annexation of New-Mexico and Upper California to the United States.
Thus, in sixty-five years after the peace of Versailles, the United States advanced from the Mississippi, and occupied a line stretching through eighteen degrees of latitude on the Pacific coast, overlooking the Sandwich Islands and Japan, and confronting China, (the Cathay for which Columbus was in search when he encountered the bewildering vision of San Domingo.) The new possession was divided into two Territories and the State of California. The simultaneous discovery of native gold in the sands and rocks of that State resulted in the instantaneous establishment of an active commerce, not only with our Atlantic cities, but also with the ports of South-America and with the maritime countries of Europe, with the Sandwich Islands, and even with China. Thus the United States ceased to be a mere Atlantic nation, and assumed the attitude of a great Continental Power, enjoying ocean navigation on either side, and bearing equal and similar relations to the eastern and to the western coast of the old world. The natural connections between the Atlantic and the Pacific regions are yet incomplete; but the same spirit which has brought them into political union is at work still, and no matter what the Government may do or may leave undone, the necessary routes of commerce, altogether within and across our own domain, will be established.
The number of States has increased, since this aggrandizement began, from seventeen to thirty-one; the population, from five millions to twenty-four millions; the tonnage employed in commerce, from one million to four and a half millions; and the national revenue, from ten millions to sixty millions of dollars. Within that period, Spain has retired altogether from the continent, and two considerable islands in the Antilles are all that remain of the New World which, hardly four centuries ago, the generous and pious Genoese navigator, under the patronage of Isabella, gave to the kingdoms of Castile and Leon. Great Britain tenders us now the freedom of the fisheries and of the St. Lawrence, on conditions of favor to the commerce of her colonies, and even deliberates on the policy of releasing them from their allegiance. The influences of the United
