Address. 9 



nations, and that now, waking from her long sleep, she is childish, bankrupt, 

 and that no king of any character is ivilling to accept her throne ? 



What Spain was three hundred years ago as to grandeur, wealth of 

 I possessions and money, we are to-day, or soon will be, and what she is to-day 

 we may be in another century, if we wander from our true course and 

 pursue the ignis tatuus that led her estray. Even now ihe same causes 

 which led her to destruction, crop out in nations of much higher civiliza- 

 tion than Spain ever claimed, and when we look to engrossment of all lands 

 in a few families in England, to the absorption of all labor in cultivation 

 among classes having no interest in the soil, to the extinction of all inde- 

 pendent yoemen, or middle men, to the strong lines of demarcation between 

 rich and poor, to the vast emigration of her industrious population, we 

 tremble lest another hand writing on the wall shall announce her debase- 

 ment, and only receive encouragement by the reaction which has taken 

 place among the working and commetcial classes, occasioned by the successful 

 issue of our republic from the flames of civil war. And even from the side 

 of our huge body appear, occasionally, signs of weakness, such as the desire 

 of one part' of the nation to expatriate our "Moors" (black-a-moors,) 

 the freedmen of the South, and thus weaken us by the despoilment of four 

 millions of agricultural laborers; the opposition in another latitude to the 

 emigration to our shores of the myriads of skilled artizans from the teem- 

 ing East, the agglomeration of lands in the ownership of an ecclesiastical 

 hierarchy, the accumulation of irresponsible power in railroad corporations, 

 and of great wealth in a few individuals, and the concentration of popula- 

 tion in our large cities, and last, but not least, the disfavor in which the 

 pursuit of agriculture is held by the fastidious citizens, the college graduate, 

 and worse than either, by our own sons and daughters. For instance, in 

 Massachusetts there are twenty-six cities, and large towns, which contain a 

 little less than half the population, and in which were born in 1861, more 

 than half of the children born that year. That iclls strongly against us; 

 for in the first place, the mortality of infants is much greater in the cities 

 than in the country, and the population is thus annually reduced, needlessly, 

 nearly a seventh of those born; and in the second place, there is not much 

 hope of many of those demoralized by first seeing the light of day in those 

 crowded walks, ever having virtu? enough to become instruments in culti- 

 vating the soil, and adding to the real productiveness of the nation. A 

 few, very few, when success has crowned their efforts, realize their youthful 

 aspirations by retiring into the country ; but the mass has become macad- 



