have come up to-day to one of these high places to commune together. We have met from many a portion of our common country, and this great assemblage testifies, not less by its numbers than by the imposing circumstances which surround it, that there is here passing one of those scenes which mark the progress of society, and which form its character, and oftentimes its destiny. And so it is, and it is good for us to be here. We have not come to fight a battle, nor to commemorate one; we have not come to worship at the shrine of power, to celebrate the birth or the death of some unworthy ruler, the last step in political degradation. Nor have we come to commence, to complete, nor to commemorate, some useless but imposing structure, erected by pride, but paid for by poverty. I would not, however, be misunderstood. Far be it from us to censure or to check those feelings of love of country, or of religion, which seek their outpourings in the erection of memorials upon spots which have drank the blood of the patriot or of the martyr. It is a tribute of virtue, which honors the dead and the living. But let it be voluntary. Then it will neither be unjust in its object nor oppressive in its accomplishment. It will teach a lesson to after ages, which may stimulate virtue to action, and give fortitude to endure till the day of deliverance comes with its struggle and its reward. Look at the mighty pyramids which rise over the Arabian and the Libyan wastes, and which cast their shadow far in the desert, mocking the researches and the pride of man. They tell no tale but the old tale of oppression. They speak in their very massiveness of pride and power on the one side, and misery and poverty on the other. One of the little channels which the Fellah has diverted from the great river at their base, and which spreads verdure and fertility over the valley that owes so much to God and so little to man, is far dearer to the oppressed population than these useless and mighty structures.

Our eastern brethren, with the characteristic liberality and patriotism which make the descendants of the Pilgrims proud of the land of their ancestors, have just completed and dedicated a monument to mark the site of the battle which opened the greatest contest between a powerful empire and her young and distant prov

inces, and whose influence, if it did not give to the Revolution its fortunate issue, impressed its character upon the whole struggle. We have no such place to hallow; but we have the people to do the deeds by which places are sanctified, and where the pilgrims of liberty come, not to worship, but to reflect. We have not the wealth nor those "appliances" by which the long and imposing procession, and the gorgeous pageantry which a great city can arrange and display, affect, and almost subdue, the imagination. We have not the chief magistrate of the republic, with his official counsellors, to mark, as it were, with a national character, the occasion of our assemblage. Nor have we constructed an obelisk, simple and severe in its style, but lasting as the deeds it commemorates, whose foundation is laid in the graves of martyred patriots, but whose summit rises towards the heavens, telling the story of their fall, and proclaiming the gratitude of their countrymen. But there are here stout hearts and strong hands, thousands who would devote themselves, as did the men of Bunker Hill, to the cause of freedom, and who would fight as they fought, and die as they died, should their country demand the sacrifice. On the face of the globe, liberty has no more zealous defenders, nor patriotism more ardent votaries, than is this great assembly, the convocation of a people who have made this region their own by all the ties that bind a man to his home, and who will defend it, and the institutions which belong to it, by all the means that energy and intelligence and devotedness have ever brought to the great day of trial, and by which they have made it a day of triumph.

We have come here to join in another commemoration. To witness the union of the lakes and the Mississippi. To survey one of the noblest works of man in the improvement of that great highway of nature, extending from New York to New Orleans, whose full moral and physical effects it were vain to seek even to conjecture. And fitly chosen is the day of this celebration. This work is another ligament which binds together this great confederated republic. Providence has given us union, and many motives to preserve it. The sun never shone upon a country abounding more than ours in all the elements of prosperity. It were needless

to enumerate the advantages we enjoy, and which give us so distinguished a position among the nations of the world. They are seen and felt in all those evidences of prosperity and improvement which greet the traveller wherever he passes through our country. And still more striking are they when we contrast our situation with that of the older regions of the world. I shall not enter into the comparison. I could speak of it from personal knowledge; but the task would not be a pleasant one, for it would recall many a cause of discontent, and many a scene of misery, which meet the eye of the most careless observer who exchanges the new hemisphere for the old. An American, who does not return to his own country a wiser man and a better citizen, and prouder and more contented, for all he has seen abroad, may well doubt his own head or heart, and may well be doubted by his countrymen.

