of enterprise
amongst the whites, and by preventing them from meeting with as numerous
a class of sailors as they require. Sailors are usually taken from the
lowest ranks of the population. But in the Southern States these lowest
ranks are composed of slaves, and it is very difficult to employ them at
sea. They are unable to serve as well as a white crew, and apprehensions
would always be entertained of their mutinying in the middle of the
ocean, or of their escaping in the foreign countries at which they might
touch.]

[Footnote n: "Darby's View of the United States," p. 444.]

The relative position of the central federal power is continually
displaced. Forty years ago the majority of the citizens of the Union was
established upon the coast of the Atlantic, in the environs of the spot
upon which Washington now stands; but the great body of the people
is now advancing inland and to the north, so that in twenty years the
majority will unquestionably be on the western side of the Alleghanies.
If the Union goes on to subsist, the basin of the Mississippi is
evidently marked out, by its fertility and its extent, as the future
centre of the Federal Government. In thirty or forty years, that tract
of country will have assumed the rank which naturally belongs to it. It
is easy to calculate that its population, compared to that of the coast
of the Atlantic, will be, in round numbers, as 40 to 11. In a few
years the States which founded the Union will lose the direction of
its policy, and the population of the valley of the Mississippi will
preponderate in the federal assemblies.

This constant gravitation of the federal power and influence towards
the northwest is shown every ten years, when a general census of the
population is made, and the number of delegates which each State
sends to Congress is settled afresh. *o In 1790 Virginia had nineteen
representatives in Congress. This number continued to increase until the
year 1813, when it reached to twenty-three; from that time it began to
decrease, and in 1833 Virginia elected only twenty-one representatives.
*p During the same period the State of New York progressed in the
contrary direction: in 1790 it had ten representatives in Congress; in
1813, twenty-seven; in 1823, thirty-four; and in 1833, forty. The State
of Ohio had only one representative in 1803, and in 1833 it had already
nineteen.

[Footnote o: It may be seen that in the course of the last ten years
(1820-183