No, 244.] 275 



this is but one of multitudes of instances of illustrations, which a 

 knowledge of facts would bring out, of the encouragement which 

 American freedom gives to innate talent. 



I knew a poor English carpenter, who with the utmost dificulty 

 gathered the needful bread for his family. His children were placed 

 in the public school of a neip'hboring city. His eldest son, having 

 no chance of education before, laid hold of his opportunity greedily, 

 passed with honor through all the stages of public education, at the 

 public expense; and on his graduating at the summit of the career 

 of the city's provision, was immediately appointed a teacher, and is 

 now a professor of ancient languages in one of the highest institu- 

 tions, and honored the more for the industry which has made him, 

 from neglected poverty, what he is. This is America. That boy 

 might have lived and died a beggar in the streets of London, and 

 no titled man have taken him by the hand, to bring out, in an ele- 

 vating education, the noble powers his Creator had implanted with- 

 in him. 



It is true, there was a period when enterprise in our country seemed 

 comparatively dead — when unbelief in the destinies of our nation 

 appeared to have supreme control over many minds — when neglected 

 Fulton sailed his steamboat upon the Collect Pond, amidst the indif- 

 ference of a surrounding multitude — and when despondent Fitch, 

 amidst the reproaches of his insanity, propelled his keel by steam on 

 the bosom of the Delaware, disregarded, ridiculed, aijd left to perish 

 in poverty. 



I have often wondered at this amazing apathy as a characteristic 

 of that generation. But I should speak of it rather as a strange 

 mingling of a foreign mind with ours, as something which was wholly 

 un-American in its character — a crisis, at which the individual en- 

 ergy df the earlier days had mainly passed, and the glorious combi- 

 nations and plans of "the American system" had not yet started into 

 being — a period when there was but limited ability to encourage 

 undertakings which seemed so vast, and so much beyond every thing 

 which was actual and visible around men. 



But these very facts, painful as they are, remain, to set out in 

 strong colors the wisdom and justice of your present course. And 

 while the prophecies of these pioneers in steam navigation, at first 

 so much neglected, have been already more than fulfilled, you are 

 now the more countenanced and confirmed by them, in 'giving encour- 



