farmer's life harmonious to their tastes and satisfactory to their ambition. Then the farmer's sons will desire and demand education as liberal as that now chiefly conferred on candidates for professional life, and will subject themselves to discipline, in acquiring the art of agriculture, as rigorous as that endured by those who apprentice themselves to other vocations.

Then, with the certain improvement of agriculture, we shall have the improvement and elevation of the agricultural class of American society. Have you considered how much that class renounce in denying themselves the self-improvement I have urged? Have you considered, that in practice they widely renounce the functions of representation in the conduct of the government in favor of other classes, no more privileged than their own? This is unnecessary, unwise, unsafe; indeed, it is not republican-it is not American. In nearly all civilized states, the farmers, or those who cultivated the soil, have constituted far the greater part of the population, The chief control of society and government, then, it would seem, should of right have been vested in them. Yet in truth, they have never, since the age of the patriarchs, attained any such control, except just here, and just now. In Great Britain they divide authority, but are overbalanced by merchants, manufacturers, and privileged classes. Notwithstanding modern constitutional concessions to them in France, they are nevertheless ruled there alternately by the city population and the army. In Germany, by the army. In parts of Italy, by the church; and in Russia they are slaves.

It has always been otherwise here. Farmers planted these colonies-all of them-and organized their governments. They were farmers who defied the British soldiery on Bunker Hill and drove them back from Lexington. They were farmers-aye, Vermont farmers, who captured the fortress at Ticonderoga, and accepted its capitulation in the name of the "Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress," and thus gave over the first fortified post to the cause of the Revolution. They were farmers who checked British power at Saratoga, and broke it in pieces like a potter's vessel at Yorktown. They were farmers who reorganized the several states and the federal government, and established them all on the principles of equality and affiliation. In every state, and in the whole Union, they constitute the broad electoral

must do so sooner or later hereafter. Nor may it be believed that any American colony, planted beyond our borders, will contentedly remain without, or will, with the national consent, be left to remain independent of the republic. Experience has taught us nothing well, if it has not taught us that, wherever the American people go, they will draw the American government over them; wherever an American colony establishes itself, there the American people will extend the constitutional roof over them. Indeed, there is nothing new in all these movements, neither those within nor those across the national borders. Expansion and incorporation were laws impressed on the American people two hundred years ago, and they yield to those laws now just as they have hitherto done, because they have arisen out of circumstances above national control, and are inevitable. Let me not, however, be misunderstood. I advocate no headlong progress, counsel no precipitant movement, much less any one involving war, violence, or injustice. I would not seize with haste, and force the fruit, which ripening in time, will fall of itself into our hands. But I know, nevertheless, that the stars will come out, even if the moon delay its rising. I have shown you then that a continent is to be peopled, and even distant islands to be colonized by us.

These grand movements will draw largely on the moral, social, intellectual, and political resources of the existing states. Other countries and other continents will, as they have done hitherto, contribute great and rapid emigrations; but the elements of American society, the two elements of the federative republican system of government, will be derived from the agricultural population of the established states already within the Union. Such supplies can not be adequately furnished, unless the resid uary forces be perpetually renewed and invigorated. If they be not adequately supplied, so as to sustain not merely a pervading community of interests, but even a thorough homogeneousness of national character, sentiments, and sympathies, political, moral, social, and religious, then expansion, instead of proving a means of union and aggrandizement, will prove the cause of disunion and decline. Confessedly we have signs, though not alarming ones, of disunion now. They appear in southern states; iu the organization of an isolated, peculiar, hostile colony in the valley of the Salt lake; and they appear, also, in the res

tiveness of a state on the Pacific, only three years old, under the supposed neglect, or disregard of her interests, by the federal government, which is now no longer a central one. In every case you see that the cause is the same-the absence of entire and perfect assimilation. How shall such assimilation be ef fected and maintained? The answer is simple, obvious, and practical. The tree, whose branches thus continually multiply and spread, and which, even now, covers nearly all of the regions of the continent lying within the temperate zone, and casts its shadow over distant islands, stands here, and we tread upon the very earth out of which the majestic trunk has risen. If we would cherish and preserve it, we must continually loosen the soil, and supply new streams of its native and accustomed moisture. While it is thus manifest that the responsibility for the preservation of our own necessary power and influence, and even of the preservation of the republic itself, rests chiefly on the agricultural population of the established states, and that responsibility involves a demand for improvement, progress, and elevation on their part, it is scarcely less apparent that, indirectly, by the influence of our tone and example, and directly by our growing connections with other nations, we must either check or accelerate, the movement of universal human society. We hear the almost stifled utterance of its aspirations; we see its often convulsive struggles; we sigh over its frequent reactions and disappointments, and so we learn and know that its tendency is toward freedom, self-government, peace, and ultimate brotherhood. How necessary is it that every action of our government should be such as at least to encourage, if it do not aid, the attainment of desires and hopes so natural, so necessary, so just, and so beneficent. But how can the corporate action of a nation -especially of a republic-be wiser, better, or more beneficent, than the temper and dispositions of the people who constitute the republic? The flowing stream always declines from the level of the fountain. Did you experience disappointment, mortification, and shame, when the great and good Kossuth, whom the nation welcomed as the overborne champion of liberty in Europe, was dismissed with coldness, neglect, and contumely, because he avowed that he had resolved to renew the lost conflict? I know you did; but where was the fault, the crime? It was the fault and the crime of the people, that they had not, with sufficient

OCCASIONAL

SPEECHES AND ADDRESSES.

THE UNION.

AUBURN, JULY 4, 1825.

To one who has not been a witness of the progress of the improvements in the condition of our country since the Revolution, they must seem like the work of enchantment. We are established here at a vast distance beyond where the most visionary enthusiast of that time had placed the confines of civilization for a century to come. Cities and villages have grown up and are flourishing in vigorous maturity where the Indian hunter forty years ago roamed in idle security in the native forest. Steamboats and ships are seen now bearing the commerce of a great inland country upon lakes which thirty years ago had never borne any vessel but the bark canoe. Canals are seen winding through the vales, and roads crossing the mountains in every direction, where civilized man at that time had never wandered. The operations of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, are going successively forward, and, in the words of the venerable guest of the nation* at the table which your hospitality lately spread for him at this place (for each of his words is a legacy to this people), "more and more giving a splendid lie to the enemies of freedom and self-government."