6719. POLICY (American), Wars of Europe.—
The insulated state in which nature
has placed the American continent,
should so far avail it that no spark of war
kindled in the other quarters of the globe
should be wafted across the wide oceans
which separate us from them. And it will
be so. In fifty years more the United States
alone will contain fifty millions of inhabitants,
and fifty years are soon gone over.
The peace of 1763 is within that period. I
was then twenty years old, and of course
remember well all the transactions of the war
preceding it. And you will live to see the
period equally ahead of us; and the numbers
which will then be spread over the other
parts of the American hemisphere, catching
long before that the principles of our portion
of it, and concurring with us in the maintenance
of the same system. * * * I am anticipating
events of which you will be the
bearer to me in the Elysian fields fifty years
hence.—
To Baron von Humboldt. Washington ed. vi, 268.
Ford ed., ix, 431.
(Dec. 1813)
