62 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ^ 



America of her physical resources, that even Americans themselves 

 pardonably fail in the selections of expressions that can afford 

 any conception of them to minds accustomed to some limitation. 

 Here we have a continent 10,000 miles in length, with an average 

 breadth of 1,600, and embracing an area of nearly eighteen mil- 

 lions of square miles, intersected by the noblest rivers and moun- 

 tain chains on the surface of the globe, possessing every variety 

 of climate, and constituting in every product of her surface and 

 soil the granary and storehouse of the w^orld. Eighty years have 

 hardly passed away since the younger Pitt congratulated her in 

 the British House of Commons as successful in throwing off the 

 English yoke, branding the war that would have perpetuated her 

 slavery, as a war " conceived in injustice and nurtured in folly — 

 of victories ohtained over men fighting in the holy cause of liberty, or 

 of dejeats which filled the land with mourning for the loss of dear 

 relatives slain in a detested and impious quarrel?^ 



So spake one of England's greatest statesmen, and you will par- 

 don me, if, in this connection, I say that if there be aught in the 

 history of my cauntry that is calculated to make my bosom swell 

 with pride at the thought that I also am an Englishman, it would 

 be found, not in the recollection of her victories, not because the 

 names of Trafalgar and Waterloo, of Nelson and of Wellington, 

 are imperishable. It would be, rather, because her senate house 

 is a spot sacred to the memories of Hampden, and of Sidney, 

 because that not with " bated breath " but boldly, openly, fear- 

 lessly, the manly recognition and avowal of broad principles of 

 the equal rights of all men, is language which there any man may 

 utter, and all will gladly more than tolerate. 



Since the hour that Pitt uttered those memorable words what 

 has this country accomplished ? Her population, (I speak of the 

 United States,) then a few thousands is now 27,000,000; her cities 

 rival those of the old world in extent, in intelligence, and impor- 

 tance. Her seaboard is dotted with ports upon which depend the 

 prosperity of Liverpool, of Bremen, of Havre. New- York and 

 New Orleans stand at the northern and southern portals of her 

 prosperity, while Charleston, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, 

 (like a chain of pearls strung on the brow of the Atlantic), seem 



