Old England; and both Old England
and New England went on, nevertheless, in their mighty career of
progress and power.

Let me begin with New England for a moment. What has resulted,
embracing, as I say, the nearly contemporaneous settlement of
Virginia,--what has resulted from the planting upon this continent of
two or three slender colonies from the mother country? Gentlemen, the
great epitaph commemorative of the character and the worth, the
discoveries and glory, of Columbus, was, that he had _given a new world
to the crowns of Castile and Aragon_. Gentlemen, this is a great
mistake. It does not come up at all to the great merits of Columbus. He
gave the territory of the southern hemisphere to the crowns of Castile
and Aragon; but as a place for the plantation of colonies, as a place
for the habitation of men, as a place to which laws and religion, and
manners and science, were to be transferred, as a place in which the
creatures of God should multiply and fill the earth, under friendly
skies and with religious hearts, he gave it to the whole world, he gave
it to universal man! From this seminal principle, and from a handful, a
hundred saints, blessed of God and ever honored of men, landed on the
shores of Plymouth and elsewhere along the coast, united, as I have said
already more than once, in the process of time, with the settlement at
Jamestown, has sprung this great people of which we are a portion.

I do not reckon myself among quite the oldest of the land, and yet it so
happens that very recently I recurred to an exulting speech or oration
of my own, in which I spoke of my country as consisting of nine millions
of people. I could hardly persuade myself that within the short time
which had elapsed since that epoch our population had doubled; and that
at the present moment there does exist most unquestionably as great a
probability of its continued progress, in the same ratio, as has ever
existed in any previous time. I do not know whose imagination is fertile
enough, I do not know whose conjectures, I may almost say, are _wild_
enough to tell what may be the progress of wealth and population in the
United States in half a century to come. All we know is, here is a
people of from seventeen to twenty millions, intelligent, educated,
freeholders, freemen, republicans, possessed of all the means of modern
improvement, modern science, arts, literature, with the world before
them! There is nothing to check them til