24
strength of the United States? An immense country, and scarcely inhabited on the coasts of the Atlantic, in the vicinity of large rivers and bays, at some points extending to great distances in the interior; a country uncultivated, with the forests yet unfelled in more than two thirds of its best lands; a country in general unsusceptible of any great progress in agriculture by reason of the bad quality of its soil, and its extreme and variable temperature in all situations.......such is the territory occupied by the United States.[1]
Judging by the calculation of Hutchins, which is doubtless exaggerated, and made to please the palates of a vain people, of the twelve hundred millions of acres which the country contained before the acquisition of Louisiana, fifty one millions are under water, and only five hundred and twenty millions are susceptible of cultivation; and by the approximate calculation of Blodget
- ↑ The reader will have frequent occasion to remark, in the course of this Memoir, that Don Luis never suffers the favourable impressions, which his observations on the country, whenever he confines himself to historical truth, are calculated to produce on the minds of foreigners, to have a very lasting influence. He is always careful to efface them, by a subsequent picture of evils, sufficiently terrible to check the spirit of European emigration. This will explain the anomaly of "beautifully diversified and fertile lands" being unsusceptible of improvements in agriculture, on account of badness of soil. T.