Still, it is not to be disguised that, from the very constitution of human nature, causes may occasionally exist, tending to weaken, though they cannot sever, the bonds which unite us; and happy is it that these causes may be counteracted, and ultimately, we may hope, rendered powerless, by measures now in progress, which will add the ties of interest to the dictates of patriotism. Our railroads and canals are penetrating every section of our territory. They are annihilating time and space. They are embracing in their folds the ocean and the lake frontiers, and the great region extending from the Alleghany to the Rocky Mountains, through which the mighty Mississippi and its countless tributaries find their way to the Gulf of Mexico. Once let this work be completed, and we are bound together by cords which no strength can sunder. The moral and political effect, therefore, of the great work before us, is even more important than the physical advantages it promises. It will bear upon its bosom the products of a thousand fertile valleys, and it will spread gladness and prosperity over regions which have just been rescued from the Indians, and from the animals, his co-tenants of the forest, which minister to his wants. But it will do more than this. It will make glad the heart of the patriot. As he sails along it, he will see, not merely the evidences and the cause of wealth and prosperity, but one of the ties which knit us

together. By a process more fortunate than alchemist ever imagined, the feeblest element will be converted into the strongest bond. It will bear the boat and its freight to a market, where products may be interchanged and wealth acquired. But it will interchange interests and feelings which no wealth can purchase, and for which no price can pay. Well, then, may we rejoice, upon this day. The occasion and the time are in unison together. And, while we thank God for the services and sacrifices which he enabled our fathers to make in the acquisition of freedom and independence, let us thank him, also, that we are able to strengthen their work, and to transmit to our children, as they transmitted to theirs, the noblest inheritance that belongs to man. The ark of the constitution is yet untouched. Withered be the hand that would pollute it!

WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS.-C. Sumner.

It is often said, "Let us not be wiser than our fathers." Rather, let us try to excel our fathers in wisdom. Let us imitate what in them was good, but not bind ourselves, as in the chains of fate, by their imperfect example. Principles are higher than human examples. Examples may be followed when they accord with the admonitions of duty. But he But he is unwise and wicked who attempts to lean upon these, rather than upon those truths which, like the Everlasting Arm, cannot fail!

In all modesty be it said, we have lived to little purpose, if we are not wiser than the generations that have gone before us. It is the grand distinction of man that he is a progressive being; that his reason at the present day is not merely the reason of a single human being, but that of the whole human race, in all ages from which knowledge has descended, in all lands from which knowledge has been borne away. We are heirs to an inheritance of truth, grandly accumulating from generation to generation. The child at his mother's knee is now taught the orbits of the heavenly bodies,

"Where worlds on worlds compose one universe,”

the nature of this globe, the character of the tribes of men by which it is covered, and the geography of nations, to an extent far beyond the ken of the most learned of other days. It is, therefore, true, as has been said, that antiquity is the real infancy of man; reason and the kindlier virtues of age, repudiating and abhorring force, now bear sway. We are the true ancients. The single lock on the battered forehead of Old Time is thinner now than when our fathers attempted to grasp it; the hour-glass has been turned often since; the scythe is heavier laden with the work of death. Let us cease, then, to look for a lamp to our feet in the feeble tapers that glimmer in the sepulchres of the past. Rather let us hail those ever-burning lights above, in whose beams is the brightness of noonday!

THE WEST AND THE SOUTH.-T. H. Benton.

TIME and my ability would fail in any attempt to enumerate the names and acts of those generous friends in the South who then stood forth our defenders and protectors, and gave us men and money, and beat the domestic foe in the capitol, while we beat the foreign foe in the field. Time and my ability would fail to do them justice; but there is one state in the South, the name and praise of which the events of this debate would drag from the stones of the West, if they could rise up in this place and speak! It is the name of that state upon which the vials, filled with the accumulated wrath of years, have been suddenly and unexpectedly emptied before us, on a motion to postpone a land debate. That state whose microscopic offence in the obscure parish of Colleton is to be hung in equipoise with the organized treason and deep damnation of the Hartford Convention; that state whose present dislike to a tariff which is tearing out her vitals is to be made the means of exciting the West against the whole South; that state whose dislike to the tariff laws is to be made the pretext for setting up a despotic authority in the Supreme Court; that state which, in the old Congress in 1785, voted for the reduction of the