carried its influence from one ocean to the other.  It did not conquer by its bigotry, by its intolerance, its cruel persecuting spirit, but by its higher mental and spiritual stamina.  These lower and baser qualities of the age of the Puritans leave a stain upon a great achievement; it took Massachusetts almost two centuries to cast them off and come into a wholesome freedom, but the vital energy and the recognition of the essential verities inhuman life carried all the institutions of the Puritans that were life-giving over the continent.

Here in the West you are near the centre of a vast empire, you feel its mighty pulse, the throb and heartbeat of its immense and growing strength.  Some of you have seen this great civilization actually grow on the vacant prairies, in the unoccupied wilderness, on the sandy shores of the inland seas.  You have seen the trails of the Indian and the deer replaced by highways of steel, and upon the spots where the first immigrants corralled their wagons, and the voyagers dragged their canoes upon the reedy shore, you have seen arise great cities, centres of industry, of commerce, of art, attaining in a generation the proportions and the world-wide fame of cities that were already famous before the discovery of America.

Naturally the country is proud of this achievement.  Naturally we magnify our material prosperity.  But in this age of science and invention this development may be said to be inevitable, and besides it is the necessary outlet of the energy of a free people.  There must be growth of cities, extension of railways, improvement of agriculture, development of manufactures, amassing of wealth, concentration of capital, beautifying of homes, splendid public buildings, private palaces, luxury, display.  Without reservoirs of wealth there would be no great universities, schools of science, museums, galleries of art, libraries, solid institutions of charity, and perhaps not the wide diffusion of culture which is the avowed aim of modern civilization.

But this in its kind is an old story.  It is an experiment that has been repeated over and over.  History is the record of the rise of splendid civilizations, many of which have flowered into the most glorious products of learning and of art, and have left monuments of the proudest material achievements.  Except in the rapidity with which steam and electricity have enabled us to move to our object, and in the discoveries of science which enable us to relieve suffering and prolong human life, there is nothing new in our experiment.  We are pursuing substantially the old ends of material success and display.  And the ends are not different because we have more people in a nation, or bigger cities with taller buildings, or more miles of railway, or grow more corn and cotton, or make more plows and threshing-machines, or have a greater variety of products than any nation ever had before.  I fancy that a pleased visitor from another planet the other day