Where shall we begin or end the list of those feats of liberty and wit, each of which feats made an epoch of history?  Thus, the effect of a framed or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, and refinement of the builder.  A man in a cave, or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.  But so simple a labor as a house being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at bay.  He is safe from the teeth of wild animals, from frost, sunstroke, and weather; and fine faculties begin to yield their fine harvest.  Invention and art are born, manners and social beauty and delight.  ’T is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier.  You would think they found it under a pine-stump.  With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those towhead boys has written a hymn on Sunday.  Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one, who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.

When the Indian trail gets widened, graded, and bridged to a good road,—­there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator, a wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry.  The building three or four hundred miles of road in the Scotch Highlands in 1726 to 1749 effectually tamed the ferocious clans, and established public order.  Another step in civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage, to agriculture.  Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant legend to convey their sense of the importance of this step.  “There was once a giantess who had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman ploughing in the field.  Then she ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, and put him and his plough and his oxen into her apron, and carried them to her mother, and said, ’Mother, what sort of a beetle is this that I found wriggling in the sand?’ But the mother said, ’Put it away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will dwell in it.’” Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy, augmented by cheapness, and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind, so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine metre of civilization.

The division of labor, the multiplication of the arts of peace, which is nothing but a large allowance to each man to choose his work according to his faculty, to live by his better hand, fills the State with useful and happy laborers,—­and they, creating demand by the very temptation of their productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by good sale:  and what a police and ten commandments their work thus becomes!  So true is Dr. Johnson’s remark, that “men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are making money.”

The skilful combinations of civil government, though they usually follow natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and territory, yet require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in their result delight the imagination.  “We see insurmountable multitudes obeying, in opposition to their strongest passions, the restraints of a power which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a single individual marked and punished at the distance of half the earth."[A]