M. Simonin calculates, from these data, that the average advance westward of the center of population has been, since 1790, 50 miles per decade, or 5 miles a year. This is wonderful enough for the statistician, and still more suggestive to the philosopher and the poet, but there is another fact which M. Simonin does not mention, and which shows more impres sively this "grand movement" of humanity in the New World. We must bear in mind that his calculations thus far refer only to the center, not to the vanguard and flanks of the movement. When Sir C. Lyell was traveling in this country, exploring its geology, more than forty years ago, he was surprised at the rapid outspread of the people as quite phenomenal in the history of the world. "In fifty years," he wrote, "the State of Ohio alone had about equaled in population all the population of European blood in all the vast regions conquered by Cortes and Pizarro, to say nothing of her superiority in wealth and civilization." But he witnessed a similar phenomenon every-where that he went; and, alluding to another distinguished foreigner who had passed over the country some years before his own visit, he says, "De Tocqueville calculated that along the border of the United States, from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, extending a distance of 1,200 miles, as the bird flies, the whites advance every year at a mean rate of 17 miles, and he truly observes that there is a grandeur and solemnity in this gradual and continuous march of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains. He compares it to a deluge of men rising, unabatedly and daily driven onward by the hand of God." This was indeed a "grand march" of humanity, armed with the ax and the spade, advancing to the trumpet of destiny, felling the forests, planting the prairies, scaling the mountains, building school-houses, churches, and halls of justice, railroads, and canals-bearing with it the institutions and energies of Christian civilization and the completest liberties of man. But a phenomenon was to appear which these travelers could not have anticipated; they saw the center of population moving 50 miles a decade, the vanguard and flanks 17 miles a year: but events-especially the discovery of gold on the Pacific coast-were soon to interrupt the comparative regularity of the march, and vanguard and flanks, disregarding ordinary restrictions and centers of gravity, were

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to break up, charging like cavalry on all prominent points, for the immediate subjugation of the great field, and pausing only before the waves of the Pacific.

But let us return to M. Simonin's figures. Having ascertained the rate of the movement of the center of population, he insists that his further calculations can be relied on, that the proofs are mathematical. The growth of nearly every great human interest in the United States, where political freedom allows the free action of natural causes, is normal and susceptible of exact statement. Accordingly, he proceeds to show how normal has been the progress of population for the successive decades of ninety years, and deduces therefrom the ratio of increase as the means of the solution of some still more striking problems respecting the future.

Making abundant allowance for contingencies, for variations in immigration, for losses by war, as in our civil struggle, he arrives at the conclusion as logically reliable that the population doubles in periods of from twenty-five to twenty-eight years. Twenty-five years have been usually assumed to be the necessary period. M. Simonin makes his calculations, therefore, on very safe grounds; and, taking what he calls the "magnificent labors of the Bureau of Statistics" as his data, he proceeds to determine a curious problem, namely, When shall the center of population complete its movement and "all the surface of the immense country be filled with inhabitants?" This we call a "curious problem;" to most of us Americans it is simply such, but to a European savant it is a profoundly interesting scientific datum. M. Simonin speaks of it as a "grande année economique" in the history of the world, and says that in "amusing" himself with his calculation of it, he was startled at the fewness of the centuries necessary for the great consummation, and the formidable millions of men which will then throng the United States."

Reaffirming that the ratios of growth can be relied on, that "they have never failed one minute," he determines the period for what he calls the "complete population of the country to be about three hundred years-at most three hundred and twenty-a period which, to us fast Americans, seems indefinitely distant, but which appears to a European as quite at hand. M. Simonin becomes emphatic on the subject. "Yes,

Messieurs," he exclaims to his French confrères, "hardly three hundred and twenty years are necessary for this result; only about that term separates us from the accession of Henry IV.! What, then, are three hundred years? We traverse this period through the lives of a few of our forefathers. In this period the United States will have completed their grand march westward, and, in the same time, will have filled with population all the prairies, all the West, all the coast of the Pacific."

Having determined, as he believes, this problem, M. Simonin faces another, namely, What will be the population of the Republic at this great consummation? The result is startling to him, and, indeed, must seem incredible to most of us; but before we approach it a hardly less striking, yet more credible, one presents itself; one which must affect profoundly the future of both the Old World and the New, and which we may properly enough here interpolate, though it requires us to deviate somewhat from M. Simonin's formula: When will the population of the Republic equal the present aggregate population of Europe?

