DR. spoffcbd's address. 18 



other diseases. Here, if we find a few acres of swamp, too low 

 to be drained into some running stream, we consider it a deformi- 

 ty, and are suspicious of its influence upon health ; but in all the 

 boundless regions of the west hitherto explored, swamps lying 

 so low that the rivers annually overflow into them, and there 

 leave ponds of fresh water, to stagnate and pollute the air, are a 

 general feature of the country. Here the waters run off from 

 our hills, plains, and meadows, into the rivers ; there, over mil- 

 lions of acres, the waters come down the rivers, overflow their 

 banks, and run back into the swamps. Much of this land may 

 in process of time be made useful, by cutting canals through the 

 river banks, that the waters may drain oft^ when the inundation 

 subsides, but a population of one or two to a square mile, makes 

 slow progress in draining the unnumbered thousands of stagnant 

 pools, and " disn)al swamps." 



I should consider myself as criminal, were 1 to traduce the 

 character of a country, as the character of an individual ; and I 

 would not state these facts in such an assembly, but for what 

 appear to me to be justifiable motives. 



Thousands of our youth have been allured from their paternal 

 homes by accounts of the plenty and fertihty of western lands, 

 without duly considering the labors, privations, and perils they 

 must encounter in cultivating and reaping the fruits of this fertili- 

 ity, in the bosom of a wilderness, on the borders of an immense 

 desolate prairie, or in the midst of a sjjreading inundation. 



Nor have many of these emigrants considered what they will 

 find painfully true, that they and their generation will have pass- 

 ed off the stage, before their new homes possess the advantages 

 of a New England settlement, — comfortable dwe'lings, fruitful 

 orchards, good roads, social village s, schools of science and tem- 

 ples of the living God. 



Every mail from the west teems with the Macedonian cry, 

 come over and help us. Hundreds of youth accustomed to 

 spend their sabbaths in the churches of the puritans, now find, by 

 privation, the value of those privileges which perhaps once 

 Jhey slighted ; and the question whether this floating population, 

 brought together from the four quarters of the world, is ever to 



