. Illinois
was Far West in 1830, Iowa and Minnesota continued to be so in 1860. The
Northerners, when they began to move westward, came in comparatively
large numbers, bringing comparatively ordered habits and the full
machinery of outward civilisation with them. Thus a great social change
followed upon their arrival in the regions to which only scattered
pioneers such as the Lincolns had previously penetrated. In Illinois,
with which so much of our story is bound up, the rapidity of that change
may be estimated from the fact that the population of that State
multiplied sevenfold between the time when Lincoln settled there and the
day when he left it as President.

The concluding stages by which the dominions of the United States came to
be as we know them were: the annexation by agreement in 1846 of the
Republic of Texas, which had separated itself from Mexico and which
claimed besides the great State of Texas a considerable territory
reaching north-west to the upper portions of the Arkansas River; the
apportionment to the Union by a delimitation treaty with Great Britain in
1846 of the Oregon Territory, including roughly the State of that name
and the rest of the basin of the Columbia River up to the present
frontier--British Columbia being at the same time apportioned to Great
Britain; the conquest from Mexico in 1848 of California and a vast
mountainous tract at the back of it; the purchase from Mexico of a small
frontier strip in 1853; and the acquisition at several later times of
various outlying dependencies which will in no way concern us.

3. _The Growth of the Practice and Traditions of the Union Government_.

We must turn back to the internal growth of the new united nation. When
the Constitution had been formed and the question of its acceptance by
the States had been at last settled, and when Washington had been
inaugurated as the first President under it, a wholly new conflict arose
between two parties, led by two Ministers in the President's Cabinet,
Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Both were potent and remarkable
men, Hamilton in all senses a great man. These two men, for all their
antagonism, did services to their country, without which the vigorous
growth of the new nation would not have been possible.

The figure of Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury (ranked
by Talleyrand with Fox and Napoleon as one of the three great men he had
known), must fascinate any English s