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56 is the universal fact in all the gradations of nature, and in all the advances of humanity.

It is the fortune of the people of the United States, that they see nations springing up almost every day. Our extensive Western frontier is a cradle of infant commonwealths. The whole process of social growth is there laid open to us, as natural growth was in the patent hatching machine, or Eccolobean, exhibited a few years since. We see the first germ deposited in the form perhaps of a single family; we see this family spread out into numerous branches, or other families moving in to unite with it, till the desert and the solitary place blossoms into a flourishing and many-columned city.

Now, what are the successive steps of this progress from the wild wilderness to the thriving mart, from the distant and lonely log-cabin of the prairie to the thronged and temple-covered metropolis? What are the indications of the gradual advance of the settlement from almost savage isolation and insecurity to the peace, wealth, comfort, and refinement of civilized union? The answer is plain: first, gradual increase in the number of the families or persons; and, second, a corresponding multiplication and interweaving of their various relations; or, in other words, their nearer and nearer approach to complete organization.

The original squatter, we know, lives for a while alone, cultivating a narrow patch of ground for food, and shooting his habiliments for the most part from the trees. He is poor, dependent, and half-wild; his own farmer, miller, merchant, mechanic, and governor. He builds his own house, raises his own wheat, makes his own tools, keeps his own store, argues his own causes, teaches his own school. He is without society,—the merest fraction of man.

The first possibility of improvement which comes to him is when he is joined by a few other persons, who relieve him at once of a portion of the laborious tasks and anxieties he was before compelled to undertake, and whose very presence acts upon him as stimulus to a more wholesome activity. He is no longer his own blacksmith, carpenter, tailor, or tradesman. The functions of these, he finds, are better