The development, which the Republic has effected, has been unexampled in
its rapidity and force. While other countries have doubled, or at most
trebled, their population, she has risen, during one single century of
freedom, in round numbers, from two millions to forty-five. As to
riches, it is reasonable to establish, from the decennial stages of the
progress thus far achieved, a series for the future; and, reckoning upon
this basis, I suppose that the very next census, in the year 1880, will
exhibit her to the world as certainly the wealthiest of all the nations.
The huge figure of a thousand millions sterling, which may be taken
roundly as the annual income of the United Kingdom, has been reached at
a surprising rate; a rate which may perhaps be best expressed by saying,
that if we could have started forty or fifty years ago from zero, at the
rate of our recent annual increment, we should now have reached our
present position. But while we have been advancing with this portentous
rapidity, America is passing us by as if in a canter. Yet even now the
work of searching the soil and the bowels of the territory, and opening
out her enterprise throughout its vast expanse, is in its infancy.
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