h while.
Since his birth in 1837 he had seen the nation reach that physical
growth--barring Alaska--which it now possesses. Not so much earlier than
his youth Florida had been added to the Union by purchase from Spain;
Mexico, after the unjust war of 1848, had ceded Texas and the territory
to the West. The boundary disputes between England and the United States
in the far Northwest had been finally adjusted. To a man with great
social and financial imagination, these facts could not help but be
significant; and if they did nothing more, they gave him a sense of the
boundless commercial possibilities which existed potentially in so
vast a realm. His was not the order of speculative financial enthusiasm
which, in the type known as the "promoter," sees endless possibilities
for gain in every unexplored rivulet and prairie reach; but the very
vastness of the country suggested possibilities which he hoped might
remain undisturbed. A territory covering the length of a whole zone and
between two seas, seemed to him to possess potentialities which it could
not retain if the States of the South were lost.

At the same time, the freedom of the negro was not a significant point
with him. He had observed that race from his boyhood with considerable
interest, and had been struck with virtues and defects which seemed
inherent and which plainly, to him, conditioned their experiences.

He was not at all sure, for instance, that the negroes could be made
into anything much more significant than they were. At any rate, it was
a long uphill struggle for them, of which many future generations would
not witness the conclusion. He had no particular quarrel with the theory
that they should be free; he saw no particular reason why the South
should not protest vigorously against the destruction of their property
and their system. It was too bad that the negroes as slaves should be
abused in some instances. He felt sure that that ought to be adjusted
in some way; but beyond that he could not see that there was any great
ethical basis for the contentions of their sponsors. The vast majority
of men and women, as he could see, were not essentially above slavery,
even when they had all the guarantees of a constitution formulated to
prevent it. There was mental slavery, the slavery of the weak mind
and the weak body. He followed the contentions of such men as Sumner,
Garrison, Phillips, and Beecher, with considerable interest; but at no
time could h