The wonderful display of our power and resources has given a reputation—call it notoriety, if you will—among the middle and lower classes of the old world, which in long years of peace we could not have attained. And our success in withstanding the terrible tempest which has assailed us, in maintaining the integrity of our political system, will spread that reputation far and wide, and give us a prestige whose effect will be seen in the increased tide of immigration that will flow in upon us upon the reëstablishment of peace. The teeming soil and salubrious climate of the far West, together with the prospect it affords, not only of wealth, but of social advancement, both of which are forever denied them in their own country, and extremely difficult of attainment even in our own Eastern States, where the population is dense and every branch of industry crowded to repletion, will allure the hardy laborers of Europe by thousands and tens of thousands to the prairie land. In the immense unsettled tracts west of the Mississippi there is room for the action of men inured to toil, and promise of quick and abundant returns for their labor. There they will be free from the disastrous competition of their superiors 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 heterogeneous conglomeration of nations and ideas such as the world has never seen. Whether these diverse peculiarities will by close contact and mutual attrition, by the advancing light of education and refinement as well as by the progress of intellect, be in time softened down, assimilated, and fused into a pure, elevating religion, or aggravated till they result in a godless, materialistic race, God only knows. For no man was ever yet able to prognosticate of religion, or prophecy with the remotest degree of its future action. For it is a thing of God, under his exclusive care, and subject to none of the influences of human action. In His hands we must leave it, in the earnest hope and belief that He will not suffer His divine purposes to be thwarted, and this people, to whom He has intrusted the task of the world's regeneration, to forget and deny their God, who has led them on to power and prosperity and happiness, to go back upon the scale of the soul's eternal progress, and become a race of wicked, corrupt, and God-defying sensualists.
Yet there is no maxim more true than that 'the gods help those who help themselves,' and in this great work of religious advancement we have nevertheless a part to act, a duty to perform. And the day is not far distant when the work of the missionary in our own land will overshadow that of the teacher in African climes. Here will be an ample field for all our exertions, all our contributions; and if we do our duty by our own people, we shall be forced, for a time at least, to leave the task of instructing the heathen of foreign lands to the Christian nations of the Old World. Our greatest responsibility is here, and it behooves us to look well to the religious culture of our own rapidly increasing population, that in after times they may be fitted for the task of Christianizing the world.
Every nation has its crisis, when its existence trembles in the balance, and through which it must safely pass before it can be firmly established as a great fact in history, a tangible landmark of progress, a controlling influence in the affairs of humanity. Nor is this crisis ever a mere fortuitous circumstance, but the necessary consequence of conflicting ideas and of untried systems. It is that point in the great process of assimilation when different and hitherto almost discordant elements tremble on the verge either of a harmonious blending for all time, or of flying off into eternal divergence and hostility. Hence it was not to be imagined that we could escape the common lot: our crisis was to be expected, and now that it has come upon us it is to be manfully met, and so controlled by an iron will, a loftiness of determination, and a purity of aim, that it leave us not stranded among the breakers of disunion and political death. And if we shall succeed in so controlling the mighty current of affairs, we may rest assured that we shall be purified by the trial, and shall have established a position on earth that no subsequent events can shake, until God, in His own good time, shall bid us give way to some higher development of mankind, if such shall be His will. With a noble and worthy nationality; with an incontestable position of strength and political influence, a widely diffused skill and experience in military affairs, a fund of warlike invention, and unbounded physical resources, which shall free us from all annoyances and intermeddlings at the hands of foreign nations; with a purification from the errors of the past, and a deeper insight into the capabilities as well as the exigencies of the present and the future; with a regenerated and higher-toned press; with an anathema maranatha for treason, in whatever shape it may assume; with a purer charity for the opinions of others, and a more graceful yielding of the obnoxious characteristics of our own; with a firmly established and health-giving system of finance; with a rapidly increasing population, bringing with it an increase of responsibility, and furnishing a broader field for the development of our energies and resources; with a glorious past behind and a golden future before us, we shall sweep majestically on upon the waves of time, an object of admiration to the world and of justifiable pride to ourselves—a great, and glorious, and, above all, a free, happy, united, and prosperous people. God grant it may be so! God grant that we may be true to the trust reposed in us, and that the glorious cause of human liberty—the cause in which are bound up the hopes of the whole world—may not again fall to the earth through the blindness and weakness and incompetence of us, who are to-day its only exponents. May we of this day and generation live to see the crowning of all these hopes; and when our sun goes down in the shadows of eternity, may we be able to look back and thank God for the trials and sufferings and losses and mournings of to-day, as the refining fire through which we have come strong and bright, the sharp knife whereby the gnawing worms of error, and corruption and inevitable death have been cut from the heart of our goodly tree.
GOD'S HARP.
FROM AN UNWRITTEN POEM.
God struck the heavens' holy Harp,
While sang the grand celestial choir.
Earth heard the awful sound, and saw
The trembling of the golden wire.
'Twas thunder to the stranger ear,
And to the eye the lightning's fire.