Here I wish I could stop. But this is not all. The North is not the whole nation; New England is not the only type of the people. There are other States differing widely from this. In the southern States you find a soil more fertile under skies more genial. Through what beautiful rivers the Alleghanies pour their tribute to the sea! What streams beautify the land in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi! There genial skies rain beauty on the soil. Nature is wanton of her gifts. There rice, cotton, and sugar grow; there the olive, the orange, the fig, all find a home. The soil teems with luxuriance. But there is not the same wealth, nor the same comfort. Only the ground is rich. You witness not a similar thrift. Strange is it, but in 1840, the single State of New York alone earned over four million dollars more than the six States of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi! The annual earnings of little Massachusetts, with her seven thousand and five hundred square miles, are nine million dollars more than the earnings of all Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina! The little county of Essex, with ninety-five thousand souls in 1840, earned more than the large State of South Carolina, with five hundred and ninety-five thousand.
In those States we miss the activity, intelligence, and enterprise of the North. You do not find the little humble school-house at every corner; the frequent meeting-house does not point its taper finger to the sky. Villages do not adorn the margin of the mountain, stream and sea; shops do not ring with industry; roads of earth and iron are poorer and less common. Temperance, morality, comfort are not there as here. In the slave States, in 1840, there were not quite three hundred and two thousand youths and maidens in all the schools, academies, and colleges of the South; but in 1840, in the free States of the North there were more than two million two hundred and twelve thousand in such institutions! Little Rhode Island has five thousand more girls and boys at school than large South Carolina. The State of Ohio alone has more than seventeen thousand children at school beyond what the whole fifteen slave States can boast. The permanent literature of the nation all comes from the North; your historians are from that quarter—your Sparkses, your Bancrofts, your Hildreths, and Prescotts, and Ticknors; the poets are from the same quarter—your Whittiers, and Longfellows, and Lowells, and Bryants; the men of literature and religion—your Channings, and Irvings, and Emersons—are from the same quarter! Preaching—it is everywhere, and sermons are as thick almost as autumnal leaves; but who ever heard of a great or famous clergyman in a Southern State? of a great and famous sermon that rang through the nation from that quarter? No man. Your Edwards of old time, and your Beechers, old and young, your Channing and Buckminster, and the rest, which throng to every man's lips—all are from the North. Nature has done enough for the South; God's cup of blessing runs over—and yet you see the result! But there has been no pestilence at the South more than at the North; no earthquake has torn the ground beneath their feet; no war has come to disturb them more than us. The government has never laid a withering hand on their commerce, their agriculture, their schools and colleges, their literature and their church.
Still, letting alone the South and the North as such, not considering either exclusively, we are one nation. What is a nation? It is one of the great parties in the world. It is a sectional party, having geographical limits; with a party organization, party opinions, party mottoes, party machinery, party leaders, and party followers; with some capital city for its party head-quarters. There has been an Assyrian party, a British, a Persian, an Egyptian, and a Roman party; there is now a Chinese party, and a Russian, a Turkish, a French, and an English party; these are also called nations. We belong to the American party, and that includes the North as well as the South; and so all are brothers of the same party, differing amongst ourselves—but from other nations in this, that we are the American party, and not the Russian nor the English.
We ought to look at the whole American party, the North and South, to see the total condition of the people. Now at this moment there is no lack of cattle and corn and cloth in the United States, North or South, only they are differently distributed in the different parts of the land. But still there is a great excitement. Men think the nation is in danger, and for many years there has not been so great an outcry and alarm amongst the politicians. The cry is raised, "The Union is in danger!" and if the Union falls, we are led to suppose that every thing falls. There will be no more Thanksgiving days; there will be anarchy and civil war, and the ruin of the American people! It is curious to see this material plenty, on the one side, and this political alarm and confusion on the other. This condition of alarm is so well known, that nothing more need be said about it at this moment.
Let me now come to the next point, and consider the Causes of our present condition. This will involve a consideration of the cause of our prosperity and of our alarm.
1. First, there are some causes which depend on God entirely; such as the nature of the country, soil, climate, and the like; its minerals, and natural productions; its seas and harbors, mountains and rivers. In respect to these natural advantages, the country is abundantly favored, but the North less so than the South. Tennessee, Virginia and Alabama, certainly have the advantage over Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio. That I pass by; a cause which depends wholly on God.
2. Then again, this is a wide and new country. We have room to spread. We have not to contend against old institutions, established a thousand years ago, and that is one very great advantage. I make no doubt that in crossing the ocean, our fathers helped forward the civilization of the world at least a thousand years; I mean to say, it would have taken mankind a thousand years longer to reach the condition we have attained in New England, if the attempt had of necessity been made on the soil of the old world and in the face of its institutions.
3. Then, as a third thing, much depends on the peculiar national character. Well, the freemen in the North and South are chiefly from the same race, this indomitable Caucasian stock; mainly from the same composite stock, the tribe produced by the mingling of Saxon, Danish and Norman blood. That makes the present English nation, and the American also. This is a very powerful tribe of men, possessing some very noble traits of character; active and creative in all the arts of peace; industrious as a nation never was before; enterprising, practical; fond of liberty, fond also of law, capable of organizing themselves into great masses, and acting with a complete concert and unity of action. In these respects, I think this tribe, which I will call the English tribe, is equal to any race of men in the world that has been or is; perhaps superior to any race that has been developed hitherto. But in what relates to the higher reason and imagination, to the affections and to the soul, I think this tribe is not so eminent as some others have been. North and South, the people are alike of Anglo-Norman descent.
4. Another cause of our prosperity, which depends a great deal on ourselves, is this—the absence of war and of armies. In France, with a population of less than forty millions, half a million are constantly under arms. The same state of things prevails substantially in Austria, Prussia, and in all the German States. Here in America, with a population of twenty millions, there is not one in a thousand that is a soldier or marine. In time of peace, I think we waste vast sums in military preparations, as we did in actual war not long since. Still, when I compare this nation with others, I think we have cause to felicitate ourselves on the absence of military power.