merchant ships and whalers, and comparing them together to make wind charts and current charts, for rendering your ocean. voyages more speedy and more safe. Just so will it be with the log-books of our great Republic, and of the lesser republics which are sailing beneath the same flag. From them is hereafter to be made up the Sailing-Chart of Freedom, which is to point out the safe channel or the fatal reef to every nation which shall enter on the same great voyage of liberty. God grant that on.no corner or margin of that chart may ever appear the sad record: "Here, upon this sunken ledge, or there upon those open breakers, or yonder, in some fatal fog, by the desertion of some cowardly crew, or the rashness of some reckless helmsman, our great NEW ERA struck, foundered, and went to pieces. the exultation of despots, and to the perpetual consternation and despair of the lovers of freedom throughout the world. Let that chart rather, I pray Heaven, bear down to a thousand generations the plain and unmistakable track of an ever smoother and more prosperous progress, giving hope and trust and confidence and assurance to all who shall launch out upon the same sea, that a safe and glorious voyage is before them, a safe and glorious haven within reach.

Thus far, certainly, Mr. President, there has been no lack of speed in our own course. We are advancing rapidly enough, no man will deny, to no second place among the nations of the earth. What other country beneath the sun has ever exhibited so vast an extension of its territory, its population, its power, within the same period of its existence? I saw an official announcement, a few days since, that one of the astronomers at our National Observatory, in looking at the thirteenth asteroid of that fragmentary system which was once thought to be composed of only four or five inferior planets, found suddenly a strange visitor within the field of his telescope, which proved to be the thirty-first asteroid of that same mysterious system. It was a fact not a little emblematic of our own national history.

While the historic observer of America has been turning his glass and fixing his gaze upon our Old Thirteen, he has suddenly seen the system increasing and multiplying beneath his view, until the thirty-first star has already appeared in the same

marvellous constellation. The war with Mexico, of which the gallant hero (General Scott) is your fellow-citizen, whose absence at this board has just been so much regretted, in adding this thirty-first star to our flag, has opened to us the vast mineral treasures of the Pacific coast; and as Congress was bestowing upon the veteran victor the commemorative medal which he so well deserved, but which was so meagre a memorial of his merits, we could not but recall the noble lines of a great English poet:

"In living medals see our wars enrolled,

And vanquished realms supply recording gold!"

But this is but of yesterday. If you would realize the rapidity of our country's progress, we must go a little farther back. We must go back to the beginning of that very half-century over which the existence of your Society has now extended. Fifty years ago! What was our country then?-what is it now? Look on that picture and on this! Ohio but just admitted, with a single representative in the national councils. Louisiana just annexed, most of it a bare, untenanted, unexplored wilderness. Not a steamboat on the Hudson, or anywhere else except in the brain of some scheming Fitch or hair-brained Fulton. Not a railroad or a telegraph within twenty years of being dreamed of. The cotton crop still in its infancy. New York hardly yet one of the great States; for you will remember that Virginia and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were the three great States of the revolutionary and constitutional periods. By the constitutional apportionment, Virginia had ten representatives, and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania eight each, while New York was allowed but six. Sir, we must look on this picture of our country, and then upon that presented in the statistics of the census just completed, if we would appreciate in any degree the railroad rapidity, I had almost said the lightning velocity, of our national career.

And where, where is it all to end? That, sir, is to be written hereafter. But let us not forget, that, in part at least, it is to be decided now. It requires no ghost to tell us, no second-sight or spiritual communication to assure us, that if we are true to

ourselves, true to the principles and examples of our fathers, and true to the institutions which they founded, our country may go forward, with the blessing of God, to higher and higher degrees of prosperity and power in safety and in peace; its destiny ever written in the motto of its greatest state, - Excelsior,

EXCELSIOR! While if we are faithless to our trust, — if, lulled into a false security by long-continued and uninterrupted success, we suffer the public vigilance to be relaxed, and the public virtue to be corrupted, — or, if dizzied by the rapid whirl of our career, and yielding to the rash impulses of the hour, we permit our country to be dragged to the verge, and even plunged into the vortex, of domestic discord or foreign strife, it may be even our own ignoble and ignominious distinction, in some volume of history to be written at no distant day,- that we helped to make shipwreck of the noblest bark that was ever launched on the tide of time.

