STEPHEN B. WEEKS 
 
 CUSS OF 1686; PH.& THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 mWWmommA 
 BE WEEKS COLLECTION 
 
 ©F 
 
 C378 
 
 UK3 
 
 I878G 
 
UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
 00039136620 
 
 This book must not 
 be taken from the 
 Library building. 
 
 \ 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2010 with funding from 
 
 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/addressofhonjameOOgran 
 
ADDRESS 
 
 tl 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Hon, James Grant, 
 
 OF DAVENPORT, IOWA, 
 
 TO THE 
 
 Alumni of the University of N . C, 
 
 At Chapfl Hill, on the 6th of June, 1878. 
 
 RALEIGH: 
 
 Edwards, Brottghton & Co., Printers and Binders. 
 
 July, 1878. 
 
At a meeting of the Alumni Association, held after the 
 Address was delivered, His Excellency Gov. Vance arose 
 and moved that the thanks of the Alumni be tendered to 
 Judge Grant for his able and eloquent address, and that a 
 copy be requested for publication. The motion being put 
 by Judge Battle, the President of the Association, it was 
 <carried unanimously with much enthusiasm. 
 
 ■ 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Alumni Association : 
 
 It is fifty years since I became a student, in the Sopho- 
 more class of 1828, at this venerable seat of learning. 
 
 To this circumstance, a lapse of half a century since I 
 came here to pursue the course of studies in college life, -I 
 am indebted for the invitation, with which I have been 
 honored, to address you to-day. 
 
 Perhaps, too, the address of Professor Wm. Hooper to you 
 in 1859, the semi-centennial of his graduation, on the occa- 
 sion of a visit by the Hon. James Buchanan, President of 
 the United States, with the Hon. Jacob Thompson, a grad- 
 uate of my class, on whom the President had conferred a 
 distinguished position in his Cabinet, and my recent asso- 
 ciations with Mr. Hooper, may have induced you to expect 
 another address glittering with the light of his keen wit, 
 trenchant satire, and burning eloquence. 
 
 But I am not a satirest or logician, as Hooper was, nor 
 an orator, as Gaston was, whose speech to the young men 
 of this University in 1882 has gone through five editions. 
 "X am a plain, blunt man ; I have neither wit nor words, 
 nor worth, action, utterance, nor power of speech to stir 
 men's blood ; I only speak right on, and tell you that which 
 you yourselves do know." 
 
 This University dates its existence from the year 1795. 
 Mr. Kerr was its first Presiding officer ; Mr. Harris its sec- 
 ond. Neither of them remained here more than a year. 
 Dr. Joseph Caldwell was its first President, from 1797 to 
 1812, when he resigned, and was succeeded by Mr. Chap- 
 man, who resigned in 1816, when Dr. Caldwell was re-ap- 
 pointed, and continued in office until his death in 1835. 
 
 Hon/David L. Swain, who had been Governor of the State, 
 
(4) 
 
 succeeded Dr. Caldwell, and held the office until his death, 
 in 1868. He was succeeded by Mr. Solomon Pool, who re- 
 mained until 1874. The institution languished until 1875, 
 when it was re-organized and placed under the control of 
 its Alumni ; and from that period it has commenced a new 
 life, which we hope may continue as long as our State lives. 
 
 When I became a student, in 1828, this University had 
 an established reputation, a full course of college study, 
 with five professors, two tutors, and from eighty to a hun- 
 dred students. Many of its early graduates had become ad- 
 vocates and statesmen, and had acquired fame, in this, as 
 well as other States. It had a large number of students 
 from the adjacent States, and they had, by their distinguish- 
 ed ability, conferred a reputation upon the institution 
 where they were taught, which gave it a name known 
 among the colleges of the land that has not diminished 
 down to this day. 
 
