If you did, these words would be as blank paper

to you.

Seven states we have gone through. They are states which have made their place in the civilization of the world and need not be afraid

prophesy. He had found out how often the population of New England doubled; he supposed that it would double three or four times at the same rate before another century ended in 1850. He was sure that the religion of the Con

gregational churches was the best in the world. He was sure that the stuff of which Connecticut and Massachusetts were made was the best in the world, and he calculated, therefore, that in 1850 six or seven million of us would be living in the

four New England colonies of his day, well, let us own it, that this confederated little nation would be as well advanced in the world as any of the old Englands or Hollands or France or Spain. He did not conceive it possible that any man in his senses would ever move west of the

Hudson River to live. Dear Ezra Stiles, I am afraid that he never pardoned his friend Franklin for establishing himself in Philadelphia.

It has not turned out just as Ezra Stiles meant it should, but when I go to Tiajuana, and when I spend a Sunday in Vienna, and when I take my coffee in the arbor in the Alhambra, and I run against a compatriot who has one of the New England names or those of their New York cousins, I am apt to find that he is glad to tell me that his forbears eight or nine generations ago came over with Brewster or Winthrop or Davenport or the Scotch-Irish or Knickerbocker or Stuyvesant. I do not find that those who come from the Empire State are ashamed of the Empire State, and I do find that those who have kinsmen in New England are glad that they have kinsmen there.

It has been a pleasure, Gentle Reader, to feel the touch of your hand and to wonder if one of your one hundred and twenty-eight ancestors who arrived in 1630 were, possibly, one of mine.

CHAPTER IX

WASHINGTON THEN AND NOW

WRITING in the city of Washington, which I first visited in 1844, I like to give some memories of that city, which I think I must have visited sixty-one different times since, before 1905.

The centennial of the city was observed with distinguished ceremonies by Congress in the year 1900. Mrs. President Adams's first drawingroom was New Year's Day, 1801. In a few words the history of the city's birth is this: By an act of 1790, the first Congress under the Constitution empowered the President to select a site for a "federal city" on the Potomac River. The "vote" was a very narrow one. The question of the site of the city had been the first geographical question which divided the national Congress. In the year 1861, when I paid one of my last visits to Josiah Quincy, he spoke of those debates

and of the end of them by a vote of the Senate with the utmost bitterness. I had asked him, I think, when the North and South first measured swords. When he replied, I felt that he had a sort of contempt for my ignorance. He said it

PRESIDENT WASHINGTON.

was on the question whether the federal city should be north or south of Mason and Dixon's linethat is, whether it should be in Northern or Southern territory. The balance between the twelve states was so even that the vote for a Southern federal secession of a New

city was gained only by the Hampshire Senator, of whom Mr. Quincy spoke with the most bitter contempt, as if his vote had been treasonable. But the vote as given was given to the bank of the Potomac River, and