ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the
contest.

But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and
a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of
fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and
external defence against the wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the
original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who
were, by general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners
of the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had constituted,
two centuries earlier, the European republic from which our federation
borrowed its name. The task, too, of the occidental United States
was double. Instead of being condensed into a small, wealthy and
defensible territory, they had at once to win their independence
from a maritime power stronger than Spain, and to redeem from utter
crudeness and turn into food, clothing and the then recognized
appliances of civilized life the wilderness thus secured. The result
could not vary nor be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in
peace, must be slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to
look back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades
of its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to look
forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have been a
handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the sculptor does
his block, and body forth in imagination the glory hidden within. That
which these may have faintly imagined stands before us palpable if not
yet perfected, the amorphous veil of the shapely figure hewn away,
and the long toil of drill and chisel only in too much danger of being
forgotten.

Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength and