Alleghanies as boundary; Western Pennsylvania, Western Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan a third; North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida a fourth; Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee a fifth; and we should never have crossed the Mississippi nor have gone to the Pacific. We should first have diversified, and founded unions afterwards, as time created public policies. We ought not to have formed states by parallel lines, but by mountain ranges, by rivers, and let social causes ripen into political formations. The name America should not have been the mere expression of an ideal totality; our entirety ought to have continued to grow into a greater and greater Union by social causes ripening into political conjunctions.

American society was indeed formed in localities, so to speak, piecemeal; but after-organisms, usages, and habits of life which they brought with them, supervened the effects natural causes would have had on their social and political conduct to a large degree. It was so in the colonial state, and it continued after the successful assertion of American independence. Roads, schools, and institutions of all kinds, as well as most of their socialities, were as much imposed on western society after 1776 as they were on eastern society before. The town sites were generally military stations, and the pioneers were soldiers of a national cause that migrated with them, though few of them were regularly enrolled in the army, nor even in the militia.

Their self-sufficiency was not mere self-reliance; it had its source in a consciousness of being members of an undefined but still ever actively advancing national movement, which was only intensified by the ease with which wealth was acquired in these primitive localities. Cities grew up as if by magic; in fact everything looked wonderful, except the pioneers to themselves. They drank the nectar of self-admiration, and believed all that grew up in and around them as their work, and as things for which they were indebted to nobody but themselves. That this self-sufficiency had its sustaining effect is undeniable, but that it produced also characteristics that made them in their pursuits less industrious, less thrifty, and less vigilant as to the political institutions that were forming so rapidly and so slovenly, in these new societies, was not perceived, and, if mentioned by others, regarded as impertinent. Well! it is out now, and we will not take it back.

We return now to our reading of North America, and proceed with our diagnosis.

This country has not, like Europe, a southern brother (Africa)

1

to serve it as a reservoir of heat for winter use; for South America lies almost entirely east of the 77th degree of longitude, the degree westward of which lies the main body of the United States. The next fact bearing on the thermal relations of this. country is, that the coast mountains, near the Pacific and the Cascade range, intercept from the middle and lower Mississippi valley the warm moisture of the Pacific Ocean. It may therefore (if the phrase be allowable) be said, that the United States make their own weather, and that it is extra warm in summer and extra cold in winter, with backward springs and protracted fine autumns. The whole land is, from these causes, kept overly busy in helping itself to sunlight and warmth, and has of course localities of strong electric and magnetic outbursts when the equations of weather are going on. The country is, so to speak, meteorologically always in extremis, and people that love the dolce far niente would seem not to be proper folks for the United States. Both animal and vegetable life must be hardy, or they will find here only "hospitable graves." As the Indian, however, ever neglectful of the laws of life, has survived, though he did it barely, we may prognosticate that populations that will be careful in their living may multiply and replenish in this American part of earth to a high degree.

The fact just stated-that of the relative position of South to North America-has most important bearings on our international commerce. Taking Cape St. Roque, on the eastermost South American coast, as the point of calculation, it will be seen that it is but twenty-eight degrees from Africa, and equal to fifty degrees' distance from the Straits of Gibraltar, while it is sixty to New York and even more to New Orleans. A steamer can leave Southampton and be as quick, if not quicker, at the South American point, which we have named,. than a steamer going from Philadelphia or Baltimore. We have accordingly, in trade to Brazil, Buenos Ayres, or more southern countries, not only no advantage, but are under disadvantages. As long as trade had to go round Cape Horn this applied also to all West American commercial intercourse, and

1 Of the foreign trade of the Argentine Republic in 1876, Europe had 73.07 per cent.; America, 21.14 per cent.; Asia, 0.15 per cent.; France, 20 per cent.;. United States, 4 per cent.

Imports and Exports from and to

Europe had

United States had

England alone had

France had

16,725,000

The shipping doing business with Uruguay was, in 1876, of European vessels number, 1047, tonnage, 787,848; United States, number, 44, tonnage, 22,874.

this made California much less an American state for all immigration than it really was territorially. That our shipping from New Orleans to Guiana, Venezuela, Granada, has to go ten and more degrees cast to reach their destination, and that for a large part of the northern coast of South America Europe is as near as most of our seaports, is not generally noticed in this land of westward tendencies and outlooks; and most persons conclude from the name South America that that continent must be a specially favorable trading point for all North America. Were persons to consult their maps they would find that this is true only of the coasts of Mexico, beginning at Cape Catoche, and around the gulf of that name, and then merely of New Orleans and the Mississippi valley.

