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ruptions; enjoying the united advantages of an infant and a mature society, they are able to apply the highly refined science and art of Europe to the improvement of the virgin soil and unoccupied natural riches of America. They start unincumbered by a thousand evils, political and moral, which weigh down the energies of the old world. The volume of our history lies before them; they may adopt our improvements, avoid our errors, take warning from our sufferings; and, with the combined lights of our experience and their own, build up a more perfect form of society! Even already they have given some momentous and salutary truths to the world. Their rapid growth has first developed the astonishing results of the productive powers of population. We can now calculate with much certainty that America, which yet presents to the eye, generally, the aspect of an untrodden forest, will, in the short space of one century, surpass Europe in the number of its inhabitants. We even hazard little in predicting that before the tide of civilization has rolled back to its original seats, Assyria, Persia, and Palestine, an intelligent population of two or three hundred millions will have overspread the New World, and extended the empire of knowledge and of the arts from Cape Horn to Alaska. Among the vast mass of civilized men, there will be but two

languages spoken. The effect of this single circumstance in accelerating the progress of society can scarcely be foreseen. What a field will then be opened to the man of science, the artist, the popular writer who addresses a hundred millions of educated persons! What a stimulus given to mental energy and social improvement, when every useful discovery will be communicated instantaneously to so great a mass of intelligent beings, by the electric agency of the Post and Press! Imagination is lost in attempting to estimate the effects of such accumulated means and powers. One result, however, may be anticipated. America must then become. the centre of knowledge, civilization and power."

Comparing the views of these two distinguished men, I am reminded of the judicious observation made. by a shrewd writer, "that it would have been well for theology if commentators could have been content to take, and not give a meaning, when professing to expound the Sacred Scriptures." It is equally true that it would have been well for the world if statesmen had contented themselves with taking, instead of giving a meaning, when studying the history of nations. And perhaps there is no nation on the face of the earth whose example and position have in this respect been more misunderstood and misrepresented than our own. We can readily account for it. The

great questions respecting Church and State, which engage public attention and divide public opinion in Europe, are, in America, brought to the decisive test of experiment; but experiments in civil and ecclesiastical polity are not to be completed with the speedy action of an electric battery. They require time and careful deliberate examination. The causes which are most effectual in producing the final results may, for a long time, be acting with a latent power; and during the process, appearances may be evolved that will lead a hasty and superficial observer to conclusions directly at variance with what may be found in the end to be truth and reality. Indeed, it is generally seen that the most valuable results are those which require the most time, and pass through the greatest variety of changes, before they are fully developed. When our fruit trees are in bloom, an observer, who is a stranger to their nature, might suppose that they were designed to answer the same end with the violet, the rose and the lily, to produce their flower and nothing more; but if he waits, he will find that the blossom was only an incipient form in which the life of the tree displayed itself, and in which it made preparation for the growth and maturity of the nutricious fruit.

Much, if not the whole of this seems to be forgotten by several political economists abroad, who

take opposite sides on the questions which they seek to determine by what is occurring in this country. They act with the hot haste of the empiric who will seize upon every new and imperfect result and try to force it into the support of his own favorite theory. This unphilosophic and selfish determination to bend facts into a correspondence with foregone conclusions, instead of drawing conclusions from facts deliberately weighed after they have been fairly ascertained, has led many able men abroad into most strange, if not ridiculous mistakes. They would build for America with the square, and compass, and plumb line of Europe; and when they find any divergence from their rules of beauty and stability, they condemn the edifice as raised in ignorance and doomed to early ruin. They forget that many of the usages in both Church and State, which might have been wise centuries ago, are now to be viewed as obsolete and behind the age. They seem as if they had yet to learn that there are sources of good working their way in the New World which were never felt in the Old; and that there are causes of suffering and evil in the Old that have no existence in the New.

To refer to the predictions of Burke. We reply to it, that the spirit of the Tartars has never emigrated to the Western Hemisphere. It cannot take root in a region like this. The natural and constant

course of events with us is directly the reverse of the aims and achievements of Tartar hordes rushing down from their wilds to ravage states and cities grown weak and effeminate by luxury and indolence. Our elder states and cities do not grow defenceless or weak, as he supposed, by the natural course of popular government and long prosperity. Our far west is not left to be a barren wild, occupied only by barbarians, savage and untamed. On the contrary, our own people from our Eastern States, and thousands upon thousands from our Eastern Hemisphere are pouring year after year into that vast wilderness, and subduing the rich soil to the purposes of civilization and refinement. There is no war waged upon the older states by marauders pouring down from the Alleghanies, with pike and sabre to plunder and pillage the wealth and luxuries they could not find at home. But the invasion is from the older States upon the new; and the only war carried on, is with the wilderness, with the forest, and with the unreclaimed prairie. Instead of the invaders leaving behind them, and on their path, desolation, such as marked the way of Tartars, Goths or Vandals; their progress is known by "the wilderness becoming a fruitful field," and the evidences of a wealth which they had not wrested from others, but created for themselves. They are opening and

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