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|231| THE DESTINY OF THE COUNTRY.

Notwithstanding the proverbial pride of Americans, few have yet attained any due sense of the magnificence of their country and the splendor of their national destiny. Indeed, the ridiculous vanity with which foreign tourists justly charge us, gathering their testimony from Fourth of July orations, or from patriotic resolutions passed at public meetings, is ascribable to the absence of that noble pride which a more intelligent and considerate acquaintance with our position among the nations of the earth would inspire. There is more to sober than to intoxicate, to awe than to addle, in a true estimate of ourselves and our country. Our vanity springs from the contemplation of what we have done, or what we are, and is often based upon comparisons which nothing but our own ignorance renders possible or flattering. We glory in the wars we have waged with the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, and confound the victory which a broad ocean, separating us from our foe, and a territory unconquerable chiefly in its extent, gave us, with our own valor and general superiority. The rapid growth of our population seems to us a merit of our own. Every providential advantage in our position we appropriate as the result of our own intentions and labors. We attribute our institutions wholly to the sagacity of our Fathers, and the maintenance of them to the wisdom of their Sons. Our national importance seems to us to have been wrought out by our own right arms. And there is a very amusing feeling throughout the nation, that Americans are a different order of beings from others ; that one American soldier is at least equal to four Mexicans, three French or two Englishmen ; a vanity which, in common with other and worse weaknesses, has involved us in the present war, and lately came near plunging us into a war with Great Britain. Ours is the only nation that resents criticism of its literature, politics or manners as a crime. The West found an ample occasion of an English war in the witticisms and caricatures of Captain Hall and Mrs. Trollope. Charles Dickens’ Notes on America excited as much national indignation as a cabinet insult. | The entente cordiale between us and the mother country is as much endangered by Punch’s squibs against Repudiation, as by claims to the exclusive navigation of the St. Johns or the Columbia. This absurd sensitiveness betrays the awkwardness and conceit of the nouveau-riche, the jealousy of the man who is not quite certain he has ceased to be a boy, the eager desire for recognition of one not quite sure of his social standing, and the disposition which the bully, who suspects his own courage, has to pick a quarrel with every coward. If we understood better our real claims to the respect and confidence of the world ; if we appreciated the greatness, not which we have achieved, but which has been thrust upon us by Destiny ; if we valued ourselves upon our real advantage and upon a greatness not dependent upon contrast or admitting comparison, but of a totally different kind from any the world has yet seen, we should cease to be vain and become self-respectful. We should take our eyes off from ourselves and direct them towards Heaven. We should humbly acknowledge how little we have done for ourselves and how much Providence has done for us, and instead of glorying in the past should bestow our admiration on the wondrous future that Heaven is opening before us. But as yet, whether because we are too actively employed as the instruments of Providence to stand back and behold the work in which we are engaged, or because standing too nigh to take in the proportions of the structure on some part of which we are each laboring, it is unquestionably true that at this very moment there is a higher and juster appreciation and estimate of America abroad than at home. We have received a deeper and nobler criticism from foreigners than from our own philosophers and politicians. De Tocqueville has written of us in a higher strain, and with a bolder and grander prophecy than any even of our own poets or patriots. Few of our own countrymen who have not been abroad, have as yet taken a comprehensive view of our circumstances, or have “risen to the height of that great argument” which conducts our people to their sublime destiny. It |232| is rare for any American to look back upon his native shores from the cliffs of Albion or the peaks of the Alps, without perceiving that he has left behind him the land of promise ; that he has been ignorantly dwelling in the most favored region on God’s earth, among institutions compared with which any others are intolerable, and where alone the hopes of humanity have an unclouded horizon, or the progress of the race an open field.

