When we look back to the handful of obscure adventurers and persecuted outcasts who formed our small beginnings, and compare their humble dwellings, scattered thinly along the coast, with the great and flourishing empire that now stretches in pride and beauty far and wide over half the continent, we cannot but feel that the history of the world offers no example, in any way parallel, of a rapid and extensive development of all the elements of national prosperity. When we contemplate the condition of the country at this very time; population proceeding in the same steady untiring progress,--wealth augmenting in a still more rapid ratio,--every branch of industry animated by the highest degree of activity and enterprise,--agriculture, and commerce supplying the markets of the world with our products,--manufactures rapidly rivaling the most perfect establishments of Europe,--improvement in science and learning, education, morals, and religion, the object of general attention and solicitude;--when we contemplate this state of things, we cannot doubt, that the causes to which we have owed our prosperity are still as busily at work as they have ever been before. What they are, it might not be safe, even in reference to our own country with which we are most familiar, to attempt to say. When we venture to assign, as one of them, the character of our Government, the sages of Europe smile in conscious superiority at our simplicity, and assure us that we have become what we are in spite of our institutions, and not in consequence of them. When we hint at the fixed religious principles, the stern morality, the persevering industry of the pilgrim fathers of New-England, who have formed the kernel of the whole population of the Union, we are scornfully told that the mass of the original settlers were, after all, the refuse of the British jails. The only principle of our success, which is readily admitted by our friends abroad as real, (it being one which confers no credit upon us) is the immense extent of our territory; although, if this circumstance alone could make a people prosperous, it is not easy to see why civilization should not be as active on the vast central _plateaux_ of Tartary and Mexico, as it is in the valley of the Mississippi. But whatever may be the cause, such at all events is the effect. We are undoubtedly at a period of our national existence corresponding with the youth of a vigorous and healthy individual, when the body is daily developing new resources in all its parts, and possesses an elasticity which enables it to throw off without difficulty almost every principle of evil that may be introduced into it. We say not this to encourage a reckless confidence, or a disposition to bold and hazardous experiments on our political institutions. We are well aware that the strength and buoyant spirits, which betray to excess, may be themselves the very causes of ruin. We would rather in ordinary times allay than exalt the sentiment