 During the period of my college life, in addition to Pres- 
 ident Caldwell, who was Professor of Moral Philosophy, 
 Elisha Mitchell, who had just succeeded Dennis Olmstead, 
 was Professor of Chemistry ; James Philips was Professor of 
 Mathematics ; William Hooper was Professor of Greek and 
 Latin ; Nicholas Marcellus Hents was Professor of Modern 
 Languages. Lorenzo Lee and Thompson Bird were tutors. 
 The number of students did not, at any period of my col- 
 lege life, exceed one hundred and fifty. The institution 
 was well endowed. It had just begun a course of prosperity, 
 which continued to increase, until its students numbered 
 many hundreds. The late civil war broke up the schools 
 all over the South ; the students joined the arm}' ; the pro- 
 fessors had no persons to instruct; the endowment of this, 
 ample and propitious as it was, was appropriated for war 
 purposes, and the institution was practically closed, for the 
 want of money and students. 
 
 Dr. William Hooper survived all his colleagues who 
 taught while I was here. 
 
(5) 
 
 He was a blue-eyed, nimble-witted man, to the outward 
 world. Like the celebrated comic actor, Liston, he was al- 
 ways grave; his most laughable jokes, his most polished 
 wit, his keenest satire, scarcely induced a smile upon his 
 lips. The thunder of applause which his thoughts pro- 
 voked seemed to him merely an agreeable surprise. He was 
 afflicted with a natural melancholy, which, in earlier life, 
 disturbed his religious faith. He left this institution for no 
 other ostensible cause than his preference to lead a more re- 
 ligious life, accepted a professorship in a theological college 
 in South Carolina, and from thence went to Wake Forest 
 College, founded about the time I left this State, and in 
 that institution he took a professorship, and remained there 
 a number of years. 
 
 It was my privilege, after he was eighty, to renew, with 
 great pleasure to him and to me, the acquaintance of my 
 youth. The years which had made him old had made him 
 gentle and tolerant. The same brilliant intellect that used 
 to set the school in a roar had been enlarged by length of 
 days, and his mind was still the pent up volcano that it 
 was fifty years before. 
 
 I last saw him in Philadelphia, in 1876, attending the 
 hundredth celebration of that Fourth of July which his 
 grandfather had contributed to make the immortal dawn of 
 Republican America. To undertake this journey, he was 
 encouraged by our friend, Mr. Paul Cameron, than whom 
 your State has no more devoted son, nor Dr. Hooper a more 
 earnest admirer. 
 
 I found Doctor Hooper in a boarding house provided by 
 the Baptists for their friends, unheralded, unattended in his 
 noble effort, which cost him his life, to witness the celebra- 
 tion of the centennial year of American Independence. 
 
 About a month after, I was advised of his death. No 
 question this want of attendance in that, to him, last jour- 
 ney, was caused by that indomitable will and resolution 
 which makes a man whose youth has been vigorous, scorn 
 
(6) 
 
 attendance and disdain the care and deference which the 
 young are always more willing to bestow than old age to 
 accept. 
 
 He realized the same fate, except that his last hours were 
 watched with the tender kindness of his family, that befell 
 his friend, Elisha Mitchell. He died a victim to his own 
 self-reliance. Like Milo, the famous wrestler of Crotona, he 
 forgot he was very old, and he was lured to death by his 
 confidence in his strength and ability to endure exposure and 
 fatigue. His endurance had departed from him at eighty- 
 one, without his being willing to admit it. At his age, and 
 with his high position as a learned man, and his immediate 
 descent from one of the statesmen signers of the Declaration 
 of Independence, he was entitled, at the grand national 
 gathering of forty millions of people, at Philadelphia, to an 
 escort of the greatest, wises and best of North Carolina's sons 
 educated here, and many of them indebted to him for the 
 primary instruction of that learning which made them an 
 honor to this College, to this State, and to this nation : such 
 a retinue he could have had for the asking ; but he was too 
 independent, too self-reliant, too confident of his own great 
 powers, then departed, and, to his infinite credit, too modest, 
 to ask for that attention and deference which he well knew 
 should have been the voluntary offering of grateful hearts. 
 
