And ours to hold Virginia, Earth’s only paradise.

Where Nature hath in store Fowl, venison, and fish, And the fruitfull’st soil, Without your toil, Three harvests more, All greater than your wish.

To what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, T’ enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

If evil times ensue, Let good men come to us, We’ll welcome them to New.

This is thy praise, America, thy power, Thou best of climes by Science visited, By Freedom blest, and richly stored with all The luxuries of life!

What numbers of faithful and free-born Englishmen and good Christians have been constrained to forsake their dearest home, their friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter…

Here in a few words are the sacrifices made by our fathers, as they turned from their English homes, and also the conscience which prompted and sustained them.

Begun in sacrifice and in conscience, their empire grew and flourished with constant and increasing promise of future grandeur.

To live by wholesome laws you now begin, Buildings to raise, and fence your cities in, To plough the earth, to plough the very main, And traffic with the universe maintain.

Long rolling years shall late bring on the times, When, with your gold debauched and ripened crimes, Europe, the world’s most noble part, shall fall, Upon her banished gods and virtue call In vain, while foreign and domestic war At once…

Meanwhile your rising glory you shall view; Wit, learning, virtue, discipline of war, Shall for protection to your world repair, And fix a long illustrious empire there.

In contrast with the poets, but mingling with them in forecast, were two writers on Trade, who saw the future through facts and figures, or what one of them called “political arithmetic,” even discerning colonial independence in the…

Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

It is difficult to exaggerate the value of these verses, which have been so often quoted as to have become a commonplace of literature and politics.

But all things of heavenly origin, like the glorious sun, move westward; and Truth and Art have their periods of shining and of night.

The Eastern nations sink, their glory ends, And empire rises where the sun descends.

In harmony with this contrition was his early feeling for the enslaved African, as witness his tract, “The Selling of Joseph,” so that he may be called the first of our Abolitionists.

New Jerusalem will not straiten and enfeeble, but wonderfully dilate and invigorate Christianity in the several quarters of the world,--in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, and in America.

Of all the parts of the world which do from this charter entitle themselves to the government of Christ, America’s plea, in my opinion, is the strongest.

Here was a recognition of the people, and an inquiry how far democracy was consistent with monarchical government.

Believing much in the people and anxious for their happiness, he had not ceased to believe in kings.

The advanced ideas of the author are constantly conspicuous, making him foremost among contemporaries in discerning the questions of the future.

His large nature is manifest in cosmopolitan ideas, and the inquiry if it were not well to consider one’s self “as citizen of the world” more than is the usage.

A construction rendering the statute at once unconstitutional and absurd must be rejected.

This construction is entirely reasonable, and in harmony with the Constitution, and the legislation under it.