contributed to that result; but this, the great division into ten
or twelve distinct languages, must not be neglected. But all these
allegations of superiority of race and destiny neither require nor
deserve any answer. They are but pretences under which to disguise
ambition, cupidity, or silly vanity."

The justice of these reflections was assuredly borne out by the
experience of history, but manifest destiny takes no account of past
lessons.

Before these lines of Mr. Gallatin were penned, on January 19, 1848,
gold was discovered in California. The announcement startled the world
and opened a new era, not only to Europe, but to mankind. Extending the
metallic basis, which no man better than Mr. Gallatin recognized and
held to be the true solvent of money transactions, it postponed for a
half century the inevitable conflict between capital and labor, the
first outbreaks of which in Europe had been with difficulty suppressed,
when the news of good tidings gave promise of unexpected relief. Credit
revived, new enterprises of colossal magnitude were undertaken, and the
demand for labor quickly exceeded the supply. Emigration to America rose
to incredible proportions. Had Mr. Gallatin lived, he would have found
new elements to be weighed in his nice balance of probabilities. He
would no longer, as in 1839, have been compelled to say that "specie is
a foreign product," but would have given to us inestimable advice as to
the proper use to be made of the vast sums taken out from our own soil.
He would have been also brought to face the ethnologic problem of a
continent inhabited by a single race, not Anglo-Saxon, nor Teutonic, nor
yet Latin, but a composite race in which all these will be merged and
blended; a new American race which, springing from a broader surface,
shall rise to higher summits of intellectual power and, with a greater
variety of natural qualities, achieve excellence in more numerous ways.
This vision was denied to Mr. Gallatin. He died at the threshold of the
new era--of the golden age. A half century has not passed since his
death, and the United States has taken from her soil a value of over
three thousand millions of dollars, in gold and silver (gold two
thousand millions, silver one thousand millions), more than two thirds
of the total amount estimated by Mr. Gallatin as the store of Europe in
1839; and has also added to her population, by immigration alone, ten
millions of people,