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Sir, I beg pardon for detaining you so long. Let me only sum up all that I have said, and all that I feel, in a concluding sentiment:

THE STATE OF NEW YORK: Upon her soil the first formal proposition of Union was made; upon her soil the first victory which gave assurance of Liberty was won; upon her soil the Constitution of the United States was originally organized. May history record that her example and her influence were always given to the support of Union, Liberty, and the Constitution!

DEDICATION OF THE WINTHROP

SCHOOL.

A SPEECH MADE AT THE DEDICATION OF THE WINTHROP SCHOOLHOUSE, IN BOSTON, 24 FEBRUARY, 1855.

I CAME here, Mr. Mayor and gentlemen, as my friend Mr. Bishop will bear witness, upon the express understanding that I was not to be responsible for any thing in the nature of a formal address. But I cannot refuse to comply with the call which has just been made upon me to add a few words to what has been already so well said. I must at least be permitted to thank the Committee of Arrangements for the opportunity of being present on this occasion. I thank them for the privilege of witnessing these interesting ceremonies, of listening to the charming voices of these happy children and these intelligent young ladies, and of participating in the congratulations which belong to such an hour.

I need not say that I have felt something more than a common interest in this scene. As a mere citizen of Boston, born upon her soil, educated in her public schools, and bound to her by a thousand ties of affection and gratitude which no time can sever, I should, indeed, have found abundant reason for gratification and for pride in seeing her engaged, in the person of her chief magistrate, in dedicating so spacious and noble an edifice to the cause of popular education. As a humble but sincere friend to free government and republican liberty, too, I could not have failed to rejoice at beholding another buttress added to the bulwarks which are to save them from overthrow and downfall. For, my friends, it cannot be too often repeated, trite and com

mon-place as it may sound, that these free institutions of ours can rest securely on no other basis than that of intelligence and virtue; and that intelligence and virtue can be disseminated and inculcated by no other agencies than the school and the church. Our schoolhouses and churches, these are the true towers and bulwarks of a republic, and the only standing army of freedom is that innumerable host of children who are in process of being trained up, in our sabbath schools and our week-day schools, in the fear of God, in the love of their neighbor, and in the elements of all useful knowledge and all sound learning. It may well be a subject for joy, then, to every patriotic heart,—and I hope mine is one, - to see our cities and towns vying with each other, not, like those of the old world, in the sumptuousness of their private mansions, or the magnificence of their government halls, but in the elegance and spaciousness and completeness of their common schoolhouses.

But, my friends, it would be affectation in me to conceal that I have another and peculiar interest in this occasion. I am sure that I need feel no delicacy in speaking of the distinguished person in whose honor this school has been primarily named. Six entire generations have now intervened between him and myself. More than two hundred years-a long time in your little calendar, my young friends have passed away since he was laid beneath the sod in what is now King's Chapel Burying Ground, within a few feet of the City Hall, where a humble tomb-stone may be seen bearing the inscription "John Winthrop, 1649." My relation to him, though direct, is thus almost too remote to subject any thing I may say of him to the imputation of being dictated by any mere partiality or family pride. His name, too, is an historical name, upon which the judgment of the world has long ago been irrevocably pronounced.

Coming over here in 1630, as the leader and Governor of the Massachusetts Company, with their charter in his hand, he was identified, perhaps beyond all other men, at once with the foundation of our Commonwealth and of our city. And there is not a page of our colonial records, or of our Town records, during the nineteen years of his living here, which does not bear testimony to his labors and his zeal for the public service. The very first