Leaving Ottawa, I embarked on the sea of the prairie, and after proceeding a few miles came to a settlement of Norwegians, consisting of a little straggling village, encompassed by luxuriant fields of wheat and corn, showing forth the rich rewards of industry operating in a fertile soil. The buildings and other appendages indicated not only comfort but competency, and I could not avoid being struck with the singularity of a community from the remote regions of Northern Europe planting itself in this secluded spot in the very bosom of the New World. Yet this is by no means a solitary example. Go where we will in the great region of the West, we perceive new evidence of the proud and happy destiny of our country, in being above all others on the face of the earth, the land toward which the eager and longing eye of hope is cast from every corner of Christendom: the land to which poverty turns for relief from its sufferings, and the oppressed for the enjoyment of the rights bestowed by God and filched away by man; the land which alone yields an adequate reward to labor, and gives to honest enterprise its fair field for exertion; the land where pining wretchedness never descends as an heir-loom from generation to generation, and want is not, like wealth, hereditary; the New World, which a gracious Providence seems to have reserved as a refuge and a home to the swarms of industrious bees driven from the parent hive for want of room, want of employment, and want of bread. This, after all, is the crowning chaplet that adorns the brow of our great republic, and long may it be before it withers. The triumphs of arms, art and literature fade in comparison with those of humanity, and that country which affords the greatest plenty of the necessaries and comforts of life to the greatest proportion of human beings, may justly challenge a pre-eminence over those which place their claims to that distinction merely on the ground of arts and refinements, whose influence is confined to a few, and contributes but little to the happiness, and less to the virtues even of those who make it the sole foundation of their assumptions of superiority. While our country continues to be the refuge of the honest, industrious poor of Europe, who cares for their boasts of those paltry refinements, those exquisite effeminacies, which in all past ages, and in every nation of the world, have been the sure precursors of decay and dissolution. When the descendants of those who were driven to the United States by the privations and discouragements they encountered at home, shall begin to leave the land of their refuge, and return to the bosom of the country of their forefathers in search of bread which they cannot procure here, then, and not till then, may the renovated Old World justly boast of that superiority which is now little more than a dream of long past times.