our growth in numbers.  When the first Congress of the old Union met, our territory was confined to a strip of land on the western shore of the Atlantic,—­and that territory was but sparsely settled.  When the thirty-sixth Congress broke up, our territory had extended to the Pacific, on which we had two States, while other communities there were preparing to become States.  It did seem as if Coleridge’s “august conception” was about to become a great fact.  “The possible destiny of the United States of America,” said that mighty genius, “as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august conception.”  To all appearance in 1860, there would be a hundred millions of freemen here, and not far from twenty millions of slaves, at the close of the nineteenth century; and middle-aged men were not unreasonable in their expectation of seeing the splendid spectacle.  The rate of increase in population that we had known warranted their most sanguine hopes.  Such a nation,—­a nation that should grow its own food, make its own cloths, dig or pick up its own gold and silver and quicksilver, mine its own coal and iron, supply itself, and the rest of the world too, with cotton and tobacco and rice and sugar, and that should have a mercantile tonnage of not less than fifteen millions, and perhaps very much more,—­such a nation, we say, it was reasonable to expect the United States would become by the year 1900.  But because the thought of it was pleasing to us, we are not to conclude that it would be so to European sovereigns and statesmen.  On the contrary, they had abundant reason to dread the accumulation of so much strength in one empire.  Even in 1860 we had passed the point at which it was possible for us to have any fear of European nations, or of a European alliance.  We had but to will it, and British America, and what there was left of Spanish America and Mexico, would all have been gathered in, reaped by that mowing-machine, the American sword.  Had our rulers of that year sought to stave off civil war by plunging us into a foreign war, we could have made ourselves masters of all North America, despite the opposition of all Europe, had all Europe been ready to try the question with us, whether the Monroe doctrine were a living thing or a dirty skeleton from the past.  But all Europe would not have opposed us, seeing that England would have been the principal sufferer from our success; and England is unpopular throughout Continental Europe,—­in France, in Germany, and in Russia.  Probably the French Emperor would have preferred a true cordial understanding with us to a nominal one with England, and, confining his labors to Europe and the East, would have obtained her “natural boundaries” for France, and supremacy over Egypt.  The war might have left but three great powers in the world, namely, France, Russia, and America, or the United States, the latter