and furs worth $150,000,000, and has paid revenue to the government exceeding by $1,500,000 the price Russia got for it in 1867; and at no distant day Hawaii and the Philippines will justify American occupation by statistics as telling as those here presented of Louisiana, Oregon, and Alaska. If a nonexpansive policy had prevailed in our national councils at the beginning of the nineteenth century; if the presidential chair had been occupied by another than the broad statesman who saw beyond the Mississippi, over the Rockies to the Pacific, and over the Pacific to the cradle of the world, we should now have an intolerable situation of affairs in North America. Had we refused Louisiana from Napoleon, what is now the United States would be partitioned, geographically, about as follows: East of the Mississippi would be the Republic of the United States of America of 1783, with England in Canada on the north, and Spain in Florida and fringing the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana would have fallen into England's hands as a result of the Napoleonic wars, and so, perhaps, Oregon, either by reason of a favorable interpretation of the Nootka convention, or Vancouver's discoveries. Mexico, as the successor of Spain, would own Texas and all the remainder of the west south of the forty-second parallel and not included in Louisiana. With a republic on one side, and European sovereignty on the other, the Mississippi would to-day be bristling with cannon. The purchase of Louisiana was political foresight, and the completion of our title to Oregon was a direct result of the Louisiana transaction. The war with Mexico was the logical sequence of both. From whatever point we may regard it, the acquisition of the trans-Mississippi region, viewed in the perspective of a century, was worth what it cost in money, actual war, and risk of war with what, in the early stages of our history was the most powerful nation on the globe.