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, by no
means, 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 been
cultivated with unusual aptitude. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce,
navigation, whether by sails or by steam, and the art of printing
in all its forms, have been pursued with surprising skill. Great
improvements have been made in all those 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
than in almost any other country. There are more seminaries in the
United States, where a respectable academical education may 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 those of the elder world. The best dictionaries of the
English language since 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. 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 marvelous application of steam as a propelling power, which was
first effected by Fulton. The harvests of the civilized world are
gathered by American reapers; the newspapers which lead the journalism
of Europe are printed on American presses; there are railroads in
Europe constructed by American engineers and traveled 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 are found on the shelves
of European libraries. It is true no American Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Copernicus, Shakspeare, 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 prevent their appearance. Homer
rose in the dawn of Grecian culture; Virgil flourished in the court of
Augustus; Dante ushered in the birth of the new European civilization;
Copernicus was reared in a Polish cloister; Shakspeare was trained in
the green-room of the theater; Milton was formed while the elements of
English thought and life were fermenting toward a great political and
moral revolution; Newton under the profligacy of the Restoration. Ages
may elapse before any country will produce a man like these, as two
centuries have passed since the last-mentioned of them was born. But
if it is really a matter of reproach to the United States that, in the
comparatively short period of their existence as a people, they have
not added another name to this illustrious list (which is equally true
of all the other nations of the earth), they may proudly boast of one
example of life and character, one career of disinterested service,
one model, of public virtue, one type of human excellence, of which
all the countries and all the ages may be searched in vain for the
parallel. I need not--on this day I need not--speak the peerless name.
It is stamped on your hearts, it glistens in your eyes, it is written
on every page of your history, on the battle-fields of the Revolution,
on the monuments of your fathers, on the portals of your capitols. It
is heard in every breeze that whispers over the fields of Independent
America. And he was all our own. He grew up on the soil of America; he
was nurtured at her bosom. She loved and trusted him in his youth; she
honored and revered him in his age; and, though she did not wait for
death to canonize his name, his precious memory, with each succeeding
year, has sunk more deeply into the hearts of his countrymen.
OUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE.--_Edward Everett's Oration at the Webster Statue
Inauguration_, 1860.
What else is there, in the material system of the world, so wonderful
as this concealment of the Western Hemisphere for ages behind the
mighty vail of waters? How could such a secret be kept from the
foundation of the world till the end of the fifteenth century? What
so astonishing as the concurrence, within less than a century, of the
invention of printing, the demonstration of the true system of the
heavens, and this great world-discovery? What so mysterious as the
dissociation of the native tribes of this continent from the civilized
and civilizable races of man? What so remarkable, in political
history, as the operation of the influences, now in conflict, now in
harmony, under which the various nations of the old world sent their
children to occupy the new; great populations silently stealing into
existence; the wilderness of one century swarming in the next with
millions; ascending the streams, crossing the mountains, struggling
with a wild hard nature, with savage foes, with rival settlements of
foreign powers, but ever onward, onward? What so propitious as this
long colonial training in the school of chartered government? and
then, when the fullness of time had come, what so majestic, amidst all
its vicissitudes and all its trials, as the Grand Separation--mutually
beneficial in its final results to both parties--the dread appeal to
arms, that venerable Continental Congress, the august Declaration,
the strange alliance of the oldest monarchy of Europe with the Infant
Republic? And, lastly, what so worthy the admiration of men and
angels as the appearance of him the expected--him the Hero--raised
up to conduct the momentous conflict to its auspicious issue in the
Confederation, the Union, the Constitution?
Is this a theme not unworthy of the pen and the mind of Webster?
Then consider the growth of the country, thus politically ushered
into existence and organized under that Constitution, as delineated
in his address on the laying the corner-stone of the extension of
the Capitol--the thirteen colonies that accomplished the Revolution
multiplied to thirty-two independent States, a single one of them
exceeding in population the old thirteen; the narrow border of
settlement along the coast, fenced in by France and the native tribes,
expanded to the dimensions of the continent; Louisiana, Florida,
Texas, New Mexico, California, Oregon--territories equal to the
great monarchies of Europe--added to the Union; and the two millions
of population which fired the imagination of Burke, swelled to
twenty-four millions, during the lifetime of Mr. Webster, and in seven
short years, which have since elapsed, increased to thirty!
With these stupendous results in his own time as the unit of
calculation; beholding under Providence with each decade of years, a
new people, millions strong, emigrants in part from the Old World,
but mainly bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, the children of
the soil, growing up to inhabit the waste places of the continent, to
inherit and transmit the rights and blessings which we have received
from our fathers; recognizing in the Constitution and in the Union
established by it the creative influence which, as far as human
agencies go, has wrought these miracles of growth and progress, and
which wraps up in sacred reserve the expansive energy with which
the work is to be carried on and perfected, he looked forward with
patriotic aspiration to the time, when, beneath its ægis, the whole
wealth of our civilization would be poured out, not only to fill up
the broad interstices of settlement, if I may so express myself,
in the old thirteen and their young and thriving sister States,
already organized in the West, but, in the lapse of time, to found a
hundred new republics in the valley of the Missouri and beyond the
Rocky Mountains, till our letters and our arts, our schools and our
churches, our laws and our liberties, shall be carried from the arctic
circle to the tropics, "from the rising of the sun to the going down
thereof."