revenge the slaughter of our countrymen. Place their example before you. Let the sparks of their veteran wisdom flash across your minds, and the sacred altars of your liberty, crowned with immortal honors, rise before you. Relying on the virtue, the courage, the patriotism, and the strength of our country, we may expect our national character will become more energetic, our citizens more enlightened, and we may hail the age as not far distant, when will be heard, as the proudest ex clamation of man, I am an American!

EXERCISE X.

AMERICA HER EXAMPLE.

AMERICANS! you have a country vast in extent, and embracing all the varieties of the most salubrious climes; held not by charters wrested from unwilling kings, but the bountiful gift of the Author of nature. The exuberance of your population is daily divesting the gloomy wilderness of its rude attire, and splendid cities rise to cheer the dreary desert. You have a government deservedly celebrated "as giving the sanctions of law to the precepts of reason;" presenting, instead of the rank luxuriance of natural licentiousness, the corrected sweets of civil liberty. You have fought the battles of freedom, and enkindled that sacred flame which now glows with vivid fervor through the greatest empire in Europe.

We indulge the sanguine hope, that her equal laws and virtuous conduct will hereafter afford examples of imitation to all surrounding nations. That the blissful period will soon arrive when man shall be elevated to his primitive character; when illuminated reason and regulated liberty shall once more exhibit him in the image of his Maker; when all the inhabitants of the globe shall be freemen and fellow-citizens, and patriotism itself be lost in universal philanthropy. Then shall volumes of incense incessantly roll from altars inscribed to liberty. Then shall the innumerable varieties of the human race unitedly "worship in her sacred temple, whose pillars shall rest on the remotest corners of the earth, and whose arch will be the vault of heaven."

EXERCISE XI.

FATE OF THE INDIANS.

THERE IS, indeed, in the fate of these unfortunate beings, much to awaken our sympathy, and much to disturb the sobriety of our judgment; much which may be urged to excuse their own atrocities; much in their characters which betrays us into an involuntary admiration. What can be more melancholy than their history? By a law of their nature, they seem destined to a slow, but sure extinction. Everywhere, at the approach of the white man, they fade away. We hear the rustling of their footsteps, like that of the withered leaves of autumn, and they are gone forever. They pass mournfully by us, and they return no more.

Two centuries ago, the smoke of their wigwams and the fires of their councils rose in every valley, from Hudson's Bay to the farthest Florida, from the ocean to the Mississippi and the lakes. The shouts of victory and the war-dance rang through the mountains and the glades. The thick arrows and the deadly tomahawk whistled through the forests; and the hunter's trace and the dark encampment startled the wild beasts in their lairs. The warriors stood forth in their glory. The young listened to the songs of other days. The mothers played with their infants, and gazed on the scene with warm hopes of the future. The aged sat down; but they wept not. They should soon be at rest in fairer regions, where the Great Spirit dwelt, in a home prepared for the brave, beyond the western skies.

Braver men never lived; truer men never drew the bow. They had courage, and fortitude, and sagacity, and perseverance, beyond most of the human race. They shrank from no dangers, and they feared no hardships. If they had the vices of savage life, they had the virtues also. They were true to their country, their friends, and their homes. If they forgave not injury, neither did they forget kindness. If their vengeance was terrible, their fidelity and generosity were uncon querable also. Their love, like their hate, stopped not on this side of the grave.

But where are they? Where are the villages, and warriors, and youth; the sachems and the tribes; the hunters and their families? They have perished. They are consumed. The wasting pestilence has not alone. done the mighty work. No; nor famine, nor war. There has been a mightier power, a moral canker, which hath eaten into their heart-cores; a plague, which the touch of the white man communicated; a poison which betrayed them into a lingering ruin. The winds of the Atlantic fan rot a single region which they may now call their own. Already the last feeble remnants of the race are preparing for their journey beyond the Mississippi. I see them leave their miserable homes, the aged, the helpless, the women, and the warriors, "few and faint, yet fearless still."

