of our country, and constant agitation
here, with one ever-present purpose, _the destruction of this Union_.
And now let not England suppose, that there is an American, who does not
feel the insult and understand the motive. England beheld, in our
wonderful progress, the ocean's scepter slipping from her grasp, our
grain and cotton almost feeding and clothing the world, our augmenting
skill and capital, our inventive genius, and ever-improving machinery,
our educated, intelligent, untaxed labor, the marvelous increase of our
revenue, tonnage, and manufactures, and our stupendous internal
communications, natural and artificial, by land and water. The last
census exhibited to her, our numbers increasing in a ratio, making the
mere _addition_, in the next twenty-five years, equal to her whole
population, and our wealth augmenting in a far greater proportion. She
saw our mines and mountains of coal and iron, (her own great element of
progress,) exceed hers nearly twenty times, our hydraulic power,
incalculably greater than that of Great Britain; a single American
river, with its tributaries, long enough to encircle the globe, and that
England might be anchored as an island in our inland seas. She witnessed
Connecticut, smaller than many English counties, and with but one sixth
the population of some of them, appropriating more money for education
in that State, than the British Parliament for the whole realm; that we
had more heads at work among our laboring classes than all Europe, and
she realized the great truth, that knowledge is power, reposing on
common schools for the whole people. She measured our continental area,
laved by two oceans, as also by the lakes and the gulf, with a more
genial sun, and a soil far more fertile and productive than that of
England, and nearly thirty times greater in extent. She saw us raise
within the loyal States a _volunteer_ army of three fourths of a
million, without a conscript, the largest, and far the most intelligent
and effective force in the world, and millions more ready, whenever
called, to rush to the defense of the Union, whilst a great and gallant
navy rose, as if by enchantment, from the ocean. She marked the rapid
transfer of the command of the commerce of the world from London to
New-York. She observed the transcendent success of our free
institutions, and with that 'fear of change, perplexing monarchs,' she
dreaded the moral influence of our republican system. But why shoul