“North America has advanced, and is every day advancing, to growth
     of state, with a steady and continually accelerating motion, of
     which there never has yet been any example in Europe.”

David Hartley wrote from England in 1777:—­

“At sea, which has hitherto been our prerogative element, they [the United States] rise against us at a stupendous rate; and if we cannot return to our old mutual hospitalities toward each other, a very few years will show us a most formidable hostile marine, ready to join hands with any of our enemies.”

Count d’Aranda, one of the first of Spanish statesmen, in 1783 thus wrote of this republic:—­

“This Federal Republic is born a pygmy, so to speak.  It required the support and forces of two powers as great as Spain and France in order to attain independence.  A day will come when it will be a giant, even a colossus formidable in these countries."[1]

[1] These quotations are from an article by Hon. Charles Sumner, entitled, “Prophetic Voices about America,” published in the Atlantic Monthly of September, 1807.

Of these prophecies, some are now wholly fulfilled, and the rest far on the road to fulfillment.  This infant of yesterday stands forth to-day a giant, vigorous, active, and courageous, and accepts with dignity its manifest destiny at the head of powers and civilizations.

Such, in brief, is the answer to the question proposed at the opening of this chapter.  Another question immediately follows:  Does the prophetic pen which has so fully delineated the rise and progress of all the other great nations of the earth, pass this one by unnoticed?  What are the probabilities in this matter?  As the student of prophecy, in common with all mankind, looks with wonder upon the unparalleled rise and progress of this nation, he cannot repress the conviction that the hand of Providence has been at work in this quiet but mighty revolution.  And this conviction he shares in common with others.

Gov.  Pownal, from whom a quotation has already been presented, speaking of the establishment of this country as a free and sovereign power calls it

     “A revolution that has stronger marks of divine interposition,
     superseding the ordinary course of human affairs than any other
     event which this world has experienced.”

De Tocqueville, a French writer, speaking of our separation from England, says:—­

“It might seem their folly, but was really their fate, or, rather, the providence of God, who has doubtless a work for us to do, in which the massive materiality of the English character would have been too ponderous a dead weight upon our progress.”

Geo. Alfred Townsend, speaking of the misfortunes that have attended the other governments on this continent (New World and Old, p. 635), says:—­

     “The history of the United States was separated by a beneficent
     Providence far from this wild and cruel history of the rest of the
     continent.”