commercial aristocracy, our cotton lords and these tobacco peers.
But the latter have vanished.
They have, to use a cruel jest, gone of in smoke — the smoke, a last of battle and the ashes of universal ruin.
’
Whether this trade will ever be restored to us in a question which may not be so readily answered in the affirmative as many may suppose.
What is left of it, has been transferred to the
Northern emporium, and the wealth, grasping ambition, and the restless energy of the denizens of that powerful community will be lavishly expended and vehemently exerted for its permanent retention.
Wall street controls the financial world; money controls commerce.
Thus the trade of the entire country is subject to Northern capital, and, without even the pretense of disinterestedness, is governed with autocratic despotism for New York's aggrandizement.
Will this centralized commercial despotism ever allow so great a source of riches to be restored to its former channel?
The war has deepened and widened the cut off which has diverted the fertilizing current.
The Great West of the present day has become as tributary to New York, as dependent upon it for the sale of its products and the supply of its wants, as was Western New York, which was the Great West of
Clinton's era. Its farmers and manufacturers may murmur never so much at exorbitant tariffs and railroad arrogance.
If the one are diminished, it is from interest; if the other relents, it is from policy.
The father of waters may roll on its course to the gulf with the silence of its bordering solitudes unbroken by the sound of a hostile gun. As far as regards any export or import trade, it might as well be closed by hostile pieces.
The supplies vouchsafed to this city are actually insufficient for its consumption, and its people would be in want of actual necessaries, were it not for the receipts by sea. They who anticipated a free opening of trade from the opening of the river, have been sadly disappointed.
Of course this state of things cannot just.
The cheapness of river transportation must eventuality restore to us a portion of our former commerce.
But as long as the
Northern emporium comical the finances of the country, and the great lines of railroads and canals communicate with it, it is doubtful if we regain that tobacco trade which we found so incentive of aid. If cotton is no longer king, New York has his throne.
