Edwardsville Spectator

THE CANAL.

We last week published the act to incorporate the "Illinois and Michigan Canal Company," and we must confess that we were greatly disappointed respecting the provision for the redemption of the stock by the state at a future period. Before reading the act, we had been led to suppose that the state could, at the end of fifty years, redeem the stock by refunding to the company the principal, with interest at six per cent. computed semi-annually; or, in other words, that the state should guarantee to the company an actual profit of six per cent upon the capital invested, for the privilege of redeeming it. But instead of this, it appears that the company has not only such guarantee, for sixty years from this time, but all the tolls to be collected, which of themselves, it is believed, would be sufficient to redeem the stock in twenty or thirty years.

That the state will never be able to redeem the stock, under the present charter, any one who will make a calculation, by geometrical progression, of the sum required for that purpose, will readily perceive.

A sum of money at compound interest of six per cent. per annum, computed yearly, will double in about eleven years. At the same rate, computed semi-annually, as this stock is to be, it will double in about ten years. And allowing the canal to cost 700,000, at the end of sixty years, when it becomes redeemable it will amount to forty-four millions eight hundred thousand dollars.