the record, what unspeakable triumphs have been accomplished!
Nearly a whole continent has been reclaimed from the savage and the wild
beasts, and the all-conquering American has paved the wilderness, east,
west, north, and south, with high roads--dug canals into its hidden
recesses, connected the great Gulf with the far-off West by a vast
network of railways and telegraphs--planted cities and villages
everywhere, and fashioned the routes of civilization; bound Cape Race to
the Crescent City and the Atlantic to the Pacific, sending human
thoughts, winged with lightning, across thousands of miles of plains and
mountains and rivers, and making neighborly the most distant peoples and
the most widely sundered States of the mighty Union. Let any man try to
estimate the value of this immense contribution to human history and
happiness; let him try to measure the vast extent of empire which it
covers, and sum up the mighty expenditure of physical and intellectual
labor which has conquered those savage wilds, and converted them into
blooming cornfields and orchards; which has built these miraculous
cities by the sea, and made their harbors populous with native ships and
the marine of every nation under heaven; those busy inland cities, the
hives of manufacturing industry and the marts of a commerce which
extends over all the regions of civilization, from the rising to the
setting sun; those innumerable towns of the great corn-growing
districts; those pleasant hamlets and pastoral homes which fringe the
forest, and girdle the mountains as with the arms of human affection and
the passion of love; those mills on the far-off rivers, whose creaking
machinery and revolving wheels are the prelude of a yet unborn, but
rapidly approaching civility, and whose music, heard by the right ears,
is of the divinest depth and diapason, and in full concord with the
immeasurable orchestra of triumph and rejoicing which the nation
celebrates in the perpetual marches of her starry progress.

No man can compass this vast dominion, and no intellect can plumb its
soundings or prophesy of its upshot. Who could have foretold what has
already happened on this continent, had he stood with the Pilgrim
Fathers on Plymouth Rock, that memorable day of the landing? Looking
back to that great epoch in American history, we have no dim regions of
antiquity to traverse, no mythic periods as of Memnon and the Nile, but
a mere modern landscape, so to speak, shut in b