Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/411

Rh the lamb, where every man shall sit in the shadow of his own vine and fig-tree, where all people shall meet together in peace, and heaven shall smile over a happy family of 275,000,000 of human beings? is that kingdom of peace, and love, and prosperity to have its place here?

Ah! it has been very painful to me to give up that beautiful dream which gladdened me as I travelled westward and saw the golden sun advance before me onward into that promised land of the West, into whose realms I seemed to be journeying. I no longer have any faith in it. It is gone!

The western land of the New World will not produce anything essentially different from the Eastern. The New Paradise is nowhere to be met with on earth. It will probably never be obtained in this world, and upon this earth!

There will, however, be no deficiency of enlightenment among the people of North America. But it will be merely obtained through the diffusion of general popular education, that great diffusion among all classes of cheap newspapers, in which all subjects are discussed, and which present every vital question of life fully investigated, and all human thoughts to the mind of every man. Life itself in this country, with its States' institutions, constitutes a great public educational establishment, demanding light and knowledge, and in the combat between light and darkness, between God and Mammon, which is going forward here, as well as in the great world's battle, the combat becomes more profound, and more inward than it ever has been before on the earth; it concentrates itself more than ever upon the innermost ground of the will and the conscience, for no one can here henceforth excuse himself by saying:—

“I did not know!”

Hence it becomes to me more and more evident that that which we have to expect from this world's cultivation