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THE

AMERICAN WHIG REVIEW,

No. XXVIII.

FOR MAY, 1850.

REVIEW OF THE REPORT OF HON. THOMAS BUTLER KING ON CALIFORNIA.

THE government of the United States | purposes only, while the whole constitutes cannot be said to have a colonial system, one contiguous, entire, and compact naunless the movements of such a system are tion."* to be seen in the constant acquisition and organization of new territories.

The expansion of the Republican Empire requiring the constant addition of new regions to receive the overflow of population and emigration, the policy of annexation,peaceful and constitutional annexationby treaty and by purchase, may be regarded as the settled policy of this government. The population of the United States, "consists of natives of Caucasian origin, and exotics of the same derivation. The native mass rapidly assimilates to itself, and absorbs the exotics, and thus these constitute one homogeneous people. The African race, bond and free, and the aborigines, savage and civilized, being incapable of such assimilation and absorption remain distinct, and owing to their peculiar condition, they constitute inferior masses, and may be regarded as accidental, if not disturbing political forces. The ruling homogeneous family, planted at first on the Atlantic shore, and following an obvious law, is seen continually and rapidly extending itself westward, year by year, and subduing the wilderness and the prairie, and thus extending this great political community, which, as fast as it advances, breaks into distinct states for municipal

This population, is now 22 millions. In fifty years it will be 80 millions, and in an hundred years 200 millions; equal to nearly one fourth the present aggregate population of the globe.

The problem for statesmen of the present day, is, therefore, not how they shall confine this irresistible and wide spreading tide of life, but rather how they shall, with sufficient expedition, provide a soil for its feet to rest upon, and extend over it a government at once congenial, powerful and free.

The government of the United States, if they have not hitherto, must now begin to have a sound colonial policy. There are legislators, otherwise men of weight and wisdom, who have no faith in the expansive power of republican institutions, who sigh for the narrow and manageable limits of the old thirteen colonies, and amuse themselves and the people with predictions of the incapacity of a republican government to extend itself over a continent. These are men of the past; doubters, and faint hearted.

Such should not be the spirit of the rising statesmen of this age; they who are to live through the coming thirty years of republican aggrandizement-who are to shape the destinies of the coming time; it Mr. Seward's speech in the Senate, March is theirs to make themselves sure of what 11th, 1850. will be, and must be; and then, by reason

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