s, planting cities and towns, making the old
wilderness to blossom as the rose, scattering life, activity,
progress, all along the road it has travelled. The great rivers that
rolled in silence through unbroken forests, have become the highways
of trade, upon whose bosoms the white sails of commerce are spread,
and through whose waters countless steamboats plough their way. These
stupendous changes are the results of human energy, and they reach, in
their moral prestige, their progressive influence, through every vein
and artery of governmental and social compacts, affecting political
institutions, shaping national policy, and forcing, by their
resistless demonstrations, change and mutations of opinions upon
all men.

"As it has been in the past century, so it is now, and so it will be
through all the long future. Forward, and forward, is the word, and
forward will be the word for centuries to come. And why? Because all
men here, in this free Republic, are free to think, free to speak,
free to will, free to act. No traditions of the past bind them; no
hereditary policy controls their action; no customs, covered with the
dust of ages, fetter them; no physical or intellectual gyves, corroded
by the rust of centuries, are eating into their flesh. Because
thinking American men everywhere live in the present, ignoring and
defying the dead past, and building up the mighty future. Because they
'speak their opinions of TO-DAY in words hard as rocks, and their
opinions of TO-MORROW in words just as hard, although their opinions
of to-morrow may contradict their opinions of to-day.' They are
fearless of personal consequences. As free men, they will think, as
free men they will speak, and as such they will act, regardless of the
jibe and sneer of those who accuse them of change, of inconsistency,
of being mutable and unstable of purpose. The point to the march
of improvement, the advance in the actualities of life, and ask, 'When
every thing else is on the move, shall we stand still? Shall the
opinions of a quarter of a century, a decade, a year, a month ago,
remain unchanged, immutable, fixed as a star always, amidst the new
demonstrations looming up like mountains everywhere around us?'

"Man's life is short at best; a little point of time, scarcely
discernible on the map of ages; his aspirations, his hopes, his
ambition, more transient than the lightning's flash; but his opinions
may tell for good upon that little point occup