ns 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. The
England and the America of the present are probably the two strongest
nations of the world. But there can hardly be a doubt, as between the
America and the England of the future, that the daughter, at some no
very distant time, will, whether fairer or less fair, be unquestionably
yet stronger than the mother.

"O matre forti filia fortior."[9]

But all this pompous detail of material triumphs, whether for the one
or for the other, is worse than idle, unless the men of the two
countries shall remain, or shall become, greater than the mere things
that they produce, and shall know how to regard those things simply as
tools and materials for the attainments of the highest purposes of their
being. Ascending, then, from the ground-floor of material industry
toward the regions in which these purposes are to be wrought out, it is
for each nation to consider how far its institutions have reached a
state in which they can contribute their maximum to the store of human
happiness and excellence. And for the political student all over the
world, it will be beyond any thing curious as well as useful to examine
with what diversities, as well as what resemblances, of apparatus the
two greater branches of a race born to command have been minded, or
induced, or constrained to work out, in their sea-severed seats, their
political destinies according to the respective laws appointed for them.

No higher ambition can find vent in a paper such as this, than to
suggest the position and claims of the sub