lished in the south, besides the settlements on
the Gold Coast and those at Aden commanding the Red Sea. English
explorers work their way, with infinite hardship, through its
untravelled wilds, and track the courses of the Congo and the Nile as
their forefathers tracked the Potomac and the Hudson. The work of La
Salle and Smith is finding its counterpart in the labours of Baker and
Livingstone. Who can doubt that within two or three centuries the
African continent will be occupied by a mighty nation of English
descent, and covered with populous cities and flourishing farms, with
railroads and telegraphs and other devices of civilization as yet
undreamed of?

If we look next to Australia, we find a country of more than two-thirds
the area of the United States, with a temperate climate and immense
resources, agricultural and mineral,--a country sparsely peopled by a
race of irredeemable savages hardly above the level of brutes. Here
England within the present century has planted six greatly thriving
states, concerning which I have not time to say much, but one fact will
serve as a specimen. When in America we wish to illustrate in one word
the wonderful growth of our so-called north-western states, we refer to
Chicago,--a city of half-a-million inhabitants standing on a spot which
fifty years ago was an uninhabited marsh. In Australia the city of
Melbourne was founded in 1837, the year when the present queen of
England began to reign, and the state of which it is the capital was
hence called Victoria. This city, now[16] just forty-three years old,
has a population half as great as that of Chicago, has a public library
of 200,000 volumes, and has a university with at least one professor of
world-wide renown. When we see, by the way, within a period of five
years and at such remote points upon the earth's surface, such erudite
and ponderous works in the English language issuing from the press as
those of Professor Hearn of Melbourne, of Bishop Colenso of Natal, and
of Mr. Hubert Bancroft of San Francisco,--even such a little commonplace
fact as this is fraught with wonderful significance when we think of all
that it implies. Then there is New Zealand, with its climate of
perpetual spring, where the English race is now multiplying faster than
anywhere else in the world unless it be in Texas and Minnesota. And
there are in the Pacific Ocean many rich and fertile spots where we
shall very soon see the same things going on.