It was the crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be taken in connection with them.

They also, to their own lasting harm, committed a crime whose shortsighted folly was worse than its guilt, for they brought hordes of African slaves, whose descendants now form immense populations in certain portions of the land.

The English-speaking peoples now hold more and better land than any other American nationality or set of nationalities.

When these continents were settled they contained the largest tracts of fertile, temperate, thinly peopled country on the face of the globe.

The gold miner, the transcontinental railway, and the soldier have been the pioneers of civilization.

In what now forms the United States, taking the country as a whole, the foes who had to be met and overcome were very much more formidable.

The Iroquois, for instance, held their own against all comers for two centuries.

Many other tribes stayed for a time the oncoming white flood, or even drove it back; in Maine the settlers were for a hundred years confined to a narrow strip of sea-coast.

When the whites first landed, the superiority and, above all, the novelty of their arms gave them a very great advantage.

By the time the English had consolidated the Atlantic colonies under their rule, the Indians had become what they have remained ever since, the most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock.

Relatively to their numbers, they have shown themselves far more to be dreaded than the Zulus or even the Maoris.

Their presence has caused the process of settlement to go on at unequal rates of speed in different places; the flood has been hemmed in at one point, or has been forced to flow round an island of native population at another.

The Indians have shrunk back before our advance only after fierce and dogged resistance.

The Americans when they became a nation continued even more successfully the work which they had begun as citizens of the several English colonies.

In doing this they not only dispossessed the Indian tribes, but they also won the land from its European owners.

By a purchase, of which we frankly announced that the alternative would be war, we acquired from France the vast, ill-defined region known as Louisiana.

From the Spaniards, or from their descendants, we won the lands of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California.

Moreover, it is well always to remember that at the day when we began our career as a nation we already differed from our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as in name; the word American already had more than a merely geographical…

Some latter-day writers deplore the enormous immigration to our shores as making us a heterogeneous instead of a homogeneous people; but as a matter of fact we are less heterogeneous at the present day than we were at the outbreak of the…

But all were being rapidly fused into one people.

As the Celt of Cornwall and the Saxon of Wessex are now alike Englishmen, so in 1775 Hollander and Huguenot, whether in New York or South Carolina, had become Americans, undistinguishable from the New Englanders and Virginians, the…

When the great western movement began we were already a people by ourselves.

Thus the Americans began their work of western conquest as a separate and individual people, at the moment when they sprang into national life.

The names of Ethan Allen and Marion are probably better known than is that of George Rogers Clark; yet their deeds, as regards their effects, could no more be compared to his, than his could be compared to Washington's.

Yet in most cases their names have already almost faded from remembrance, while his fame will grow steadily brighter as the importance of his deeds is more thoroughly realized.