“What shall be said of the notion of an empire extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the North Pole to the Equator? Of the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, of its universal monarchy over the whole of North America? Now, I will ask, which is the portion of the globe that has attained the highest degree of civilization and even of power—Asia, with its vast empires of Turkey, India, and China, or Europe divided into near twenty independent sovereignties? Other powerful causes have undoubtedly largely contributed to that result; but this, the great division into ten or twelve distinct languages, must not be neglected. But all these allegations of superiority of race and destiny neither require nor deserve any answer. They are but pretences under which to disguise ambition, cupidity, or silly vanity.”
The justice of these reflections was assuredly borne out by the experience of history, but manifest destiny takes no account of past lessons.
Before these lines of Mr. Gallatin were penned, on January 19, 1848, gold was discovered in California. The announcement startled the world and opened a new era, not only to Europe, but to mankind. Extending the metallic basis, which no man better than Mr. Gallatin recognized and held to be the true solvent of money transactions, it postponed for a half century the inevitable conflict between capital and labor, the first outbreaks of which in Europe had been with difficulty suppressed, when the news of good tidings gave promise of unexpected relief. Credit revived, new enterprises of colossal magnitude were undertaken, and the demand for labor quickly exceeded the supply. Emigration to America rose to incredible proportions. Had Mr. Gallatin lived, he would have found new elements to be weighed in his nice balance of probabilities. He would no longer, as in 1839, have been compelled to say that “specie is a foreign product,” but would have given to us inestimable advice as to the proper use to be made of the vast sums taken out from our own soil. He would have been also brought to face the ethnologic problem of a continent inhabited by a single race, not Anglo-Saxon, nor Teutonic, nor yet Latin, but a composite race in which all these will be merged and blended; a new American race which, springing from a broader surface, shall rise to higher summits of intellectual power and, with a greater variety of natural qualities, achieve excellence in more numerous ways. This vision was denied to Mr. Gallatin. He died at the threshold of the new era—of the golden age. A half century has not passed since his death, and the United States has taken from her soil a value of over three thousand millions of dollars, in gold and silver (gold two thousand millions, silver one thousand millions), more than two thirds of the total amount estimated by Mr. Gallatin as the store of Europe in 1839; and has also added to her population, by immigration alone, ten millions of people, of whom but a small proportion are of the Anglo-Saxon race.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Life of Albert Gallatin, p. 546.
[20] The frigate Chesapeake was captured by the British man-of-war Leopard in June, 1807.
[21] A translation of this work, Economie Politique, was published under Jefferson's supervision in 1818.