 Other instructors followed those whom I left here, and 
 among them Mr. Green, afterwards and now Bishop of Mis- 
 sissippi. Messrs. Fordyce Hubbard, W. H. Battle, Manuel 
 Felter, John Wheat, Albert M. Shipp, J. deBernier Hooper, 
 Hedrick, Deems, Walker Anderson, Charles Phillips, Brown, 
 Battle and others. 
 
 From the time of its organization in 1795, the University 
 continued to grow in usefulness and popular esteem until 
 the late civil war. 
 
 The number of graduates from 1804 up to this com- 
 mencement amount to 1,749. 
 
 It has furnished to the nation a President Polk, Vicer 
 
(7) 
 
 President King, five members of the Cabinet, many minis- 
 ters to foreign courts, and numbers of members of the Sen- 
 ate and House of Representatives. Thomas H. Benton, who 
 was for thirty years continuously a Senator from Missouri, 
 was a student at this College. 
 
 In your State government there is hardly an office of 
 honor that has not been filled by the graduates from this 
 building. The University has its representatives in the 
 highest places, in church, among the leaders of the bar, in 
 the healing art ; and when the laws became silent its grad- 
 uates became leaders and acquired gl^ry and renown in an 
 army whose courage, and continence, and skill, has survived 
 a defeat which was annihilation to the cause for which they 
 went forth to battle, and for which many of them died. 
 
 Men educated and trained here have been presidents and 
 governors of banks, institutions of learning, builders and 
 managers of railroads, and the agriculture of your State has 
 received its ablest instructors from the men who have gone 
 from this school to that most extensive and independent 
 employment of the American race. 
 
 And it is the history of the men who have gone hence to 
 the busy haunts of the world, that the ^morality and per- 
 sonal obligation to duty which has been taught here, has 
 attended those who have held high places, in all their em- 
 ployments. 
 
 Many have adorned the Senate and the forum with their 
 talents ; but they have adorned human nature more, in the 
 honesty, truth, justice and integrity with which they have 
 administered their high offices; virtues which have con- 
 tributed more to their success than their learning and 
 ability. 
 
 If North Carolina has never achieved a distinguished 
 name and fame by her progress in science, in art, in manu- 
 factures or commerce, she has won, and deserves to main- 
 tain among the States of this Union, a reputation for 
 integrity in public and official life, which was without a 
 
(8) 
 
 stain until the government was usurped by that lot of ad- 
 venturers which at the end of the civil war swooped down 
 on the Southern States with a desolation as blighting to 
 their prosperity as a swarm of locusts, which, sometimes, in 
 myriads fly down from our western mountains, and falling 
 on our fertile prairies and rich pasture? consume every 
 green thing and leave the whole earth in their circuit a 
 blackened mass of destruction and ruin. 
 
 Fifty years of a busy life is a long period of existence in 
 any part of the historic life of man. It is a long vista to 
 look back to the year 1828, when I joined a small band of 
 students in these halls to undergo the preparatory training 
 for the great course of life. There were fourteen of us : 
 Henry J. Cannon, J. De Bernier Hooper, Allen C. Jones, 
 Calvin Jones, Giles Mebane, Thomas J. Owen, Thomas J. 
 Pitchford, Samuel B. Powell, Archibald A. J. Smith, Wil- 
 liam W. Spear, Jacob Thompson, Jesse A. Waugh, James 
 M. "Williamson, and James Grant. Of this number, after a 
 lapse of fifty years, Hooper, Allen Jones, Calvin Jones, Owen, 
 Pitchford, Spear, Thompson, and Grant survive. Of the 
 survivors Hooper, Mebane, Spear and Grant are here to-day. 
 If my memory fails me not, there was nothing about this 
 class that made it famous in college history. I am quite 
 sure there was not one among it that rendered it infamous ; 
 there was no bad sheep to infect a whole flock. We went 
 through our college course with fair diligence in our studies; 
 we required no special admonitions to good behavior ; we, 
 none of us, desired or achieved notoriety as boisterous, idle 
 or dissipated students ; we pursued the usual college studies, 
 and performed our college duties with enough of diligence 
 and order to escape censure from our instructors. 
 
