No. 244.] 253 



as intellectual culture: there are, as De Witt Clinton once said, "the 

 Georgics of the heart as well as of the head," and we can only look 

 to the general diffusion of knowledge as the aegis of our federal ex- 

 istence and representative system. And here let me say, that most of 

 the benefits of a sound education and highly cultivated mind, may be 

 acquired in our country by a young man who never enters the walls 

 of a college, and who speaks no language but our glorious mother 

 tongue, which God means shall yet help a man on every acre of this 

 continent, and, I believe, all round our globe. But if parents are 

 determined that their children shall live without labor, let them look 

 forward to a posterity of listless, vicious, incapable characters, who 

 will curse the memory of ancestors who failed to train up their 

 children to live in obedience to the great law of their being, ^Hhat 

 no man liveth to himself.''' 



The great service which this Institute has rendered to the country 

 is, that it has showed to the people the intimate connection of com- 

 merce, manufactures and agriculture, and the immense importance of 

 each of these great interests. The publications of the American In- 

 stitute contain a body of statistical and political economics which 

 cannot be matched in the United States. It has done nobly in 

 working out a national independence of character. It has striven on 

 through evil and good report to disabuse the public mind of the fal- 

 lacious principle, that the true prosperity of a country depends upon 

 its wealth 3 rather, says this Institute, on its physical strength, inter- 

 nal resources and moral greatness. Wealth has often destroyed, it 

 never created a country. Our wealth and strengt^ii and prosperity all 

 consist in the blood, bone, muscle, sinew and intellect of the people. 

 These, and not the Spanish DollaT, are a nation's true riches. Oh, 

 it is a narrow and miserable policy which looks at property only 

 through the medium of the precious metals ! and it is an ill lesson for 

 the people to learn, whether it come from the professor's chair or 

 from the government. 



Never did the God of Nature ever form a country so calculated to 

 support a happy people as our own. On the globe there is no such 

 theatre presented for human happiness. The United States contain 

 more than one-eighteenth part of the land of the entire globe, and 

 many hundred thousand square miles more than all Europe. God 

 has given us a mighty home ; He has operated on a gigantic scale. 

 Rivers, lakes, cataracts, mountains — a theatre replete with the sub- 

 lime and beautiful. Our climate is salubrious — free from pestilence 

 — our soil is fertile, so that famine is a stranger. If 'we advance in 



