The Physical Development of the United States.
Nations are intelligent, moral persons, existing for the ends of their own happiness and the improvement of mankind. They grow, mature, and decline. Their physical development, being most obvious, always attracts our attention first. Certainly we can not too well understand the material condition of our own country. "I think," said Burke, sadly, addressing the British House of Commons, just after the American war; "I think I can trace all the calamities of this country to the single source of not having had steadily before our eyes a general, comprehensive, well-connected, and well-proportioned view of the whole of our dominions, and a just sense of their bearings and relations."
Trace on a map the early boundaries of the United States, as they were defined by the treaty of Versailles, in 1783. See with what jealousy Great Britain abridged their enjoyment of the fisheries on the north-east coast, and how tenaciously she locked up against them the St. Lawrence, the only possible channel between their inland regions and the Atlantic ocean. Observe how Spain, while retaining the vast and varied solitudes which spread out westward from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean, at the same time assigned the thirty-first parallel of latitude as the southern boundary of the United States, and thus shut them out from access by that river or otherwise to the Gulf of Mexico. See now how the massive and unpassable Alleghany Mountains traversed the new Republic from north to south, dividing it into two regions: the inner one rich in agricultural
