Volumes have been written and more will be on the romance of the Louisiana purchase; Josiah Quincy threatened the dismemberment of the Union when the present state of Louisiana was admitted in 1812; but for Jefferson's wisdom in exploration it might have remained a wilderness long after settlement began; Great Britain coveted it in 1815 when Jackson saved it; Aaron Burr probably coveted an empire within it; Napoleon III had dreams of its return to the new France he was to found in Mexico. Excluding the Floridas, which Spain would not concede as a part of it, and the Oregon country, the territory thus acquired was greater than that of Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined. Its agricultural and mineral resources were, humanly speaking, inexhaustible. No wonder it excited the cupidity as it stirred the imagination of mankind; no wonder if men avid to retain their power were dismayed at the preponderance it was sure to exert eventually in a federal union of states. At the present moment fourteen of our commonwealths, with a population of about sixteen millions and a taxable wealth of seven billions, occupy its soil. By the time we are fifty years older, at the present rate of settlement, these will contain about a third of the power in the Union as determined by numbers and prosperity. All of them, however, were from the first administrative districts, never states, and by the retroactive influence of this fact state sovereignty has thus been made an empty phrase.