within the memory of man were frontier military posts; to find railroads and electric telegraphs traversing forests, in whose gloomy shades, as late as 1789, and in territories not more remote than the present State of Ohio, the wild savage still burned his captives at the stake.

The desponding or the unfriendly censor will remind me of the blemishes of this tumultuous civilization;-outbreaks of frontier violence in earlier and later times; acts of injustice to the native tribes, (though the policy of the Government toward them has in the main been paternal and conscientiously administered,) the roughness of manners in infant settlements, the collisions of adventurers not yet compacted into a stable society, deeds of wild justice and wilder injustice, border license, lynch law. All these I admit and I lament;-but a community cannot grow up at once from the log-cabin, with the wolf at the door and the savage in the neighboring thicket, into the order and beauty of communities which have been maturing for centuries. We must remember, too, that all these blemishes of an infant settlement, the inseparable accompaniment of that stage of progress and phase of society and life, have their counterpart at the other end of the scale, in the festering iniquities of large cities, the gigantic frauds of speculation and trade, the wholesale corruption, in a word, of older societies, in all parts of the

world. When I reflect that the day we celebrate found us a feeble strip of thirteen Colonies along the coast, averaging at most a little more than 150,000 inhabitants each; and that this, its eighty-fourth return, sees us grown to thirty-three States, scattered through the interior and pushed to the Pacific, averaging nearly a million of inhabitants, each a wellcompacted representative republic, securing to its citizens a larger amount of the substantial blessings of life, than are enjoyed by equal numbers of people in the oldest and most prosperous States of Europe, I am lost in wonder; and, as a sufficient answer to all general charges of degeneracy, I am tempted to exclaim, Look around you.

But, merely to fill up the wilderness with a population provided with the ordinary institutions and carrying on the customary pursuits of civilized life, though surely no mean achievement, was not the whole of the work allotted to the United States, and thus far performed with signal activity, intelligence, and success. The Founders of America and their descendants have accomplished more and better things. On the basis of a rapid geographical extension, and with the force of teeming numbers, they have, in the very infancy of their political existence, successfully aimed at higher progress in a generous civilization. The mechanical arts have not only been cultivated, but they have been cultivated with unusual

aptitude. Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Navigation, whether by sails or steam, and the art of printing in all its forms and in all its applications, have been pursued with surprising skill. Great improvements have been made in all these branches of industry, and in the machinery pertaining to them, which have been eagerly adopted in Europe. A more adequate provision has been made for popular education, the great basis, humanly speaking of social improvement, than in almost any other country. I believe that in the cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, more money, in proportion to the population, is raised by taxation for the support of common schools, than in any other cities in the world. There are more seminaries in the United States, where a decent academical education can be obtained, -more, I still mean in proportion to the population, than in any other country except Germany. The Fine Arts have reached a high degree of excellence. The taste for music is rapidly spreading in town and country; and every year witnesses productions from the pencil and the chisel of American sculptors and painters, which would adorn any gallery in the world. Our Astronomers, Mathematicians, Naturalists, Chemists, Engineers, Jurists, Publicists, Historians, Poets, Novelists, and Lexicographers, have placed themselves on a level with their contemporaries abroad. The best dictionaries of the English language

since that of Johnson, are those published in America. Our constitutions, whether of the United States or of the separate States, exclude all public provision for the maintenance of Religion, but in no part of Christendom is it more generously supported. Sacred Science is pursued as diligently and the pulpit commands as high a degree of respect in the United States, as in those countries where the Church is publicly endowed; while the American Missionary operations have won the admiration of the civilized world. Nowhere, I am persuaded, are there more liberal contributions to public-spirited and charitable objects, witness the remarkable article on that subject, the second of the kind, by Mr. Eliot, in the last number of the North American Review. Our charitable asylums, houses of industry, institutions for the education of deaf mutes and the blind, for the care of the pauper, and the discipline and reformation of the criminal, are nowhere surpassed. The latter led the way in the modern penitentiary reforms. In a word, there is no branch of the mechanical or fine arts, no department of science exact or applied, no form of polite literature, no description of social improvement, in which, due allowance being made for the means and resources at command, the progress of the United States has not been satisfactory, and in some respects astonishing. At this moment, the rivers and seas of the globe are navigated with that

marvellous application of steam as a propelling power, which was first practically effected by Fulton; the monster steamship which has just reached our shores, rides at anchor in the waters, in which the first successful experiment of Steam Navigation was made. The wheat harvest of England this summer will be gathered by American reapers; the newspapers which lead the journalism of Europe are printed on American presses; there are imperial Railroads in Europe constructed by American Engineers and travelled by American locomotives; troops armed with American weapons, and ships of war built in American dockyards. In the factories of Europe there is machinery of American invention or improvement; in their observatories, telescopes of American construction; and apparatus of American invention for recording the celestial phenomena. America contests with Europe the introduction into actual use of the electric telegraph, and her mode of operating it is adopted throughout the French empire. American authors in almost every department of science and literature are found on the shelves of European libraries. It is true no American Homer, Virgil, Dante, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Newton, has risen on the world. These mighty geniuses seem to be exceptions in the history of the human mind. Favorable circumstances do not produce them, nor does the absence of favorable circumstances pre