Some said that it flowed through Virginia into the Atlantic, some that it passed through Florida, some that it emptied into the Pacific, and some that it reached the Gulf of Mexico.

Parted from their native countries by the stormy Atlantic, to cross which implied a voyage of many months, these refugees seemed lost to the world.
But before the close of the nineteenth century the descendants of this feeble people had become one of the great powers of the earth.

They had established a republic whose sway extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

With an army of more than a million men, not on paper, but actually in the field, they had overthrown a domestic assailant.
They had maintained at sea a war-fleet of nearly seven hundred ships, carrying five thousand guns, some of them the heaviest in the world.

The tonnage of this navy amounted to half a million.