the southern continent contains about seven millions of square miles.  I do not pass the 50th degree of northern latitude in my reckoning, because we must draw a line somewhere, and considering the soil and climate beyond that, I would only avail my calculation of it, as a make-weight, to make good what the colder regions, within that line, may be supposed to fall short in their future population.  Here are twelve millions of square miles, then, which, at the rate of population before assumed, will nourish twelve hundred millions of inhabitants, a number greater than the present population of the whole globe is supposed to amount to.  If those who propose medals for the resolution of questions, about which nobody makes any question, those who have invited discussion on the pretended problem, Whether the discovery of America was for the good of mankind? if they, I say, would have viewed it only as doubling the numbers of mankind, and, of course, the quantum of existence and happiness, they might have saved the money and the reputation which their proposition has cost them.  The present population of the inhabited parts of the United States is of about ten to the square mile; and experience has shown us, that wherever we reach that, the inhabitants become uneasy, as too much compressed, and go off, in great numbers, to search for vacant country.  Within forty years, their whole territory will be peopled at that rate.  We may fix that, then, as the term, beyond which the people of those States will not be restrained within their present limits; we may fix that population, too, as the limit which they will not exceed, till the whole of those two continents are filled up to that mark; that is to say, till they shall contain one hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants.  The soil of the country, on the western side of the Mississippi, its climate, and its vicinity to the United States, point it out as the first which will receive population from that nest.  The present occupiers will just have force enough to repress and restrain the emigrations, to a certain degree of consistence.  We have seen, lately, a single person go, and decide on a settlement in Kentucky, many hundred miles from any white inhabitant, remove thither with his family and a few neighbors, and though perpetually harassed by the Indians, that settlement in the course of ten years has acquired thirty thousand inhabitants; its numbers are increasing while we are writing, and the State, of which it formerly made a part, has offered it independence.

Page 280, line five. ‘Huit des onze Etats,’ &c.  Say, ’there were ten States present; six voted unanimously for it, three against it, and one was divided:  and seven votes being requisite to decide the proposition affirmatively, it was lost.  The voice of a single individual of the State which was divided, or of one of those which were of the negative, would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country.  Thus we see the fate of millions unborn, hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!  But it is to be hoped it will not always be silent, and that the friends to the rights of human nature will, in the end, prevail.