is "the hand of the diligent that maketh rich;" and nothing else, nothing less can do it.

We showed also, how the face of their country and its associations, furnished excitement and cultivation to the intellectual faculties of the Hebrews. With us also, mind in all its varieties has new scope and ample nutriment. Thought, and communication of thought, are free as the air. Intellect is rendered alert and bounding by the vast and inviting fields that are yet to be explored and improved; while the taste and fancy of our artists and poets and orators are heightened by the grandeur and beauty which are spread over the face of the country, in its lofty mountains, its majestic rivers, its wide plains and seas. The materials and the excitement of thought are furnished by the scenery that environs us throughout our borders.

As to security against invasion from foreign foes; it was scarcely more true that "Israel dwelt in safety and alone, and was not numbered among the nations," than it is true of us as a people. The wide ocean rolls between us and the kingdoms which have long proved restless and dangerous neighbors to each other; nor is there a moral possibility of a nation growing up at our side, with strength to endanger our peace and our safety. On the contrary, every few years sees our territory

widened and making fresh accessions to the strength of the nation; nor is this done by conquest, subjecting our neighbors to a colonial dependance, which they would improve the first opportunity to throw off. They come to us of their own will. They knock at our doors for adoption, as members of the national household, promising allegiance to our authority, while they ask for protection from our power.*

But there is still another point of the parallel worthy of distinct notice. It lies in the local advantages possessed by this country for easy and speedy access to all the most important nations of the earth. In this respect, we sustain, in a remarkable degree, the same relation to the world at large, in which, as we have seen, the Hebrews stood to the Eastern Hemisphere. Look at the extent of ocean which washes our shores from North to South, furnishing us with the readiest communication with every nation of our own continent. Look also at the broad Atlantic, which carries us to the door of every great nation in Western Europe. But still more, look in a different direction, and to what, until lately, has been less observed. Turn your eyes towards the vast and populous Empires of China and India, which have hitherto been reached both by Europeans and ourselves, after long and circuitous voyages, over

* Note K.

seas and around capes, that have been strewed with wrecks, till they have been made frightful Golgothas, for the mariners and merchandise of all civilized nations. The highway of commerce to those rich countries of the East, will not much longer be around the southern point of Africa, or under the burning Equator. A wiser and a safer way is fast revealing itself to the sagacious observer of events and developments in the present generation. Steam has now shown that it can be rendered quite as effective for the navigation of oceans as of rivers; and the wide Pacific, rolling between our western shores and the nations of Eastern Asia, seems formed by the Creator for the ocean steamer. Its numberless islands, that give life and variety to its bosom, are just the opportune resting places or depots to furnish what the vessel needs as she wings her way across its broad expanse of waters; and we have only to cast our eyes over the surface of our whole globe and observe the points of distance which separate both Europe and America from Eastern Asia, in order to see how inevitably our country, with its cities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, must soon become the great thoroughfare of wealth and knowledge travelled by the civilized world. I speak of a change which neither war, nor violence, nor cunning diplomacy, can be required to accomplish; but which

will be accomplished all the sooner and better if these unholy agencies will let it alone. I speak of what is the` manifest purpose of Him who hath fixed bounds to the sea and the dry land; and hath determined the courses of rivers and of mountains. I speak of what is the natural course of events, and which flow as a consequence from the works of His hand, which neither the folly nor selfishness of man can resist or defeat. But when our land shall thus have become a central point to the whole world, on the one side reaching China and the adjacent Archipelago, through the Pacific, studded with its coral isles; and, on the other, reaching the most powerful nations of Europe, through the long travelled Atlantic; who does not foresee the impulse which will then be given to the spread of our religion, our laws and institutions, and the influence which they must thenceforward have on the destinies of the whole habitable globe.

Allow me to notice one other point in this parallel. We have shown you how opportunely the establishment of the Hebrew commonwealth was adapted to prevent the utter ruin of the guilty nations whose iniquity was then full. Equally opportune was the settlement of this land and the rise of our republic. When America first came to the knowledge of Europe, so galling was the yoke of

civil and ecclesiastical tyranny, and such was the determined spirit of resistance against it, that had there not been in this country a place of escape for the wronged and oppressed, an explosion would have been produced, causing blood to flow in tor rents. Judge of it as the kings and princes of Europe may, this western world is the safety-valve to which they owe their preservation from an earlier and utter ruin. Had it not been provided in due season, their thrones would have been hurled to the dust by a spirit too fierce and excited to discern where justice should end and mercy should begin, and which, in its hot haste, might have confounded right with wrong, and truth with error. Cromwell was on the point of leaving England and embarking for America, when he was compelled to remain by an arbitrary order of Council, and the consequence to royalty is well known. In this new world his daring and manly spirit would have had ample scope for the accomplishment of good, without the irritation from insufferable wrongs which drove him to deeds that every one must condemn and deplore. Many a noble patriot in our land would have been a Cromwell, if not something worse, had he been compelled to act his part under Cromwell's tempta tions. Chafed, as the minds of men had become in the Old World, by long continued cruelty and in