resources, but without markets; and the outer one adapted to defenos and markets, but wanting the materials for commerce. Were not the Europeans astute in thus confining the United States within limits which would probably render an early separation of them inevitable, and would also prevent equally the whole and each of the future parts from ever becoming a formidable or even a really independent Atlantic power! They had cause for their jealousies. They were monarchies, and they largely divided the western hemisphere between them. The United States aimed to become a maritime nation, and their success would tend to make that hemisphere not only republican, but also independent of Europe. That success was foreseen. A British statesman, in describing the American Colonies just before the peace, had said to his countrymen: "Your children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood than they spread from families to communities, and from villages to nations."
The United States, thus confined landward, betook themselves at once to the sea, whose broad realm lay unappropriated; and, having furnished themselves with shipping and seamen equal to the adventurous pursuit of the whale fishery under the poles, they presented themselves in European ports as a maritime people. Afterward, their well-chosen attitude of neutrality, in a season of general war, enabled them to become carriers for the world. But they never for got, for a moment, the importance of improving their position on the coast. France was now the owner of the province of Louisiana, which stretched all along the western bank of the Mississippi. She wisely sold a possession, which she was unable to defend, to the United States, who thus, only twenty years after the treaty of Versailles, secured the exclusive navigation of the great river; and, descending from their inland frontier, established themselves on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Spain soon saw that her colonies on that coast, east of the Mississippi, now virtually surrounded by the United States, were untenable. She, therefore, for an equivalent, ceded the Floridas, and retired behind the Saline; and so the sea-coast of the United States was now seen to begin at that river, and passing along the gulf, and around the peninsula, and beyond the capes, to terminate at the St. Croix, in the Bay of Fundy.
