great glowing letters upon everything. It stands out in blazing
capitals everywhere. All things are on the move! Forward! and forward!
is the word. And who would, who CAN, stand still amidst the universal
rush? Only a century ago, from the valley through which the majestic
Hudson rolls its everlasting flood, westward to the mighty
Mississippi, westward still to the Rocky Mountains, and yet westward
to the Pacific, was one vast wilderness; interminable forests,
standing in all their primeval grandeur and gloom; boundless prairies,
covered with profitless verdure, over which the silence of the
everlasting past brooded; and above all these, mountain peaks, covered
with perpetual snows, upon which the eye of a white man had never
looked, stood piercing the sky. From the Atlantic coast to the
Mississippi, that old forest has been swept away. The broad prairies
have been, or are being, subjected to the culture of human industry;
even the Rocky Mountains have been overleaped, and beyond them is a
great State already admitted into the family of the Union, and a
territory teeming with an adventurous and hardy population, knocking
at its door for admission. The march of civilization has crossed a
continent of more than three thousand miles, sweeping away forests,
spreading out green fields, planting cities and towns, making the old
wilderness to blossom as the rose, scattering life, activity,
progress, all along the road it has travelled. The great rivers that
rolled in silence through unbroken forests, have become the highways
of trade, upon whose bosoms the white sails of commerce are spread,
and through whose waters countless steamboats plough their way. These
stupendous changes are the results of human energy, and they reach, in
their moral prestige, their progressive influence, through every vein
and artery of governmental and social compacts, affecting political
institutions, shaping national policy, and forcing, by their
resistless demonstrations, change and mutations of opinions upon