WnAT THE Age Owes to America, 
347 
The partition wall of slavery was thrown down; the line of Border 
States obliterated; those who had battled for territory, as an ex¬ 
tension and perpetuation of slavery, and those who fought against 
its enlargement, as a disparagement and a danger to liberty, were 
alike confounded. 
Those who feared undue and precipitate expansion of our posses¬ 
sions, as loosening the ties of union, and those who desired it, as a 
step toward dissolution, have suffered a common discomfiture. The 
immense social and political forces which the existence of slavery 
in this country, and the invincible repugnance to it of the vital prin¬ 
ciples of our state, together generated, have had their play upon 
the passions and the interests of this people, have formed the basis 
of parties, divided sects, agitated and invigorated the popular mind, 
inspired the eloquence, inflamed the zeal, informed the understand¬ 
ings, and fired the hearts of three generations. At last the dread 
debate escaped all bounds of reason, and the nation in arms solved, 
by the appeal of war, what was too hard for civil wisdom. With 
our territory unmutilated, our constitution uncorrupted, a united 
people, in the last years of the century, crowns with new glory the 
immortal truths of the Declaration of Independence by the eman¬ 
cipation of a race. 
PROMISE OF NATIONAL LONGEVITY. 
I find, then, in the method and the results of the century’s pro¬ 
gress of the nation in this amplification of its domain, sure promise 
of the duration of the body politic, whose growth to these vast pro¬ 
portions has, as yet, but laid out the ground plan of the structure. 
For I find the vital forces of the free society and the people’s gov¬ 
ernment, here founded, have by their own vigor made this a natural 
growth. Strength and symmetry have knit together the great 
frame as its bulk increased, and the spirit of the nation animates 
the whole: 
-“ totamque infusa per artus, 
Mens agitat molem, et magnose, corpore miscet.” 
We turn now from the survey of this vast territory, which the 
closing century has consolidated and confirmed as the ample home 
for a nation, to exhibit the greatness in numbers, the spirit, the 
character, the port and mien of the people that dwell in this secure 
habitation. That in these years, our population has steadily ad- 
