From "a series of letters to a friend in England," in 1793, "tending to
shew the probable rise and grandeur of the American Empire":

"_It struck me as a natural object of enquiry to what a future increase
and elevation of magnitude and grandeur the spreading empire of America
might attain, when a country had thus suddenly risen from an uninhabited
wild, to the quantum of population necessary to govern and regulate its
own administration._"

G. IMLAY
("A captain in the American Army during the late war, and a commissioner
for laying out land in the back settlements").




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


I address the reader as living in the land from which the pioneers of
France went out to America; first, because I wrote these chapters in that
land, a few steps from the Seine; second, because I should otherwise have
to assume the familiarity of the reader with much that I have gathered
into these chapters, though the reader may have forgotten or never known
it; and, third, because I wish the reader to look at these new-world
regions from without, and, standing apart and aloof, to see the present