g reconstruction
necessary; and that tempest was six hundred years ago. On the road from
Geneva to Chamouni there is a point of which Baedeker says: "The rocks
on the left are seven thousand feet high." In the Orkneys a tower six
hundred years old is new, and in the Alps a precipice seven thousand
feet high is a moderate bit of scenery. The standards of the measurement
of time and space may be exact, and yet are comparative, affected by the
atmosphere of history and the scale of landscapes.

In that portion of this country which was the West a generation ago, a
farm was old when the stumps had rotted in the fields, and the land was
improved when the trees were cut. New ground was that which had not been
ploughed. Once a man of varied experiences accounted to a pious woman
for an unhappy bit of profanity by saying that when a boy he had
ploughed new ground, and the plough caught in the roots, and the horses
balked, and his feet were torn with splinters and thorns, and the
handles of the plough kicked and hurt him, until depravity was
developed. The lady said she would pray for his forgiveness, if he
never would do so any more, and he promised, and I am told he did not
keep that promise.

Daniel Boone's new country, when he lived on the Yadkin, in North
Carolina, was Kentucky, and afterward it was Missouri. Washington's new
country was first Ohio, and then Indiana. Lincoln's new country, when he
was a child, was Indiana, and then Illinois. Beyond the Alleghany
Mountains was the land of promise of the original States; beyond the
Mississippi was the new world of those who moved west in wagons, before
the Mexican war and the railroads broadened our dominions, and we were
bounded east and west by the oceans. It was for the new country of their
ages that Columbus and the Puritans and Captain John Smith set sail. In
the new country there is always, at least, the dream of liberty and the
hope that the earth we inherit may be generous in the bounties it yields
to toil.

The march of manhood westward has reached the shores of the seas that
look out on ancient Asia. We have realized the vision of the
Genoese--finding in the sunset the footsteps of Marco Polo. We have
crossed the mountain ranges and followed the majestic rivers, have
traced the borders of the great lakes, whitened by the sails and
darkened by the smoke of a commerce that competes in magnitude with that
of the salted sea; and Texas, our France, confronts the Medit