ple
spread in such numbers during the course of the nineteenth
century that we were able to build up State after State, each
with exactly the same complete local independence in all matters
affecting purely its own domestic interests as in any of the
original thirteen States, each owing the same absolute fealty to
the Union of all the States which each of the original thirteen
States also owes, and, finally, each having the same
proportional right to its share in shaping and directing the
common policy of the Union which is possessed by any other
State, whether of the original thirteen or not.

This process now seems to us part of the natural order of
things, but it was wholly unknown until our own people devised
it. It seems to us a mere matter of course, a matter of
elementary right and justice, that in the deliberations of the
national representative bodies the representatives of a State
which came into the Union but yesterday stand on a footing of
exact and entire equality with those of the commonwealth whose
sons once signed the Declaration of Independence.

But this way of looking at the matter is purely modern and in
its origin purely American. When Washington, during his
Presidency, saw new States come into the Union on a footing of
complete equality with the old, every European nation which had
colonies still administered them as dependencies, and every
other mother country treated the colonists not as a
self-governing equal, but as a subject.

The process which we began has since been followed by all the
great people who were capable both of expansion and of
self-government, and now the world accepts it as the natural
process, as the rule; but a century and a quarter ago it was not
merely exceptional--it was unknown.

This, then, is the great historic significance of the movement
of continental expansion, in which the Louisiana Purchase was
the most striking single achievement. It stands out in marked
relief even among the feats of a nation of pioneers, a nation
whose people have, from the beginning, been picked out by a
process of natural selection from among the most enterprising
individuals of the nations of western Europe.

The acquisition of the territory is a credit to the broad and
far-sighted statesmanship of the great statesmen to whom it wa