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 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

predisposition for it, just as the British mind has it to-day in Africa and India; but there was also an instinctive though covert repugnance. That the first got the upper hand, and the second was either cowed or overwhelmed, was due to the peculiar circumstances under which the several questions arose. The purchase of Louisiana came like a golden opportunity, seized in wisdom and virtue by the then chief magistrate, and it carried the general public with it. But Aaron Burr's movements, though promising an even greater prize, looked like a dishonest snatching of others' territory, and the beginning of a subjection of the constituted authorities of the land to purposes of personal ambition. And the country recoiled as promptly as it had advanced before. Florida came again in an honorable way and was accepted, while Texas was presented in a more or less questionable shape in 1844, so that it aroused the old (nearly dormant) antagonism to annexation. The defeat of Van Buren, within the democratic party at that time, the Mexican War, and the abandonment of the more valuable part of Oregon, added new elements to the opposition, and with them came the Wilmot proviso, which was but the inclined plane to which the country was being hurried, because the extension policy had become synonymous to being a pro-slavery policy. Anti-slavery agitation was then the only way by which the opposition (to further annexations) could get some foothold so as to retrieve its fatal blunder and lukewarmness in the Oregon question. It had, as to that question, been the tail of a very shallow-pated sectionalism, that looked upon every northern annexation as an act inimical to southern interests.

After the Mexican War and the acquisition of California the popular mind became self-complacent. It did not miss the piece of front on the Pacific which England or, rather, the Dominion now holds; and it seemed to say to itself: We have enough land now, let us improve it and bind it together by railroads! Thus the United States grew to be, in their own thoughts at least, a world to itself; and to all appearances it had achieved its purposes, for the country looked on all this, as if thus it had to be and could not be otherwise. We have often, with a view to test this, asked persons whether any section could in their opinion be spared, or whether they would add to any section; and invariably we received a negative reply. Only when we would mention Alaska, then there was a frequent response that this land of rain might drop out of the Union and not be missed. We found, however, also, that many had changed their mind as to Oregon (to 54°), and we presume that if ever a fair opportunity occurs for

regaining this territory and the islands in front of it the people will not again forgive the statesman that would lose it to the Union. Otherwise the public mind is content with the country as it is, with its double ocean front and double mountain backbone.

In truth and fact there is, as a sectional antinational distinction, no north, no south, no east, no west in the United States, and we may add there is neither a middle nor other extreme section. Pick out, if you please, kind reader, any such section, and how quick you will see, that you cannot put together any three states that have not outside affiliations equally as strong as those to the inside. Take Massachusetts, what two other states will you attach to it that will not rather fly from her than to her? Or will you take Virginia, the mother of states? Are any of her children homesick? Pennsylvania and New Jersey should perhaps have been married long ago, if only as a counterpoise to New York; but what other state would you add? Would you restore Delaware to Pennsylvania? Surely it were wiser to annex it to Maryland. Go where you will in the United States, and while you may find discordances within states as now formed, you cannot point to a single conjunction of states that would form a permanently cohesive entirety as against the rest of the Union. Hence we regard sectional mastery as an impossibility, whether in the sense of a solid south or a solid north or west. A single look at the map contradicts all such partisan fictions. We say, therefore, that while the country may seem to have come together by chance, the conjunction was in our opinion formed from the instinctive or, if you please, inherent necessity to have one supreme political power over all, so as to avoid a disjointedness that would have been eternal distress.

We have then found, if not a positive, at least a negative reason why the area of the present United States is our country, and in the best sense of the word. We have heard a side-denial of this, on the ground that the Union has no spot on which can be erected the permanent capital of the country. We cannot accept the reason as in itself sound, because we know that permanent seats of government are not national necessities. My native land has had Aix-la-Chapelle, Regensburg, Frankfurt, Speyer, and Wetzlar, not to speak of others that were such more temporarily. Switzerland had for hundreds of years alternating capitals. And we would not regard the removal of our federal government from Washington as in itself a fatal act, unless it were caused, as that in ancient Rome was to Constantinople, because the empire had lost its cohesiveness.

