in education and enlightenment, and have
opportunities such as no other portion of the earth presents, for the
founding of communities of their own, and the practical realization of
their own ideas of social progress. Comparatively few years will pass
after the restoration of peace before the West will be peopled by the
very bone and sinew of all civilized nations. And these men will come to
our shores imbued with the bitterest hatred of monarchical institutions,
and an unbounded admiration and love of our own. Hence the new country
will be intensely republican in its tendencies, and this will be another
strong bond of union--another mighty element of strength and perpetuity
to republicanism. For, as the movement goes steadily on, in time the
balance of political power will rest with them. And it will be ours to
see that the strong bias in favor of antiquated customs, laws, and
usages, the result of centuries of unopposed tyranny, is eradicated from
the minds of these men. They must be properly instructed in the
principles of true liberty and self-government. They must be
familiarized with the workings of free institutions and put to school in
the experience of our century of experiment. Our very safety requires
it; for so great is the field and so quickly will it be filled, that if
we are not alive to the work, a mighty nation will soon have sprung up
on our borders, and almost in our midst, which will be entirely beyond
our control, and threaten the very existence of our race, and of the
principles we most cherish. For the danger is that, suddenly released
from all the restrictions of their own feudal climes, they will fly to
the other extreme, and become lawless, reckless, and turbulent. For many
years to come all legislation must have an eye to the possible and
probable capacities and immense importance of the yet unsettled West,
and to the exigencies arising from causes which at present we know not
of save by conjecture. We have a future before us such as the past has
never known, and an incentive, nay, rather a necessity, for more
vigorous action than we have yet been called upon to display, and for a
deeper and more far-sighted wisdom than has ever yet pervaded our
councils.

The religious future of this portion of our country is veiled in the
deepest obscurity. Here we shall have the free-thinking German, the
bigoted Roman Catholic, the atheistic Frenchman, and the latitudinarian
Yankee, in one grand heterogene