r permit
alienation of feeling to weaken the power of their united efforts nor
internal dissensions to paralyze the great arm of freedom, uplifted for
the vindication of self-government.

I have thus briefly presented such suggestions as seem to me especially
worthy of your consideration. In providing for the present you can
hardly fail to avail yourselves of the light which the experience of the
past casts upon the future.

The growth of our population has now brought us, in the destined career
of our national history, to a point at which it well behooves us to
expand our vision over the vast prospective.

The successive decennial returns of the census since the adoption of the
Constitution have revealed a law of steady, progressive development,
which may be stated in general terms as a duplication every quarter
century. Carried forward from the point already reached for only a short
period of time, as applicable to the existence of a nation, this law of
progress, if unchecked, will bring us to almost incredible results.
A large allowance for a diminished proportional effect of emigration
would not very materially reduce the estimate, while the increased
average duration of human life known to have already resulted from the
scientific and hygienic improvements of the past fifty years will tend
to keep up through the next fifty, or perhaps hundred, the same ratio
of growth which has been thus revealed in our past progress; and to the
influence of these causes may be added the influx of laboring masses
from eastern Asia to the Pacific side of our possessions, together
with the probable accession of the populations already existing in
other parts of our hemisphere, which within the period in question will
feel with yearly increasing force the natural attraction of so vast,
powerful, and prosperous a confederation of self-governing republics and
will seek the privilege of being admitted within its safe and happy
bosom, transferring with themselves, by a peaceful and healthy process
of incorporation, spacious regions of virgin and exuberant soil, which
are destined to swarm with the fast-growing and fast-spreading millions
of our race.

These considerations seem fully to justify the presumption that
the law of population above stated will continue to act with
undiminished effect through at least the next half century, and that
thousands of persons who have already arrived at maturity and are now
exercising the rights o