William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 2

France has been bought off; the outlets of the Mississippi are in American hands. Spain has been ousted from Florida, and Mexico driven from California, Arizona, and Texas. Nearly all the temperate, and some of the semi-tropical, zones of America have been brought under the rule of English idioms and American laws. Thirty States and Territories, each about the size of Spain, have been added to the Republic in a hundred years. In these States and Territories there are forty millions of free citizens, sixty three thousand churches, with twenty-one million sittings; a hundred and forty-one thousand schools, two hundred and seventy thousand teachers, and more than seven million boys and girls attending school. Spread about these States and Territories are fifty-six thousand public libraries, containing nearly twenty million volumes; a hundred thousand private libraries, containing nearly twenty-six million volumes. The States and Territories produce five thousand eight hundred newspapers, with a yearly issue of fifteen thousand