Page:An address delivered at the request of a committe of the citizens of Washington (IA addressdelivered00adamiala).pdf/32

 and lascivious lyrics! Come and enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind! In the half century which has elapsed since the Declaration of American Independence, what have you done for the benefit of mankind?

When Themistocles was sarcastically asked by some great musical genius of his age, whether he knew how to play upon the lute, he answered, No! but he knew how to make a great city of a small one. We shall not contend with you for the prize of music, painting, or sculpture. We shall not disturb the extatic trances of your Chemists, nor call from the heavens the ardent gaze of your Astronomers. We will not ask you who was the last President of your Royal Academy. We will not enquire by whose mechanical combinations it was, that your Steam-Boats stem the currents of your rivers, and vanquish the opposition of the winds them- selves upon your seas. We will not name the inventor of the Cotton-Gin, for we fear that you would ask us the meaning of the word, and pronounce it a provincial barbarism. We will not name to you him, whose graver defies the imitation of forgery, and saves the labor of your executioner, by taking from your greatest geniuses of robbery the power of committing the crime. He is now among yourselves and since your philosophers have permitted him to prove to them the compressibility of water, you may perhaps claim him for your own. Would you soar to fame upon a rocket, or burst into glory from a shell? we shall leave you to enquire of your naval heroes their opinion of the Steam Battery and the Torpedo. It is not by the contrivance of agents of destruction, that America wishes to commend her in- ventive genius to the admiration or the gratitude of after times; nor is it even in the detection of the secrets, or the composition of new modifications of physical nature,