[Footnote 6: General Bernard, whose anticipations of the leading events of that revolution, in a conversation with the author, had all the accuracy of history.]
Having thus taken a view of the past effects of the progress of philosophy, let us now look before us, and endeavoring to scan the future, learn what are hereafter to be its effects on the world, especially on that portion of it, in which we are most interested.
We are sometimes reproached with being more disposed to look at what our country will be, than at what it is; but when the changes are so rapid and great, we should not only betray a strange insensibility to our future destiny, but be grossly wanting in prudence, not to keep the fact constantly present to our minds. It should affect our policy, legislation, and even our individual contracts and schemes of profit; and while we do not object to other nations seeing, in the mirror of the past, interesting memorials of their former glory, they may suffer us to look at ours, through the prism of hope, in which objects are a little distorted without being exaggerated, and appear in hues delightfully gay and diversified. Let us see then how the certain progress of population, and the probable progress of reason and philosophy are likely to affect us.
Of the rapid advancement of the United States in numbers, powers and wealth, we have now a moral certainty. After the lapse of forty years, we have seen that their population continues to double at the rate which Franklin long ago assumed, and we have full confirmation of the views taken by Malthus more than thirty years ago, and by Franklin long before him, that mankind continue thus to increase where the means of subsistence are easy. There will hardly be any change in this particular here, before our numbers have reached 60 persons to a square mile. Perhaps when we consider the remarkable fertility of the larger part, not before we have reached 100: but with the former limit, our country would contain 100 millions of inhabitants, in three periods of doubling, or in 75 years. Some doubts have been entertained whether our future increase will not diminish in an increasing ratio; and a very general error as to the rate of increase, exhibited at the last census, has favored that opinion. But in point of fact, the increase for the ten years ending in 1830, was a fraction more than 34 per cent., instead of a fraction more than 33 per cent., as our almanacs and other periodicals have stated, because they did not attend to the fact, that the last census shewed the increase only for nine years and ten months. This result is so unexampled and so great, that it requires an effort for us to conceive its reality; yet it rests upon as satisfactory grounds as any future event whatever: and it is not a remote improbability, that some who now hear me will live to see our population amount to 100 millions.