The actual ratio of our increase will validly apply for at least one age of human life to come; M. Simonin thinks it will " for one or two ages;" immigration and the general prosperity of the country will, we can hardly doubt, go on at the present rate during the life-time of our youngest children; it is not improbable that they will go on, for that time, with increasing ratios. We have now a territory about equal to that of Europe. The Hon. Schuyler Colfax, when Speaker of the House of Representatives, citing official records at Washington, claimed for us some thousands of square miles more than the territory of Europe; but, be the difference more or less, it can hardly affect the present question. If we take, not M. Simonin's shortest term for the doubling of the population, which is the usually admitted term of twenty-five years, nor his longest term of twenty-eight years, but the intermediate term of twentyseven years, our population will equal the actual population of all Europe in about seventy years. According to the Tables of Mortality there are some thousands of children now in their cradles at our firesides who will see that time.

The fact of such a result is, in itself, startling; the fact of its proximity renders it doubly startling. It will be, as it

were, to-morrow in the history of nations; and its inevitable consequences cannot fail to suggest grave anticipations to the statesmen and thinkers of both hemispheres.

What, it has been asked, would be the national consciousness of any one European people who should have a similar prospect? What of the Germans, for example, if they could calculate, with equal confidence, that within seventy years their flag will wave from the North Cape to Malta, from Lisbon to Moscow, over a population homogeneous in all vital respects -in their social institutions, their politics, their economic interests, and, mostly, in their blood-all speaking the same language, having perfect religious and civil liberty, with the best means of financial prosperity, of popular education, and of household comfort known on the earth?

An equivalent prospect is not only probable, but apparently certain, for the United States. It depends, of course, on the continued unity of the nation, but we will not doubt that, for the short period here given. Every patriotic motive increasingly guarantees that unity, and this grand prospect itself must tend to reinforce every such motive. Personal pride is usually a vice, but, in certain cases, it may be a virtue; national pride is always a virtue; it is an essential element of patriotism. Every American citizen must feel that this increasing glory of his country is reflected on himself and on his children. Whatever motive of discord (alleged to be justifiable or unjustifiable) may have heretofore endangered our unity, any citizen who would now abet intrigues which could defeat this great future, who could fire on the flag of his country, of such a country, is unworthy to have been born under its sky, unworthy of a grave in its soil. He is the enemy, not only of his country, but of the human race. Patriotism is, to be sure, a sentiment, but it need not be sentimentalism; for what are sentiments but heightened ideas, convictions of the heart as well as of the head, opinions incandescent? Every reasonable conviction, every intelligent opinion, respecting the interests of the country, or the self-interest of its citizens—and with us they are logically identical-demands the inviolability of the Union. The public conscience should never again allow it to be a subject of doubt. The one only serious peril to it has been extinguished. All the present and possible

interests of the nation are harmonious, not to say identical. The South, the Interior, the West, are rapidly becoming assimilated to the North and East, by manufactures and commerce. Georgia is becoming a southern Massachusetts. Distances and local isolations are mostly annihilated by the modern improvements in communication. Nearly all the remote States and Territories are, to-day, practically nearer the political center than the remote colonies were at the time of the organization of the Republic. One of our best scientific authorities has shown that the geography, the very topography, of the country forbids disunion.* Were the States of the Mississippi Valley to organize by themselves, they would impair their relations to their chief domestic markets; they would be wedged in between two great powers on the east and west, and would have as their own but one outlet to the seas, the mouth of the Mississippi. Were the South to secede, it would not only impair its relations to its best domestic markets, but it would provoke endless struggles with the West about the outlet of the Mississippi-a consideration which powerfully influenced the West in the Civil War. Were the Atlantic or the Pacific States to essay a separation from the Union, choosing, respectively, the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains as their natural boundaries, they would thereby not only impair their chief interior commercial resources in the valley of the Mississippi, but they would render themselves liable to the continual hostile reaction of the latter, hedged in, if not crushed in, between them. What an expense, too, in military provisions against one another would be implied by such divisions! The greatest feature on the face of the continent is the valley of the Mississippi. By its peculiar situation it has become a principal guarantee of the Union.

What in former times were considered to be the "natural boundaries" of nations-great rivers and mountain rangesare no longer such, especially with us. The new means of communication to which we have alluded have obliterated these old barriers, and are miracles of our times, changing the face of the world. The philosopher must consider it a remarkable coincidence, the Christian thinker a remarkable providence, that these scientific miracles have been contemporaneous with the

*Professor Draper's "History of the Civil War."