 After finishing the studies allotted to our course here, 
 Cannon, Grant, Calvin Jones, Mebane, Thompson and Wil- 
 liamson, became lawyers ; Hooper maintained his reputa- 
 tion as the first student of the class, and became a teacher ; 
 Owen became a minister of the Gospel, as did Spear. 
 
(9; 
 
 Thompson alone acquired a national reputation as a 
 statesman; has been a member of Congress, and Secretary 
 of the Interior in the Cabinet of James Buchanan ; was dis- 
 tinguished in the military and diplomatic service of the 
 unsuccessful party in the civil war. 
 
 Reverses of fortune, an independent spirit, and probably 
 a too haughty temper, an aversion to slavery, the avowal of 
 which would have done no good to mankind, and caused 
 infinite pain to parents and relatives, and, I trust, a not 
 unworthy ambition, carried the speaker in early manhood 
 to the rich lands of the northwest, then the very out-post of 
 civilization in America. This separation of the ties of early 
 association has prevented me from seeing the faces of some 
 of my classmates in all these fifty years. 
 
 Long and constant association with other people, whose 
 habits of energy, and pluck, and plod, and whose indepen- 
 dent mode of thinking accorded with my own, have made 
 me, in association, in manners, in sympathy and feeling, a 
 frontierman, a stranger to the land of my birth, and a wan- 
 derer from the associations of childhood. But, in all this 
 long life of half a century, in days of poverty, of obscurity, 
 of failure, of oblivion, and of ultimate success and old age, 
 of, I trust, respect and honor among people who have grown 
 from manhood to old age with me on the border (as you 
 would regard it) of civilization, there was always cherished, 
 down in the deep fountains of the affections, a love of the 
 old fireside, of the scenes and associations of childhood, of 
 the kins-people and playmates and schoolmates of boyhood's 
 days, always a still longing for the old plantation, and for 
 the old folks at home. In all my wanderings, the old North 
 State has never lost its place in my memory or affections. 
 To me, in the full maturity of manhood's days, in the en- 
 joyment of the recollections of a long life, there is ever a 
 well-spring of happiness in the memories of the past, which 
 cluster around the humble home of childhood's hours ; and 
 I rejoice that the misfortune of boyhood which stimulated 
 
(10) 
 
 me to go to another, and as I think, a better land, was 
 passed in the pine-barrens of your sea-coast, and that the 
 sturdy manhood, the independent spirit, the indomitable 
 will to succeed, were all made a part of my existence in the 
 quiet shades of these college grounds. 
 
 We who have lived in the last half century have lived in 
 the most useful and progressive age of our race. 
 
 The middle half of the Nineteenth Century has been in 
 all the arts and sciences, and occupations of man, which 
 render life useful, the most eventful in the whole world's 
 history. 
 
 No half century of known eras has produced such grand 
 events, or such useful inventions, as that in which we have 
 lived. 
 
 Science, which in all civilized ages has, by the study of 
 nature's laws been diligent in promoting human welfare, 
 has in this period eclipsed the glory of all its prior achieve- 
 ments. In the words of one of the most accomplished 
 writers of our language, in any period : 
 
