PHILOSOPHY DISCUSSED. 157 



is written in great glowing letters upon everything. It 

 stands out in blazing capitals everywhere. All things are 

 on the move ! Forward ! and forward ! is the word. And 

 who would, who CAN, stand still amidst the universal rush ? 

 Only a century ago, from the valley through which the ma- 

 jestic Hudson rolls its everlasting flood, westward to the 

 mighty Mississippi, westward still to the Eocky Mountains, 

 and yet westward to the Pacific, was one vast wilderness ; 

 interminable forests, standing in all their primeval grandeur 

 and gloom ; boundless prairies, covered with profitless ver- 

 dure, over which the silence of the everlasting past brooded ; 

 and above all these, mountain peaks, covered with perpetual 

 snows, upon which the eye of a white man had never looked, 

 stood piercing the sky. From the Atlantic coast to the 

 Mississippi, that old forest has been swept away. The broad 

 prairies have been, or are being, subjected to the culture of 

 human industry ; even the Rocky Mountains have been 

 overleaped, and beyond them is a great State already ad- 

 mitted into the family of the Union, and a territory teeming 

 with an adventurous and hardy population, knocking at its 



door for admission. The march of civilization has crossed a 







continent of more than three thousand miles, sweeping away 

 forests, spreading out green fields, planting cities and towns, 

 making the old wilderness to blossom as the rose, scattering 

 life, activity, progress, all along the road it has travelled. 

 The great rivers that rolled in silence through unbroken 

 forests, have become the highways of trade, upon whose 



