What a country! I have drawn a hypothetical line from Milwaukie to the Pacific,--not that the region south of it--Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, or California--does not abound in natural resources, with fruitful soil and vast capabilities, but because the configuration of the continent--the water-systems, the mountain-ranges, the elevations and depressions, the soil and climate--is in many respects different north of the 43d parallel from what it is south of it. We need not look upon the territory now held by Great Britain with a covetous eye. The 49th parallel is an imaginary line running across the prairies, an arbitrary political boundary which Nature will not take into account in her disposition of affairs in the future. Sooner or later the line will fade away. Railway trains--the constant passing and repassing of a multitude of people speaking the same language, having ideas in common, and related by blood--will rub it out, and there will be one country, one people, one government. What an empire then! The region west of Lake Michigan and north of the latitude of Milwaukie--the 43d parallel extended to the Pacific--will give to the nation, to say nothing of Alaska Territory, forty States as large as Ohio, or two hundred States of the size of Massachusetts! I have been accustomed to look upon this part of the world as being so far north, so cold, so snowy, so distant,--and all the other imaginary so's,--that it never could be available for settlement; but the facts show that it is as capable of settlement as New York or New England,--that the country along the Athabasca has a climate no more severe than that of northern New Hampshire or Maine, while the summers are more favorable to the growing of grains than those of the northern Atlantic coast. It is not, therefore, hypothetical geography. Following the 43d parallel eastward, we find it passing along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, through central Italy, and through the heart of the Turkish Empire. Nearly all of Europe lies north of it,--the whole of France, half of Italy, the whole of the Austrian Empire, and all of Russia's vast dominions. The entire wheat-field of Europe is above that parallel. The valleys of the Alps lying between the 46th and 50th parallels swarm with an industrious people; why may not those of the Rocky Mountains at the head-waters of the Missouri and Columbia in like manner be hives of industry in the future? If a Christiania, a Stockholm, and a St. Petersburg, with golden-domed churches, gorgeous palaces, and abodes of comfort, can be built up in lat. 60 in the Old World, why may we not expect to see their counterpart in the New, when we take into account the fact that a heated current from the tropics gives the same mildness of climate to the northwestern section of this continent that the Gulf Stream gives to northern Europe? With this outlook towards future possibilities, we see Minnesota the central State of the Continental Republic of the future.