Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 5.djvu/252

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS

shrewd benignant mind if he could watch all the giant marvels of your mills and furnaces, and all the apparatus devised by the wondrous in- ventive faculties of man; if he could have fore- seen that his experiments with the kite in his garden at Philadelphia, his tubes, his Leyden jars would end in the electric appliances of to- day — the largest electric plant in all the world on the site of Fort Duquesne; if he could have heard of 5,000,000,000 of passengers carried in the United States by electric motor power in a year ; if he could have realized all the rest of the magician's tale of our time.

Still more would he have been astounded and elated could he have foreseen, beyond all ad- vances in material production, the unbroken strength of that political structure which he had so grand a share in rearing. Into this very region where we are this afternoon, swept wave after wave of immigration ; English from Virginia flowed over the border, bringing English traits, literature, habits of mind; Scots, or Scoto-Irish, originally from Ulster, flowed in from Central Pennsylvania ; Catholics from Southern Ireland ; new hosts from Southern and East Central Europe. This is not the Fourth of July. But people of every school would agree that it is no exuberance of rhetoric, it is only sober truth to say that the persevering absorption and incor- poration of all this ceaseless torrent of heter- ogenous elements into one united, stable, indus- trious, and pacific State is an achievement that 214

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