WlIAT THE AQE O^YES TO AMERICA. 
345 
cial, and political development of our country which the record of 
the hundred years displays, and thus present to “the opinion of 
mankind,” for its generous judgment, our nation as it is to-day — 
our land, our people, and our laws. And, first, we notice the wide 
territory to which we have steadily pushed on our limits. Lines of 
climate mark our boundaries north and south, and two oceans east 
and west. The space between, speaking by and large, covers the 
whole temperate zone of the continent, and in area measures near 
tenfold the possessions of the thirteen colonies, the natural features, 
the climate, the productions, the influences of the outward world, 
are all imphed in the immensity of this domain, for they embrace all 
that the goodness and the power of God have planned for so large 
a share of the habitable globe. The steps of the successive acqui¬ 
sitions, the impulses which assisted, and the motives which retarded 
the expansion of our territory; the play of the competing elements 
in our civilization and their incessant struggle each to outrun the 
other; the irrepressible conflict thus nursed in the bosom of the 
state; the lesson in humility and patience, “in charity for all and 
malice toward none,” which the study of the manifest designs of 
Providence so plainly teach us — these may well detain us fora 
moment’s illustration. 
EMANCIPATION. 
And this calls attention to that ingredient in the population of 
this country which came, not from the culminated pride of Europe, 
but from the abject despondency of Africa. A race discriminated 
from all the converging streams of immigration which I have named 
by ineffaceable distinctions of nature; which was brought hither by 
a forced migration and into slavery, while all others came by choice 
and for greater liberty; a race unrepresented in the Congress which 
issued the Declaration of Independence, but now, in the persons of 
4,000,000 of our countrymen, raised by the power of the great truths 
then declared, as it were from the dead, and rejoicing in one coun¬ 
try and the same constituted liberties with ourselves. 
In August, 1620, a Dutch slave-ship landed her freight in Vir¬ 
ginia, completing her voyage soon after that of the Mayflower com¬ 
menced. Both ships were on the ocean at the same time, both 
sought our shores, and planted their seeds of liberty and slavery to 
grow together on this chosen field until the harvest. Until the'sep- 
aration from England the several colonies attracted each their own 
