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serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world. Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life!"

If this state of his country had been foretold to him, would it not have required all the sanguine credulity of youth, and all the fervid glow of enthusiasm, to make him believe it? Fortunate man, he has lived to see it! Fortunate indeed, if he live to see nothing to vary the prospect, and cloud the setting of his day!

XXXIII.

ON THE RAPID GROWTH OF AMERICA.-Daniel Webster.

It is now five and forty years since the growth and rising glory of America were portrayed in the English parliament, with inimitable beauty, by the most consummate orator of modern times. Going back somewhat more than half a century, and describing our progress as foreseen from that point, by his amiable friend Lord Bathurst, then living, he spoke of the wonderful progress which America had made during the period of a single human life. There is no American heart, I imagine, that does not glow, both with conscious patriotic pride and admiration, for one of the happiest efforts of eloquence, so often as the vision of "that little speck, scarce visible in the mass of national interest, a small seminal principle, rather than a formed body," and the progress of its astonishing development and growth, are recalled to the recollection. But a stronger feeling might be produced, if we were able to take up this prophetic de

scription where he left it; and placing ourselves at the point of time in which he was speaking, to set forth with equal felicity the subsequent progress of the country. There is yet among the living a most distinguished and venerable name, a descendant of the Pilgrims; one who has been attended through life by a great and fortunate genius a man illustrious by his own great merits, and favored of heaven in the long continuation of his years. The time when the English orator was thus speaking of America, preceded, but by a few days, the actual opening of the revolutionary drama at Lexington. He to whom I have alluded, then at the age of forty, was among the most zealous and able defenders of the violated rights of his country. He seemed already to have filled a full measure of public service, and attained an honorable fame. The moment was full of difficulty and danger, and big with events of immeasurable importance. The country was on the very brink of a civil war, of which no man could foretell the duration or the result. Something more than a courageous hope, or characteristic ardor, would have been necessary to impress the glorious prospect on his belief, if, at that moment, before the sound of the first shock of actual war had reached his ears, some attendant spirit had opened to him the vision of the future; if it had said to him-"The blow is struck, and America is severed from England forever!" if it had informed him, that he himself, the next annual revolution of the sun, should put his hand to the great instrument of independence, and write his name where all nations should behold it, and all time should not efface it; that ere long he himself should maintain the interest and represent the sovereignty of his new-born country, in the proudest courts of Europe; that he should one day exercise her supreme magistracy; that he should yet live to behold ten millions of fellow-citizens paying him the homage of their deepest gratitude and kindest affections; that he should see distinguished talent and high public trust resting where his name rested;

that he should even see with his own unclouded eyes, the close of the second century of New-England, who had begun life almost with its commencement, and lived through nearly half the whole history of his country; and that on the morning of this auspicious day, he should be found in the political councils of his native State, revising, by the light of experience, that system of government, which forty years before he had assisted to frame and establish; and great and happy as he should then behold his country, there should be nothing in prospect to cloud the scene, nothing to check the ardor of that confident and patriotic hope, which should glow in his bosom to the end of his long protracted and happy life.

XXXIV.

SPEECH OF MR. PHILIPS, FOR A GARDENER.

Gentlemen-I feel, to day, that I have much to combat in advocating the cause of humble poverty against pampered oppression. I have to charge that oppression upon a character where the virtues and the charities of life are presumed to dwell; I have to fear also, lest the language which I must hold towards the individual, may be misconstrued into any disrespect to his venerated profession-most assuredly I mean no such thing; but when I find a man in lofty station hiding a worldly heart under a religious garment, it is my duty to overcome the pain which the exposure gives me a duty to the rank such conduct has dishonored-a duty to the church, thus more endangered by its own professors than by all that infidelity can urge against it. I shall proceed to detail to you the facts.

The plaintiff is a poor man, living by the labor of his hands. The defendant, Mr. is a clergyman of the Church of England, of ample fortune, and its useful attendant, a large establishment. It happened that in October of the last year the defendant was employed in the garden of Mr. as under-gardener, and on

the 21st of that month, it being Sunday, he dined with his aunt at Camberwell. They had a round of corned beef for dinner; and upon his departure, his aunt pressed him to accept a slice of it. He accepted it, returned home, and placed it in an open tool-box in the garden, the usual depository for the under-gardener's dinner. About eleven o'clock, the parson went to take the air in his garden; he proceeded with the sagacity of an old pointer, to the tool-house, and made a dead set upon the poor man's beef, sweeping it at once entire and wholesale into his pocket. Out of the Doctor's own lips I shall prove this ludicrous disposal of the beef. He proceeded directly to his house: and dived at once into the kitchen: "Follow me," said he to the astonishened cook, "Follow me into the larder and bring the carving knife with you." The cook followed with tremulous apprehension. Arrived at the kitchen larder, he cut a measured slice from a round of beef with much caution; performed the like operation upon a loaf of bread, and then stalked away without uttering a syllable. Next morning the cook received a summons to attend his dressing-room; there, spread out in state, he showed her the slice he had cut off the round, and the beef he had manœuvred out of the tool-box, so cut to match, that you could scarcely distinguish between them. "Wont you swear," said the parson, "that these two slices are from the same round ?" "It's impossible that I can," said the cook; "I can," said the parson; "here's a slice that came off my round; and I'll swear it did, because I found it in the tool-box." "Your round," said the cook, "was safe in the larder; the door was locked, and the key was in my pocket." There was another reason, too, which the Doctor assigned for claiming the beef, and which, as it has at least the merit of originality, I shall mention. Indeed he repeated it before a jury:"I know the beef to be mine from its complexion !" Gentlemen, the next appearance of the cook was before a magistrate, where she distinctly swore to the ut

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ter impossibility of any access to the beef without her knowledge; and she solemnly denied that such access was ever afforded. The cook having failed, the butler was resorted to. The parson produced to him the slice from the round, and asked him whether it was not his property?"No," "No," said the butler. "Bless me," said the parson, "what a fool you are not to swear to the beef!" He then produced the slice from the tool-box. "At all events, Joe, you'll have no hesitation in swearing that this and the other came from the same round?” No," replied Joe, "I'd rather say they did not, because the one is much drier than the other." The old mathematician, when he solved the problem, and exclaimed, erueka! never felt one-tenth portion of the parson's ecstacy. "It's the same, Joe, it's the same; it's only drier because I carried it in my pocket." His next resource, gentlemen, was the plaintiff himself. The plaintiff was bewailing the robbery of his dinner, little foreseeing he was to be considered a thief; he toid at once that he got the beef from his aunt at Camberwell; but the parson was not to be satisfied; nor would he even make inquiry. The man still came to his work; the parson tormenting him hourly with the same questions. At length his patience was exhausted, and he said, as I am told, in the presence of the butler, "Sir, I told you the name of my aunt and where she lived; I am ready to prove my innocence before any tribunal in the world."

Will you believe, gentlemen, that upon these grounds, against the speaking evidence of the man's daily return to work-against the oath of his own servants-against common sense, merely because he had a cold round in his larder this prop of the church, who keeps his lordly mansion, his equipage, and his retinue, determined to prosecute this helpless peasant on a charge of robbery ! —a charge so laid as to subject him to transportation. Did you ever, gentlemen, hear of such a case as this? I remember to have heard of one, and but one, which

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