their original numbers, counting them by millions.  Now it is the fashion to go to the other extreme, and even to maintain that they have not decreased at all.  This last is a theory that can only be upheld on the supposition that the whole does not consist of the sum of the parts; for whereas we can check off on our fingers the tribes that have slightly increased, we can enumerate scores that have died out almost before our eyes.  Speaking broadly, they have mixed but little with the English (as distinguished from the French and Spanish) invaders.  They are driven back, or die out, or retire to their own reservations; but they are not often assimilated.  Still, on every frontier, there is always a certain amount of assimilation going on, much more than is commonly admitted;[1] and whenever a French or Spanish community has been absorbed by the energetic Americans, a certain amount of Indian blood has been absorbed also.  There seems to be a chance that in one part of our country, the Indian territory, the Indians, who are continually advancing in civilization, will remain as the ground element of the population, like the Creoles in Louisiana, or the Mexicans in New Mexico.

The Americans when they became a nation continued even more successfully the work which they had begun as citizens of the several English colonies.  At the outbreak of the Revolution they still all dwelt on the seaboard, either on the coast itself or along the banks of the streams flowing into the Atlantic.  When the fight at Lexington took place they had no settlements beyond the mountain chain on our western border.  It had taken them over a century and a half to spread from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies.  In the next three quarters of a century they spread from the Alleghanies to the Pacific.  In doing this they not only dispossessed the Indian tribes, but they also won the land from its European owners.  Britain had to yield the territory between the Ohio and the Great Lakes.  By a purchase, of which we frankly announced that the alternative would be war, we acquired from France the vast, ill-defined region known as Louisiana.  From the Spaniards, or from their descendants, we won the lands of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California.

All these lands were conquered after we had become a power, independent of every other, and one within our own borders; when we were no longer a loose assemblage of petty seaboard communities, each with only such relationship to its neighbor as was implied in their common subjection to a foreign king and a foreign people.  Moreover, it is well always to remember that at the day when we began our career as a nation we already differed from our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as in name; the word American already had more than a merely geographical signification.  Americans belong to the English race only in the sense in which Englishmen belong to the German.  The fact that no change of language has accompanied the second wandering