Beadle's Dime National Speaker, Embodying Gems of Oratory and Wit, Particularly Adapted to American Schools and Firesides

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Various. Beadle's Dime National Speaker, Embodying Gems of Oratory and Wit, Particularly Adapted to American Schools and Firesides

THE UNION AND ITS RESULTS. – Edward Everett, July 4th, 1860

OUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE. – Edward Everett's Oration at the Webster Statue Inauguration, 1860

THE STATESMAN'S LABORS. – Ibid

TRUE IMMORTALITY. – Ibid

LET THE CHILDLESS WEEP. – Metta Victoria Victor

OUR COUNTRY'S GREATEST GLORY. – Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota, 1860

THE UNION A HOUSEHOLD. – Ibid

INDEPENDENCE BELL. – July 4th, 1776

THE SCHOLAR'S DIGNITY. – Hon. George E. Pugh July 5th, 1859

THE CYCLES OF PROGRESS. – Ibid

A CHRISTMAS CHANT. – Alfred Domett

STABILITY OF CHRISTIANITY. – Rev. T. H. Stockton, House of Representatives, March 19th, 1860

THE TRUE HIGHER LAW. – Ibid

THE ONE GREAT NEED. – Ibid

THE SHIP AND THE BIRD. – Owen Meredith

TECUMSEH'S SPEECH TO THE CREEK WARRIORS – Clairborn's Life of Gen. Dale

TERRITORIAL EXPANSION. – Hon. S. S. Cox, House of Representatives, March 19th, 1860

MARTHA HOPKINS. – Phœbe Cary

THE BASHFUL MAN'S STORY. – Charles Matthews

THE MATTER-OF-FACT MAN. – Anon

RICH AND POOR. – Joseph Barber

SEEING THE ECLIPSE. – Anon

THE BEAUTIES OF THE LAW

GE-LANG! GIT UP! – New Orleans Delta

THE RATS OF LIFE. – Charles T. Congdon

"THE CREOWNIN' GLORY OF THE UNITED STATES." – Knickerbocker Magazine

THREE FOOLS. – C. H. Spurgeon

WASHINGTON. – Hon. Thomas S. Bocock, Feb. 22d, 1860

THE SAME

THE SAME

OUR GREAT INHERITANCE. – John J. Crittenden, 1860

EULOGIUM ON HENRY CLAY. – Lincoln, 1852

OHIO. – Bancroft's Oration at Cleveland, Sept. 10th, 1860

OLIVER HAZARD PERRY. – Ibid

OUR DOMAIN. – Ibid

SYSTEMS OF BELIEF. – Rev. W. H. Milburn, 1860

THE INDIAN CHIEF

THE INDEPENDENT FARMER. – W. W. Fosdick

MRS. GRAMMAR'S BALL. – Anon

HOW THE MONEY COMES

THE FUTURE OF THE FASHIONS. – Punch

LOYALTY TO LIBERTY OUR ONLY HOPE. – Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota

