erest in the lakes and bind
it to the North as its southern frontiers bound it to the South and
Southwest, thus checking any tendency to sectional disunion. Judge Pope
pointed out that associations would thus be formed both with the North
and South, and that a State thus situated, having a decided interest in
the commerce, and in the preservation of the whole confederacy, could
never consent to disunion. These views were happily successful in
obtaining the approbation of Congress, and Illinois was saved from the
limits which would have made it only a southern border State. In the
Southwest, as well as in the North pioneers pushed rapidly into the
wilderness, crossing the Mississippi and founding new States in which the
long struggle between freedom and slavery was to begin.

* * *

When what may be called the blockade of Europe was raised by the final
defeat of Napoleon, immigrants began to pour into the United States in
large numbers. Many of them, like many immigrants to-day, became stranded
in the cities of the coast, without resources and without employment,
willing to work, but unable to get work. In February, 1817, James
Buchanan, the British consul at New York, issued a warning against
immigration to the United States, on the ground, as he alleged, of
numerous applications made to his office for aid to return to Great
Britain and Ireland, but at the same time the consul stated that he was
authorized to place all desirable immigrants, who found themselves
destitute in New York, in Upper Canada or Nova Scotia. Mr. Buchanan was
evidently not so anxious to assist his fellow-subjects of King George as
he was to promote the British policy of building up the Canadian
territories as a counterpoise to the United States. While there was
undoubtedly some distress among immigrants of the improvident class,
those who came here with the determination to work generally found work
before long at much better compensation than they could have earned in
England, while those who proceeded to the new regions of the West had no
difficulty in becoming independent and prosperous freeholders.

"In exchanging the condition of an English farmer for that of an American
proprietor," wrote an intelligent immigrant, "I expect to suffer many
inconveniences; but I am willing to make a great sacrifice of present
ease, were it merely for the sake of obtaining in the decline of life, an
exemption from tha