The present treaty is a visible step in the occupation of the whole North American continent. As such it will be recognized by the world and accepted by the American people. But the treaty involves something more. We dismiss one other monarch from the continent. One by one they have retired,--first France, then Spain, then France again, and now Russia,--all giving way to the absorbing Unity declared in the national motto, _E pluribus unum_. * * * * * 4. _Anticipation of Great Britain._--Another motive to this acquisition may be found in the desire to anticipate imagined schemes or necessities of Great Britain. With regard to all these I confess doubt; and yet, if we credit report, it would seem as if there were already a British movement in this direction. Sometimes it is said that Great Britain desires to buy, if Russia will sell. Sir George Simpson, Governor-in-chief of the Hudson’s Bay Company, declared, that, without the strip on the coast underlet to them by the Russian Company, the interior would be “comparatively useless to England.”[24] Here, then, is provocation to buy. Sometimes report assumes a graver character. A German scientific journal, in an elaborate paper entitled “The Russian Colonies on the Northwest Coast of America,” after referring to the constant “pressure” upon Russia, proceeds to say that there are already crowds of adventurers from British Columbia and California now at the gold mines on the Stikine, which flows from British territory through the Russian possessions, who openly declare their purpose of driving the Russians out of this region. I refer to the “Archiv für Wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland,”[25] edited at Berlin as late as 1863, by A. Erman, and undoubtedly the leading authority on Russian questions. At the same time it presents a curious passage bearing directly on British policy, purporting to be taken from the “British Colonist,” a newspaper of Victoria, on Vancouver’s Island. As this was regarded of sufficient importance to be translated into German for the instruction of scientific readers, I am justified in laying it before you, restored from German to English.