 " It has lengthened life ; it has mitigated pain ; it has 
 extinguished disease ; it has increased the fertility of the 
 soil ; it has given new security to the mariner; it has fur- 
 nished new arms to the warrior ; it has spanned great rivers 
 and estuaries with bridges of form and material unknown 
 to our ancestors ; it has rendered the thunderbolt harmless : 
 has guided it from heaven to earth, made it the means of 
 speech between man from ocean to ocean, and continent to 
 continent ; it has lighted up the night with the splendor of 
 the day ; it has extended the range of human vision ; it has 
 multiplied the power of human muscles; it has annihilated 
 distance; it has rendered intercourse, friendly offices, the 
 dispatch of business common to all nations and people ; it 
 has enabled man to descend to the depths of sea ; to soar 
 in the air; to penetrate securely the noxious recesses of the 
 earth, to traverse the land in cars, which whirl along with- 
 out horses; to travel the ocean in ships, which run against 
 
(11) 
 
 the hurricane, and which move independent of wind and of 
 tide. It is a philosophy which never attains its end, which 
 never admits perfection, and is always improving what it 
 has done before; its law is progress ; a point which yester- 
 day was invisible, is its goal to-day, and will be its starting 
 point to-morrow." 
 
 There is a reciprocal action between science and its appli- 
 cation to the useful purposes of life. While there is no 
 advance in any branch of science which does not sooner or 
 later give rise to a corresponding improvement in practical 
 art, so every advance made in practical art gives to science 
 something which was not known before. 
 
 The great material advantages which this age possesses 
 over all its predecessors, the cheapness of production, which 
 has made comforts and luxuries unknown to our fathers 
 necessities in our day, are traceable, in a great degree, to 
 those inventions and instruments which require a diminu- 
 tion of labor, and which enable one man to accomplish acts 
 which formerly required the services of a multitude: to the 
 steam engine and its countless applications to useful arts ; 
 to an increased knowledge of metals and their properties ; 
 to the use of powerful and accurate tools ; to the plan of 
 multiplying copies instead of fashioning every thing anew 
 by hand labor. Half a century ago, many things, — perhaps 
 we may safely say most things, in use, — were slowly and 
 imperfectly made by the tedious process of the workman's 
 hand. Now perfect results of ingenious manufacture are in 
 every day use, scattered everywhere, so that their very uni- 
 versal use prevents us from giving them that admiration 
 which their wonder would otherwise excite. 
 
 A single machine now, worked by the forces of nature, 
 performs with ease and certainty the labor which was ex^ 
 tracted from the hard toil of thousands. Every natural 
 agent has been pressed into man's service : the winds, the 
 water, fire, gravity, electricity, light itself. 
 
 These great results of science applied by art, and to useful 
 
(12) 
 
 purposes, have become so much a part of the every-day of 
 our life's journey, that it is difficult for one who has not 
 witnessed the changes produced by such appliances to realize 
 their importance. T© comprehend why the present epoch 
 is worthy of so much admiration in the world's progress, 
 address yourself to some one who is old enough to remem- 
 ber the beginning of the present century. Enquire what 
 wonderful changes have been wrought in the aspect of 
 things within a single life-time; and ask what has brought 
 about these changes? Look at the railway and the steam- 
 ship ; the telegraph ; the great guns ; the mighty ships of 
 war; the machine more potent in shaping the destinies of 
 our race than all the implements of war, the steam printing 
 p>ress; the endless and marvelous transformations of chem- 
 istry, which from dirt and dross extracts fragrant essences 
 and dyes more beautiful than Tyrian hue ; that burrows in 
 the mountain side, and the deep caverns of the earth, and 
 brings out the rocks and converts them into gold ; that 
 wonderful instrument which can make a faint beam of light, 
 reaching us after a journey of a thousand years, unfold its 
 tale and reveal the secrets of the stars. 
 
 The steam engine was supposed to have reached perfec- 
 tion by the inventions of Watt. Its application to propel- 
 ling vessels on inland waters which required only short 
 journeys and hourly renewals of fuel, under the inventions 
 of Fulton, was supposed in 1828 to have reached its ulti- 
 mate useful results. 
 
