"How quick we found what a pride and what an interest we had in the magnitude, power, and prosperity of our country, and how firmly we were attached to its beneficent government.
"The history of modern civilization in Europe has shown a constant struggle for many years for what they call the balance of power.
"Five leading nations, speaking five different languages, and having different modes of thought and life, have watched and emulated each other, and each at times has had the reputation of being the most powerful. Fifty years ago France was foremost, today Prussia is the first power in Europe. These changes may be traced almost indefinitely.
"In all the past, the national life, the national pride has grown with the growth of civilization.
"It would be impossible that a nation should become great or powerful without a national self-love that wrought glowing pictures of its manifest destiny.
"We find ourselves possessed of a country whose productive extent is far greater than all Europe, with its 300 million population, put together.
"Beginning a little less than a hundred years ago with a population of three million, it has doubled every twenty-five years, if we shall reach forty-eight million in 1875, which scarcely admits of a doubt. The whole emigration added is less than six million.
"At the same rate of increase for the next one hundred years our population will reach the enormous figures of seven hundred and sixty-eight millions. But suppose we shall touch the resistance, namely the lack of territory to supply so great a population with food; yet we may safely estimate reaching five hundred million, and the population equally distributed will then be about equal in density to the present population of Massachusetts.
"I have neither time nor is it necessary to describe the variety of climate embracing the tropic and the temperate zones, nor the vastness, nor the fertility, nor the mineral and coal resources of our country.