to meet the actual existing needs, not by insisting upon the application of some abstract shibboleth to all our new possessions alike, no matter how incongruous this application might sometimes be.

Over by far the major part of the territory, however, our people spread in such numbers during the course of the nineteenth century that we were able to build up State after State, each with exactly the same complete local independence in all matters affecting purely its own domestic interests as in any of the original thirteen States, each owing the same absolute fealty to the Union of all the States which each of the original thirteen States also owes, and, finally, each having the same proportional right to its share in shaping and directing the common policy of the Union which is possessed by any other State, whether of the original thirteen or not.

This process now seems to us part of the natural order of things, but it was wholly unknown until our own people devised it.  It seems to us a mere matter of course, a matter of elementary right and justice, that in the deliberations of the national representative bodies the representatives of a State which came into the Union but yesterday stand on a footing of exact and entire equality with those of the commonwealth whose sons once signed the Declaration of Independence.

But this way of looking at the matter is purely modern and in its origin purely American.  When Washington, during his Presidency, saw new States come into the Union on a footing of complete equality with the old, every European nation which had colonies still administered them as dependencies, and every other mother country treated the colonists not as a self-governing equal, but as a subject.

The process which we began has since been followed by all the great people who were capable both of expansion and of self-government, and now the world accepts it as the natural process, as the rule; but a century and a quarter ago it was not merely exceptional—­it was unknown.

This, then, is the great historic significance of the movement of continental expansion, in which the Louisiana Purchase was the most striking single achievement.  It stands out in marked relief even among the feats of a nation of pioneers, a nation whose people have, from the beginning, been picked out by a process of natural selection from among the most enterprising individuals of the nations of western Europe.

The acquisition of the territory is a credit to the broad and far-sighted statesmanship of the great statesmen to whom it was immediately due, and, above all, to the aggressive and masterful character of the hardy pioneer folk to whose restless energy these statesmen gave expression and direction, whom they followed rather than led.  The history of the land comprised within the limits of the Purchase is an epitome of the entire history of