The President on our National Progress.
The President’s message, transmitted to Congress at the opening of the present session, speaks as follows of the advancement of the United States during the past hundred years:— To the Senate and House of Representatives: In submitting my seventh annual message to Congress in this centennial year of our national existence as a free and independent people, it affords me great pleasure to recur to the advancement that has been made from the time of the colonies, one hundred years ago. THE PROGRESS OF A CENTURY.
We were then a people numbering only three millions. Now we number more than forty millions. Then industries were confined almost exclusively to the tillage of the soil. Now manufactories absorb much of the labor of the country. Our liberties remain unimpaired. The bondsmen have been freed from slavery. We have become possessed of the respect if not the friendship of all civilized nations. Our progress has been great in all the arts, in science, agriculture, commerce, navigation, mining, mechanics, law, medicine, etc., and in general education the progress is likewise encouraging. Our thirteen States have become thirty-eight, including Colorado (which has taken the initiatory steps to become a State), and eight territories, including the Indian Territory and Alaska, and excluding Colorado, making a territory extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. On the south we have extended to the Gulf of Mexico, and in the west from the Mississippi to the Pacific. One hundred years ago the cotton-gin, the steamship, the railroad, the telegraph, the reaping, sewing, and modern printing machines, and numerous other inventions of scarcely less value to our business and happiness, were entirely unknown. In 1776 manufactories scarcely existed, even in name, in all this vast territory. In 1870 more than two millions of persons were employed in manufactories, producing more than $2,100,000,000 of products in amount annually, nearly equal to our national debt. From nearly the whole of the population of 1776 being engaged in the one occupation of agriculture, in 1870, so numerous and diversified had become the occupations of our people that less than six millions out of more than forty millions were so engaged. The extraordinary effect produced in our country by a resort to diversified occupations, has built a market for the products of fertile land distant from the sea-board and the markets of the world. The American system of locating various and extensive manufactories next to the plow and the pasture, and adding connecting railroads and steamboats, has produced in our distant interior country a result noticeable by the intelligent parts of the commercial nation. The ingenuity and skill of American mechanics have been demonstrated at home and abroad in a manner most flattering to their pride; but for the extraordinary genius and ability of our mechanics, the achievements of our agriculturists, manufacturers, and transporters throughout the country would have been impossible of attainment. The progress of the miner has also been great. Of coal, our production was small; now many millions of tons are mined annually. So with iron which formed scarcely an appreciable part of our products half a century ago; we now produce more than the world consumed at the beginning of our national existence. Lead, zinc, and copper, from being articles of import, we may expect to be large exporters of in the near future. The development of gold and silver mines in the United States and territories has not only been remarkable, but has had a large influence upon the business of all commercial nations. Our merchants in the last hundred years have had a success and have established a reputation for enterprise, sagacity, progress and integrity unsurpassed by the peoples of older nationalities. This “good name” is not confined to their homes, but goes out upon every sea and into every port where commerce enters. With equal pride we can point to our progress in all of the learned professions. As we are now about to enter upon our second centennial commencing our manhood as a nation, it is well to look back upon the past and study what will be best to preserve and advance our future greatness. From the fall of Adam for his transgressions to the present day, no nation has ever been free from threatened danger to its prosperity and happiness. We should look to the dangers threatening us and remedy them so far as lies in our power. We are a republic, where one man is as good as another before the law. Under such a form of government it is of the greatest importance that all should be possessed of education and intelligence—enough to cast a vote with a right understanding of its meaning. A large association of ignorant men cannot for any considerable period oppose a successful resistance to tyranny and oppression from the educated few, but will inevitably sink into acquiescence to the will of intelligence, whether directed by the demagogue or by priestcraft. Hence the education of the masses becomes of the first necessity for the preservation of our Institutions. They are worth preserving because they have secured the greatest good to the greatest number of the population of any form of government yet devised. All other forms of government approach it just in proportion to the general diffusion of education and independence of thought and action.