There is no nation on the face of the earth or in the records of history, if we except the Jews, whose origin, circumstances and progress have been so purely providential as ours ; none which owes so little to itself and so much to the Ruler of its destiny. It is impossible not to trace in its brief but wonderful career the unfolding of a plan too vast, and requiring too much antecedent calculation and extraordinary concurrence of events, to be ascribed to any other than infinite wisdom. The concealment of this whole continent in the mysterious remoteness of the ocean during so many centuries, while our race were trying the many necessary experiments of civilization in the old world ; its discovery at the precise period when the social and political theories and policies of Europe had evidently exhausted themselves, and when other and most potent instruments of civilization destined to revolutionize the whole order of society—the mariner’s compass and the printing press—were just coming into use ; the peculiar complexion of events in England which decided the character and views of the colonists who shaped the political destinies of this country ; all indicate a consummate and glorious plan involving the interest not of a nation, but of the race. And this is the peculiarity of our existence ; that unlike any other, the people are not one nation among the other nations of the earth, but a people made up of all nations, the heirs of the united blood and experience of all, equally regarded by all as their own child, to whom the hopes of the race are intrusted, and who is sent to seek and to push the fortunes of the family in a new and fresh field of enterprise. “The new world” is a phrase which from familiarity has lost its emphasis. But it contains in it an idea of the most pregnant and momentous character. “The new world,” was to the nations of decrepit, exhausted Europe—its soil full of the roots of social and political prejudices fatal to the | culture of human rights—a new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. It was a new world, a world as new as if the race had been translated to another planet, where man might begin over again the experiment of civil society with the benefit of a long experience, and without the obstacle of conventional or traditionary associations and customs. This new world properly belonged to the race and not to any portion of it. It was a world, not a country ; a continent, not an island, a peninsula, or a region which a river or a chain of mountains could bound. It owed its being to the united efforts of the greatest powers on earth. Spain discovered it, France explored it, England gave it language and laws ; and every nation has sent rivers of its blood to run in the great stream which now bears the most precious hopes of the race on its bosom. The Macedonian empire merged in its brief but brilliant existence, Greek, Syrian, Persian and Egyptian, but its conquests were never assimilated to each other, and its unity was an aggregate not a sum. The Roman empire left to every nation it conquered, its language, its religion and its customs ; it took away nothing but its independence and gave little but its own protection. But into the soil of America has trickled drop by drop the blood of every European nation. Commingled inseparably, the divided children of the old world are the united family of the new. For the first time the chief nations of the earth are blended in a common fate, in which their individuality is wholly lost. American blood is neither English nor Irish, nor French, nor Spanish, nor German, nor Swiss. But it is all these in large proportions of each, and every day the purely Anglo-Saxon stock is losing its predominancy. We rejoice that England so far prevailed over the early fortunes of the new world, as to give its language, its religion and its laws and customs to those colonies before which all the rest have succumbed or must finally bend. But we rejoice also that the new world has been open to the emigration of all lands, and that it now shelters in its bosom the representatives of every European soil. Nay, we firmly believe that the Anglo-Saxon stock is to be greatly improved by intermixture with other races, and that it is a providential purpose that it should here be brought into contact and become ultimately merged in a new race compounded of the richness of |233| every olden people. But at any rate, be it for better or worse, the new world was not destined to be a mere extension of British rule, or Saxon blood, or of the characteristic customs and prejudices of any one people. It was to be the home of delegates from the race. And here we have indeed a new world, inhabited by a new race. And this astonishing heterogeneousness of races, perfectly blended into one, is one of the most interesting and peculiar features in our condition, as it is one of the marks of the universal or general interest which appertains to our destiny.

Consider in the next place, in connection with our political institutions, providential origin and circumstances, the grandeur both in extent and features of the territory inherited by this new race. Let us place ourselves at the Capitol, and from the balcony overhanging that commanding height survey the land. The landscape within reach of the outward eye is magnificent and infinitely suggestive to the visionary orb within. The broad river, the ample plain, the distant mountains, the unfinished, wide-spread city well represent and characterize the country and the people to which they belong. No spot tells like this the whole story of our recent origin, our incredible or unexampled progress, our magnificent and half-realized hopes. This city at our feet, of only thirty thousand inhabitants, occupies the room of a Metropolis of millions. These broad avenues are designed to accommodate that tide of population which our vast territories shall ultimately roll through the capitol of the country ! These noble public edifices, many of them worthy of towering over the most magnificent city on the globe, but now rising amid mean and temporary dwellings, do but anticipate and foreshadow the splendid future they befit, while they afford by vivid contrast the liveliest conception of our present incomplete but promising and vigorous youth.

