The statistical story of the first period, under that accurate
classification, would be about as interesting as a bulletin of real-estate
transactions in Chicago would be to a professor of paleontology in the
Sorbonne. It is only when those sales are considered teleologically (as
the philosophers would say) that they can seem absorbingly vital to others
than economists or to the fortunate heirs of some of the purchasers. I am
aware (let me say parenthetically) that customs duties might have a
somewhat like interpretation under a higher imaginative power; but this
possibility does not lessen to me the singularly spiritual character of
this series of transactions-of land sales, or transmutations of lands, on
the one hand, into the maintenance of the fabric of a government by the
people, and, on the other, into the ruggedest, hardiest species of men and
women the world has known in its new hemisphere.
Land-offices, as I have seen them described in the newspapers of the early
part of the nineteenth century, gave no outward suggestion of being places
of miracles--sacred places.
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