one of the happiest, and destined to be one of the greatest, that his rays fall upon; and his annual visitation, from that day to this, to our frozen region, has enabled him to see that progress, progress, was the characteristic of that small people.  He has seen them from a handful, that one of his beams coming through a key-hole might illuminate, spread over a hemisphere which he cannot enlighten under the slightest eclipse.  Nor, though this globe should revolve round him for tens of hundreds of thousands of years, will he see such another incipient colonization upon any part of this attendant upon his mighty orb.  What else he may see in those other planets which revolve around him we cannot tell, at least until we have tried the fifty-foot telescope which Lord Rosse is preparing for that purpose.

There is not, Gentlemen, and we may as well admit it, in any history of the past, another epoch from which so many great events have taken a turn; events which, while important to us, are equally important to the country from whence we came.  The settlement of Plymouth—­concurring, I always wish to be understood, with that of Virginia—­was the settlement of New England by colonies of Old England.  Now, Gentlemen, take these two ideas and run out the thoughts suggested by both.  What has been, and what is to be, Old England?  What has been, what is, and what may be, in the providence of God, New England, with her neighbors and associates?  I would not dwell, Gentlemen, with any particular emphasis upon the sentiment, which I nevertheless entertain, with respect to the great diversity in the races of men.  I do not know how far in that respect I might not encroach on those mysteries of Providence which, while I adore, I may not comprehend; but it does seem to me to be very remarkable, that we may go back to the time when New England, or those who founded it, were subtracted from Old England; and both Old England and New England went on, nevertheless, in their mighty career of progress and power.

Let me begin with New England for a moment.  What has resulted, embracing, as I say, the nearly contemporaneous settlement of Virginia,—­what has resulted from the planting upon this continent of two or three slender colonies from the mother country?  Gentlemen, the great epitaph commemorative of the character and the worth, the discoveries and glory, of Columbus, was, that he had given a new world to the crowns of Castile and Aragon.  Gentlemen, this is a great mistake.  It does not come up at all to the great merits of Columbus.  He gave the territory of the southern hemisphere to the crowns of Castile and Aragon; but as a place for the plantation of colonies, as a place for the habitation of men, as a place to which laws and religion, and manners and science, were to be transferred, as a place in which the creatures of God should multiply and fill the earth, under friendly skies and with religious hearts, he gave it to the whole world, he gave it to universal man!  From this seminal principle, and from a handful, a hundred saints, blessed of God and ever honored of men, landed on the shores of Plymouth and elsewhere along the coast, united, as I have said already more than once, in the process of time, with the settlement at Jamestown, has sprung this great people of which we are a portion.