The Hillsborough Recorder

STATE OF AMERICA.

In forty years the Americans have quadrupled their population, and stretched their territory from the waters of the Ohio and Mississippi to the Pacific. They have assumed, as it by instinct, a mighty system of private law; a bold precision of diplomacy; a large code of commerce and national interests. They have taken the lead in vigour of improvement and practical science. Mendicity is almost unknown; the demand of labour is immense, and its rewards abundant. Church dissensions are heard of only in the history of foreigners; slavery itself, the plague spot of human society, is fast verging to decay. Agriculture, the mechanic arts and manufactures are advancing with mighty strides. The bowels of the Alleghanies are pouring forth their treasures of iron, coal, and lead; and the huge western Savannas, trodden a little while ago only by the bison, the cougar, or the wolf, are echoing the noises of forges, looms, and bloomeries. Since 1800, the export trade of the union has advanced from twenty-three millions of dollars, to more than eighty millions. Their tonnage amounts to more than a million and a half; being nearly a treble increase since the beginning of the present century. In the Hudson alone, the number of merchant vessels is at this hour nearly equal, and twelve years ago was much superior to the whole shipping of Scotland. Their steamboats almost double in numerical amount, and far surpass in tonnage and velocity, the vapour ships of Britain.
Before the extent of their canals, the forts of the modern world shrink into insignificance: nay, the mighty ways and aqueducts of imperial Roman herself, are brought into hazardous comparison. The number is at least twenty: and the greatest length stretches to three hundred and six miles. Yet the biggest of these majestic ducts, was accomplished at the sole charge of a state of little more than a single million of inhabitants.—The navy of the union amounts to more than twenty ships of the line, besides numerous frigates and gun boats. And the whole of this enormous mass of vigour, wealth and population, is secured by defended by a standing army of little more than five thousand men.
Nor are there any internal taxes; any hateful pryings into income or domestic privacy. The provincial governments alone levy a direct impost of about a dollar on each inhabitant. This is to be a free people. This it is to have sprung from the bosom of the British empire, like Pallas from the brain of Jove, full grown and armed in proof. Do we turn sick at these advances? The mutual trade of the U. S. and British empire now exceeds fifty millions of dollars; an amount quite equal to the trade of the republic with all the rest of the globe. And is that any food for jealousy? It is as it ought to be, the strongest cement of friendship. We rejoice in this growing up of freedom and power in the free latitudes of the western world We glory in this living bulwark against the worse than pagan excursions of legitimate fanaticism. we look forward with joy to the illustrious period, when the growing tide of population shall have fully fertilized the barbarity of the western wilderness; and a mighty race, one in sentiment, one in virtue, one in interest, speaking in no more than a double tongue, shall be busied in lighting up and transmitting the lamp of knowledge, without interruption—from the wolf's dens of Kenai, "to the lunar fires of Huron."