14 MR. cushing's address. 



Generation after generation may give themselves up to 

 slaughter in civil or foreign war ; dynasty follow dynasty, each 

 with new varieties of oppression or misrule ; the fratricidal 

 rage of domestic factions rend the entrails of their common 

 country ; temples, and basilica, and capitols, crumble to dust ; 

 proud navies melt into the yeast of the sea ; and all that Art 

 fitfully does to perpetuate itself, disappear like the phantasm 

 of a troubled dream ; but Nature is everlasting ; and, above the 

 wreck and uproar of our vain devices and childish tumults, the 

 tutelary stars continue to sparkle upon us from their distant 

 spheres ; the sun to pour out his vivifying rays of light and heat 

 over the earth ; the elements to dissolve in grateful rain ; the 

 majestic river to roll on his fertilizing waters unceasingly ; and 

 the ungrudging soil to yield up the plenteousness of its harvest 

 year after year to the hand of the husbandman. 



He, the husbandman, is the servant of those divine elements 

 of earth and air ; he is the minister of that gracious, that be- 

 nign, that bounteous, that fostering, that nourishing, that reno- 

 vating, that inexhaustible, that adorable Nature ; and as such, 

 the stewardship of our nationality is in him. 



God has in all times vouchsafed to our country ministers of 

 religion, whose hearts and whose life were touched as with 

 holy fire from his altar ; soldiers, of whom the very name 

 sounds in the mind's ear as a trumpet-call to battle and vic- 

 tory; statesmen, the glory of whose eloquence, whose wis- 

 dom, whose patriotism, will descend to future ages, obscuring 

 in the effulgence of its light all Greek and Roman fame. God 

 has made us of that Anglo-Saxon race, which Tacitus com- 

 memorates of old, as inclined to shun the crowded city, and to 

 choose its abodes by the sparkling fountain, or along the green 

 glades, or in the solemn depths of the forest ; whose passion is 

 land ; whose individualism, whose genius of separation and 

 self-action, whose rural tendencies, render it especially apt for 

 that period in the career of a political community, when land 

 is super-abundant with it, and when the uncultivated earth is 

 to be reclaimed to the dominion of man. God has endowed 

 US with courage, energy, activity, genius, invention, industry, 

 love of knowledge, improvement, and virtue, at least equal to 