The ashes are cold on their native hearths. The smoke no longer curls round their lowly cabins. They move on with a slow, unsteady step. The white man is upon their heels, for terror or despatch; but they heed him not. They turn to take a last look of their deserted villages. They cast a last glance upon the graves of their fathers. They shed no tears; they utter no cries; they heave no groans. There is something in their hearts which passes speech. There is something in their looks, not of vengeance or submission, but of hard necessity, which stifles both; which chokes all utterance; which has no aim or method. It is courage

absorbed in despair. They linger but for a moment. Their look is onward. They have passed the fatal stream. It shall never be repassed by them—no, never! Yet there lies not between us and them an impassable gulf. They know and feel, that there is for them still one remove further, not distant, nor unseen. It is to the general burial-ground of the race.

EXERCISE XII.

OBLIGATIONS TO THE PILGRIMS.

LET us go back to the rock where the Pilgrims first stood, and look abroad upon this wide and happy land,

so full of their lineal or adopted sons, and repeat the question-to whom do we owe it, that "the wilderness has thus been turned into a fruitful field, and the desert has become as the garden of the Lord?" To whom do we owe it, under an all-wise Providence, that this nation, so miraculously born, is now contributing with such effect to the welfare of the human family, by aiding the march of mental and moral improvement, and giving an example to the nations of what it is to be pious, intelligent, and free? To whom do we owe it, that with us the great ends of the social compact are accomplished to a degree of perfection never before realized; that the union of public power and private liberty is here exhibited in a harmony so singular and perfect as to allow the might of political combination to rest upon the basis of individual virtue, and to call into exercise, by the very freedom which such a union gives, all the powers that contribute to national prosperity?

To whom do we owe it, that the pure and powerful light of the gospel is now shed abroad over these countries, and is rapidly gaining upon the darkness of the western world; that the importance of religion to the temporal welfare of men, and to the permanence of wise institutions, is here beginning to be felt in its just measure; that the influence of a divine revelation is not here, as in almost every other section of Christendom, wrested to purposes of worldly ambition; that the holy Bible is not sealed from the eyes of those for whom it was intended, and the best charities and noblest powers of the soul degraded by the terrors of a dark and artful superstition?

To whom do we owe it, that in this favored land the gospel of the grace of God has best displayed its power to bless humanity, by uniting the anticipations of a better world with the highest interests and pursuits of this; -by carrying its merciful influence into the very business and bosoms of men; -by making the ignorant wise and the miserable happy;-by breaking the fetters of the slave, and teaching the "babe and suckling" those simple and sublime truths which give to life its dignity and virtue, and fill immortality with hope? To whom

do we owe all this? Doubtless, to the Plymouth Pilgrims! Happily did one of these fearless exiles exclaim, in view of all that was past, and of the blessing, and honor, and glory, that was yet to come, "God hath sifted three kingdoms, that he might gather the choice grain, and plant it in the wilderness."

EXERCISE XIII.

PUBLIC INSTRUCTION.

AMONG all the various blessings bequeathed to us by the ancestors of New England-if we except religious freedom-none has stronger claims for our attachment, or demands more imperiously our warmest gratitude, than their early institution of the Common School System. As if endowed with wisdom beyond the age in which they lived, and with a liberality far above the people from whom they came out, they were the first to declare-if not the first to entertain-the important doctrine, that religious and civil liberty, in the broadest sense, could have a permanent foundation only in a general diffusion of intelligence in the whole community. They were the very first men to declare positively against an exclusive aristocracy in mental cultivation; the first to open freely and fully to all classes and to both sexes the fountains of knowledge; the first to establish and maintain, at the public expense, wherever they felled the forest and founded a settlement-second in their affections only to the ordinances of religion — the means of public instruction.

And, perhaps, it is no censurable pride in us that we fondly-and, it may be, somewhat boastfully-repeat the fact, that the spot which is now the site of the city of Salem, in the county of Essex and commonwealth of Massachusetts, was the locality of the very first public free school the world ever saw!

To us, then, who are met within the limits of a state so honorably distinguished in the annals of human improvement; to us, who are the descendants of a New England ancestry, and have been nurtured amid New