poured into the wide and fertile valley of the Mississippi, with
eddying whirl has passed to the coast of the Pacific, from the West
and the East the tides are rushing towards each other--and the mind is
carried to the day when all the cultivable and will be inhabited, and
the American people will sign for more wildernesses to conquer. But
there is here a physico-political problem presented for our solution.
Were it was purely physical--your past triumphs would leave but little
doubt of your capacity to solve it.

A community, which, when less than twenty thousand, conceived the
grand project of crossing the White Mountains, and, unaided, save by
the stimulus which jeers and prophecies of failure gave, successfully
executed the herculean work, might well be impatient, if it were
suggested that a physical problem was before us, too difficult for
their mastery. The history of man teaches that high mountains and wide
deserts have resisted the permanent extension of empire, and have
formed the immutable boundaries of States. From time to time, under
some able leader, have the hordes of the upper plains of Asia swept
over the adjacent country, and rolled their conquering columns over
Southern Europe. Yet, after the lapse of a few generations, the
physical law to which I have referred, has asserted its supremacy, and
the boundaries of those States differ little now from those which
obtained three thousand years ago. Rome flew her conquering eagles
over the then known world, and has now subsided into the little
territory on which her great city was originally built. The Alps and
the Pyrenees have been unable to restrain imperial France; but her
expansion was a leverish action; her advance and her retreat were
tracked with blood, and those mountain ridges are the re-established
limits of her empire. Shall the Rocky Mountains prove a dividing
barrier to us? Were ours a central consolidated government, instead of