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are safely tolerated, where reason is left free to combat their errors. Nor is the constitution a dead letter, unalterably fixed; it has the capacity for improvement; adopting whatever changes time and the public will may require, and safe from decay, so long as that will retains its energy.

6. New states are forming in the wilderness; canals, intersecting our plains, and crossing our highlands, open numerous channels to internal commerce; manufactures prosper along our water-courses; the use of steam on our rivers and railroads annihilates distance by the acceleration of speed. Our wealth and population, already giving us a place in the first rank of nations, are so rapidly cumulative, that the former is increased fourfold, and the latter is doubled, in every period of twenty-two or twenty-three years.

7. There is no national debt; the community is opulent; the government economical; and the public treasury full. Religion, neither persecuted nor paid by the state, is sustained by the regard for public morals, and the convictions of an enlightened faith. Intelligence is diffused with unparalleled universality; a free press teems with the choicest productions of all nations and ages.

8. There are more daily journals in the United States, than in the world beside. A public document of general interest is, within a month, reproduced in at least a million of copies, and is brought within the reach of every freeman in the country. An immense concourse of emigrants, of the most various lineage, is perpetually crowding to our shores; and the principles of liberty, uniting all interests by the operation of equal laws, blend the discordant elements into harmonious union.

9. Other governments are convulsed by the innovations and reforms of neighboring states; our constitution, fixed in the affections of the people, from whose choice it has sprung, neutralizes the influence of foreign principles, and fearlessly opens an asylum to the virtuous, the unfortunate, and the oppressed of every nation.

10. And yet it is but little more than two centuries since the oldest of our states received its first permanent colony. Before that time, the whole territory was an unproductive waste. Throughout its wide extent, the arts had not erected a monument. Its only inhabitants were a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of

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political connection. The axe and the ploughshare were unknown. The soil, which had been gathering fertility from the repose of centuries, was lavishing its strength in magnificent but useless vegetation. In the view of civiliza tion, the immense domain was a solitude.

11. It is the object of history to explain how the change in the condition of our land has been accomplished; and. as the fortunes of a nation are not under the control of blind destiny, to follow the steps by which a favoring Provi dence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory.

LESSON XCIII.

Reflections on the Settlement of New England. [From an oration delivered at Plymouth, Mass., on the anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Dec. 22, 1620.]

1. THE settlement of New England, by the colony which landed here on the twenty-second of December, sixteen hundred and twenty, although not the first European establishment in what now constitutes the United States, was yet so peculiar in its causes and character, and has been followed, and must still be followed, by such consequences, as to give it a high claim to lasting commemoration. On these causes and consequences, more than on its immediately attendant circumstances, its importance, as an historical event, depends.

2. Great actions and striking occurrences, having excited a temporary admiration, often pass away and are forgotten, because they leave no lasting results, affecting the prosperity of communities. Such is frequently the fortune of the most brilliant military achievements. Of the ten thousand battles which have been fought; of all the fields fertilized with carnage; of the banners which have been bathed in blood; of the warriors who have hoped that they had risen from the field of conquest to a glory as bright and as durable as the stars, how few that continue long to interest mankind!

3. The victory of yesterday is reversed by the defeat of to-day; the star of military glory, rising like a meteor, like a meteor has fallen; disgrace and disaster hang on the heels of conquest and renown; victor and vanquished presently pass away to oblivion, and the world holds on its

course, with the loss only of so many lives, and so much

treasure.

4. But if this is frequently, or generally, the fortune of military achievements, it is not always so. There are enterprises, military as well as civil, that sometimes check the current of events, give a new turn to human affairs, and transmit their consequences through ages. We see their importance in their results, and call them great, because great things follow.

5. There have been battles which have fixed the fate of nations. These come down to us in history with a solid and permanent influence, not created by a display of glittering armor, the rush of adverse battalions, the sinking and rising of pennons, the flight, the pursuit, and the victory; but by their effect in advancing or retarding human knowledge, in overthrowing or establishing despotism, in extending or destroying human happiness.

