Struggle with the wilderness and with the savage produced among them a society more democratic and more independent than Europe had ever known; while their profound religious convictions saved the colonists from barbarism and intellectual decline. It can truthfully be held, that in 1775, at the outbreak of the American Revolution, the colonists had abler men and greater political ability than the mother-country of England. It was these men who, at the close of the Revolution, framed the American Constitution, the greatest achievement in the history of public law. This nation, endowed at its commencement with so precious an inheritance of political genius, felt its civil superiority to the illiberal or ineffective governments of Europe, and this feeling has produced in Americans a supreme and traditional confidence in their own forms of government and democratic standards of life. Certainly their history contains much to justify the choice of their institutions. A hundred and twenty-five years ago, these colonies were a small nation of 2,500,000 people, occupying no more than the Atlantic coast of the continent. Great mountain chains divided them from the interior, which was overrun by the fiercest and most warlike type of man that the races have produced--the American Indian. With an energy which has shown no diminishing from generation to generation, the American broke through these mountain chains, subdued the wilderness, conquered the Indian tribes, and in the space of three generations was master of the continent of North America. Even while engaged in the War for Independence, the American frontiersman crossed the Appalachians and secured Kentucky and the Northwest Territory, and with them the richest and most productive regions of the Temperate Zone,--the Mississippi Valley. In 1803, the great empire of Louisiana, falling from the hand of France, was added to the American nation. In 1818, Florida was ceded by Spain, and in 1857, as a result of war with Mexico, came the Greater West and the Pacific seaboard. This vast dominion, nearly three thousand miles in width from east to west, has been peopled by natural increase and by immigration from Europe, until, at the end of the nineteenth century, the American nation numbered seventy-four million souls. This development has taken place without fundamental change in the constitution or form of government, without loss of individual liberty, and constantly increasing national prosperity. Moreover, the States have survived the Civil War, the most bloody and persistently fought war of all modern centuries--a war in which a million soldiers fell, and to sustain which three and a half billion dollars in gold were expended out of the national treasury. This war accomplished the abolition of negro slavery, the greatest economic revolution ever effected by a single blow.