to West, that we are apt to overlook what an entirely different process is the growth of our territory beyond the beyond the Rocky Mountains, from anything which has happened to the east of them. It was a great step to cross the Appalachian range and found Kentucky and Tennessee; it was a great step to leap the Ohio, and plant the new, free life of Illinois and Wisconsin. It was a still more daring feat, it was in the opinion of our ancestors unconstitutional, to acquire Louisiana and Florida by purchase. But all these States were within the range of the original English colonists, or within that of the original French colonists, whose power fell seven years before the century we are considering, or, in the extreme case, had received European civilization as soon as ourselves, or even sooner. But in extending the genius of our government to the regions on the Pacific coast, we are entering upon a land unknown even to the nations of Europe in 1776. In the maps published by geographers of authority in the middle of the last century, the whole northern part of America is laid down with a wildness of speculation which reminds one of Chinese or Arabic science. In this same year 1770, from which I date my subject, I find recorded the death of Capt. Christopher Middleton, who received the Royal So ciety's Medal for his explorations in the Arctic Seas. But Captain Middleton had been sent in 1742 to explore a northwest passage from Hudson's Bay to the South Sea, and it was evidently expected that it would be but the journey of a few days from ocean to ocean in latitude 60°. It was not till Washington's first administration was drawing to its close, that Capt. Robert Gray of Boston discovered the Columbia River, nor till twelve years after that it was reached overland. In two generations we have California and Oregon entering the Union as states. Now here, fellow-citizens, we have a new idea, a new element in the national life. All the previous additions to the old thirteen, however different in their history, their soil, or the genius of their first settlers, yet looked more or less to the towns on the Atlantic seaboard for the full development of their resources. No matter what authority they might claim in virtue of the unheardof stream of agricultural and mineral wealth which they were destined to pour' upon the old world, as long as the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence run eastward, they must still look to the Atlantic ports as the channels through which that abundance should flow, and everything that the old world could give them in exchange must come across that same Atlantic ocean, which throughout its expanse is the true Mediterranean or connector of the lands. And it is not only as a medium of commerce, not only to carry out its native wealth and bring back its acquired luxuries, that the sea and the coast are needed by a great inland country like ours. No, nor yet for that other marvellous influence which only the sea imparts from its rocks and beaches, that strange health-giving force which comes from salt air and salt water alone, above the purest inspiration of the mountain, and the deepest rest of the plains. There is a nobler power yet, which the sea, and nothing but the sea, breathes into the heart of a nation. The mountaineer learns the austerer virtues, which are apt to wither at the first touch of civilization, and the selfish independence which bids every other nation stand off; — the inhabitant of the plains learns to accumulate wealth, with that sort of fair-weather enterprise which tends only to foster prosperity, and ends in sluggish content. But it is the sea-kings and their descendants alone, who enjoy the freest liberty in a genial intercourse with every land, who tear their golden treasures from the caves and floods of the barren main, who make a sport of danger and a mock of difficulty, whose messengers are winds, and the flames of fire their ministers. We children of tidewater, who draw in the ocean with every breath, can hardly appreciate what a blessing we enjoy above those who live far removed from it. I was told by one of our own lamented dead, who marched with Sherman to the sea, that some of the Western men on arriving at the shore stooped down and drank the water, of which the taste rather staggered them. I fear physical geography was neglected in their school. But another Western man, worth all Sherman's army put together, I mean President Lincoln, - told me with his own lips in 1863, that he longed to stay a while at the sea-shore, for he had never seen the sea in his life, except hastily from the windows of a railroad car. As he said it, that wild, sweet, unearthly look of melancholy that he too often wore, played across his rugged features, softening them to more than woman's tenderness, and he seemed to say like a man who resembled him in nothing but a love of liberty, and the abuse he got for it, "I could lie down like a tired child And weep away the life of care And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony." Oh why was he not spared to us one summer more, that we might show him the sea? How all our coast would have risen like one man to greet him! How all the Lincolns in Hingham would have fought to be the first to get him, and the last to part with him! How we should have waked his child-like mirth to tenfold peals of laughter at the sports and stories of the sea-shore! How the old fishermen and sailors would have crowded round to welcome the rugged Westerner that was so like themselves - how we would have laid before him all the treasures of beach and rock, the wonders of fortress and beacon, how we would have blown away the cares and miseries of four wretched years with one whiff of an incoming tide! How we would have sent him back again to tell his own rich valleys, where nature seems to have outdone all her exploits of fertility, that after all there were no hearts and hands like the coastmen's in New England! Now this mighty influence of the sea, which all history tells us has such an effect on nations, our Western brethren had for years to seek from us. They were obliged to descend to the coast of the same water that bore the ships of King Athelstane, of Rollo, of Columbus, of Philip. But when Oregon and California came into our family of States, a western coast, a coast all their own, was spread before them, and an ocean highway whose like Athelstane and |