And here as we stand almost in the presence of the representatives of every State and district and important town in our vast country, it requires very little force of imagination to crowd the horizon out till it compasses the enormous area of this great and free land of our birth. In the far North-East we see our boundary line shining with the recent lustre of peaceful diplomacy and enlightened patriotism. That noble chain of inland seas, stretching from East to West, itself | secured as our northern line by the sagacity and firmness of the elder Adams, fitly completes what the treaty of Washington begins. We follow the river at our feet to its mouth, and the broad Atlantic, bulwark of the new world against the institutions, manners and customs of an effete civilization, washes for fifteen hundred miles our eastern coast white with cities, into whose ports is filing the commerce of the world. On the South, those rich and peaceful purchases, Florida and Louisiana—kingdoms of themselves anywhere else—by which our country has possessed itself of the whole northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and the vast territory of Texas—that unlooked for and not wholly welcome accession—reveal themselves to our straining eyes. And, finally, in the West, passing the broad streams and endless prairies far beyond that Mediterranean river that once seemed made to divide nations and stay the course of empire, far across deserts and mountains, through almost inaccessible passes, the gleam of the Pacific ocean tells us we have reached the occidental boundary of our country.

And this broad continent, this new world, with lakes like oceans and rivers like seas, penetrated to the heart with bays and gulfs ; this region comprising every clime and furnishing the products of all—the furs of the north and the fruits of the tropics—the bread stuffs of temperate zones—the woolens of cold, and the cottons of warm climates—stretching from one great ocean of the globe to the other, and from the frozen serpent almost to the equator—this vast area with natural divisions to indicate it as the home of many nations, is, by the Providence of God, one country, speaking one language, rejoicing in one common Constitution, honoring the same great national names, celebrating the same great national events. It is one nation. And it is a free nation. It possesses an ideal form of government, the dream of ancient heroes no longer a vision of the night ; the prophetic visionary song of poets become the prosaic language of matter-of-fact men. It is without hereditary rulers, without a legalized aristocracy. It is self-governed. It is a land of equal rights. It is a stable republic.

And what a marvelous and providential history has it had ! The hemisphere itself has been discovered only three and a half centuries, less than one-fifth of the period which has elapsed since the origin |234| of Christianity. Two centuries only have passed since our territory was reached by two distant bands of colonists, one led by the spirit of chivalrous adventure and commercial enterprise, the other by the love of religious liberty and political freedom ; but both from the land of Hampden and Pym. But three-score and ten years—the life of one man—have sped, since this people, a handful of men, breaking loose from the most powerful nation on the face of the globe at the peril of everything held dear, proclaimed its independence, and after maintaining two wars with the parent country, the Queen of the Seas, is now become the third power on the earth, with a population little short of twenty millions, with resources of manufactures and agriculture which render it substantially independent of foreign commerce in war, although able and glad to compete with the commerce of the world in peace.

