infancy, when compared with European States, but possessing, in the fullest sense, the strength and vigour of manhood—manhood in all its freshness of youth and buoyancy of hope. In such a country man is most conscious of his value: he is the architect of his country's greatness, the author of her civilisation, the miracle-worker by whom all has been or can be accomplished. Where a few years since a forest waved in mournful grandeur, there are cultivated fields, blooming orchards, comfortable homesteads, cheerful hamlets—churches, schools, civilisation; where but the other day a few huts stood on a river's bank, by the shore of a lake, or on some estuary of the sea, swelling domes and lofty spires and broad porticoes now meet the eye; and the waters but recently skimmed by the light bark of the Indian are ploughed into foam by countless steamers. And the same man who performed these miracles of a few years since—of yesterday—has the same power of to-morrow achieving the same wondrous results of patience and energy, courage and skill. But for him, and his hands to toil and his brain to plan, the vast country whose commerce is on every sea, and whose influence is felt in every court, would be still the abode of savage tribes, dwelling in perpetual conflict and steeped in the grossest ignorance. Labour is thus a thing to be honoured, not a badge of inferiority. Nor is the poor man here a drug, a social nuisance, something to be legislated against or got rid of, regarded with suspicion because of his probable motives or intentions, or with aversion as a possible burden on property. In the old countries, the ordinary lot of the man born to poverty is that poverty shall be his doom—that he shall die in the condition in which he was brought into the world, and that he shall transmit hard toil and scanty remuneration as a legacy to his children. But in a new country, especially one of limitless fields for enterprise, the rudest implements of labour may be the means of advancement to wealth,
