are oppressed with a sense of infinitude. Bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific, washed by the ocean gulf at the south and the ocean lakes at the north; divided into two breathing lobes of life by the Mississippi, the Mediterranean of the Republic, no physical empire yet vouchsafed to any Government has had the giant proportions of the United States. With mountains on the east, and still loftier mountains on the west, pregnant with the richest ores for use and ornament and groaning for deliverance of their treasures, they ask but enterprise and time to pour into the lap of wealth their untold millions. Surrounded in every region of our domain with boundless leagues of fertile soil, annually tickled by the yeoman's plow, and laughing back smiling harvests in his face, the swarming hives of our population will find ample scope for their children's homes, for countless prolific generations of freemen. With a commerce whose sails shall yet whiten every sea, at home and abroad, our people shall gather the products of every clime in exchange for our own. Our teeming factories shall fill the land with the sound of hammers and the hum of spindles till the music of industry shall compose a grander symphony than ever Mozart or Beethoven conceived. Cities whose population shall be counted by millions; villages nestling in coves of mountains or bays, or picturesque curves of rivers, or sleeping in shady valleys; farm-houses of sturdy yeomen, but palaces in elegance and comfort, shall yet arise to gladden the eye. Railroads and steamers shall by every plain and river bring each region in close and constant communion with every other. The tropics and the frozen zone shall supply us, as home productions, with the sunny fruits and the warming furs, while the fibers, and cereals, and minerals-all the products of our native hands-shall make us a world within ourselves.

But wealth and luxury are sources of weakness rather than strength if not accompanied by intellectual vigor and moral rectitude. Our unbounded future wealth, and consequent temptations to luxury and dissipation can not but excite the fears of the thoughtful. Shall we live over again the history of old countries? Shall the haughty millionaire, as in decaying Rome, enslave the free spirit of the people, corrupt their morals by his licentious. habits, or purchase their suffrages by his bribes? Shall liberty become a form and despotism a fact? If these be the results of

your wealth and grandeur, what matters it that fountains, and rostrums and statues adorn your streets? What matters it that parks and gardens, and palaces crown your suburbs? What matters it that expositions of your industry build splendid structures, or your plastic tastes construct gorgeous theatres, museums of art, or concert halls? What matters it that saintly formalists point the spires of cathedral and church to unresponsive Heaven? The grand material future of America must, if we would not soon be numbered with the nations of the past, be but the minister of coming ages of intellectual glory. Simplicity of life, purity of morals, and those lofty purposes which make heroes of the humblest, must characterize our people or their coming power and splendor will inevitably corrupt and ruin them. We have every incentive to prompt to intellectual culture and moral purity. The freedom of our institutions, the early fame of our country, the revered name of our ancestors, the future of our children—to what higher motives could appeal be made? If we are true to these traditions and hopes, how grandly looms the Republic upon the vision! The second Centennial will find that glorious banner now waving over us covering and protecting a hundred millions of high-souled, intelligent, free citizens. Not only a broad domain, wealth, and power shall make us the republican empress of the world's destiny, but intelligence, virtue and courage -high manhood and womanhood-shall fill every household and insure the perpetuity of the American Republic. And when the next Centennial shall dawn we shall be not only untold millions of happy freemen, surrounded by palatial grandeur, internal peace and social and domestic purity, but the Great Republic will be the intellectual and moral leader of the world.

THE CHANGES OF A CENTURY,

AN ORATION BY S. O. GRISWOLD, ESQ.,

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION IN THE CITY OF CLEVELAND, OHIO, JULY 4TH, 1876.

MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW-CITIZENS,-The phenomena of movement in the heavenly bodies could not fail to arrest the attention of men in the primeval days. The natural impulse of those untaught men was worship, which lifted upward their hearts, conveying their thoughts from material to spiritual conceptions, and inducing a culture which slowly led them from savagery to civilization.

In the earlier times this culture extended beyond the mere alteration of days and nights and led them to the observation of the recurrence of long periods, and to the divisions of time, known as months, years, cycles, centuries. These divisions of time naturally became the point from which to date events that perpetuated themselves in the world's memory. But in the progress of the race, as by natural metaphor, this order was reversed, and great events themselves became the marking points in the time and history.

