decades of its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to look forward to half shrank from it.  Among them there may have been a handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the sculptor does his block, and body forth in imagination the glory hidden within.  That which these may have faintly imagined stands before us palpable if not yet perfected, the amorphous veil of the shapely figure hewn away, and the long toil of drill and chisel only in too much danger of being forgotten.

Population, the most convenient gauge of national strength and progress, is far from being a universally reliable one.  We shall find sometimes as wide a difference between two given millions as between two given individuals.  Either may grow without doing much else.  They may direct their energies to different fields.  Compared with the United States, France and Germany, for example, have advanced but little in population.  They have, however, done wonders for themselves and the world by activities which we have, in comparison, neglected.  The old city of London gains in wealth as it loses in inhabitants.

[Illustration:  Hoe’s new perfecting printing-press, printing 12,000 double impressions per hour, and the old Ephrata press.]

Yet success in the multiplication of souls within their own borders—­depopulate as they may elsewhere—­is eagerly coveted and regularly measured by all the nations.  Since 1790, when we set them the example, they have one by one adopted the rule of numbering heads every five, six or ten years, recognizing latterly as well, more and more, the importance of numbering other things, until men, women and children have come to be embedded in a medley of steam-engines, pigs, newspapers, schools, churches and bolts of calico.  For twenty centuries this taking of stock by governments had been an obsolete practice, until revived by the framers of the American Constitution and made a vital part of that instrument.  The right of the most—­and not of the richest, the best, the bravest, the cleverest, or the oldest in blood—­to rule being formally recognized and set down on paper, it became necessary to ascertain at stated intervals who were the most.  The lords of the soil, instead of being inducted into power on the death of their parents with great pother of ointment, Te Deum, heraldry, drum and trumpet, were chosen every ten years by a corps of humble knights of the pencil and schedule.

To these disposers of empire, the enhancement and complication of whose toil has been a labor of love with each decennial Congress, we owe the knowledge that eighty years, out of the hundred, brought the people of the Union up from a tally of 3,929,214 in 1790 to 38,558,371 in 1870, and that down to the beginning of the last decade the rate of increment adhered closely to 35 per cent.  On that basis of growth the latest