s and ends which must brand
our future with sordidness, oppression, and shame? Why can not we rise
to noble conceptions of our destiny? Why do we not feel that our work as
a nation is to carry freedom, religion, science, and a nobler form of
human nature over this continent? And why do we not remember that to
diffuse these blessings we must first cherish them in our own borders,
and that whatever deeply and permanently corrupts us will make our
spreading influence a curse, not a blessing, to this New World? It is a
common idea in Europe that we are destined to spread an inferior
civilization over North America; that our absorption in gain and outward
interests mark us out as fated to fall behind the Old World in the
higher improvements of human nature--in the philosophy, the refinements,
the enthusiasm of literature and the arts, which throw a luster round
other countries. I am not prophet enough to read our fate.

THE GRAND SCOPE OF THE COLUMBIAN CELEBRATION.

The Chicago _Inter Ocean_.

The Columbian Exposition should be an exhibition worthy of the fame of
Columbus and of the great republic that has taken root in the New World,
which the Genoese discoverer not only "to Castille and to Aragon gave,"
but to the struggling, the oppressed, the aspiring, and the resolute of
all humanity in all its conditions.

AMERICAN NATIONALITY.

RUFUS CHOATE,, the most eminent advocate of New England. Born at
Essex, Mass., October 1, 1799; died at Halifax, N. S., July 13,
1858. From an Independence Day oration delivered in Boston.

But now there rises colossal the fine sweet spirit of nationality--the
nationality of America. See there the pillar of fire which God has
kindled, and lighted, and moved, for our hosts and our ages. Under such
an influence you ascend above the smoke and stir of this small local
strife; you tread upon the high places of the earth and of history; you
think and feel as an American for America; her power, her eminence, her
consideration, her honor are yours; your competitors, like hers, are
kings; your home, like hers, is the world; your path, like hers, is on
the highway of empires; your charge, her charge, is of generations and
ages; your record, her record, is of treaties, battles, voyages, beneath
all the constellations; her image--one, immortal, golden--rises on your
eye as our western star at evening rises on the traveler from his home;
no lowering cloud, no angry river, no li