In that great city of antiquity, which subdued the cultured east and the barbaric west, and for so many centuries imposed its law and rule upon the world, time was officially reckoned from its own beginning. For ordinary purposes they adopted the received chronology, and their own greatest genius reformed the calendar, and furnished the rules for its universal use; but all public acts were officially dated, Anno Urbis Condite-from the year of the founding of the city-and in this designation there was a continued appeal to the pride and patriotism, alike of rulers and people.

When the nations of Western Europe emerged from the barbarism into which they relapsed after the withdrawal of the central power of the empire, they had nothing in their own national experience upon which to found a chronological succession. The chiefs>

of that hierarchy which succeeded the imperial with their spiritual sway, adopted for general use the Julian tables; and these Western nations, more submissive to priestly than political supremacy, readily accepted their instruction, and took with them, as their initial point in reckoning, that which they were taught to believe was the year of the Divine Advent to earth in their behalf.

Offspring of these Western nations, the people of America con tinued the use of the common calendar, but the founders of the new form of Government, when they ordained the same in this Western Hemisphere, took a new departure in time. With more than prophetic prescience, they believed that here would arise and grow an Empire of the People, mightier and more beneficent than that of Rome. Animated by that great example, and influenced by the same motives, they intended all acts of their Government, so long as it endured, should bear proper relation in time and history to that great event,-the Birth of the Nation, and so they practiced; and whenever an act has been or is done in the name of the Government it is always recited as "Done in the Independence of the United States of America."

year of the

And we, fellow-citizens, are here assembled to celebrate the Hundredth Anniversary of that event. It is in the highest degree appropriate that this celebration should be conducted by the performance of religious ceremonies, by music, by civil and military display, and by all the modes in which intelligent men may testify their reverence, their gratitude, and their joy. It has also been recommended by Congress and the President of the United States that on the occasion of this celebration, in each town and city, there should be prepared an address, embodying the local history of the place, the same to be deposited in the archives of the Nation. In this city of ours there exists a Society, the object and purpose of which is to collect and preserve all the material relating to the history of the place from the earliest period to the present date, and the distinguished President of that association has prepared with great care and labor that history, and his work is set forth in an elaborate volume, which is already deposited in the National library.

It was therefore requested of me by your Committee of Arrangements that this recommended duty be on my part omitted, and in

their behalf to submit to you a few words such as I should deem fit and appropriate to the time and occasion.

I doubt not, the thought uppermost in the minds of all, is the change during the Century. On the 4th day of July, 1776, Cleveland was not; and now behold the fair city with all its pride and beauty in which we are assembled-located on a site which would have delighted even a Greek Eponymist-itself a living exhibition of the progress, the development, and the results of the century. If one were possessed of the painter's skill or engraver's art, there might be presented a scene which would convey to your minds by a single glance all the grand features of that contrast which a volume of words would fail to express. Here would be shown the broad lake, its waters unvexed by keel or prow, washing a tenantless shore, with a river debouching from a vast forest into it, whose sluggish waters were slowly forcing their way through the bar at the mouth of the channel. In the forest glade, might be seen, a few savage men maintaining a precarious conflict for life with equally savage beasts. There, might be seen, the ocean line, its border fringed with the habitations of men, and their overhanging sun and sky would be darkened by smoke of the battle of contending armies. In the center of that habited region, there would be seen a fair city, the abode of peaceful men; in the city's midst, a council chamber, in which was gathered a company of Elders, whose form and appearance would indicate that Plutarch's men had returned to earth again. The chief of that council would be holding in his hand an unrolled scroll upon which all eyes were intent, and on that scroll, in letters all of living gold, flashing with a brighter than electric light, those never to be forgotten words, "All men are created equal." There, leading out from the inhabited land, might be seen a procession, the leader of which was a surveyor, with his compass and chains; following him a hardy emigrant, axe in hand, with his slow team of oxen bearing his family and scanty household goods; then would appear an established highway with moving teams of better appointed travelers; then, the artificial inland river with its slow-moving burdened craft; then, the rushing locomotive, followed by a great company which no man might number. Here, might be seen, the woodman making a clearing in the forest, and beyond, the cabin, the school