It was a question whether the expansion of the United States was to conduce to national strength or national weakness. France and Germany and Italy have expanded to the injury of national vitality, England and the United States to its strengthening. The building of the Cumberland Road was a means of securing the West to the United States as it was never secured to France or England. The era of canals and national roads and steam navigation brought the farthest West into living touch with the East, and each contributed to the other's power and both were welded into one nation. The population of the three states west of the Ohio through which the Cumberland Road ran increased from 783,635 to 3,620,314 in the generation the road was in active use. The average increase of percentage of permanent population for the first five decades in these states was over 182 per decade. In the second decade of the century Indiana's population increased over 500 per cent. This has been equaled but three times in all the phenomenal "rushes" of recent years into the western states. In all this making of "the young empire of the West" the Cumberland Road had a preponderating influence. This "Chain of Federal Union," forged, under God, by the hand of that first American in the hot fires of revolution, strengthened wisely by the same timely hand in those critical afterhours, has thrown its imperial links, one by one, across a continent. Historic Washington's Road, with all the wealth of history and tradition which attaches to it, was the first and most important link. FOOTNOTES: [1] Darlington's _Christopher Gist's Journals_, p. 67. [2] A very curious, and possibly the only, view of these buildings in existence will be found in an old "Map of Fort Cumberland," _Historic Highways of America_, vol. iv. [3] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Washington, 1754_, p. 16. [4] Toner's _Journal of Colonel George Washington, 1754_, p. 13. [5] The private _Journal_ kept by Washington on the expedition of the Virginia Regiment in 1754 was composed of rough notes only. It was lost with other papers at the battle of Fort Necessity and was captured by the French and sent to Paris. Two years later it was published by the French government, after being thoroughly "edited" by a French censor. It was titled "MEMOIRE _contenant le Precis des Faits, avec leurs Pieces Justificatives, pour servir de Reponse aux_ OBSERVATIONS _envoyées, par les Ministres d'Angleterre, dans les Cours de l'Europe. A Paris; de l'Imprimerie Royale, 1756._"