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VOICE TO AMERICA.

THE UNITED STATES-RETROSPECTIVE AND

PROSPECTIVE

"With America, and in America, a new era commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly-awakened and unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community, before altogether unknown and unheard of."

DANIEL WEBSTER.

WHEN the inhabitants of the old Thirteen Colonies arose against the despotic and mercenary aggression of England, they were three millions of people, mostly scattered farmers. They inhabited a strip of the Atlantic seashore-a half-wild territory between the Alleghanies and the ocean-about one thousand miles long, and a hundred and fifty miles wide, and containing only six towns of any size, three of which had less than ten thousand inhabitants, and none over twenty thousand. It is true that they were an enterprising, industrious, honest, intelligent community-a happy and flourishing nation in fact, though not in form. But whatever were the precise point of prosperity to which they had then attained, it was in spite of the discouragements of their supreme government that they attained it; for the agriculture, manufactures, and commerce of the colonies were capriciously controlled and restricted for the advantage of English speculators; and the laws and constitutions of the little republics were constantly attacked and insulted by the placemen of the English administration, for the sake of enforcing arbitrary schemes of govern

ment, fit only for tributary slaves. Navigation acts, stamp acts, writs of assistance, prohibitions of the manufacture of iron, the manufacture of cloths, of hats, of every thing which Englishmen wanted to manufacture, and endless other troublesome and unrighteous enactments, perplexed and annoyed the provinces. Yet the new nation, which, under the name of the United States of America, spoke itself into being by the Declaration of Independence, contained all the elements of a healthy, powerful, and vigorous life.

With the fervent sympathy of the majority of the people, but with lukewarm aid or timid indifference from very many; with overwhelming fears and doubts on the part of some of the wisest and best men of the day, and even in spite of the venomous treasons and intestine wars of the Tory population, the new commonwealth agonized through the seven years of the revolutionary struggle, fainting and almost torn in pieces, and achieved what seemed at the moment to be a fruitless independence.

At the end of that war it was indeed a nation in name, and one in form; but it had little of actual national life. It was repeatedly on the extreme verge of falling into fragments-into anarchy; of returning to a monarchical form of government. One hundred and seventy millions of dollars in money had been actually spent in the war, and that when money was worth nearly twice as much as it is now, and when the nation was not one-twentieth as rich as at present. The country had been ravaged through and through: crops had been destroyed, towns and houses burned. The inhabitants were sick, disabled, demoralized, fled; manufactures had been encouraged but little; commerce was stagnant, or even utterly dead; disbanded and immoral soldiers roamed up and down, unable to obtain work, or to get their wages, even in the good-for-nothing continental money, which was worth sometimes three cents on the dollar, sometimes nothing, and of which one hundred dollars were once given for a mug of cider. The central government was everywhere despised and abused-a beggarly, strengthless shadow. It labored under an immense home and foreign debt, which it could not pay; it was an importunate and un

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welcome beggar for home and foreign loans,-unsuccessfully, because it could not meet its former engagements; its requisitions upon the States were neglected or refused; it was even bullied in its own hall by a sergeant's squad of unpaid mutineers dunning for their wages, against whom the militia of Philadelphia declined to protect it, except in case of actual assault and battery.

The States quarrelled with each other about lands, or insulted and encroached on the miserable central government. There arose in many of them, within a few years after the termination of the war, home insurrections of their own. The whisky insurrection in Pennsylvania; Shays' insurrection in Massachusetts, with the risings that preceded it; a similar mob in New Hampshire, which, for a time, besieged the legislature and courts of that State; the general disorganization of the western country, and other such tumults, showed the unsettled and anarchic condition of men's minds, as well as their poverty and distress. Wise men, the revolutionary fathers of the country, communicated to each other their apprehensions of the loss of our nationality, almost at its birth. Despondency weighed upon the best of the patriots of the day, and with painful forebodings they speculated upon the probabilities of many republics-of a monarchy -of a retreat beneath the English power.

