rning. It
proclaimed what an elm could be. It set tree-planters to planting elms.
So America preaches, man capable of self-government; preaches over the
sea, a republic is safer than any kingdom. Men have outgrown kings. We
shall remember Walt Whitman, if only for a line, "O America! we build
for you because you build for the world."

MORAL PROGRESS.

WILLIAM HENRY SEWARD, an eminent American statesman. Born at
Florida, Orange County, N. Y., May 16, 1801; died at Auburn, N. Y.,
October 10, 1872.

A kind of reverence is paid by all nations to antiquity. There is no one
that does not trace its lineage from the gods, or from those who were
especially favored by the gods. Every people has had its age of gold, or
Augustine age, or historic age--an age, alas! forever passed. These
prejudices are not altogether unwholesome. Although they produce a
conviction of declining virtue, which is unfavorable to generous
emulation, yet a people at once ignorant and irreverential would
necessarily become licentious. Nevertheless, such prejudices ought to be
modified. It is untrue that in the period of a nation's rise from
disorder to refinement it is not able to continually surpass itself. We
see the _present_, plainly, distinctly, with all its coarse outlines,
its rough inequalities, its dark blots, and its glaring deformities. We
hear all its tumultuous sounds and jarring discords. We see and hear the
_past_ through a distance which reduces all its inequalities to a plane,
mellows all its shades into a pleasing hue, and subdues even its
hoarsest voices into harmony. In our own case, the prejudice is less
erroneous than in most others. The Revolutionary age was truly a heroic
one. Its exigencies called forth the genius, and the talents, and the
virtues of society, and they ripened amid the hardships of a long and
severe trial. But there were selfishness and vice and factions then as
now, although comparatively subdued and repressed. You have only to
consult impartial history to learn that neither public faith, nor public
loyalty, nor private virtue, culminated at that period in our own
country; while a mere glance at the literature, or at the stage, or at
the politics of any European country, in any previous age, reveals the
fact that it was marked, more distinctly than the present, by
licentious morals and mean ambition. It is only just to infer in favor
of the United States an improvement of morals from their estab