 The first use of steam in a locomotive was applied about 
 the year 1804. It could draw loads only by means of tooth 
 driving wheels. In 1813 the important discovery was made 
 that such aid was not necessary ; that the adhesion of a 
 smooth wheel on a smooth rail was sufficient for all the or- 
 dinary purposes of draft. The progress in utilizing this 
 machine was slow, until about the year 1825, when George 
 Stevenson adopted the blast-pipe tubular boiler. In 1829 
 the longest railway in the world was but a few miles, and 
 
(13) 
 
 steam had not then been used to draw wagons upon an iron 
 way. In that year the managers of the Liverpool and Man- 
 chester railway, which was thirty-two miles long, offered a 
 prize of five hundred pounds to the inventor of a locomo- 
 tive that would attain a speed of ten miles an hour, draw- 
 ing a load of twelve tons. The invention of Stevenson, the 
 "Rocket," won this prize, drawing its load fourteen miles an 
 hour. Since that period such improvements have been 
 made in locomotives and iron ways that engines are made 
 weighing forty tons, and carrying from fifty to a thousand 
 tons load, at a speed of from ten to sixty miles an hour. 
 
 The first railway for the carriage of passengers was the 
 Stockton and Darlington, thirty-seven miles long, built in 
 1825. The carriages were drawn by horses. At this period 
 the only improved means, over the common highway, of 
 intercourse between different marts on land, were canals, 
 which, in the northern part of the temperate zone, were 
 like the rivers, frozen uver for one-half the year. The busi- 
 ness was so badly conducted that the transport of a bale of 
 cotton from Liverpool to Manchester is said to have occu- 
 pied as long a time as that required for an ordinary voyage 
 across the Atlantic in sailing vessels. All the commerce 
 between the Atlantic and Ohio was by wagons. 
 
 Mankind, even in the face of all our progress, is slow to 
 adapt anything new. The fate of Fulton is not peculiar. 
 Howe, the sewing machine man, long after his invention 
 was in practical use, was thought to be a cracked-brain en- 
 thusiast. The canal interest in Britain had such influence 
 in parliament as to delay for years the passage of a bill to 
 construct a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester. The 
 act was passed in 1828. The line, when begun, was to be 
 used to convey goods, and the wagons to be drawn by horses. 
 When the proposal was made and a prize offered to induce 
 the use of steam power, an eminent authority, in a serious 
 treatise on the subject, "hoped he might not be confounded 
 with those enthusiasts who maintained the possibility of 
 
(14) 
 
 carriages being driven on a railway at such a speed as twelve 
 miles an hour." 
 
 The ridicule which this great energy of our day received 
 from all classes, is a matter of astonishment. The canal 
 men made fun of the proposed railroad and continued their 
 exorbitant charges, just as railways do now in our time. 
 
 The land-owners then, as now, of large and wealthy es- 
 tates in rich countries offered resistance to the surveyors, 
 and w r ould not permit them to enter their fields. Even 
 clergymen threatened them with violence. Civil engineers 
 scouted the idea of a steam railway. Stevenson was held 
 up to the public an an ignoramus and maniac by the most 
 intelligent men of his time. A journal in the interest of 
 advanced civilization, favorable to railways, exclaimed : 
 "What can be more ridiculous than the prospect held out 
 of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stage coaches ; we 
 should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer 
 themselves to be fired off in one of Congreve's rockets as to 
 trust themselves to the mere} 7 of a machine going at such a 
 rate ; we will back old father Thames against the Wool" 
 wich for any sum ; we trust that parliament will, in all rail- 
 ways which it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine 
 miles an hour." 
 
