is written in great glowing letters upon everything.  It stands out in blazing capitals everywhere.  All things are on the move!  Forward! and forward! is the word.  And who would, who CAN, stand still amidst the universal rush?  Only a century ago, from the valley through which the majestic Hudson rolls its everlasting flood, westward to the mighty Mississippi, westward still to the Rocky Mountains, and yet westward to the Pacific, was one vast wilderness; interminable forests, standing in all their primeval grandeur and gloom; boundless prairies, covered with profitless verdure, over which the silence of the everlasting past brooded; and above all these, mountain peaks, covered with perpetual snows, upon which the eye of a white man had never looked, stood piercing the sky.  From the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi, that old forest has been swept away.  The broad prairies have been, or are being, subjected to the culture of human industry; even the Rocky Mountains have been overleaped, and beyond them is a great State already admitted into the family of the Union, and a territory teeming with an adventurous and hardy population, knocking at its door for admission.  The march of civilization has crossed a continent of more than three thousand miles, sweeping away forests, spreading out green fields, 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,