but for your prowess it would not have gone. You have a right to be
proud of your achievements as well on the land as the sea. Well may
you point as you do with satisfaction, to your school houses and your
work-shops, and to the fruits they have borne on the forum and in the
council chamber, and in the manufactures which have increased the
comforts of our own people, and have encircled the globe to find
exchangeable products required at home. Those are the greatest and
most beneficent triumphs--the triumph of mind over matter. These are
the monuments of greatness, which resist both time and circumstance.

I have spoken of diversity among the people of the United States; yet
there is probably greater similitude than is to be found elsewhere
over the same extent of country, and in the same number of people. In
language, especially, our people are one; surely much more so than
those of any other country. The diversity between the people of the
different States, even those most remote from each other, is not as
great as that between inhabitants of adjoining countries of England,
or departments of France or Spain, where provinces have their separate
dialects. And chief among the causes for this I would place the
primary book, in which children of my day learned their letters, and
took their first lessons in spelling and reading. I refer to the good
old spelling book of Noah Webster, on which I doubt if there has been
any improvement, and which had the singular advantage of being used
over the whole country. To this unity of language and general
similitude, is to be added a community of sentiment wherever the
American is brought into contrast or opposition to any other people.

If shadows float over our disc and threaten an eclipse; if there be
those who would not avert, but desire to precipitate catastrophe to
the Union, these are not the sentiments of the American heart; they