Cincinnati Has Long Been Known As A Great Town - Conspicuous Among All Towns For The Number Of Hogs Which Are There Killed, Salted, And Packed.

It is the great hog metropolis of the Western States; but Cincinnati has not grown with the rapidity of other towns.

It has now 170,000 inhabitants, but then it got an early start. St. Louis, which is west of it again near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi, has gone ahead of it. Cincinnati stands on the Ohio River, separated by a ferry from Kentucky, which is a slave State, Ohio itself is a free-soil State. When the time comes for arranging the line of division, if such time shall ever come, it will be very hard to say where Northern feeling ends and where Southern wishes commence. Newport and Covington, which are in Kentucky, are suburbs of Cincinnati; and yet in these places slavery is rife. The domestic servants are mostly slaves, though it is essential that those so kept should be known as slaves who will not run away. It is understood that a slave who escapes into Ohio will not be caught and given up by the intervention of the Ohio police; and from Covington or Newport any slave with ease can escape into Ohio. But when that division takes place, no river like the Ohio can form the boundary between the divided nations. Such rivers are the highways, round which in this country people have clustered themselves. A river here is not a natural barrier, but a connecting street. It would be as well to make a railway a division, or the center line of a city a national boundary. Kentucky and Ohio States are joined together by the Ohio River, with Cincinnati on one side and Louisville on the other; and I do not think that man's act can upset these ties of nature. But between Kentucky and Tennessee there is no such bond of union. There a mathematical line has been simply drawn, a continuation of that line which divides Virginia from North Carolina, to which two latter States Kentucky and Tennessee belonged when the thirteen original States first formed themselves into a Union. But that mathematical line has offered no peculiar advantages to population. No great towns cluster there, and no strong social interests would be dissevered should Kentucky throw in her lot with the North, and Tennessee with the South; but Kentucky owns a quarter of a million of slaves, and those slaves must either be emancipated or removed before such a junction can be firmly settled.

The great business of Cincinnati is hog killing now, as it used to be in the old days of which I have so often heard. It seems to be an established fact, that in this portion of the world the porcine genus are all hogs. One never hears of a pig. With us a trade in hogs and pigs is subject to some little contumely. There is a feeling, which has perhaps never been expressed in words, but which certainly exists, that these animals are not so honorable in their bearings as sheep and oxen.

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