Examining the map will also explain to us why no West India policy could ever have the persistence in it which is indispensable to success. The twenty degrees which they stand out eastward from the 77th degree of longitude makes them less our neighbours than we are apt to think; and there is therefore less natural commercial intercourse with us and more with Europe than would be the case if they laid directly south of our southern coasts. This point may be brought to our minds more fully if we will think on a similar relation of the island of Sicily to Italy, Spain, and Northern Africa. That island has never been a steadfast adherent of any of the adjacent mainlands, nor could it ever be a selfgoverning island in itself, because it was not a focus of trade and power to any of them. It was long competed for between Greece and Carthage; then between Carthage and Rome; afterwards between the Saracens, the Normans, Spaniards, and Italians; and latterly again between France, England, and Italy. It is now the enfant terrible of the kingdom of Italy; but it would readily change this relation to Northern Africa if there were a New Carthage or other strong power there. As it lies it is, in its proclivities, semi-French and semi-Italian, just as the West Indies are semi-American and semi-European. If ever there shall be a right strong power on the northern coast of South America it will be a further competitor for securing the islands or, at least, part of them. Mexico might also loom up again as a rival. But were Cuba ever to form a confederacy with Jamaica and Hayti and Porto Rico, and Southern Europe were to resume its ancient preponderance in the world's commerce, things and powers would assume shapes which our prognosis can but indicate, not delineate.

And if we now turn to our northern relations and begin with the outlets of the St. Lawrence, we see Nova Scotia with its fine

harbor, Halifax, to be ten degrees nearer Great Britain than our commercial emporium, New York. This is equal to two days' steamer journey, and involves the carriage of one-fifth greater supply of coal for each journey. And it explains to us why Canada was ever less restless under British rule than the Colonies, that are now a part of the United States, were. It lets us see, too, why there have always been more voices for the liberal treatment of New Brunswick and Canada generally in British councils, than there were for our states, especially the southern states.

And casting now a glance at the Pacific coasts, where the "present" affords so few indications for the "future," we see that there also the Canadian Dominion is in possession of the advance posts to Asia, especially Japan and China, unless Alaska (alas! once more) can be used as a skirmishing line and corps d'attaque. The gap left in our trade with Asia by administrative weakness or Southern bad faith-we hardly know which-in the Oregon imbroglio between 1845 and 1848, will yet loom up as even a sadder fatality in our politics, than those of us who know its bad effects in the train of events that brought the Mexican War, the acquisition of new territory, the Wilmot proviso, and in 1861 the Civil War, can now realize. We had better have spent five hundred millions for Oregon to the 54th degree than one hundred in a war with Mexico. The territories we obtained through that war were fruits that could ripen for nobody but ourselves. Those lost in the North are now, if not beyond recovery, at least very difficult to get back.

After thus inviting the attention of the reader to the external (our commerce restricting) causes in our foreign, and yet American relations, we must present also the internal ones. They had their origin in local disquietudes, that came to those sections when the country's frontiers were extended, as instinctive apprehensions that with every annexation they became less and less the free factors of what they regarded as their own-to them-most beneficial and necessary public policy. New England clung to the protective tariff policy as the best course for ever attaining its own self-sufficiency and independence. The South had, on the other hand, talked itself into its pro-slavery infatuation. But Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia began to become semi-conscious that opening outlets to its labouring forces, while immigration slackened, was social suicide, however many new political births it might produce. And these states became morose and bitter, for they knew not whom to blame for their dissatisfactions, and just as little

where to look for a remedy. They fell gradually into the idea that they were sufficient unto themselves and did not need the Union. But that was too late, after the purchase of Louisiana, the acquisition of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California had brought new ties, commercially and socially. These were now the main factors of politics in the Union, and they could not make the interests of the southern Atlantic states, nor those of New England, either their study or their public policy. Had not these southern Atlantic states themselves complicated the issue by inaugurating south-western extension? Had they not themselves created forces in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas that could not be reliable allies in a public policy that would have secured to the southern Atlantic states the liberty to work out their prosperity by their own special interests ?

In Maryland, Delaware, and in New Jersey with New York the apprehensions from indefinite western extensions were most complex. They were in possession of much capital, the product of their industry and economy. They were They were on the one side pleased with the profits which the extensions of interior western trade brought, but they began to have misgivings as cities grew up in the west who exhibited competitive as well as antagonistic tendencies. And they, more even than the more northern states, made western interests the criterion of the country's main policy. That this meant a partition of western business with Canadian as well as Mississippi valley transportation and trading facilities, was too patent not to be seen, and the thought must necessarily next arise that the position of the governing elements would in time be reversed, and that this meant danger to their own freedom of selfdevelopment. The eastern cities, that were self-sustaining, while their merchant princes were the cultivators of foreign trade and world-wide commercial enterprises, grew more and more into inland dependency as foreign commerce dwindled, compared to that derived from interior business. Their several canal, turnpike, and railroad policies were then inaugurated as anchors to the windward; but while they brought stage-line lords, canal oligarchs, and railroad kings upon themselves, they did not, indeed could not, relieve the commercial cities of the domination which a massive interior, that has the political power of a country by its ponderosity and numerical force, always exercises over them.

The general opinion is that unlimited extensions of the area of the United States had always the entire public mind in their favor, but this is only partially true. There was always a