404 The Man for the Times. {^Septemher, 



every man, what can you do ? Not what you know, not how many 

 pages of musty lore you have thumbed, but what application you are 

 enabled to make of it. The past three-score and ten of our years 

 are worth more in these tides of earnest and efficient life, than the 

 whole nine hundred and sixty and nine years of the old patriarch. 



The fjict that American Nationality is yet in its infancy, is the 

 mightiest inducement that can be brought to bear upon the educator, 

 to be greatly in earnest in bringing this infant Republic up in the 

 ways of a pure morality. The present generation of men will leave 

 its character and impress on our national character, down to all gene- 

 rations. If the young eyes that are just opening on our national 

 glories look out, in the dimness of age, and the gathering darkness of 

 death, upon America, and behold us, a great people — honest and 

 temperate, law-abiding and united, loyal to God, and obedient to his 

 great statutes, working out efficiently the temporal and eternal inter- 

 ests of a world — his evident design in our existence and progress — 

 then there will be no influence under the broad heaven that can 

 darken our promise, or that can bode hinderance and disaster; but let 

 the elements that are now at work continue unchecked — unpurified — 

 let the fire in the crucible fail in refining the pure metal, and burning 

 out the dross — let, instead of enlightened earnestness, and manly 

 boldness, the frenzied zeal, stimulated by mad ambition, but continue 

 rampant, and the glories which we now boast shall have departed, and 

 the beautiful columns of our Republic, now the admiration of the 

 world, will have crumbled into ruins. 



The exhortation following from what has been said in relation to 

 the kind of men needed, must be plain and impressive. We need 

 more self consecration to the interests of man and of manhood, and 

 less to ambition, less to selfishness, less to the all absorbing interests 

 of mammon. These motives, now so all powerful, can neither awaken 

 nor purchase the best energies of the mind, nor even of the body. 

 They reduce every thing to a money value, so that even a man's prin- 

 ciples — his virtue — has a price in the market. Such influences serve 

 but to dwarf the energies of man, and check every gush of generous 

 and holy emotion; never have they given rise to any thing that has 

 blest our age and country. Our Washingtons, and Franklins, and 

 Henrys, and Clays, and Websters, were not animated by such ignoble 

 motives; and the young must be taught early to avoid their besetting 

 influence, or the last hope of liberty to the nations will be entombed. 

 We must raise up a generation of diligent workers — men of strong 

 hands, and pure hearts^ earnest in the cause of the right, if the world 