OUR COUNTRY FIRST, LAST, AND ALWAYS. – Ibid

BRITISH INFLUENCE. – John Randolph

DEFENSE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. – Henry Clay

NATIONAL HATREDS ARE BARBAROUS. – Rufus Choate

MURDER WILL OUT. – Daniel Webster

STRIVE FOR THE BEST

EARLY RISING. – John G. Saxe

DEEDS OF KINDNESS

THE GATES OF SLEEP. – Dr. John Henry

THE BUGLE. – Tennyson

A HOODISH GEM

PURITY OF THE AMERICAN STRUGGLE.By Hon. Henry Wilson. 1859

OLD AGE. – Theodore Parker

BEAUTIFUL, AND AS TRUE AS BEAUTIFUL

THE DELUGE

THE WORM OF THE STILL

MAN'S CONNECTION WITH THE INFINITE

THE LANGUAGE OF THE EAGLE

WASHINGTON. – S. S. Cox

AMERICA vs. ENGLAND. – David Dudley Field

IF WE KNEW. – By Ruth Benton

Отрывок из книги

Merely to fill up the wilderness with a population provided with the ordinary institutions and carrying on the customary pursuits of civilized life – though surely no mean achievement – was, by no means, the whole of the work allotted to the United States, and thus far performed with signal activity, intelligence, and success. The founders of America and their descendants have accomplished more and better things. On the basis of a rapid geographical extension, and with the force of teeming numbers, they have, in the very infancy of their political existence, successfully aimed at higher progress in a generous civilization. The mechanical arts have been cultivated with unusual aptitude. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, navigation, whether by sails or by steam, and the art of printing in all its forms, have been pursued with surprising skill. Great improvements have been made in all those branches of industry, and in the machinery pertaining to them, which have been eagerly adopted in Europe. A more adequate provision has been made for popular education than in almost any other country. There are more seminaries in the United States, where a respectable academical education may be obtained – more, I still mean, in proportion to the population – than in any other country except Germany. The fine arts have reached a high degree of excellence. The taste for music is rapidly spreading in town and country; and every year witnesses productions from the pencil and the chisel of American sculptors and painters, which would adorn any gallery in the world. Our Astronomers, Mathematicians, Naturalists, Chemists, Engineers, Jurists, Publicists, Historians, Poets, Novelists, and Lexicographers, have placed themselves on a level with those of the elder world. The best dictionaries of the English language since Johnson, are those published in America. Our constitutions, whether of the United States or of the separate States, exclude all public provision for the maintenance of religion, but in no part of Christendom is it more generously supported. Sacred science is pursued as diligently and the pulpit commands as high a degree of respect in the United States, as in those countries where the Church is publicly endowed; while the American Missionary operations have won the admiration of the civilized world. Nowhere, I am persuaded, are there more liberal contributions to public-spirited and charitable objects. In a word, there is no branch of the mechanical or fine arts, no department of science, exact or applied, no form of polite literature, no description of social improvement, in which, due allowance being made for the means and resources at command, the progress of the United States has not been satisfactory, and in some respects astonishing.

At this moment the rivers and seas of the globe are navigated with that marvelous application of steam as a propelling power, which was first effected by Fulton. The harvests of the civilized world are gathered by American reapers; the newspapers which lead the journalism of Europe are printed on American presses; there are railroads in Europe constructed by American engineers and traveled by American locomotives; troops armed with American weapons, and ships of war built in American dockyards. In the factories of Europe there is machinery of American invention or improvement; in their observatories telescopes of American construction, and apparatus of American invention for recording the celestial phenomena. America contests with Europe the introduction into actual use of the electric telegraph, and her mode of operating it is adopted throughout the French empire. American authors in almost every department are found on the shelves of European libraries. It is true no American Homer, Virgil, Dante, Copernicus, Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Newton, has risen on the world. These mighty geniuses seem to be exceptions in the history of the human mind. Favorable circumstances do not produce them, nor does the absence of favorable circumstances prevent their appearance. Homer rose in the dawn of Grecian culture; Virgil flourished in the court of Augustus; Dante ushered in the birth of the new European civilization; Copernicus was reared in a Polish cloister; Shakspeare was trained in the green-room of the theater; Milton was formed while the elements of English thought and life were fermenting toward a great political and moral revolution; Newton under the profligacy of the Restoration. Ages may elapse before any country will produce a man like these, as two centuries have passed since the last-mentioned of them was born. But if it is really a matter of reproach to the United States that, in the comparatively short period of their existence as a people, they have not added another name to this illustrious list (which is equally true of all the other nations of the earth), they may proudly boast of one example of life and character, one career of disinterested service, one model, of public virtue, one type of human excellence, of which all the countries and all the ages may be searched in vain for the parallel. I need not – on this day I need not – speak the peerless name. It is stamped on your hearts, it glistens in your eyes, it is written on every page of your history, on the battle-fields of the Revolution, on the monuments of your fathers, on the portals of your capitols. It is heard in every breeze that whispers over the fields of Independent America. And he was all our own. He grew up on the soil of America; he was nurtured at her bosom. She loved and trusted him in his youth; she honored and revered him in his age; and, though she did not wait for death to canonize his name, his precious memory, with each succeeding year, has sunk more deeply into the hearts of his countrymen.

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With these stupendous results in his own time as the unit of calculation; beholding under Providence with each decade of years, a new people, millions strong, emigrants in part from the Old World, but mainly bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, the children of the soil, growing up to inhabit the waste places of the continent, to inherit and transmit the rights and blessings which we have received from our fathers; recognizing in the Constitution and in the Union established by it the creative influence which, as far as human agencies go, has wrought these miracles of growth and progress, and which wraps up in sacred reserve the expansive energy with which the work is to be carried on and perfected, he looked forward with patriotic aspiration to the time, when, beneath its ægis, the whole wealth of our civilization would be poured out, not only to fill up the broad interstices of settlement, if I may so express myself, in the old thirteen and their young and thriving sister States, already organized in the West, but, in the lapse of time, to found a hundred new republics in the valley of the Missouri and beyond the Rocky Mountains, till our letters and our arts, our schools and our churches, our laws and our liberties, shall be carried from the arctic circle to the tropics, "from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof."

Such, I have reason to believe, were the principles entertained by Mr. Webster; not certainly those best calculated to win a temporary popularity in any part of the Union, in times of passionate sectional agitation which, between the extremes of opinion, leaves no middle ground for moderate counsels. If any one could have found and could have trodden such ground with success, he would seem to have been qualified to do it, by his transcendent talent, his mature experience, his approved temper and calmness, and his tried patriotism. If he failed of finding such a path for himself or the country – while we thoughtfully await what time and an all-wise Providence has in store for ourselves and our children – let us remember that his attempt was the highest and the purest which can engage the thoughts of a Statesman and a Patriot: peace on earth, good-will toward men, harmony and brotherly love among the children of our common country.

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