It is in no indulgence of national vanity that we repeat this history, whatever the appearance may be. There are stains enough upon our skirts to humble the pride of any patriotic American, stains that look darker here than anywhere else. But whatever our wrongs or follies or ill deserts, no lover of his race, no friend of Christianity, no one who waits upon God’s providence and believes in a divine government, can fail to see that the great Ruler of events has shaped the natural features, the general history and the political institutions of our country, into a wonderful theatre of mercy and love, and fitted it for a great display of his power ; nor can we hesitate to announce the preparation here for a glorious and unexampled triumph of the principles of justice, humanity and religion. Could the colossal statue of Columbus that flanks the rear entrance to the Capitol, have momentary vision granted to its stony orbs ; could the pictured company on the walls of the Rotunda, that listen at Delft-Haven to the prayer of Robinson, have but for a moment the reality and life they seem to possess ; could the more than Roman majesty that clothes the father of his country, rise from its marble chair—and these fit representatives of the three great bands that under Providence have made us what we are, the Discoverers, the Pilgrim Fathers, and the Revolutionary heroes, be gathered with us on this noble gallery and stretch their eyes where ours go over the land as | it is and into the open secret of the Future as it must be, would not he who came expressly to erect the cross on heathen soil and to gain new victories for Christ, and the Puritans who sought religious liberty in the wilderness, and the patriots who fought for religious and political freedom—the discoverers, the settlers, and the founders of our country—unite in declaring this the land of promise and themselves men of destiny, who had been engaged in a work greater than they knew, unconsciously laboring under a Heaven-directed plan—entering successively into each other’s labors without estimating the inheritance, and committing their own to other hands without understanding the responsibility they had shared or devolved ? Would they not see, and should not we see, something more than the well-being of a particular people ; something too momentous and solemn for national exultation, in the history and prospects of this our country ? Aye. Their thoughts would be of the prospects of the human race thus opening before them. More understandingly than we, would they call this the new world ; the world beginning over again, with the riches, the experience, the literature, the morality and religion of the old world—but on a virgin soil, sustaining free institutions and enjoying perfect toleration—with a people covering a quarter of the globe, speaking one language, bound together by common interests, professing one common religion—yet in the dew of youth, but already full of wealth, health, power and prosperity ! Would they not say and with sober truth, this work is not of man ? It is the Lord’s doing and marvelous in our eyes ! Alas, we are not astonished at what may astonish angels ! So wonted are we to our privileges and our inherited rights, and so broadly separated from the nations that are bereft of them, that we appreciate not our peculiar happiness !

Have we often considered the wonderful and providential aptitude of our country for deriving the greatest and most indispensable advantages from the most brilliant discoveries of modern times in science and art ? May we not feel that steam in its applications as a motive power was discovered with express reference to our enormous rivers and lakes ? It has greatly aided other nations, but it has re-created ours. Was not the railroad expressly invented to hold together in its vast iron cleets our broad and |235| otherwise unbound country, threatening to fall to pieces by its own weight ? Its ponderous trains flying like great shuttles across our land, weave into one seamless web the many-colored interests and varied sentiments and affections of our scattered countrymen. Let its fiery horse, with a continent for his pasture, speed as swiftly as he can ; where there is land to sustain his hoof, he cannot take us off our own soil, or away from the sound of our native tongue ! Is not the lightning-winged telegraph, that puts a girdle of intelligence round the earth in the eighth of a second, a providential angel whose mission is peculiar to our own land—an all but omnipotent spirit whose business it is to facilitate the intercourse of a nation whose territories stretch into different climates, and are divided by chains of mountains, and which yet depends for its united existence upon agreement of sentiment, frequency of intercourse,concurrence of sympathies and central unity of operations ? If the providence of God, choosing out a theatre for the ultimate triumph of his earthly purposes toward our race, had selected this land after having long, and until the fullness of time, kept it back from civilized possession, would not the whole world have recognized the justice and expediency of the choice ? And what gifts could Heaven have bestowed to make up for the disadvantages apparently inseparable from other and more important blessings—as it were, to reconcile in our favor physical incompatibilities—the benefits of vast area with none of its evils—its varied climates, products and spaciousness, without its separation, conflict of interests, or jealous diversity of sentiments—than the inventions of the last quarter of a century—the Steamboat, the Locomotive, and the Magnetic Telegraph ? In what other nation are these actually indispensable or invaluable ? And the date of these benefactions has been as providential as the bequest itself !

