The population of the New Continent as yet surpasses but little that of France or Germany. It doubles in the United States in twenty-three or twenty-five years; and at Mexico, even under the government of the mother country, it doubles in forty or forty-five years. Without indulging too flattering hopes of the future, it may be admitted that in less than a century and a half the population of America will equal that of Europe. This noble rivalry in civilization and the arts of industry and commerce, far from impoverishing the old continent, as has often been supposed it might at the expense of the new one, will augment the wants of the consumer, the mass of productive labour, and the activity of exchange. Doubtless, in consequence of the great revolutions which human society undergoes, the public fortune, the common patrimony of civilization, is found differently divided among the nations of the old and the new world: but by degrees the equilibrium is restored; and it is a fatal, I had almost said an impious prejudice, to consider the growing prosperity of any other part of our planet as a calamity to Europe. The independence of the colonies will not contribute to isolate them from the old civilized nations, but will rather bring all more closely together. Commerce tends to unite countries which a jealous policy has long separated. It is the nature of civilization to go forward without any tendency to decline in the spot that gave it birth. Its progress from east to west, from Asia to Europe, proves nothing against this axiom. A clear light loses none of its brilliancy by being diffused over a wider space. Intellectual cultivation, that fertile source of national wealth, advances by degrees and extends without being displaced. Its movement is not a migration: and though it may seem to be such in the east, it is because barbarous hordes possessed themselves of Egypt, Asia Minor, and of once free Greece, the forsaken cradle of the civilization of our ancestors.