Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/95

 CURTIS

and its very wail seemed a tribute to the pacific glories of the land.

"The ornament of beauty is suspect, A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air."

The government was felt to be but a hand of protection and blessing; labor was fully em- ploj'ed ; capital was secured ; the army was a jest ; enterprise was pushing through the AUe- ghanies, grasping and settling the El Dorado of the prairies, and still braving the wilderness, reached out toward the Rocky Mountains, and reversing the voyages of Columbus, rediscovered the Old World from the New. America was the Benjamin of nations, the best beloved of heaven, and the starry flag of the United States flashed a line of celestial light around the world, the harbinger of freedom, peace, and prosperity.

Think, for instance, of the change wrought by foreign immigration, with all its necessary con- sequences. In the State of Massachusetts to-day the number of citizens of foreign birth who have no traditional association with the story of Concord and Lexington is larger than the entire population of the State on the day of battle. The first fifty years after the battle brought to the whole country fewer immigants than are now living in ^Massachusetts alone. At the end of that half century, when Mr. Everett stood here, less than three hundred thousand foreign immigrants had come to this country ; but in the fifty years that have since elapsed, that immigra- 69

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