Page:The Relation of the Sunday-school System to our Christian Patriotism.pdf/13

Rh by our side. Mighty as we have already become, the valley between our great mountains is the cradle of, as yet, an infant nation destined to attain a gigantic strength, compared with which every other republic, past or present, will appear like a dwarf. Still we are one people, and the national will is the aggregate result of the suffrage of each individual citizen of all these millions. It is but yesterday, as it were, that the first pioneer paddled his canoe across the great river of the west, and already have we seen the power of the nation balanced upon the ridge of the Alleghanies, then ponderating on the other side. The child, born this day on the desert shore of Lake Superior, the blood-stained banks of the Rio Grande, or the beach of the Pacific, may, before his generation has passed away, be the president of fifty millions—for while our increase laughs at arithmetic, it is within the working of our national system. My friends, as well might one limb of the living anatomy seek to live apart from the rest, as we think to separate ourselves from any individual of our wide nation. Our blood flows through all these veins, and like the beating of one mighty heart is felt the action of the popular will. Strange as it may seem to the foreign observer, contrary to the forebodings of many an honest patriot, our extension, thus far, has consolidated the Union. We are now, with thirty States, more united, more sympathetic, stronger and more likely to endure than when we were thirteen. By a striking coincidence of discovery, through the subjugation of expansive vapour and of the lightning fire to the will of man, the moral distance between us has been lessened, while that of our habitations has increased.