have poured out their
abundance of luxuries for the tables of the rich, and of necessaries for
the sustenance of the poor. Birds and animals of beauty and value have
been added to the European stocks; and transplantations from the
unequalled riches of our forests have mingled themselves profusely with
the elms, and ashes, and Druidical oaks of England.

America has made contributions to Europe far more important. Who can
estimate the amount, or the value, of the augmentation of the commerce
of the world that has resulted from America? Who can imagine to himself
what would now be the shock to the Eastern Continent, if the Atlantic
were no longer traversable, or if there were no longer American
productions, or American markets?

But America exercises influences, or holds out examples, for the
consideration of the Old World, of a much higher, because they are of a
moral and political character.

America has furnished to Europe proof of the fact, that popular
institutions, founded on equality and the principle of representation,
are capable of maintaining governments, able to secure the rights of
person, property, and reputation.

America has proved that it is practicable to elevate the mass of
mankind,--that portion which in Europe is called the laboring, or lower
class,--to raise them to self-respect, to make them competent to act a
part in the great right and great duty of self-government; and she has
proved that this may be done by education and the diffusion of
knowledge. She holds out an example, a thousand times more encouraging
than ever was presented before, to those nine tenths of the human race
who are born without hereditary fortune or hereditary rank.

America has furnished to the world the character of Washington! And if
our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have
entitled them to the respect of mankind.

Washington! "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of
his countrymen!" Washington is all our own! The enthusiastic veneration
and regard in which the people of the United States hold him, prove
them to be worthy of such a countryman; while his reputation abroad
reflects the highest honor on his country. I would cheerfully put the
question to-day to the intelligence of Europe and the world, what
character of the century, upon the whole, stands out in the relief of
history, most pure, most respectable, most sublime; and I doubt not,
that, by a suffrage approachi