WARS and BATTLES
From Ancient Greece - to modern day.

The climate of the Union is upon the whole preferable to that of Europe, and its natural advantages are not less great; it is therefore evident that its population will at some future time be proportionate to our own. Europe, divided as it is between so many different nations, and torn as it has been by incessant wars and the barbarous manners of the Middle Ages, has notwithstanding, attained a population of 410 inhabitants to the square league. What cause can prevent the United States from having as numerous a population in time?

"The time will therefore come when one hundred and fifty millions of men will be living in North America, equal in condition, the progeny of one race, owing their origin to the same cause, and preserving the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same manners, and imbued with the same opinions, propagated under the same forms. The rest is uncertain, but this is certain; and it is a fact new to the world, a fact fraught with such portentous consequences as to baffle the effort, even of the imagination."

Let us turn from the French statesman writing in 1835, to an English statesman who is justly regarded as the highest authority in all statistical subjects, and who described the United States only five years ago.

Macgregor tells us -

"The states which, on the ratification of independence, formed the American Republican Union were thirteen, viz.: "Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Kew York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

"The foregoing thirteen states (the whole inhabited territory of which, with the exception of a few small settlements, was confined to the region extending between the Alleghany Mountains and the Atlantic) were those which existed at the period when they became an acknowledged separate and independent federal sovereign power. The thirteen stripes of the standard or flag of the United States continue to represent the original number. The stars have multiplied to twenty-six, according as the number of states has increased.

"The territory of the thirteen original states of the Union, including Maine and Vermont, comprehended a superficies of 371,124 English square miles, that of the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 120,354; that of France, including Corsica, 214,910; that of the Austrian empire, including Hungary and all the Imperial states, 257,540 English square miles.

"The present superficies of the twenty-six constitutional states of the Anglo-American Union, and the District of Columbia, and territories of Florida, include 1,029,025 square miles; to which it we add the Northwest, or Wisconsin Territory, east of the Mississippi, and bound by Lake Superior on the north, and Michigan on the east, and occupying at least 100,000 square miles, and then add the great western region, not yet well defined territories, but at the most limited calculation comprehending 700,000 square miles, the whole unbroken in its vast length and breadth by foreign nations, comprehends a portion of the earth's surface equal to 1,729,025 English, or 1,296,770 geographical square miles."

We may add that the population of the states when they declared their independence was about two millions and a half; it is now twenty-three millions.

I have quoted Macgregor, not only on account of the clear and full view which ho gives of the progress of America to the date when he wrote, but because his description may be contrasted with what the United States have become even since his book appeared. Only three years after the time when Macgregor thus wrote, the American president truly stated:

"Within less than four years the annexation of Texas to the Union has been consummated; all conflicting title to the Oregon Territory, south of the 49th degree of north latitude, adjusted; and New Mexico and Upper California have been acquired by treaty. The area of these several territories contains 1,193,061 square miles, or 763,559,040 acres; while the area of the remaining twenty-nine states, and the territory not yet organized into states east of the Rocky Mountains, contains 2,059,513 square miles, or 1,318,126,058 acres.

These estimates show that the territories recently acquired, and over which our exclusive jurisdiction and dominion have been extended, constitute a country more than half as large as all that which was held by the United States before their acquisition.

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