a blow.  When the mother-country, under the guidance of an ignorant king and short-sighted ministers, undertook to act upon the antiquated theory that the new communities were merely groups of trading-stations, the political bond of connection was severed; yet the war which ensued was not like the war which had but just now been so gloriously ended by the victory of Wolfe.  It was not a struggle between two different peoples, like the French of the Old Regime and the English, each representing antagonistic theories of how political life ought to be conducted.  But, like the Barons’ War of the thirteenth century and the Parliament’s War of the seventeenth, it was a struggle sustained by a part of the English people in behalf of principles that time has shown to be equally dear to all.  And so the issue only made it apparent to an astonished world that instead of one there were now two Englands, alike prepared to work with might and main toward the political regeneration of mankind.

Let us consider now to what conclusions the rapidity and unabated steadiness of the increase of the English race in America must lead us as we go on to forecast the future.  Carlyle somewhere speaks slightingly of the fact that the Americans double their numbers every twenty years, as if to have forty million dollar-hunters in the world were any better than to have twenty million dollar-hunters!  The implication that Americans are nothing but dollar-hunters, and are thereby distinguishable from the rest of mankind, would not perhaps bear too elaborate scrutiny.  But during the present lecture we have been considering the gradual transfer of the preponderance of physical strength from the hands of the war-loving portion of the human race into the hands of the peace-loving portion,—­into the hands of the dollar-hunters, if you please, but out of the hands of the scalp-hunters.  Obviously to double the numbers of a pre-eminently industrious, peaceful, orderly, and free-thinking community, is somewhat to increase the weight in the world of the tendencies that go towards making communities free and orderly and peaceful and industrious.  So that, from this point of view, the fact we are speaking of is well worth considering, even for its physical dimensions.  I do not know whether the United States could support a population everywhere as dense as that of Belgium; so I will suppose that, with ordinary improvement in cultivation and in the industrial arts, we might support a population half as dense as that of Belgium,—­and this is no doubt an extremely moderate supposition.  Now a very simple operation in arithmetic will show that this means a population of fifteen hundred millions, or more than the population of the whole world at the present date.  Another very simple operation in arithmetic will show that if we were to go on doubling our numbers, even once in every twenty-five years, we should reach that stupendous figure at about the close of the twentieth century,—­that