rags amid the foam of angry breakers, to where the solemn
surge of the Pacific pours itself around our Western continent, boon
Nature has spread out fields which ask only the magic touch of Labor
to wave with every harvest and blush with every fruitage. Majestic
forests crown the hills, asking to be transformed into homes for man
on the solid earth, or into the moving miracles in which he flies on
wings of wind or flame over the ocean to the ends of the
earth. Exhaustless mineral treasures offer themselves to his hand,
scarce hidden beneath the soil, or lying carelessly upon the
surface,--coal, and lead, and copper, and the "all-worshipped ore" of
gold itself; while quarries, reaching to the centre, from many a
rugged hill-top, barren of all beside, court the architect and the
sculptor, ready to give shape to their dreams of beauty in the palace
or in the statue.

The soil, too, is fitted by the influences of every sky for the
production of every harvest that can bring food, comfort, wealth, and
luxury to man. Every family of the grasses, every cereal that can
strengthen the heart, every fruit that can delight the taste, every
fibre that can be woven into raiment or persuaded into the thousand
shapes of human necessity, asks but a gentle solicitation to pour its
abundance bounteously into the bosom of the husbandman. And men have
multiplied under conditions thus auspicious to life, until they swarm
on the Atlantic slope, are fast filling up the great valley of the
Mississippi, and gradually flow over upon the descent towards the
Pacific. The three millions, who formed the population of the Thirteen
States that set the British empire at defiance, have grown up into a
nation of nearly, if not quite, ten times that strength, within the
duration of active lives not yet finished. And in freedom from
unmanageable debt, in abundance and certainty of revenue, in the
materials for naval armaments, in the elements of which armies are
made up, in everything that goes to form national wealth, power, and
strength, the United States, it would seem, even as they are now,
might stand against the world in arms, or in the arts of peace. Are
not these results proofs irrefragable of the wisdom of the government
under which they have come to pass?

When the eyes of the thoughtful inquirer turn from the general
prospect of the national greatness and strength, to the geographical
divisions of the country, to examine the relative proportions