vered, as if it had been kept in reserve by the
Deity, and had just risen from beneath the waters of the deluge.

That continent still presents, as it did in the primeval time, rivers
which rise from never-failing sources, green and moist solitudes, and
fields which the ploughshare of the husbandman has never turned. In this
state it is offered to man, not in the barbarous and isolated condition
of the early ages, but to a being who is already in possession of
the most potent secrets of the natural world, who is united to his
fellow-men, and instructed by the experience of fifty centuries. At
this very time thirteen millions of civilized Europeans are peaceably
spreading over those fertile plains, with whose resources and whose
extent they are not yet themselves accurately acquainted. Three or four
thousand soldiers drive the wandering races of the aborigines before
them; these are followed by the pioneers, who pierce the woods, scare
off the beasts of prey, explore the courses of the inland streams, and
make ready the triumphal procession of civilization across the waste.

The favorable influence of the temporal prosperity of America upon the
institutions of that country has been so often described by others,
and adverted to by myself, that I shall not enlarge upon it beyond the
addition of a few facts. An erroneous notion is generally entertained
that the deserts of America are peopled by European emigrants, who
annually disembark upon the coasts of the New World, whilst the American
population increases and multiplies upon the soil which its forefathers
tilled. The European settler, however, usually arrives in the United
States without friends, and sometimes without resources; in order to
subsist he is obliged to work for hire, and he rarely proceeds beyond
that belt of industrious population which adjoins the ocean. The desert
cannot be explored without capital or credit; and the body must be
accustomed to the rigors of a new climate before it can be exposed to
the chances of forest life. It is the Americans themselves who daily
quit the spots which gave them birth to acquire extensive domains in
a remote country. Thus the European leaves his cottage for the
trans-Atlantic shores; and the American, who is born on that very coast,
plunges in his turn into the wilds of Central America. This double
emigration is incessant; it begins in the remotest parts of Europe, it
crosses the Atlantic Ocean, and it advances over th