MR. CUSIIING S ADDRESS. O 



Gentlemen, there is, in my estimation, no condition of private 

 life more useful to the community, or more honorable to the 

 individual, than the cultivation of the earth. I propose, in 

 continuation, to develope this idea, and to exhibit the relations 

 of land, its ownership, and its cultivation, to the material 

 wealth of nat'ons, to their moral and political welfare, and 

 especially to the prosperity and happiness of these United 

 States. 



It is impossible that any American should call to mind the 

 history of his country, and look abroad on its present condition, 

 without feeling a sentiment of exultation in the remembrance 

 of the one, and of pride in the contemplation of the other. 



It may be, that something of exaggeration enters into the 

 sentiment, it may be that the frequent expression of it has a 

 sound of boastfulness to the foreign ear ; yet, as Mr. Everett 

 truly and well observes, the feeling and the manifestation of 

 it have been most natural to us of this generation, who saw 

 eminent men of the revolutionary struggle still lingering among 

 us after the nation had already grown into surpassing great- 

 ness, thus prolonging our heroic age even into the present 

 time. 



This feeling is the more natural, inasmuch as we ourselves 

 are the witnesses of a visible, yet marvellous national growth ; 

 of populous cities, filled with monuments of art, which have 

 sprung up as it were by enchantment from the bare face of the 

 wilderness, with the suddenness, but without the transientness, 

 of one of the vast oriental encampments ; of great states, with 

 their thronging millions of inhabitants, appearing in wide 

 lands, where the first furrow was ploughed in the virgin soil by 

 the hands of our very fathers ; nay, of an empire, broader than 

 Macedonian king or Roman general ever ruled, rising out 

 of the earth as if at the stamp of our feet. 



"VYe see that it is not an empire only, but a people, standing 

 before us, colossal, glorious, sublime in its supernal majesty, 

 with the aureola of divinity flashing from its brow. For that 

 people has the highest of the patents of nobility to show for 

 itself, as the Spaniard phrases it, namely, its works ; it has taken 

 its knightly spurs on the field : it has gained its blazon of arms in 



