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Important Statistics

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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 8, 1864

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 24, No. 24.

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Important Statistics.

WHO can read the following statistics relative to the unparalleled growth, power, and influence, of these United States, and not believe that they are somewhere noted in prophecy? That a people occupying so prominent a position as we do among the nations of the earth, should be passed in silence by the prophetic pen, while others are mentioned, would be to us unaccountable. In the following article, the contrast is drawn between the condition of the United States in 1860, and its condition when the present constitutional government was adopted in 1789.
The new Government was found to be fully adequate to all the purposes for which Government is instituted among men.
In no age of the world was there a higher appreciation of the moral duties of life; the spirit of truth and justice pervaded the whole people; they had laid broad and deep the foundations of public liberty, opened the career of the Republic, and consigned its fortunes and its fate to the generations that were to follow. WHAT! FROM THIS SUBLIME COMMENCEMENT OF OUR CAREER, HAS BEEN OUR PROGRESS?
We have grown in territorial extent, from 800,000 square miles, to three millions, two hundred and fifty thousand; from a population of 3,900,000, to thirty-three millions; from thirteen sovereign States, to thirty-four, with a promise to enter the next century with one hundred and twenty millions, with an assessed value of property rising, since 1790, from four hundred and eighty millions of dollars, to the immense aggregate of sixteen thousand millions, yielding an annual profit to the people of between five and six hundred millions of dollars, and with a commercial marine rapidly verging toward six millions of tonnage.
Nearly fifty thousand ships belonging to the Republic are scattered either over the ocean, traversing our great inland seas, or are penetrating the great streams that flow within our limits.
Fifty thousand miles of Railroad are projected, and thirty thousand completed, at a cost of over eleven hundred millions of dollars.
Forty thousand miles of telegraphic line have been established, at a cost of five millions of dollars.
From 75 post offices in 1790, we have increased to 30,000 in 1860; from 1,875 miles of post routes in 1790, to 275,000 in 1860; from 1,500 miles of sea coast in 1790, to 5,100 miles in 1860.
Recurring to the contrast of what, as a nation, our condition was at the foundation of the Constitutional Government, when compared with the results under its benign influences, we find that, in the year 1791, our country exported 2,065,000 bushels of grain, in 1855, 1,000,000,000 of bushels, worth $400,000,000.
The wheat crop alone of 1860 was 230,000,000 bushels, furnishing, with the surplus of the previous year, 75,000,000 for exportation.
Chicago, in 1829, was not even in existence. A century previous to that date, CHARLEVOIX, the Jesuit explorer, designated its locality as a point destined to be of the highest commercial importance in the future.
As a grain depot, it is now the first in the world; its warehouses capable of storing nearly eight millions of bushels; its ability to ship in ten hours one million and a half of bushels.
In 1860, its grain shipments were between thirty-five and forty millions of bushels. St. Louis, Cincinnati, Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester, vie with the Illinois commercial capital in this vast domestic and extensive grain trade.
The agricultural products of the Union, for 1860, have been estimated at sixteen hundred millions of dollars, and the fertile fields within the Union are capable of producing a hundred times that value.
The food products in England in 1824 fell below the consumption of the British Islands, and in 1847 nearly half a million of people died of starvation in Ireland.
Now the necessities of the people of the British Islands require an annual importation of $225,000,000 worth of wheat, flour, corn, meal, and oats, and this trade, of which we already enjoy the largest share, will doubtless increase and continue to be of additional value to us.
The increase in the population of the Union has been, since 1790,
FOUR TIMES GREATER THAN RUSSIA; SIX TIMES GREATER THAN GREAT BRITAIN; NINE TIMES GREATER THAN AUSTRIA; AND TEN TIMES GREATER THAN FRANCE.
Our territory, if peopled as densely as France, would hold five hundred millions; or as England, seven hundred and fifty millions; or as Belgium, eleven hundred and fifty millions—a number greater than the aggregate population of the globe.
The farms and plantations have reached, from the sparse settlements of 1790, in the year 1860, to 2,150,000 farms and plantations. The dwellings, from 250,000 in 1790, worth $130,000,000, to 4,340,000, houses, valued at $4,000,000,000, the increase of population demanding yearly the erection of 130,000 new houses—whilst 50,000 churches, erected to the worship of the Most High, attest the wide-spread religious feeling of the American family.
The average of our domestic exports to foreign countries, from 1790 to 1794, was $22,000,000. In the year 1860, our exports were $400,000,000. The value of our manufactures in 1790, too inconsiderable for estimate, were, in 1820, $62,000,000; in 1855, $1,055,000,000; in 1860, $2,000,000,000; whilst the land value in thirty-four States equals nine thousand three hundred and seventeen millions of dollars.
The navigation laws, taking their date from the protectorate of England, restricted the importation into that island of imports from Asia, Africa, or America, except by British vessels.
The retaliatory laws of our Constitutional Government forced a treaty of equal rights in this respect, still further liberalized by extending the privilege to American vessels as carriers to British colonies, thus dissolving the exclusive system of Great Britain.
The fruits and wines of the Mediterranean, valued annually at $7,500,000, employing over six hundred vessels, have now a competitor in the large supply from California, on the Pacific, which furnished in 1860 a grape crop valued at $8,000,000. The wine capabilities of three counties alone in this State, when fully developed, it is estimated, will be over one hundred millions of gallons per annum.
In 1791, our cotton export to Great Britain was 189,518 pounds; in 1860, eleven hundred millions, whilst 300,000 citizens, who went to the Pacific twelve years ago, have sent back six hundred millions of dollars in the precious metal.
To these results may be added the aggregate total of imports and exports respectively, for the seventy years that succeeded the adoption of the Constitution, at 8,000 to 8,500 millions of dollars, which represent the industry of our country.
Such is but an imperfect outline of the growth and progress of the American people under their Constitutional Government, as founded in 1789.