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us to ask in its behalf, securing to itself the benefit of the petition of successful but no part of the loss if any should be incurred without success.

Notwithstanding our exertions in this cause, there are persons in this community who (lamentable as it may be) affect to believe that the company are not sincere in their efforts to secure the complete success of this great measure-that their design is to have to themselves certain personal advantages and gratify their selfish or speculative views. They are sometimes charged with ambitions designs incompatible with the public interest, and at others, inconsistent as it may appear, they are represented as visionary schemes and projectors of chimerical measures. This is all affectation if it is not entitled to a harsher epithet; and the proof that it is so, is to be found in the whole course and procedure of the company tending to the advancement of the work. We wish the Legislature and the public to look at our acts, in preference to consulting the fertile imagination of our opponents, in proof of our designs; and we fearlessly submit to all who may be concerned the measures which have been pursued by the company as an earnest of their future course and policy. An opposition as unexpected as it is unprecedented has been invoked by certain spirits in the bosom of our own community who are, from local interest, or some less worthy feeling opposed to the canal, but fearing to express too openly this hostility, least public sentiment should take the alarm, they endeavor to conciliate the public feeling or rouse it into hostility by opening their shafts at the Canal Company. They denounce the company a visionary schemers or chimerical projectors but are careful at the same time not to denounce the canal itself as a visionary scheme or chimerical project. If the company are entitled to these epithets, why is not the offspring of their visionary [miseries?] entitled to the same; and so a converse of the canal itself is not a visionary scheme what evidence is there that its projectors are envious schemers-