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If so, they have done wisely to add a valuable territory to their southern frontier at a very small expense, in the way of barter, which is a much easier, safer, and better mode of acquiring dominion than that of war and conquest. The whole purchase-money does not amount to quite sevenpence sterling an acre, for the fee simple of upwards of thirty-seven millions of acres, to say nothing of the territorial sovereignty. The public lands, as yet ungranted, will pay the price of the whole country ten times over.

Its surface covers 58,000 square miles, and contains not quite 10,000 people, or about one person to every six square miles. Its sea-coast is extensive, and presents many fine harbours, and many good situations for commercial towns. Indeed, the whole country, when cleared, drained, and cultivated, will maintain an abundant population.

If Florida be incorporated with the dominion of the United States, it will very soon number a greater population than ten thousand souls. Such is the contrast between the quickening power of popular liberty and the benumbing influence of single despotism. Spanish America, and the Brazils, are far superior to the United States in all the physical advantages of soil, climate, the products of the earth, and navigable waters; and yet, under the weak, improvident, tyrannical administration of the Spanish and Portuguese governments, those vast regions languish in ignorance, superstition, poverty, weakness, and vice; while the United States present to the eyes of an astonished world the extreme reverse of all these bad qualities and conditions. NewOrleans, while under the dominion of Spain, was lost in imbecility, idleness, and folly; but now, after experiencing only fourteen years of American freedom, it is advancing rapidly towards the rank of a first-rate commercial city, by its enterprise and spirit, its growth in wealth and population. And so will it fare with Cuba, with Mexico, and Peru, when they become integral parts of the United States, and exchange their present penury and bondage for the freedom and abundance

that invariably follow the foot-tracks of a popular go

vernment.

How strange and portentous is the contrast between the steady and progressive policy of the United States, and the supine indifference of the British government! Britain has lavished the life's blood of a hundred thousand of her bravest warriors, and expended uncounted millions, in rescuing Spain from the yoke of France; and yet she cannot, or will not, acquire a single inch of territory, in any quarter of the globe, from the Spanish government; while the United States, without sacrificing the life of a single citizen, and at the expense of only twenty millions of dollars, have, within the course of a few years, obtained from France and Spain the exclusive sovereignty over a fair and fertile dominion, at least twenty times the extent of all the British isles taken together.

Why does not England, as part of the indemnity due to her from Spain, transfer to her own sceptre the sovereignty of Cuba; seeing that the Havanna commands the passage from the Gulf of Mexico? Why does she not take possession of Panama on the south, and Darien on the north, and join the waters of the Atlantic with those of the Pacific ocean, in order to resuscitate her drooping commerce? Or is it her intention still to slumber on, until she is awakened from the stupefaction of her dreams by the final fall of Spanish America, and of her own North American provinces, beneath the ever-widening power of the United States; and by the floating of the Russian flag, in token of Russian sovereignty, over the Grecian Archipelago, and on the towers of Constantinople? Are all her national glories to be blotted out in one hemisphere, by a power but recently emerged from the snows and barbarism of the north; and in the other hemisphere, to be trampled into the dust by the gigantic footsteps of her own child? Is the heathen mythology of Jupiter and Saturn to be verified in the nineteenth century?

The island of Cuba would soon exhibit another, and a better aspect, under the vigorous dominion of Britain,

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than she now presents, under the forlorn and beggarly government of Spain. By her free and equal laws, by the weight of her capital, by the skill, industry, spirit, and enterprise of her people, Britain would soon render that island a powerful nation in itself, and a most valuable outwork of her own maritime empire. By the possession of Panama and Darien, and the junction of the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean, England might command the commerce of the east and west, and pour such a floodtide of wealth over all her home territory as would relieve her people from the pressure of their national burdens, and give to their productive labour an unimpeded course, and an abundant recompense. Doubtless, the proposals made to the British government, in the years 1792 and 1798, by the Spanish American delegates, for the emancipation of their country, and the junction of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and which have been already adverted to in a preceding chapter, on the Commerce of the United States, are to be found in the Office of the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, in London.

Notwithstanding the shattered state of the European system of finance, and the consequent weakness. of the governments of Europe, it is more than ever incumbent upon the United States to lay the foundation of an ample, permanent, and growing internal revenue, arising from home taxation; because, whenever Europe becomes generally embroiled again, America will find that she now fills too large a space in the eye of the world to preserve her neutrality, and to keep aloof from the conflict. In spite of the apparent calm, the elements of an approaching tempest are every where visible in the European horizon. There are no symptoms of continuous health and long life in the coalition of the allied sovereigns. Russia already exhibits signs of jealousy at the naval preponderance and commercial influence of Britain; while England is alarmed at the enormous strides of the Russian government towards absolute ascendency on the continent of Europe: she refuses to join, and looks with apprehension on the Holy

H

League, whose avowed principles are so extremely simple, not to say childish, that they cannot fail to rouse the suspicion of every one that is acquainted with the steady, strait-forward progress by which Russia has enlarged her territory, swollen her population, and augmented her power, during the last hundred years. Austria and Prussia both tremble at the overgrown greatness of their imperial neighbour; and see, in the increase of that greatness, the forerunner of their own doom.

Meanwhile, France, whose habitual intrigue and diplomatic cunning never sleep, whatever be the form of her government, will labour incessantly to sow the seed and ripen the harvest of dissension among the coalesced sovereigns; and will strain every nerve to embroil Britain with Russia and America, that she herself may profit amidst the general confusion. The United States will be called upon to take sides in the Europeon contest; and they will, both government and people, range themselves against England, whom they hate with all their heart, and soul, and strength, as their naval and commercial rival, who must, at all events, be exterminated. They must, therefore, build up their financial system on a broad basis, in order to maintain a long and desperate struggle-since the British lion will not yield in subjection, while a drop of blood plays around and warms his heart; he will not lie down in bondage until the whole lifetide shall have been drained from out his veins.

CHAPTER V.

On the Government, Policy, Laws, &c. of the
United States.

As all the governments of this country are purely elective, and founded upon the full sovereignty of the people, the study of political economy ought to make an essential part of American education; whereas, excepting in the State of Virginia, our schools and colleges generally neglect this important branch of philosophical inquiry altogether. Indeed, it is far too fashionable a doctrine in the United States, that a man may be a very profound political economist, although his ignorance on all other subjects is quite conspicuous, and his general dulness no less manifest. But, in fact, there is no royal road to this science; and although, in an hereditary aristocracy, men are born legislators, yet no privileges of birth can confer a knowledge of political philosophy. And I would advise those sapient personages, who insist upon the extreme facilities of this science, and that its whole compass lies within the range of the every-day exertions of ordinary understandings, to learn the individual application of the argumentum ad modestium to themselves, by a perusal of. the political effusions of the greatest philosophers and statesmen of ancient Greece; for instance, the Treatise of Plato on the best constitution of a Republic; the elaborate work of Aristotle on Politics, and the schemes of Isocrates for obviating or preventing the external quarrels of the Greeks among themselves, by directing a constant hostility against foreign nations, more especially against the monarchy of Persia.

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