There is a growing feeling that the interests of the New World, and the prospects of humanity on this continent are largely dependent upon the preservation of the union of the United States. And in nothing has the Providence over us been more strikingly illustrated than in the unexpected bonds of stability which have disclosed themselves in the history of events. If the rapidity of our growth, the increase of our territory, the early | and fierce agitation of the most exciting questions had been foreseen, it certainly would not have been credited that the Union of these States would have continued beyond a half century ! The bare spread of territory would have been considered a sufficient cause of separation, to say nothing of the difference of interests and the apparent independence of each great section of the country of every other. But what an astonishing and inextricable mutual dependence has revealed itself, till this time increasing with the increase of causes of dissociation or severance ; the centripetal ever counteracting the centrifugal forces, and in the very nick of time asserting new energy, until we are almost forced to believe the integrity of the Union a providential decree ! Philosophers at one date alarmed the world by announcing disturbances in the solar system which must ultimately involve the earth, with its sister planets, in a common ruin. But a profounder science has detected the correcting influence, and demonstrated the stability of the solar universe. We have a confidence that an analogy to this will be found in the history of the American Union, which has thus far gloriously disappointed the predictions of foreign observers, and found unexpected correctives for those perturbations which threatened to destroy it. De Tocqueville has enumerated with his usual brilliancy most of the bonds which unite us, as well as the elements of discord and separation, and has expressed his apprehension that our rapid increase and unexampled prosperity would terminate in disunion. But he certainly misapprehended many symptoms from which he augured dissolution. He underrated the power of the central government, which he thought was growing weaker every day. Experience has shown, on the contrary, that the jealousy of centralization had reached its head about the very time he based his prophesy upon the supposition of its regular increase. There can be no question that the spirit in which nullification arose is very much abated ; that the constitutional objections pleaded against internal improvements by the Federal Government are very much quieted ; that the Senate has grown in authority and dignity ; that local prejudices have been allayed and sectional ambition much rebuked. The last five years, the very period during which the most alarming extension of country has been witnessed, |236| have, notwithstanding all, done more to strengthen the central power than any period since the war of 1812. There is a steady growth of nationality among our people, a feeling that the States are merged in the Nation, and owe their power, importance and dignity in the eyes of the world to the Union and the General Government. The more frequent our intercourse with foreign powers, and the more plainly we see ourselves recognized as a great power by the other nations of the world, the greater must be our disposition to maintain the national existence, to which we owe our importance. Painful as the suspense was which attended the discussion of the North-Eastern boundary, and the Oregon question, who can doubt that those difficulties, and the treaties that resulted from them, by bringing our nation into direct comparison in diplomacy, in spirit, and in generosity, with Great Britain, did a great deal to strengthen our bonds at home, which are never weak, except when through prosperity we become forgetful of their value ? The growing disposition abroad, to think and speak of us as one people, will, doubtless, increase the disposition at home to continue such. Add to this, that the importance of the real subjects of dispute or jealousy is daily lessening.

