The American nation is now, and always must remain, in the strictest sense, "_a people./i>" The order of our political and civil institutions, the vast area of our territory and the unlimited susceptibility of its development, the achievements of art and mechanism by which alone that development can be secured, all necessitate, in the future, as in the present, a nation of working-men, homogeneous in principles, in intelligence, and in toil. Classes of society, except so far as based upon the accidents of personal friendship, cultivation, or locality, are practically now, and must hereafter become more and more, unknown. The distinctions by which its divisions in the Old World were created and maintained, lost the last hold upon America when slavery went down in the fierce tempest of the recent war. The proud prerogatives of race and birth are henceforth without value. Every man must receive himself from the hands of his Creator just as that Creator made him, and carve out for himself a destiny, limited only by his individual ambition, and by his fidelity to the end for which his life and independence were bestowed upon him. Unfavorable as such a state of things may be for the extreme cultivation of the few, that the great masses gain immeasurably by it, is undeniable. A race of farmers, of mechanics, of tradesmen, of laborers, can never be illiterate, immoral, or impoverished. {149} A race whose future embraces the population and political direction of a continent, into whose veins the choicest blood of the eastern hemisphere pours itself with an exhaustless tide, whose wisdom is the experience of six thousand years, and whose labors already testify to the vigor of its ripe and lusty manhood, must be a people in whose ranks each individual counts one, and by the overwhelming pressure of whose progress ignorance and pauperism must eventually disappear.