The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate extraction for her broad tropical empire.  A newspaper of August 20, 1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of “the sloop Mississippi, Capt.  Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th inst.”  They had “laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez,” where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals numbering “above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio from Virginia and the Carolinas.”  The Connecticut men doubtless came back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen; and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in unusual force.  The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina.  The cash value to the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files into Castle Garden.  The German came with the Celt in almost equal force—­enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop, Riedesel and Knyphausen.  The attention drawn to the colonies by the ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the contest.

But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and external defence against the wolves of the deep.  It barely equaled the original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who were, by general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners of the land.  It fell far short of the numbers that had constituted, two centuries earlier, the European republic from which our federation borrowed its name.  The task, too, of the occidental United States was double.  Instead of being condensed into a small, wealthy and defensible territory, they had at once to win their independence from a maritime power stronger than Spain, and to redeem from utter crudeness and turn into food, clothing and the then recognized appliances of civilized life the wilderness thus secured.  The result could not vary nor be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in peace, must be slow and wearing, was quite as certain.  It is dreary to look back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier