crossed the Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne and he ascended the Big Tombigbee in a comfortable steamboat. From Tuscaloosa he shot athwart the wilds of Alabama, over Indian grounds that bloody battles have rendered memorable. He traversed Georgia and the Carolinas, ranged along the base of the mountains of Virginia; and for three months more he enjoyed one perpetual, unvarying, ever-coming, spring -that most delicious season of the year- till, by the middle of June, he found himself in the fogs of the Passamaquoddy where tardy summer was even then hesitating whether it was time to come. And yet he had never been off the soil of his own country! The flag that he saw on the summit of the fortress on the lakes near New Orleans was like that which floated from the staff on the hills of old Fort Sullivan, in the easternmost extremity of Maine; and the morning gun that startled his slumbers among the rocky battlements of the Bay of Fundy, was not answered till many minutes after on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and hours after on the shores of the Bay of San Francisco in California."
The political unity of the United States appeared to him quite as wonderful as its territorial extent. " What nation on earth presents such a spectacle as the United States of North America of a confederated government over such a vast extent of territory so complicated, with so many varied interests, and yet moving so harmoniously? I went within the walls of the Capitol at Washington, and there, under the star-spangled banners that wave amid its domes. I found the representatives of thirty States - nations, in many senses, they may be called - that have within them each the germ of a greater people than many of the proud, now tottering, principalities of Europe; all speaking or learning the same language, all acting with one heart and all burning with the same enthusiasm - the love and glory of this great Republic."
The " manifest destiny " of this nation, as arbiter of the political fortunes of the Western Hemisphere, did not es-