The commercial character of the country, notwithstanding all discouragements, had begun to display itself, and five hundred vessels, then belonging to Massachusetts, placed her, in relation to commerce, thus early at the head of the Colonies.  An author who wrote very near the close of the first century says:—­“New England is almost deserving that noble name, so mightily hath it increased; and from a small settlement at first, is now become a very populous and flourishing government.  The capital city, Boston, is a place of great wealth and trade; and by much the largest of any in the English empire of America; and not exceeded but by few cities, perhaps two or three, in all the American world.”

But if our ancestors at the close of the first century could look back with joy and even admiration, at the progress of the country, what emotions must we not feel, when, from the point on which we stand, we also look back and run along the events of the century which has now closed!  The country which then, as we have seen, was thought deserving of a “noble name,”—­which then had “mightily increased,” and become “very populous,”—­what was it, in comparison with what our eyes behold it?  At that period, a very great proportion of its inhabitants lived in the eastern section of Massachusetts proper, and in Plymouth Colony.  In Connecticut, there were towns along the coast, some of them respectable, but in the interior all was a wilderness beyond Hartford.  On Connecticut River, settlements had proceeded as far up as Deerfield, and Fort Dummer had been built near where is now the south line of New Hampshire.  In New Hampshire no settlement was then begun thirty miles from the mouth of Piscataqua River, and in what is now Maine the inhabitants were confined to the coast.  The aggregate of the whole population of New England did not exceed one hundred and sixty thousand.  Its present amount (1820) is probably one million seven hundred thousand.  Instead of being confined to its former limits, her population has rolled backward, and filled up the spaces included within her actual local boundaries.  Not this only, but it has overflowed those boundaries, and the waves of emigration have pressed farther and farther toward the West.  The Alleghany has not checked it; the banks of the Ohio have been covered with it.  New England farms, houses, villages, and churches spread over and adorn the immense extent from the Ohio to Lake Erie, and stretch along from the Alleghany onwards, beyond the Miamis, and toward the Falls of St. Anthony.  Two thousand miles westward from the rock where their fathers landed, may now be found the sons of the Pilgrims, cultivating smiling fields, rearing towns and villages, and cherishing, we trust, the patrimonial blessings of wise institutions, of liberty, and religion.  The world has seen nothing like this.  Regions large enough to be empires, and which, half a century ago, were known only as remote and unexplored wildernesses,