Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/33

Rh than its surface, nor can we cast the horoscope of its future. This we do know, that while humanity was trying its experiments with rising and falling empires in the Old World, exhausting as it seemed the zest and the possibilities of life, jaded and weary and foul, and often sinking in despair, here was a hidden realm of virgin earth, of forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains, of fields and meadows, of mines and cataracts, with its secrets and marvels of grandeur and beauty, all glowing and beaming as with the alluring legend, “Try once more what you can do with, what you can make of, human life!” It was as when one turns from a melancholy stroll in a decayed town or ruined city, with its crumbling and mouldering structures, its sewers choked with foulness, and its festering graveyards whose inscribed stones only vary the tale of woe and vanity and falsehood, and mounts a breezy hill in our fairest regions of yet lonely space, and gazes upon the prospect.

Such was the boon and gift offered to humanity on the opening of this continent. Profoundly penetrating and solemn is the thought, that never again on this globe will this transcendent privilege and proffer be repeated. We have got the whole, in all its parts. Australia has discouraged the hope which beamed at its first welcome. Though it is the largest island on the globe, — itself a continent, — having an area of nearly three million square miles, only the skirts of its coasts appear to be profitable for cultivation, while the surveys of its interior, so far as they have with difficulty been made, reveal enormous deserts of sand and rock. We note that the British men of science, at the annual meetings of their Association, offer their measurements of the yet remaining capacities of the mines of coal and iron and other metals, and forecast the date when England must yield the power and glory of being the workshop of the world. It requires no abstruse mathematics to deal with the facts of a larger and more august problem. What shall men, in the steady increase of our race, do when all