366 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



the most favored members of the human family. God has 

 blessed and protected us in our efforts to establish and maintain 

 wise and good institutions of government, and has enabled us 

 to defend them against all enemies, alike on the ocean and the 

 land. But God in his great mercy has also given us a country, 

 geographically speaking, without the singular features and situ- 

 ation of which, all the wisdom, virtue, and sacrifices of our 

 fathers and ourselves would but have served, like those of 

 Swedish Charles, 



" To point a moral, and adorn a tale ; " 



and without which, the specific qualities of our parent stock, 

 their instincts of personal independence, severance of interests, 

 diffusion of authority, repellence of race, exaggerated self-con- 

 fidence of judgment, intolerance of any opinion, tastes or habits 

 differing from their own, and their very avidity for land, would 

 all have proved to be the elements of dissolution and destruc- 

 tion, rather than of wealth and power. 



We, of the United States, possess a portion of the earth, in 

 which all the natural sources of wealth, mineral or vegetable, 

 abound ; which constitutes (approximately) the whole of the 

 temperate zone of this continent, and is therefore highly con- 

 genial to animal life ; which, by the configuration of the sea- 

 coast, abounds in harbors ; which contains interior seas ; and 

 whose superficies is so disposed, with numerous moderate ele- 

 vations, with no conglomeration of lofty mountains, but with 

 extensive gently inclined planes, that it contains a larger sys- 

 tem of rivers, and a greater proportion of tillable lands, than 

 any other country in the world, except possibly Russia and 

 China. 



Compare, for illustration, with the condition of the American 

 republic in this respect, the contrary state of things in the 

 Mexican. Such is the configuration of the coast of Mexico, 

 that she has almost no good harbor on the Atlantic ocean. 

 Vera Cruz is but a road-stead along the sea-beach, imperfectly 

 sheltered by a reef of rocks. You cannot reach the interior of 

 the country, and the seats of its natural resources and power, 

 from either sea-coast, without ascending to a height of seven 

 thousand feet in a line of one hundred miles, and the whole 