The native sense of the country, however, was at last aroused to the exigencies of the case, and the people, responding to the call that emanated from the Virginia Legislature, deputed that great and wise assembly which created the Constitution of the United States-a frame of government the nearest perfection which the world has ever seen; by the operation of which the nation was at once invigorated; under which it forthwith sprang out into that unparalleled career of growth, whose constantly increasing speed has already made all the world astonished spectators, and which seems to possess an immortal vigor equal to any emergency.

Within less than three-quarters of a century of national life under this constitution, the United States of America have arisen to a prouder height of physical strength and of moral power, than has ever been

occupied by any other nation in the world. The allotted life of a man covers a period equal to the whole existence of our mighty empire. Men are this day alive and well who voted for the adoption of the Constitution, and for Washington in 1789. At the end of the Revolutionary War, we numbered about three millions of people—as many as now inhabit the single State of New York; now we are twenty-five millions. Then we had nine hundred thousand square miles of territory; now we have three millions of square miles— half of North America-three times as much as France, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark-a domain as large as the Roman Empire ever was; a territory by the side of which the possessions of the proudest European dynasties are "but a patch on the earth's surface."* European distances are steps to ours; European rivers are brooks. It is as far across the United States from New York to San Francisco as from London to Ispahan, in Persia; from New York to New Orleans is as far as from Paris to St. Petersburg, or from London to Constantinople. The Mississippi is twice as long as the Danube; the Ohio is six hundred miles longer than the Rhine; the Hudson is navigated, within the State of New York, a hundred and twenty miles -a distance greater than the length of the Thames. Nor is this vast expanse in danger of falling apart by its own weight it is knit the tighter as it expands, by the iron bands of the railroad and the telegraph. Our country extends through every healthy climate. Avoiding the inhospitable wastes of the Arctic snow, and the fever-haunted jungles of the tropic zone, it stretches from the cold and bracing mountain air of New England and Oregon, to the everlasting spring of the sunny South. Within our limits is found every tree of the forest, from the towering pines of Maine, and the more gigantic cedars of California, four hundred feet high; the northern oak, the birch, the beech, and the other hardy woods of its kindred forests, to the live-oak of the south, the cypress, and the magnolia, the orange, the cocoanut, the banana, and the palm. We

*Webster's Letter to Hulsemann.

grow alike the corn, flax, and wheat of temperate regions, and the sugar and cotton, the rice and indigo of the south. From the bosom of the earth we dig all the precious and all the useful minerals: gold comes from California at the rate of seventy-five millions of dollars a year; pure copper is blasted or chopped out from the mines at Lake Superior by the ton together. There is lead enough in Wisconsin to supply the world; iron is piled into mountains in Missouri, and its ores are found in the majority of the States; and the coal of single States-Ohio and Pennsylvania-is sufficient to furnish all the earth with fuel for thousands of years.

Nor are our treasures inaccessible. There is only one of the great divisions of the earth-Europe-which has a greater proportion of seacoast to the square mile than North America. The shore-line of the United States, on the two great oceans and the Mexican Gulf, is eighteen thousand miles. The land is pierced through and through with enormous rivers, upon which we possess forty-nine thousand miles of steamboat navigation, together with thirty-five hundred miles of shore on the sides of the great northern lakes. Five thousand miles of supplementary artificial navigation by canals completes this most enormous amount of internal water conveyance. Within the single State of New York there are three thousand miles of navigable inland waters. Besides the innumerable ordinary roads, we are netted and woven together by twenty thousand miles of completed railroads, and thirteen thousand miles more, now in process of completion. Upon these inland routes a capital of one thousand millions of dollars is invested in the gigantic transfers of our internal trade and travel.

We have not been idle in improving the advantages of our situation. Our wealth and industry-our credit and commerce, both at home and abroad, have enlarged to an immeasurable extent. At the close of the Revolution we had possibly seven hundred and fifty millions of dollars' worth of real and personal estate; now we have at least fifteen thousand millions of dollars' worth, besides fourteen hundred millions of acres of public lands-enough to give a large

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