such alterations. It was but a step from favoring constitutional amendments for this purpose to doing without them; Jefferson, Madison, Monroe had done the one, John Quincy Adams did the other.

Noth

Of course it took the nation by surprise. ing astonishes people more than to be taken at their word and have their own theories energetically put in practice. Others had talked in a general way about internal improvements; under President Monroe there had even been created (April 30, 1824) a national board to plan them; but John Quincy Adams really meant to have them; and his very first message looked formidable to those who supposed that because he had broken with the Federalists he was therefore about to behave like an old-fashioned Democrat. In truth he was more new-fashioned than anybody. This is the way he committed himself in this first message:

"While foreign nations, less blessed with that freedom which is power than ourselves, are advancing with gigantic strides in the career of public improvement, were we to slumber in indolence, or fold up our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents, would it not be to cast away the bounties of Providence, and doom ourselves to perpetual inferiority? In the course of the year now drawing to its close we have taken, under the auspices and at the expense of one State of this Union, a new university unfolding its portals to the sons of science, and holding up the torch of human improvement to eyes that seek the light. We have seen, under the persevering and enlightened enterprise of another State, the waters of our Western lakes mingle with those of the ocean. If undertakings like these have been accomplished in the compass of a few years by the authority of single members of our confederation, can we, the representative authorities of the whole Union, fall behind our fellow-servants in the exercise

of the trust committed to us for the benefit of our common sovereign, by the accomplishment of works important to the whole, and to which neither the authority nor the resources of any one State can be adequate?"

Nor was this all. It is curious to see that the President's faithful ally, Richard Rush, Secretary of the Treasury, went far beyond his chief in the tone of his recommendations, and drifted into what would now be promptly labelled as communism. When we read as an extreme proposition in these days, in the middle of some mildly socialistic manifesto, the suggestion that there should be a national bureau 'whereby new fields can be opened, old ones developed, and every labor can be properly directed and located," we fancy it a novelty. But see how utterly Mr. Rush surpassed these moderate proposals in one of his reports as Secretary of the Treasury. He said that it was the duty of government

"to augment the number and variety of occupations for its inhabitants; to hold out to every degree of labor and to every manifestation of skill its appropriate object and inducement; to organize the whole labor of a country; to entice into the widest ranges its mechanical and intellectual capacities, instead of suffering them to slumber; to call forth, wherever hidden, latent ingenuity, giving to effort activity and to emulation ardor; to create employment for the greatest amount of numbers by adapting it to the diversified faculties, propensities, and situations of men, so that every particle of ability, every shade of genius, may come into requisition."

Let us now turn to the actual advances made under the guidance of Mr. Adams. Nothing in the history of the globe is so extraordinary in its topographical and moral results as the vast western march of the

American people within a hundred years. Let us look, for instance, at some contemporary map of what constituted the northern part of the United States in 1798. The western boundary of visible settlement is the Genesee River of New York. The names on the Hudson are like the names of to-day; all beyond is strange. No railroad, no canal; only a turnpike running to the Genesee, and with no farther track to mark the way through the forest to "Buffaloe," on the far-off lake. Along this turnpike are settlements "Schenectady," "Canajohary," "Schuyler, or Utica," "Fort Stenwick, or Rome," "Oneida Cassle," "Onondaga Cassle," "Geneva," and "Canandargue," where the road turns north to Lake Ontario. Forests cover all western New York, all northwestern Pennsylvania. Far off in Ohio is a detached region indicated as "the Connecticut Reserve, conceded to the families who had been ruined during the war of independence"-whence our modern phrase "Western Reserve." The summary of the whole map is that the nation still consists of the region east of the Alleghanies, with a few outlying settlements, and nothing more.

In the map pre

Now pass over twenty years. fixed to William Darby's Tour from New York to Detroit, in 1818—this Darby being the author of an emigrant's guide and a member of the New York Historical Society-we find no State west of the Mississippi except Missouri, and scarcely any towns in Indiana or Illinois. Michigan Territory is designated, but across the whole western half of it is the inscription, "This part very imperfectly known." All beyond Lake Michigan and all west of the Mississippi is a nameless waste, except for a few names

of rivers and of Indian villages. This marks the progress and a very considerable progress → of twenty years. Writing from Buffalo (now spelled correctly), Darby says, "The beautiful and highly cultivated lands of the strait of Erie are now a specimen of what in forty years will be the landscape from Erie to Chicaga [sic]. It is a very gratifying anticipation to behold in fancy the epoch to come when this augmenting mass of the population will enjoy, in the interior of this vast continent, a choice collection of immense marts where the produce of the banks of innumerable rivers and lakes can be exchanged."

Already, it seems, travellers and map-makers had got from misspelling "Buffaloe" to misspelling "Chicaga." It was a great deal. The Edinburgh Review for that same year (June, 1818), in reviewing Birkbeck's once celebrated Travels in America, said:

"Where is this prodigious increase of numbers, this vast extension of dominion, to end? What bounds has nature set to the progress of this mighty nation? Let our jealousy burn as it may, let our intolerance of America be as unreasonably violent as we please, still it is plain that she is a power in spite of us, rapidly rising to supremacy; or, at least, that each year so mightily augments her strength as to overtake, by a most sensible distance, even the most formidable of her competitors."

This was written, it must be remembered, when the whole population of the United States was but little more than nine millions, or less than the number now occupying New York and Massachusetts taken together.

What were the first channels for this great transfer of population? They were the great turnpike

road up the Mohawk Valley, in New York; and, farther south, the "National Road," which ended at Wheeling, Virginia. Old men, now or recently living— as, for instance, Sewall Newhouse, the trapper and trap-maker of Oneida-can recall the long lines of broad-wheeled wagons, drawn by ten horses, forty of these teams sometimes coming in close succession; the stages, six of which were sometimes in sight at once; the casualties, the break-downs, the sloughs of despond, the passengers at work with fence-rails to pry out the vehicle from a mud-hole. These sights, now vanishing or gone upon the shores of the Pacific, were then familiar in the heart of what is now the East. This was the tide flowing westward; while eastward, on the other hand, there soon began a counter-current of flocks and herds sent from the new settlements to supply the older States. As early as 1824 Timothy Flint records meeting a drove of more than a thousand cattle and swine, rough and shaggy as wolves, guided towards the Philadelphia market by a herdsman looking as untamed as themselves, and coming from Ohio-"a name which still sounded in our ears," Flint says, "like the land of savages.'

The group so well known in our literature, the emigrant family, the way-side fire, the high-peaked wagon, the exhausted oxen this picture recedes steadily in space as we come nearer to our own time. In 1788 it set off with the first settlers from Massachusetts to seek Ohio; in 1798 it was just leaving the Hudson to ascend the Mohawk River; in 1815 the hero of Lawrie Todd saw it at Rochester, New York; in 1819 Darby met it near Detroit, Michigan; in 1824 Flint saw it in Missouri; in 1831 Alexander