There is, probably, no subject which has jeopardized the union of these States so much as slavery. But the principal danger was at the outset of the discussion. The firmness and constitutional fidelity which the North and West have shown in regard to that institution, have quieted the apprehensions of the South. It has become perfectly plain, that no intention exists, anywhere in this country, to violate the chartered rights of the South. The policy agreed to by the North and West, is one in which the South itself concurs, if we may judge the matter by the course of their Coryphæus, Mr. Calhoun, viz. to abide by the compromises of the Constitution. Every indication exists, that abolition excitement has reached its head, and is exploding in every kind of extravagance and ultraism, until the calm and wise heads and hearts of the country are utterly alienated from all cooperation with it. Soon the economic view of the question, is to become the absorbing one, and the moment Southern | intelligence takes this question into its own hands, healthier and more dispassionate views will be entertained on the subject at large, and the bands of union among the States will, we are persuaded, be drawn closer than ever. Every one must see that the cotton, sugar, and tobacco staples are every day losing their relative and preponderating importance among the exports of the country. It is perfectly plain, that the exports of the grain-growing regions—large portions of which belong to the middle and southern states—from this time forward must render the country less dependent, for credit in foreign markets, upon the more particular products of the South. This very month brings us fifteen millions in exchange from England, in return for our flour and meal. The Indian corn crop—a great Southern and Western staple—is already half as valuable as the cotton crop. The maple sugars of Vermont, New York and Ohio, exercise not a great but a decided influence upon the demand for Southern sugars. Tobacco, as is well known, is not more than half as valuable as it was, as the crop rapidly exhausts the lands producing it, which are then chiefly turned to the production of corn. These causes combined, must make the South less peculiar in its interests, less separate in its position, more inclined to compromise or co-operate with the other portions of the Union. Even now, a certain degree of attention to manufactures in Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee, shows that the entire reliance upon these staples is no longer practicable ; and the Memphis Convention indicates clearly enough that the jealousy of Northern interests, the thorough anti-tariff policy, the anti-internal improvement war, are no longer to be uncompromisingly maintained. From these general and various considerations, we infer that disunion is not likely to proceed from the discussion of slavery, or from conflict of interests. To industrial change, bringing about a great community of labor and production, do we confidently look for the gradual dissipation of all sectional prejudices, in every part of the Union, and the growth in their stead of a lasting community of interest and regard.

Mr. Vinton, of Ohio, in one of the most pregnant speeches^*|236| ever made on the floor of Congress, laid down some |237| very remarkable and incontrovertible principles in respect to the stability of the Union. We know that his speech left a very deep impression upon the minds of thinking men, in all parts of the Union, whatever may have been the immediate response to a discourse so broad in its foundations, and grand in its proportions, as to require a distant and deliberate view. It was his object to demonstrate the safety and importance of allowing the West her due share of influence in the general councils of the nation. It is well known that when the Confederacy in 1780, was solicitous to obtain from the States, concessions of Western territory, it held out the promise that this territory should, under the conditions of the Constitution, be framed into independent States, “not less than one hundred, or more than one hundred and fifty miles square.” Virginia, consequently, ceded all her territory west of the Ohio to the Federal Government, upon this promise, or condition. Now, the effect of this legislation would have been to create at least fourteen States west of the Ohio, to say nothing of Kentucky and Tennessee, giving to the country, beyond the Alleghanies, a majority of States in the Confederacy. This arrangement was made at a time, when the peopling of the great western valley went on so slowly, and when the navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi was so difficult and little valued, that no jealousy existed of the Western power. But when the difficulties arose between Spain and the United States, as to the navigation of the Mississippi, the discussion brought its importance into public notice. Railroads, canals, and national roads had not then leveled the Alleghanies, and they were naturally regarded as interposing an everlasting barrier between the eastern Atlantic slope and the western valley. An opinion naturally sprung up, that the interests of the two regions would be for ever divided, and then it burst upon the Federal Government, that it had made such provisions that the balance of power would inevitably lie in the Western scale, where they had never dreamed of placing it. To obviate this, with the consent of Virginia, Congress, by the celebrated ordinance of 1787, which abolished slavery in the territory north-west of the Ohio, provided that it should be divided into not less than three, nor more than five States, thus restoring the balance to | the eastern division of the country. This jealousy and injustice—for the States thus laid out, both in territory and in population, are ten times the usual size of the New England States, and twice or thrice the size of the Middle and Southern States with two or three exceptions—grew out of the supposed permanent opposition of interests between the Atlantic States and the Western division of the country. But, as Mr. Vinton has shown, experience has proved that no such conflict, or even diversity of interests exists.

De Tocqueville had already remarked that the Alleghanies interposed no serious barrier between the East and West, for the mountains are themselves cultivable, and contain some of the richest slopes and most beautiful valleys in the world, and so far from dividing whole regions, do not even separate States, often lying, as in Virginia and Pennsylvania, in the very heart of a single sovereignty. Besides, at the North the fertile territory of New York offered an unbroken plain connecting the East and the West ; and the lakes, by a blessed foresight secured as our northern boundary, form of themselves, with small interruptions, a great natural highway between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. Mr. Samuel B. Ruggles, in his celebrated report to the New York Assembly, has exhibited in the most graphic lines and with an enthusiasm as near poetical as the strictest mathematics would allow, the astonishing provisions which nature has made for a system of internal improvements, uniting the East and the West in the most cordial and indissoluble bonds. But Mr. Vinton has gone still further, and proved that the Alleghanies, so far from dividing, positively unite us ; that they interpose just obstacle enough to form a strong party-wall holding up both sides ; that the strength and union and intimacy of the East and West depend upon their distance from each other, the difference of their soil, the unlikeness of their interests and their reciprocal obligations. He has demonstrated that the balance of power is nowhere to be so safely placed as in the West ; for the West has a greater stake and a more obvious interest in the union than the East, and quite as much as the South. It is perfectly plain that “that great fertile valley of the upper waters of the Mississippi, which spreads out from the sources of the Monongahela and Alleghany |238| rivers, to the head waters of the Missouri will always contain the heart and seat of the population of the Union.” Of course it ought to have and will have the chief political power, and therefore it is a great question whether it is safe that the balance of power in this Union should lie there. Mr. Vinton, we repeat, has demonstrated this safety. He has shown, that the West is completely and forever dependent upon the markets of the Atlantic on the one hand and on the market of New Orleans on the other, so that it is impossible she should ever “inflict an injury upon the North or the South without feeling the full and fatal recoil of the blow she strikes.” The East has understood this practically ; as the Erie canal, the Western railroad, the Pennsylvania lines of internal connection with the Ohio river sufficiently attest. And the resolutions passed at the Memphis Convention show that Southern abstractions vanish before the touch of sober interests. Mr. Calhoun, wisely, if not consistently, teaches that the Mississippi river is an inland ocean, and as much entitled to the care of the general government as Lake Erie or the Chesapeake Bay ; and he lays out a system of railways uniting the Mississippi with Savannah and Charleston, which rival the roads of Massachusetts in complexity of members and unity of result, to which he invites the patronage of government to the extent of a surrender of every other section of land, wherever the roads run through its territory, besides a remission of duties on railroad iron, equivalent to a bounty of $2,000 a mile.^*|238|

It is evident, then, that the prosperity of the West is bound up with the prosperity of the East and of the South. She must have a free, a regular, a constant and an increasing trade with the Atlantic, either by New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, or through the lakes and the railroads across the country to the sea-board. There never was an hour when she could have fully felt how wholly dependent she is upon the East and her commerce until the present, when the starving population of Ireland, of France, of Scotland, are crying for her bread-stuffs, and when Eastern ships can alone bring the West and her foreign customers together. The home market she finds, too, is constantly increasing in importance, | and the West is therefore deeply interested in so far maintaining the system of manufactures by which the East thrives, as to allow the Northern Atlantic States to depend even more than they now do upon the Western granary. The West cannot intelligently suffer the Protective tariff to be destroyed by Southern prejudice ; for every Eastern factory is her customer and puts a portion of its gains into her treasury. The home market is the sure market. The failure of foreign crops may give a temporary extra importance to what is always of much importance, the Transatlantic market ; but a population regularly and increasingly dependent for its food upon the West is a more valuable customer. And the West must see this too clearly to adopt the ultra Free-trade notions of the South, which begins to flinch itself, as is apparent from the Memphis Convention.

If we add to this the evident mediatorial position of the West in respect to slavery, its half-way post in regard to all questions that divide the North and South, both in manners, sympathies, tastes, climate, democratic temper, and general civilization, we shall see a wonderful adaptation in its condition to allay the causes of mutual jealousy or hostility between other portions of the confederacy and to hold them for its own sake, if for no other reason, in peace and concord. For these reasons it would appear safe and desirable that the balance of power should pass to the West ; and no danger to the Union is to be apprehended from the sudden and rapid growth of population and power in the valley of the Mississippi.

