cannon, recalling our late similar experience in the Yellowstone Park. Alaska constitutes the northwestern portion of the American continent, and has a coast line exceeding eleven thousand miles. The extreme length of the Territory, north and south, is eleven hundred miles, and its breadth is eight hundred. It is bounded on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by British Columbia, on the south by the Pacific Ocean, and on the west by Behring Strait and the North Pacific. Our geographies and encyclopædias help us to little more than the boundaries of this great Territory, which contains nearly six hundred thousand square miles. The latest published estimates give the aggregate number of square miles as nineteen thousand less than the amount we have named, but Governor Swineford and other residents of the Territory believe it to be an underestimate. As there is no actual survey extant, the figures given can only be a reasonable approximation to the true number. The boundary dividing Alaska and British Columbia was settled by treaty between England and Russia in 1825, and the same line is recognized to-day as separating our possessions in this quarter from those of Great Britain. Alaska is as large as all of the New England and Middle States, with Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee combined. So far as size is concerned, the Territory is, therefore, an empire in itself, being equal in area to seventy-one States like Massachusetts, and containing as many square miles as England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Belgium united. It has been estimated by competent judges that, with its islands, it has a coast line equal to the circumference of the globe. Very few of our people, even among the educated class, have an adequate idea of the immensity of this northwestern Territory, two thirds of which abounds in available resources, only awaiting development. Were Alaska situated on our Atlantic coast it would extend from Maine to Florida. Miss Kate Field, in a comprehensive article already quoted from, published in the “North American Review,” justly censuring Congress for its supineness and ignorance in relation to Alaska, says: “American citizens, living comfortably on the Atlantic seaboard, knowing their own wants and dictating terms to their submissive representatives, take little heed of those new additions to the United States which are destined to be the crowning glory of the Republic. When a nation is so big as to render portions of it a _terra incognita_ to those who make the laws, there’s something rotten this side of Denmark!... The march of empire goes on in spite of human fallibility, and now the land of the midnight sun knocks at the door of Congress. She is twenty-three years old, and asks to be treated as though she were of age. The big-wigs at Washington rub their eyes, put on their spectacles, and wonder what this Hyperborean hubbub means?”