Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/34

14 the desirable stretches of the habitable earth, on continent and island, are occupied? We know how festering diseases and a devitalized blood track the long abode of a crowd of men in one spot; we know how the life-stock in our cities is renewed by new comers from rural homes. What resources will humanity have for its long future refreshment and purification as it uses up, exhausts, and defiles its old scenes and seeks fresh fields and pastures new? The only meet answer we can give to that question is in the fidelity and economy with which we use man's last and largest continent.

It is not admitted, however, that men are less vigorous in an old country than in a new one. While we attribute to the length of their ages the decays of some Eastern people, Germany has not lost its power for producing men of noblest energy and talent, by any lapse of centuries. And it has even been affirmed that our race has physically deteriorated since its transfer here.

Notwithstanding the mystery which overhung the continent on its discovery, it was from the first delighted in and gloried over as a land of infinite possibilities. The wealth and prosperity which have been wrought from it may not answer in kind or form to the fashionings of the exalted imaginations of its hidden treasures, because there was a halo investing at first the vast unknown. It was at once found that everything here was on a magnificent scale of size and grandeur. What the Old World from which the adventurers came had only in miniature, in toy shapes, this continent presented in sublime magnitudes. Its rivers were bays, its ponds were seas, and its lakes were oceans. Where did the continent begin, and where did it end, and how was it to be opened? The early comers listened to and repeated some legendary and monstrous stories of the sort of men which were to be found deep in these forests. Columbus saw mermaids in the sea. Jacques Cartier, in Canada, had heard of men with the convenient accomplishment of living without a particle of any kind of food;