y.[189:1] The acquisition of Florida, Texas, and the Far
West followed naturally. Not only was the nation set on an independent
path in foreign relations; its political system was revolutionized, for
the Mississippi Valley now opened the way for adding State after State,
swamping the New England section and its Federalism. The doctrine of
strict construction had received a fatal blow at the hands of its own
prophet. The old conception of historic sovereign States, makers of a
federation, was shattered by this vast addition of raw material for an
indefinite number of parallelograms called States, nursed through a
Territorial period by the Federal government, admitted under conditions,
and animated by national rather than by State patriotism.

The area of the nation had been so enlarged and the development of the
internal resources so promoted, by the acquisition of the whole course
of the mighty river, its tributaries and its outlet, that the Atlantic
coast soon turned its economic energies from the sea to the interior.
Cities and sections began to struggle for ascendancy over its industrial
life. A real national activity, a genuine American culture began. The
vast spaces, the huge natural resources, of the Valley demanded
exploitation and population. Later there came the tide of foreign
immigration which has risen so steadily that it has made a composite
American people whose amalgamation is destined to produce a new national
stock.

But without attempting to exhaust, or even to indicate, all the effects
of the Louisiana Purchase, I wish next to ask your attention to the
significance of the Mississippi Valley in the promotion of democracy and
the transfer of the political center of gravity in the nation. The
Mississippi Valley has been the especial home of democracy. Born of free
land and the pioneer spirit, nurtured in the ideas of the Revolution and
finding free play for these ideas in the freedom of the wilderness,
democracy showed itself in the earliest utterances of the men of the
Western Waters and it has persisted there. The demand for local
self-government, which was insistent on the frontier, and the
endorsement given by the Alleghanies to these demands led to the
creation of a system of independent Western governments and to the
Ordinance of 1787, an original contribution to colonial policy. This was
framed in the period when any rigorous subjection of the West to Eastern
rule would have endangered the ties t