6. When the traveller pauses on the plains of Marathon, what are the emotions which strongly agitate his breast? what is that glorious recollection that thrills through his frame, and suffuses his eyes? Not, I imagine, that Grecian skill and Grecian valor were here most signally displayed; but that Greece herself was saved. It is because to this spot, and to the event which has rendered it immortal, he refers all the succeeding glories of the republic. It is because, if that day had gone otherwise, Greece had perished.

7. It is because he perceives that her philosophers and orators, her poets and painters, her sculptors and architects, her government and free institutions, point backward to Marathon, and that their future existence seems to have been suspended on the contingency, whether the Persian or Grecian banner should wave victorious in the beams of that day's setting sun.

8. And, as his imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to the interesting moment; he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts; his interest for the result overwhelms him; he trembles as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and Phidias, as secure, yet, to himself and to the world.

9. "If we conquer," said the Athenian commander, on the morning of that decisive day,-"If we conquer, we

shall make Athens the greatest city of Greece." A prophecy how well fulfilled! "If God prosper us,"-might have been the more appropriate language of our fathers, when they landed upon this rock,-" If God prosper us, we shall here begin a work that shall last for ages; we shall plant here a new society, in the principles of the fullest liberty, and the purest religion.

10. "We shall subdue this wilderness which is before us; we shall fill this region of the great continent, which stretches almost from pole to pole, with civilization and Christianity; the temples of the true God shall rise where now ascends the smoke of idolatrous sacrifice; fields and gardens, the flowers of summer, and the waving and golden harvests of autumn, shall extend over a thousand hills, and stretch along a thousand valleys, never yet, since the creation, reclaimed to the use of civilized man.

11. "We shall whiten this coast with the canvass of a prosperous commerce; we shall stud the long and winding shore with a hundred cities. That which we sow in weakness shall be raised in strength. From our sincere, but houseless worship, there shall spring splendid temples to record God's goodness; from the simplicity of our social union, there shall arise wise and politic constitutions of government, full of the liberty which we ourselves bring and breathe.

12. "From our zeal for learning, institutions shall spring, which shall scatter the light of knowledge throughout the land, and, in time, paying back what they have borrowed, shall contribute their part to the great aggregate of human knowledge; and our descendants, through all generations, shall look back to this spot, and this hour, with unabated affection and regard."

LESSON XCIV.

Advantages of Adversity to our Forefathers.

1. Ir is sad, indeed, to reflect on the disasters which the little band of pilgrims encountered; sad to see a portion of them, the prey of unrelenting cupidity, treacherously embarked in an unsound, unseaworthy ship, which they are soon obliged to abandon, and crowd themselves into one

vessel; one hundred persons, besides the ship's company, in a vessel of one hundred and sixty tons.

2. One is touched at the story of the long, cold, and weary autumnal passage; of the landing on the inhospitable rocks at this dismal season; where they are deserted, before long, by the ship which had brought them, and which seemed their only hold upon the world of fellow-men, a prey to the elements and to want, and fearfully ignorant of the numbers, the power, and the temper of the savage tribes, that filled the unexplored continent, upon whose verge they had ventured.

3. But all this wrought together for good. These trials of wandering and exile, of the ocean, the winter, the wilderness, and the savage foe, were the final assurances of success. It was these that put far away from our fathers' cause all patrician softness, all hereditary claims to preëminence. No effeminate nobility crowded into the dark and austere ranks of the pilgrims.

4. No Carr nor Villiers would lead on the ill-provided band of despised Puritans. No well-endowed clergy were on the alert to quit their cathedrals, and set up a pompous hierarchy in the frozen wilderness. No craving governors were anxious to be sent over to our cheerless El Dorados of ice and of snow. No; they could not say they had encouraged, patronized, or helped the pilgrims; their own cares, their own labors, their own councils, and their own blood, contrived all, achieved all, bore all, sealed all.

5. They could not afterwards fairly pretend to reap where they had not strewn; and, as our fathers reared this broad and solid fabric with pains and watchfulness, unaided, barely tolerated, it did not fall when the favor, which had always been withholden, was changed into wrath; when the arm which had never supported, was raised to destroy.

6. Methinks I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future State, and bound across the unknown I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore.

sea.

7. I see them now scantily supplied with provisions; crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison; delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route,-and now driven in

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