To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of
whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we
owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the
people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371
in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of
increment adhered closely to 35 per cent. On that basis of growth the
latest return falls nearly four millions short. One of the causes of
this is "too obvious" (and too disagreeable) "to mention;" but it
is inadequate. The sharp demarcation of the western frontier by the
grasshopper and the hygrometer is another, which will continue to
operate until, by irrigation, tree-planting or some other device, a
new climate can be manufactured for the Plains. The teeming West, that
of old needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh with a harvest,
has disappeared. At least what is left of it has lost the power of
suction that was wont to reach across the ocean, pull Ballys and Dorfs
up by the roots and transplant them bodily to the Muskingum and
the Des Moines. A third cause, operating more especially within
the current decade, is attributable to another mode in which that
attractive power has been exerted--the absorption from the European
purse for the construction of railways of seven or eight times as much
as the thirty-five millions in specie it took to fight through the
Revolutionary war. For a while, Hans came with his thalers, but they
outfooted him--"fast and faster" behind came "unmerciful disaster,"
and he was fain to turn his back on the land of promise and promises.
Similar set-backs, however, are interspersed through our previous
history, and the influence of the last one may be over-rated.

In truth, the Old World's fund of humanity is not sufficiently ample
to keep up the pace; and the rate of natural increase is no longer