late and separate the people, no
natural barriers like the Alps and Pyrenees. The West cannot live
without the Mississippi; it is a question of life and death to the
Western farmers to hold the mouth of the river. The United States felt
this from the first day of their existence. When the Ohio and
Mississippi were yet but streams lost in the forest, when the first
planters were only a handful of men scattered in the wilderness, the
Americans already knew that New Orleans was _the key of the house_. They
would not leave it either to Spain or France. Napoleon understood this;
he held in his hands the future greatness of the United States; he was
glad to cede this vast territory to America, with the intention, he
said, 'to give to England a maritime rival which sooner or later would
lower the pride of our enemies.' (Here the author refers to his
pamphlet, entitled, _Les Etats Unis et la France_, and to _L'histoire de
la Louisiane_, by Barbe Marbois.) He could have satisfied the United
States by only giving up the left bank of the river, which was all they
asked for then; he did more (and in this I think he was very wrong),
with a stroke of his pen he ceded a country as large as the half of
Europe, and renounced our last rights on this beautiful river which we
had discovered. Sixty years have quickly passed since this cession. The
States which are now called Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa,
Minnesota, Kansas, Oregon, and the territories of Nebraska, Dacotah,
Jefferson and Washington, which will soon become States, have been
established on the immense domain abandoned by Napoleon. Without
counting the slaveholding population which wishes to break up the Union,
there are ten millions of free citizens between Pittsburg and Fort
Union, who claim the course and mouth of the Mississippi as having been
ceded to them by France. It is from us that they hold their title and
their possession. They have a right of sixty years, a right consecrated
by labors and cultivation, a right which they have received from a
contract, and, better still, from nature, and from God.

See what it is they are reproached for defending; they are, forsooth,
usurpers and tyrants, because they wish to hold what is their own,
because they will not place themselves at the mercy of an ambitious
minority. What would we say, if, to-morrow, Normandy, rising, should
pretend to hold for herself alone Rouen and Havre, and yet what is the
interest of the Seine com