in the United States alone. America has somewhat grown since the time when it was gravely proposed to call her "Alleghania," after a chain of mountains which, looking from this western side, may be said to skirt her eastern border, and the loftiest peaks of which are but half the height of the very passes of the Rocky Mountains.

America is becoming, not English merely, but world-embracing in the variety of its type; and as the English element has given language and history to that land, America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue. Through America, England is speaking to the world.

D

OMPHALISM

ASHING through a grove of cottonwood trees draped in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming scene; a range of huts and forts crowning a long, low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine, while the clear stream of the Republican Fork wreathed itself about the woods and bluffs. The blockhouse over which floated the Stars and Stripes was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are to measure all their miles; the "capital of the universe," or centre of the world." Not that it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the centre of its crust also moves; within the last ten years it has removed westward into Kansas from Missouri, from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for centreship is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon; London plumes herself on being the "centre of the terrestrial globe"; Boston is the "hub of the hull universe,” though the latter claim is less physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley, the Western men seem to have found the physical centre of the United States, but they claim for the Great Plains as well the intellectual as the political leadership of the whole continent. These hitherto untrodden tracts, they tell you, form the heart of the empire, from which the lifeblood must

be driven to the extremities.

must ultimately coincide.

Geographical and political centres

Connected with this belief is another Western theory- that the powers of the future must be "Continental. » Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb all Asia and Europe except Britain. North America is already cared for, as the gradual extinction of the Mexicans and absorption of the Canadians they consider certain. As for South America, the Californians are already planning an occupation of western Brazil, on the ground that the continental power of South America must start from the head waters of the great rivers and spread seaward down the streams. Even in the Brazilian climate they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to become the dominant race.

The success of this omphalism, this government from the centre, will be brought about, in the Western belief, by the necessity under which the natives on the head waters of all streams will find themselves of having the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true that railways are beating rivers, still the railways must also lead seaward to the ports, and the need for their control is still felt by the producers in the centre countries of the continent. The Upper States must everywhere command the Lower, and salt-water despotism find its end.

The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the more heartily in the Federal cause from the fact that they were battling for the freedom of the Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look forward to the time when they will have to assert, peaceably but with firmness, their right to the freedom of their railways through the North Atlantic States. Whatever their respect for New England, it cannot be expected that they are forever to permit Illinois and Ohio to be neutralized in the Senate by Rhode Island and Vermont. If it go hard with New England, it will go still harder with New York, and the Western men look forward to the day when Washington will be removed, Congress and all, to Columbus or Fort Riley.

The singular wideness of Western thought, always verging on extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. The immensity of the continent produces a kind of intoxication; there is moral dram-drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth of July oration can come up to the plain facts contained in the land commissioner's report. The public domain of the United States still consists of one thousand five hundred millions

of acres; there are two hundred thousand square miles of coallands in the country, ten times as much as in all the remaining world. In the Western Territories not yet States, there is land sufficient to bear, at the English population rate, five hundred and fifty millions of human beings.

It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the Eastern States. Buffalo is called a "Western city"; yet from New York to Buffalo is only three hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to the west of the most eastern point in all the United States. On the other hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred miles westward without quitting the United States. "The West" is eight times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will soon be eight times as strong.

The conformation of North America is widely different to that of any other continent on the globe. In Europe the glaciers of the Alps occupy the centre point, and shed the waters toward each of the surrounding seas; confluence is almost unknown. So it is in Asia; there the Indus flowing into the Arabian Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges into the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, and the Yenesei into. the Arctic Ocean, all take their rise in the central table-land. In South America the mountains form a wall upon the West, whence the rivers flow eastward in parallel lines. In North America alone are there mountains on each coast, and a trough between, into which the rivers flow together, giving in a single valley twenty-three thousand miles of navigable stream to be plowed by steamships. The map proclaims the essential unity of North America. Political geography might be a more interesting study than it has yet been made.

JOHN A. DIX

(1798-1879)

OHN A. DIX was born at Boscawen, New Hampshire, July 24th, 1798, and educated partly in the schools of his native State and partly in a French college at Montreal. He served in the War of 1812, and returning was admitted to the bar of New York. Becoming interested in politics he held various State offices until 1845, when he was elected to the United States Senate, where he served four years. He was Postmaster of New York city and Secretary of the Treasury under President Buchanan. In 1861 he became a Major-General of volunteers, and afterwards served with the same rank in the regular army. From 1866 to 1869 he was Minister to France, and from 1873 to 1875 Governor of New York. He died in New York city, April 21st, 1879. While he is more noted as a soldier and man of affairs than as a speaker, some passages from his addresses have become celebrated. Among the most often quoted is that on the Influence of Christianity on Politics, here reproduced from 'Munn's American Orator' (Boston 1853).

THE

CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS

HE influence of Christianity upon the political condition of mankind, though silent and almost imperceptible, has doubtless been one of the most powerful instruments of its amelioration. The principles and the practical rules of conduct which it prescribes; the doctrine of the natural equality of men, of a common origin, a common responsibility, and a common fate; the lessons of humility, gentleness, and forbearance, which it teaches, are as much at war with political as they are with all moral injustice, oppression, and wrong. During century after century, excepting for brief intervals, the world too often saw the beauty of the system marred by the fiercest intolerance and the grossest depravity. It has been made the confederate of monarchs in carrying out schemes of oppression and fraud. Under its banner armed multitudes have been banded together and

led on by martial prelates to wars of desolation and revenge. Perpetrators of the blackest crimes have purchased from its chief ministers a mercenary immunity from punishment.

But nearly two thousand years have passed away, and no trace is left of the millions who, under the influence of bad passions, have dishonored its holy precepts, or of the far smaller number who, in seasons of general depravation, have drunk its current of living water on the solitary mountain or in the hollow rock. Its simple maxims, outliving them all, are silently working out a greater revolution than any which the world has seen; and long as the period may seem since its doctrines were first announced, it is almost imperceptible when regarded as one of the divisions of that time which is of endless duration. To use the language of an eloquent and philosophical writer:

"The movements of Providence are not restricted to narrow bounds; it is not anxious to deduce to-day the consequences of the premises it laid down yesterday, It may defer this for ages, till the fullness of time shall come. Its logic will not be less conclusive for reasoning slowly. Providence moves through time as the gods of Homer through space; it makes a step, and years have rolled away. How long a time, how many circumstances, intervened before the regeneration of the moral powers of man by Christianity exercised its great, its legitimate function upon his social condition! Yet who can doubt or mistake its power?"