The railway intended to connect the Ohio Valley with East Tennessee and with Charleston will be finished, and the North Carolina Railway will be carried westward until it connects with some branch of the Pacific Road, and the now ruined railroads of the South will be put in complete order again. That internal coast-line of navigation, even now almost continuous from Long Island Sound to Florida, will be perfected by connecting the bays, sounds, and channels, until our coastwise commerce can pass from New York to Florida by this inland route, safe alike from an enemy, and from ocean storms. There will be a shipcanal around the falls of Niagara, and from the lakes to the Mississippi, and the Ohio River will be rendered navigable through the year. In addition to this, the government must soon bring its mineral lands into the market in the same manner as it does all other lands, and give a title in fee to the purchaser.

While these things are in progress, the tide of our population will set strongly in upon the South, and the mineral lands of the Western mountains, and industry will plant itself precisely where it is most needed to sustain our finances, where it will produce the great staples of the South and silver and gold as the basis of our currency, while, at the same time, the riches of the Eastern commerce will flow in through the golden gate of California. Any amount of debt which this war can create will press lightly upon such a country as this will be, almost in the immediate future.

Nor are any of the predictions so freely made, at home and abroad, in regard to future divisions of our country, likely to be fulfilled.

No one of the great geographical divisions of the land is complete in itself. Each is a necessary part of one great whole.

The mineral region, the great agricultural basins, the coast-lines for commerce on the two oceans, fronting Europe and Asia, the long lines of hill-country for manufactures; in the East the Alleghanies, stretching from Canada

to central Alabama, and, in the far West, the Rocky Mountains and the Nevada, all bear a due proportion to each other, and stand so related to each other as to be bound inseparably together to form one grand national whole, in which each part, like members of a living body, will be necessary to all the rest.

The manufacturers of the country will purchase the staples of the South and the South-west. Commerce will make the exchanges, the agricultural regions will supply the food, and the mines will furnish the silver and the gold as the money basis of the whole; and, bound together as we shall be by railways and canals, and all the interlacing bonds of kindred and business and social relations, warned by the experience of this rebellion, and having learned the value of a great nationality, we shall remain henceforth "one and inseparable."

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CHAPTER XXXIX.

SUMMARY OF THE RELATIONS OF ENGLAND, FRANCE, RUSSIA, AND AMERICA, TO THE WORLD AND TO EACH OTHER.

FROM what has been already stated, it is not difficult to see in what direction the great forces of the world are to be exerted in the future, and the bearing which the four powers named above will have upon the progress of civilization.

France is the great military power of Western Europe. With Louis Napoleon and his political and military associates, this is the one ruling idea; the chief, if not the sole object of every wile of state-craft, as well as every movement in war. The extending and consolidating the Papal power is with them a means to an end. The common religious sentiment and the ties of race are being used to combine the Catholic nations into one grand organization, with its head at Paris; a vast military power, supported by the prestige and authority of the Romish Church, and strong enough, as is hoped, to give civil and ecclesiastical law to Europe, and perhaps, also, to this Western world.

France desires manufactures and colonies, not for the benefit of the people, but to create a wealth which may support the army, the navy, and the splendor of the imperial government. The people, like the slaves on a plantation, are regarded simply as machines for the production of wealth which the government may use.

The Emperor adorns his capital with regal magnificence; he constructs such fortifications and dock-yards as those at Cherbourg; he creates navies and armies; he concentrates, in short, all the wealth of the empire in the hands of the rulers whom he directs, but he does little or nothing for the education, the comfort, the general progress of the people. One fact, already stated, is a whole volume of history for France. Her population has increased only thirty-seven per cent. in sixty years. Sixty years ago she had more than twenty-seven millions of inhabitants; she has about thirty-nine millions now. This shows conclusively how heavily the government policy presses upon the laboring classes, and how little hope the empire can have of keeping pace in growth with either Russia or America, and hence the need of seeking combinations of power which she can herself direct.

The empire is, in no sense, of or for the people. The elections are simply a farce and an imposition. The Emperor and his officers are the State; they are France, the only France with which the world without has any relations. The government has really no popular element in it; the bayonets alone vote, and in accordance with the orders given.

The government virtually owns say thirty millions of laborers, whose earnings, excepting only common food and clothing, it consumes in navies, armies, and in imperial pomp.

Such, politically, is France: a military despotism, seeking to dominate both over Europe and America. The leaders of the Papal Church are, equally with the Empe ror, intent upon the military aggrandizement of France; but with them this military power is not an end, but a means to extend, in both hemispheres, the exclusive domin ion of the Romish Church. Thus the Jesuits use the military strength of the empire to advance the Church, and Louis Napoleon, on his part, sustains the Church, and excites her ambition, and extends her influence, in order that he may use it all to create, consolidate, and

secure a military empire that shall, if possible, rule the world. Unless France is again revolutionized, she will very soon embody the three forms of despotism which have cursed the world: the ecclesiastical, the political, and the military.

Should Louis Napoleon succeed in so allying all the Papal States of Europe to France that he could wield the military power of all combined, and then this force should be controlled by Jesuit statesmen, it would, of course, be used everywhere to repress free institutions, whether religious or political; it would become, in both hemispheres, the most formidable foe of freedom and human progress that has arisen in modern times.

The Papal Church is bound by her nature her principles, and all her past history, to the monarchical form of government to the theory that the people have no right of choice in rulers, nor authority to shape the laws by which they are governed; her spirit is that of a despotism from which the people can have no appeal, and in this she can not change, for that would annihilate the Papacy, and sink it to the level of a mere religious denomination. The Romish Church must and will, from its very nature, compel obedience to itself as the only true Church, to the full extent of her power, and, therefore, the most alarming feature in the immediate future of Europe is the rapid growth of the military power of France, the swift yet steady increase of her political influence, and the old persecuting power of the dark ages, now become a part of the empire's life, growing with its growth and strengthening with its strength.

No conspiracy so formidable as this has been formed for many centuries against popular civil rights and relig ious freedom. Its ramifications already extend to every nation, but the two chief objects at which it proposes to strike are, Russia and the Greek Church in the East, and the American Republic, with its free institutions and its Protestant faith.

The French occupation of Mexico, and the letter of the