Look at it! It has kindled us to no aims of conquest. It has involved us in no entangling alliances. It has kept our neutrality dignified and just. The victories of peace have been our prized victories. But the larger and truer grandeur of the nations, for which they are created, and for which they must one day, before some tribunal, give account, what a measure of these it has enabled us already to fulfill! It has lifted us to the throne, and has set on our brow the name of the Great Republic. It has taught us to demand nothing wrong and to submit to nothing wrong; it has made our diplomacy sagacious, wary, and accomplished; it has opened the iron gate of the mountain, and planted our ensign on the great tranquil sea. It has made the desert to bud and blossom as the rose; it has quickened to life the giant brood of useful arts; it has whitened lake and ocean with the sails of a daring, new, and lawful trade; it has extended to exiles, flying as clouds, the asylum of our better liberty. It has kept us at rest within our borders; it has scattered the seeds of liberty, under law and under order, broadcast; it has seen and helped American feeling to swell into a fuller flood; from many a field and many a deck, though it seeks not war, makes not war, and fears not war, it has borne the radiant flag, all unstained. THE LOVE OF COUNTRY. There is a love of country which comes uncalled for, one knows not how. It comes in with the very air, the eye, the ear, the instinct, the first beatings of the heart. The faces of brothers and sisters, and the loved father and mother, the laugh of playmates, the old willow tree and well and school-house, the bees at work in the spring, the note of the robin at evening, the lullaby, the cows coming home, the singing-book, the visits of neighbors, the general training--all things which make childhood happy, begin it. And then, as the age of the passions and the age of the reason draw on, and the love of home, and the sense of security and property under the law come to life, and as the story goes round, and as the book or the newspaper relates the less favored lot of other lands, and the public and private sense of the man is forming and formed, there is a type of patriotism already. Thus they have imbibed it who stood that charge at Concord, and they who hung on the deadly retreat, and they who threw up the hasty and imperfect redoubt at Bunker Hill by night, set on it the blood-red provincial flag, and passed so calmly with Prescott and Putnam and Warren through the experiences of the first fire. To direct this spontaneous sentiment of hearts to our great Union, to raise it high, to make it broad and deep, to instruct it, to educate it, is in some things harder, and in some things easier; but it may be, it must be, done. Our country has her great names; she has her food for patriotism, for childhood, and for man.--_Ibid._ THE UNITED STATES STEAMSHIP COLUMBIA.