children, without husbands, brings out the sad truth that our real available man-force is but small. And yet the moral calls upon us in this new sphere, the intellectual demands, and the physical requirements, with the vastness of territory, and the largeness of providential circumstances around us, while they quicken imagination, fix also the conviction of helpless weakness, and in some men produce indifference or despair; in others, vexation and painful anxiousness. The population question is dwarfing the powers of our strong and earnest leaders. They cannot lift themselves up to grand ideas and large conceptions. In all their efforts they are "cribbed, cabined, and confined."
We need this day for the great work before us, in a region of not less than 500,000 square miles, we need, I say, not less than 50,000 civilized men. We ought to be travelling onward through the land, and to appropriate and modify a remark of De Tocqueville's, to be "peopling our vast wilderness at the average rate of at least five miles per annum," And for the work of civilization an enlightenment among our aboriginal population, we should have even now, a mental power and a moral force working through all our territory, fitted for just such a transformation as has been produced in New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands in a period of twenty-five years. The tide of immigration, as it now sets in, promises us no such results. Our ratio of increase, with our present diverse disturbing influences, is but small. Unfortunately, there is no general consciousness of our lack and need in this respect. I have had the fear that
