necessity and human luxury are produced here in the greatest abundance, and the great majority of these nowhere else.  The white man, from his physical organization, cannot perform in these regions the labor necessary to their production.  His centre of creation is in the temperate zones, and only there can he profitably labor in the earth’s cultivation.  But his mental endowments enable him to appropriate all which nature has supplied for the necessities of life and the progress of his race.  He sees and comprehends in nature the designs of her Creator:  these designs he develops, and the consequence is a constant and enlightened progress of his race, and the subjection of the physical world to this end.

He finds the soil, the climate, the production, and the labor united, and he applies his intelligence to develop the design of this combination; and the consequence has been the wonderful progress of the last two centuries.  I hold it as a great truth that nature points to her uses and ends; that to observe these and follow them is to promote the greatest happiness to the human family; and that wherever these aims are diverted or misdirected, retrogression and human misery are the consequence.  In all matters, experience is a better test than speculation; and to surrender a great practical utility to a mere theory is great folly.  But it has been done, and we abide the consequences.

In all nations, a spurious, pretentious religion has been the avant-coureur of their destruction.  In their inception and early progress this curse exercises but slight influence, and their growth is consequently healthy and vigorous.  All nations have concealed this cancerous ulcer, sooner or later to develop for their destruction.  These wear out with those they destroy, and a new or reformed religion is almost always accompanied with new and vigorous developments in a new and progressive Government.  The shackles which have paralyzed the mind, forbidding its development, are broken; the unnatural superstition ceases to circumscribe and influence its operations; and thus emancipated, it recovers its elasticity and springs forward toward the perfection of the Creator.  Rescued from these baleful influences, the new organization is vigorous and rapid in its growth, yielding the beneficent blessings natural to the healthful and unabused energies of the mind.  But with maturity and age the webs of superstition begin to fasten on the mind; priests become prominent, and as is their wont, the moment they shackle the mind, they reach out for power, and the chained disciple of their superstition willingly yields, under the vain delusion that he shares and participates in this power as a holy office for the propagation of his creed—­and retrogression commences.