promises of good to give spring to hope and effort; and it is not wise to open our eyes and ears to ill omens alone.  It is to be lamented that men who boast of courage in other trials, should shrink so weakly from public difficulties and dangers, and should spend in unmanly reproaches, or complaints, the strength which they ought to give to their country’s safety.  But this ought not to surprise us in the present case:  for our lot, until of late, has been singularly prosperous, and great prosperity enfeebles men’s spirits, and prepares them to despond when it shall have passed away.  The country, we are told, is “ruined.”  What! the country ruined, when the mass of the population have hardly retrenched a luxury!  We are indeed paying, and we ought to pay, the penalty of reckless extravagance, of wild and criminal speculation, of general abandonment to the passion for sudden and enormous gains.  But how are we ruined?  Is the kind, nourishing earth about to become a cruel step-mother?  Or is the teeming soil of this magnificent country sinking beneath our feet?  Is the ocean dried up?  Are our cities and villages, our schools and churches, in ruins?  Are the stout muscles which have conquered sea and land, palsied?  Are the earnings of past years dissipated, and the skill which gathered them forgotten?  I open my eyes on this ruined country, and I see around me fields fresh with verdure, and behold on all sides the intelligent countenance, the sinewy limb, the kindly look, the free and manly bearing, which indicate any thing but a fallen people.  Undoubtedly we have much cause to humble ourselves for the vices which our recent prosperity warmed into being, or rather brought out from the depths of men’s souls.  But in the reprobation which these vices awaken, have we no proof that the fountain of moral life in the nation’s heart is not exhausted.  In the progress of temperance, of education, and of religious sensibility, in our land, have we no proof that there is among us an impulse towards improvement, which no temporary crime or calamity can overpower.

After all, there is a growing intelligence in this community; there is much domestic virtue, there is a deep working of Christianity; there is going on a struggle of higher truths with narrow traditions, and of a wider benevolence with social evils; there is a spirit of freedom, a recognition of the equal rights of men; there are profound impulses received from our history, from the virtues of our fathers, and especially from our revolutionary conflict; and there is an indomitable energy, which, after rearing an empire in the wilderness, is fresh for new achievements.