At this time greater apprehensions are doubtless felt for the permanency of the Union, from the spirit of conquest which seems to have seized our government, than from all other causes. The annexation of Texas seemed to be a disturbance of the mutual dependence of the parts of the country on each other. But, bating the extension it gave to slavery it did not really add a centrifugal territory to the Union, seeing that its connection with and dependence upon us, is much-more direct and natural than with Mexico, from which it is divided by deserts and mountains. If that accession had not involved us in an unjust war and made it probable that the Southern |239| Question will be again agitated, we should be reconciled to it. We think the purchase of California would not be an unwise investment, for the sake of its ports alone—for its soil every day grows leaner and leaner as we acquire more reliable information in regard to it. But we have no apprehensions that the boundary of the United States will extend, for some generations, below the Nueces. If we owned territory there we could do nothing with it. Our population will have no tendency to run over in that direction until it has filled up many much more inviting and convenient territories. It is plain enough that the Administration are now looking out for a creditable opportunity of withdrawing our forces and of getting out of the Mexican scrape with as little more waste of powder and treasury notes as possible. We consider the aggressive war to be over in that direction, and are every day looking for the result of secret negotiations ending in peace. It is plain that the South has no interest in pressing the war. The North is wholly opposed to it. The West has nothing but a sort of 54° 40’ excitement to work off in fight. The party is sick of it, and it is difficult to see what can induce or support the Administration in carrying it on. It can make no capital out of it. It has not been able to make a party question out of the supplies. The victors have been Whig generals. The treasury needs nursing. Mr. Polk is the object of universal abuse on both sides of the water and from all parties, and we are therefore convinced that the war must be brought to a close, not speedily to be resumed in that direction. We have very little fear, therefore, that an extension of our territory South by conquest, is to trouble us for a long time to come. It is as sure as the coming of time, that our people is destined to spill over on to Mexican soil as soon as the habitable portions of the West are filled up. Mr. Crittenden, in one of his happiest efforts in the Senate, ridiculed the idea, which the French Chambers with true French abstractionizing were then discussing—of the importance of preserving the balance of power by strengthening the antagonistic or anti-United States powers on this continent—by quoting the former advice which the Minister of | Foreign Affairs had given to Louis XV., to form an alliance with the Cherokees, in order to head our progress over the Alleghany Mountains ! He well asked, what was to head the peaceful inevitable spread of a population which fifty years would change from twenty to a hundred millions ? It is calculated, we believe, that the advance of the tide of population upon the Western frontier is at the rate of seventeen miles annually. It becomes a simple calculation, how soon, at this rate, we shall reach the Pacific ocean. And long before that time our cup must run over in the southern direction. That Mexico will ultimately fall a political prey, not to force, but to a superior population, insensibly oozing into her territories, changing her customs, and out-living, out-trading, exterminating her weaker blood, we regard with as much certainty, as we do the final extinction of the Indian races, to which the mass of the Mexican population seem very little superior ; and we have no reason to doubt that this country will not have doubled its three centuries of existence, before South America will speak the English tongue and submit to the civilization, laws and religion of the Anglo-Saxon race. We, as a great civilized and Christian nation, have only to use all endeavors to have this tide of population regular and peaceful in its course—with no violence, or spirit of conquest ; its sure progress we cannot help.

Such are some of the reasons for believing that the dissolution of the Union is less probable now than at any previous date of our existence, and thus that the only evil which seemed to cloud the glorious destiny before our race in this New World is not impending.

We have many things to say respecting the operation of the Institutions for which we have ventured to predict permanency, and on which for general reasons we set so lofty a value. The influence of the Democratic sentiment upon our social condition and our personal character is a theme rich in suggestions. We hope to meet our readers, at such intervals as convenience requires, upon this ground, to consider together whatever is new, peculiar, or important, for good or evil, in our national existence and social state.