The common idea that the capital of a nation should, as near as may be, occupy the territorial centre, rests upon false premises, and we may be glad that the American public mind never could be talked into it, because we feel certain that all the places that have been suggested are much less fit for being our political centre than Washington. We refer here more particularly to St. Louis and Cincinnati.

General Washington's reasons for locating the permanent seat of the Government of the United States where it is now, were: that the site was at the head of navigation on the Potomac, therefore accessible to the largest sea vessels then known; and that the river flowed into Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the country, about two hundred miles long, from seven to twenty broad, and generally nine fathoms deep; the entire surface drained by the river's flowing into the bay being estimated at 70,000 square miles. Washington's keen eye saw that with a moderate expenditure canals and turnpikes could be constructed that would penetrate and connect the country westward, northward, and southward, and that the place would therefore combine commercial usefulness with great political and strategic advantages. These reasons are good to-day, though railroads have since changed the aspect somewhat. Let the reader take his map before him and scan the bearing of the Alleghanies, the Shenandoah mountains, the Blue Ridge and the western outspurs, the Cumberland, Smoky, Bald, and Iron mountains, and then hold the map so that it will present a stretch from Fort Duncan on the Rio Grande to Bangor Maine, and the city of Washington will appear as the breastplate of the Union, the mountains as its spinal cord, and New York and New England as its head. And by a little stretch of fancy he will detect in Florida and Michigan the arms of the Union, and other less mentionable parts of the human figure in all their broadness, lying amidst valleys and plateaus, watered by rivers like the Rio Grande, the Mississippi, the Ohio, Missouri, and others too numerous to mention. Those who may want to speculate further on the appearance of the human shape and features on the American continent will find that the course of the Mississippi has left upon its western bank the figure of a stumpy man. The top of the head is in the Minnesota front, the head itself, including nose and chin, in that of Iowa, the belly comes out by Missouri and part Arkansas, and the legs and feet with heel and toes in Arkansas and Louisiana. The man is looking eastward as if waiting for Brother Jonathan and smiling at his advance. The forehead is, we confess, rather too retreating to indicate much intellect. And with this bird's-eye

view of the general outline, Washington City will be found to be the proper central seat of the North American Union, as it was and as it is.

No other locality could answer as well for a capital as Washington. All places on the lakes would be too open to attack from Canada, and our land defence and marine operations would necessarily be inadequate. The sites on the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers would be too much inland. The cities on the Atlantic, on the Gulf, or the Pacific would, though excellent for commerce, be too much exposed to foreign inroads, besides (except Baltimore) not being central in any sense. Philadelphia was picked out by Franklin as the capital of his Union plan in 1754, but the experiences of the revolutionary war satisfied him and others that it would not answer.

The only point that is still an open question is the probability that eventually the relations of the United States to Asia will assume such a magnitude as to require a relocation of our capital with a view to the then existing political geographical conditions. We have read the reports of the Canadian engineers for tracing the line and fixing the Pacific terminus of its great railroad, and were struck by their idea that the head of North America is near Vancouver Island, and its centre the valleys of Frazier, Saskatchewan and Assiniboin rivers, the Lakes and the St. Lawrence. A friend, to whom we showed this, remarked: "This would leave both extremities of the country, the head and the feet, in the cold, and the middle exposed to draughts; while, with New England as the head, and the Rio Grande as the seat, the country would have its head cool and its other extremities warm." And we could not help coinciding with this view, because with the completion of the railroad from the Mississippi to San Diego and San Francisco along the thirty-two degrees parallel, it completes the configuration that gives to all parts, even to the lands around the estuary of the Straits of St. Juan de Fuca, the back country and the inland poise which they need. Only in case New York and New England were driven by foolish western and southern prejudices into close alliances with the Dominion, would this view be changed. We hope that such a contingency is out of the question, and will not speculate further upon it.

We are aware that public opinion in America is averse to have the capital of the Union also the centre of wealth and fashion, but we know also that this idea is but a misguided sentimentality. Commerce is not a corrupter, but a purifier and elevator of political atmospheres. The meanest politicians have ever been men that knew nothing of the civilization that