200 NATIONAL GROWTH AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 



direst slogan of history ; and Sam Houston led his little band 

 with such deep skill and mysterious swiftness and dogged dis- 

 regard of death that the great army of Santa Aha was first ter- 

 rorized and then defeated ignominiously — and Texas rose into 

 republican freedom. 



The hard-fought liberation of Texas was an expression of per- 

 sonal and national character, j T et the events were reflected in a 

 million minds with such inspiring effect as to raise Americans 

 to a new vantage-point in their struggle for conquest over the 

 material and the moral. Without the Declaration there would 

 have been no trans-Appalachian acquisition of territory; with- 

 out this conquest there would have been no Union, no Constitu- 

 tion, no Louisiana; without Louisiana and Oregon there would 

 have been no great nation; without Texas there would have 

 been no America, in the sense in which we and others employ 

 the term ; and the admission of Texas into the Union, albeit dila- 

 tory, was but an expression of that manifest destiny which at- 

 tends the spread of enlightenment wheresoever liberty's lumi- 

 nary shines. 



The next large chapter in American history was opened by 

 an echo from the preceding chapter; for international feeling 

 engendered by the admission of Texas rankled until removed 

 by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with its acquisition of 

 half a million square miles of territory (including California), 

 an acquisition supplemented five years later through the much- 

 derided Gadsden purchase. These accessions marked growing 

 self-reliance on tbe part of the nation, itself the expression of 

 individual strength ; yet the first was barely consummated be- 

 fore it began to react on character with unexpected and unprece- 

 dented vigor. The golden gleam of Yuba's placers shot athwart 

 the mountains and plains and caught the eyes of the hardiest 

 sons of a vigorous ancestry ; and a voluntary industrial army laid 

 overland trails, or devised sea routes, of six months' journey to- 

 ward the sunset. Like the British colonists and the Texan rangers, 

 they were picked men and chosen women ; like their fathers and 

 mothers, they were strengthened by the test to which they were 

 subjected ; and in good time they were followed by progeny of 

 the finest physical and mental constitution the ages have pro- 

 duced. Taught by a beneficent school system, educated by a 

 judicious patent system, and inspired (like all of their fellows) by 

 freedom's boon, the " Forty-niners " and their followers carried 

 creative faculty with them, and invention kept pace with their 



