machinations of sectional politicians, who in their folly and blindness are endeavouring to employ the power of our government to accomplish this purpose, and to lift their eyes to that august Providence, which is steadily and surely baffling their plans, and by its immutable laws securing to free and enlightened labor the dominion of the earth. Instead of being terrified and irritated at what men, and parties, and earthly rulers are vainly attempting, and spreading the unbelieving and malign infection among our fellow-citizens, let us, when the Almighty is so visibly stretching forth his own arm, "leave Him," as one of the greatest of the Puritans said "alone to govern the world; " not interposing our agency unless in methods subsidiary to His. Let us stand back, as it were, in reverent silence, and rejoicing assurance, and witness the movements of our God, as he goes forth in those sublime elemental laws of his moral government by whose resistless energy he is removing the obstructions in the social and political world, which have heretofore checked the prevalence of liberty, justice, and happiness among men. The history of nations, and especially the history and present condition of our own country, display the operation of those laws; and confiding in their continued operation, let us look forward, with certainty, to their triumphs in the future.

And while we thus trust to the Providence of God

to remove this great evil, let us do our part, in cooperation and subserviency to Him, in rendering more efficient the agency he employs. Let us give our influence and efforts to promote the circulation of knowledge, to encourage freedom of thought, enterprise and industry, and to impart to our fellow-men, and confirm in our own hearts, the truths of religion, and the sentiments of piety, which clothe the spirit with a strength from God. When the feet of the Pilgrims first struck the Rock of Plymouth, these elements of character sources of the world's regeneration - gushed forth from it. They were the living waters that sustained our fathers in the wilderness, and they will at length fertilize and gladden the whole continent.

Freedom and enterprise are swelling, with a rapidity which no calculation can follow, the millions which overflow the boundaries of the north-western States. They will bring into the bosom of the republic more new States on the slopes of the Stony Mountains, than could be carved out of the whole of Mexico. They will forthwith, strangely confounding the hopes of some, preoccupy the grand and beautiful regions already conquered by our gallant armies. The climate, soil, and all the features of that country will be found incompatible with any other than free labor. Gradually our own territories, and the States even where, as the Governor of Missouri expresses himself, "physical labor"

has been longest depended upon, will throw off the incubus, and welcome the blessings scattered by liberty along her path.

My limits allow me no more extended and elaborate discussion. There is one topic, however, which I must touch before I close.

Our fathers, as has been before intimated, entertained the idea, sometimes the vision brightened into clearness of delineation, sometimes it was dimmed with shadows, but its outlines never vanished wholly from their minds, that a vast empire, to be limited only by the great oceans, was to rise from the foundations they laid. In a prophetic dream, which a poet of our own day imagines to have visited one of the Pilgrim Fathers, he justly represents the voice of their posterity as exclaiming "The continent is ours.' "" * Besides particular

sentiments incidentally expressed, to be found in their writings to this effect, the thought lay deep beneath their institutions and whole public policy. It was expressed in their charters. It supplied a perpetual stimulus to their resolution, and made that resolution absolutely unconquerable, to expel the French from the western wilderness behind them, and is seen to have exalted the patriotic enthusiasm of such men as John Adams and Josiah

* Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Quincy, Jr., in the opening struggles of the Revolutionary controversy, suggesting to their ardent minds the most lofty views of the future fortunes of the country, which they had resolved to bear on their arms, at every peril, into the family of independent nations.

The Constitution of the United States of America, that greatest production of associated human wisdom, the most beneficent plan ever contrived for the government of men in bodies politic, affords, if we will but be true to it, the means by which gradually, and far better would it be if it were left peaceably to be done, the whole continent may be included within the protection and shelter of one empire of liberty and order. The organization of State governments, within certain convenient limits, for all local purposes of legislation and administration, and the Union of them into one pervading government for purposes in which there is a general interest, is a plan which, I most assuredly believe, will be found to work more favorably the wider the regions over which it is extended. As the system expands, territorial distance, and the want of prompt inter-communication between remote members of the Confederacy, the only real difficulties that threatened to be insurmountable, are already greatly reduced, and almost absolutely obliterated by recent achievements in science.

The American States have now continued in sub

stantial union for seventy years. They went into the Revolutionary War, when occupying a narrow strip of the continent along the Atlantic shore; they now stretch their legislative and executive organization to the Pacific. When their numbers were few, and the limits of the country itself were contracted, a disaffected section might entertain the project of withdrawing from the Union; but now its insignificance, if separated, is so palpable as to forbid the idea. For half a century, the question was discussed in newspapers, in periodicals, at college exhibitions, and in all private circles, whether extension of territory would not weaken the bonds of Union. It is high time to drop it forever. There is not a State, a county, a city, a town, a village, in the nation, in which, if the popular sentiment were tested, allegiance to the Union would not be found prevalent and ineradicable.

The only source, from which alienation to the Union is to be apprehended, is on the part of those persons who feel themselves implicated in objectionable institutions maintained and cherished in some of the States. A certain description of ignorant and insolent foreigners, not understanding our beautiful Federal system, are doing what they can to inflame this feeling. On this point I wish, before I close, to draw a lesson of warning from an error of our fathers. They were deluded by this