Bedford inquirer. [volume] (Bedford, Pa.) 1857-1884, 1866-06-15
DURB0RR0W IUTz Editors and ProprietOrs.

! known IN that land as ignorance or violent
| crime Every man viii be secure in his
home, every man equal, every man free to
do whatsoever of good his hand can find. or
! his brain invent, or his heart conceive. So
| great will be the love Of the people for these
| institutions that the idea ofattack viii fade
away, for what nation could dream of at
taclling a country in which thirty millions Of
armed males, capable of becoming soldiers
! III SIX weeks, will perish rather than suffer
menace, and vii own ships greater in num-
Der than those Of the rest Of the earth Z
I ct so great VIII be content of this people
that Europe viii pass on its way Hnharmed,
unmpeded, afd uncontrolled, save indeed !,
i Raay be- ~ "a ezsopted agreement chat
America shall always be left open, secure
harbor OF refuge, the shadow Of great
rock 10 the poor, and the miserable, and
the oppressed. To South and North alike
the land Will be open, and while the Dane
eaten out OF his home may find in Maine
climate as rough ana manners as kindly as
his own, the Italian Unable to prosper may
grow Lacrima Christi on the slopes of Yir-
ginia, or renew the myrtiles IF Sicily by the
blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico There
is room for all and to spare, and when the
tale IS complete, and Americans outnumber
WV Als+t AAANS Att'C bAtAtEr WIZ clAGlCu BE4OLE
them other territories to possess, lands more
vast, mountains more various, plains mere
rich rivers still broader, cultivation aud pos
sibilities Of social life yet more multiform
and great, for they may cross the lsthmuS
fix a capital greater than Rome, at a spot
where the President can look from the White
House upon two oceans, and stretch away,
pressing on in innumerable hordes. over The
glorious wilderness Of Brazil and the rich
alluvium Of the Amizon, mine the Andes,
and fill those wonderful plateaus where, as
in Bogota, the apple and the pineapple grow
side by side, and 50 spread slowly down away
to the Antarctic zone. The half of earth
will then be Americans, and the curse of
divided language done away and the hu-
man race, nd at last Of physical misery, of
war, Of inequality, and of the paralysis of
powers produced by fears of each other,
may commence career as new as that which
began when man first instituted marriage
and discovered fire.
Ii is pleasant dream, one which makes
New England farmers better, and softer, and
nobler amidst their sordid cares ard it is all
possible, or at least conceivable No Eng
hshman with an imagination denies that in
his heart, or even doubts it, and it raises In
him, among other things, that fierce jealousy
which broke out so strangely during the re
cent civil war He feels as If this structure
thus visibly rising to the stars cast a shadow
over England, as if his own land were lost
in the haze around that coming Empire as
if he were dwarfed by the presence of his
mightier defendant He feels as a jew
might in the year 30, when, conscious that
be alone of mankind recognized the grand
intellectual and moral truths, he yet saw his
country nominally independent, really but a
province Of ail-absorbing aad luxurious
Rome
The bitterness is the greater because the
EngIishman, almost alone among mankind,
has neither past nor future neither dwells
on the glory of his forefathers nor looks for
ward with hope to the descendants The
Scotch peasant remembers Baunockburn as
if it were yesterday, the Russian moujik be-
ieves in the day when Holv Russia, mis-
Hess Of Constantinople, shall give the law to
mankind. The average Eugli,hHan knows
nothing which happened before bis father,
looks forward to nothing IN which his coun-
try viii play conspicuous part He has
few national traditions aud no national
hopes.
The educated German believes always in
some coming Ctopia, when al men shall
have leisure to enjoy, aud Germany, safe in
her unity, shah plunge ie y into
thought; and The educated trsnchnlan n s
er wearies Of the past Of France but the
educated Englishman only wonders how
men endured lives so bad as those Of his fore
fathers, looks forward only to the time
when the greatness OF England shall have
passed away. Yet it he dreamed, as Amer
leans dream. pleasant things, and yet pos
sible, the dream would not be an ignorant
one.
lie might dream of a little kingdom IN
rough but healthy climate, cultivated ike a
garden, in which q society Of forty millions
had been organized till it was as completely
an entity as a human being, ia which the
slightest injury to che meanest was felt as
the piucking Of a hair in a strong man
beard. In that land, so small and 50 eold
might exist society coherent as the dia
mond, but with colors as infinitely varied,
table as bright, facets as definite and as dis
slmliar-a society In which men rich as the
old kings Of the East realized luxury more
than Assyrlan, by the aid ofarts more suite
than those OF tsreece, yet shared every lux
ury and every art with the meanest of those
around them; and IN which workers, never
poor to pinching, cordially aided in produ-
eng the magnlhcence they freely enjoyed I;
IN which Thought, for the first time really
free, for the first time spread among millions, I
would strike out new literatures and novel
sciences, and add every day NOT uhly to mau's
dominion over nature--it was a savage who
first tortured earth into multiplying seed
rn-but to man S capacity for living noble
lives IN which 50 indefinite would be the
variety OF position, and circumstance and
wcrk, that every capacity and every disposi-
ton should be able to put out and profit by
the full measure Of It's powers: in which the 1
latent use Of all forms Of weakness should
become visible, In which the virtues should
be able to act as motors, the passions be
pruned down into energies.
He might dream Of an England in which ]
every man was educated and could form an
opinion for himself, every man provided with
means sufficient to give his faculties scope,
and every man able to rely on the aggregate
force Of all for aid against nature, OF time,
or circumstance, as he now relies on it |
against violent eyildoers an England in /
which Parliament should be the brain of a
vast being, Of municipality with conscious
life, guiding all men, facilitating allmeasures, /
making enterprises easy which now seem
impossible or absurd He might imagine
England thus organized, thus throbbing with +
many -colored life, ruling quietly over South {
ern Asia, breaking up sun baked eiviliza-
lions, sowing the seeds of new life over half T
watering every germ as ii grew to
and learning, as all great garden
srs learn, te recognize the beauty, and the (
meaning, and the use OF things which seem I
L !