 As late as 1855 a mob gathered in a large town in the 
 United States, and tore up the track of two railroads about 
 to connect in the Streets of their town, because through 
 trains would ruin their commerce. Legislative restrictions 
 against free commerce in railways loaded down all the ear- 
 lier charters granted by the* States in this country, 
 
 During our half of this century, in all Europe, in North 
 America, the British colonies of India, Australia, and New 
 Zealand, the chief means of internal commerce between ad- 
 jacent states and nations, and all the rapid intercourse of 
 people and exchange of commercial enteprise among men - , 
 is made by the railway. People visit and traffic in towns 
 and cities in elegant coaches, drawn through the streets on 
 
(15) 
 
 railways; and all the great business affairs between town 
 and country, cities and States, and kingdoms, are conducted 
 on the railway. It has penetrated forests, deserts and moun- 
 tains; crossed the great waters to connect the commerce of 
 one country and neighborhood with another. It has almost 
 annihilated space, and time that was formerly counted by 
 the day and week now occupies in business but the hour. 
 
 Fifty years ago it required me forty days on horse-back, (the 
 then most expeditious way of travel;, to go from Raleigh, 
 the capital of your State, to the few log-cabins on Lake 
 Michigan, named Chicago. This same journey I have done 
 by the railway and steam engine in forty-eight hours ; and 
 the same means of commerce has, in thirty years, converted 
 the log huts into an imperial city, built of marble, with four 
 hundred thousand enterprising people, more potent in the 
 world's history than Rome in the days of Augustus Cresar. 
 So, in all parts of civilized society, the railway, by the anni- 
 hilation of space, has increased the use and duration of the 
 time which is allotted to our existence to such a degree that 
 we live longer and accomplish more in fifty years, than in 
 the nine hundred years of the age of Methuselah. 
 
 These United States have to-day incomparably much the 
 longest railway system of the world. Eighty thousand 
 miles of railroad, distributed, in a greater or less degree, in 
 all the thirty-eight States of the Union, have made the Uni- 
 ted States, for all time, one nation with one destiny. All 
 other civilized countries have utilized this modern inven- 
 tion of traffic and travel, and the whole world is bound to- 
 gether by the iron way, and exchanges commerce by the 
 iron steam carrier. 
 
 The increase of speed and cheapness in travel and traffic 
 by the iron road has been equalled, if not excelled, by the 
 ease, comfort, luxury, and safety in the transport of persons 
 from one place to another. The iron horse never grows 
 weary, never stops to sleep or to rest ; supplied with fuel 
 and water, he carries you by day and by night ; he tarries 
 
(16) 
 
 not in the valley which he descends, nor at the stream which 
 he crosses, nor in the desert from hunger, nor in the moun- 
 tain which he climbs. All seasons are alike to him — 
 neither the blast of winter, the heat of summer, the rains 
 or the snows, the night or the day, arrest his progress. 
 You ride in carriages which are converted into hotels of 
 palatial splendor on wheels, large enough to carry half a 
 hundred persons to a carriage, and thousands in a train. 
 You enter one of these palace cars at the emporium of the 
 United States in the east, and start on a week's jourae}' to 
 the western ocean ; fifty years ago it took half a year at the 
 peril of life, from want of food and shelter — you now accom- 
 plish in a few days a year's journey. Entering the train 
 you sit down to amusement or study as you would in your 
 own dwelling. You are supplied with the morning news- 
 papers before you breakfast. This is furnished you in the 
 hotel car with the same food and the like service as you find 
 at the best modern hotels or the private mansions of the 
 rich. You lie down or sit up, or sleep or wake, as it may 
 suit your convenience You find new friends and make 
 new acquaintances on the road. You are constantly enter- 
 tained in the day with momentary changes of place and 
 scenery. You pass through a city of half a million and in 
 an hour you are forty miles away, looking at the green pas- 
 tures and the lowing herds ; you see the farmer at his toil, 
 the manufacturer at his forge. At one moment you are 
 passing over the boundless prairie, green, or brown, or white 
 with snow as the season in which you travel creates; at 
 another you descend the deep canon, or the fertile vale ; in 
 another moment you are climbing the giddy heights of the 
 great snowy range of mountains, and you look down with 
 awe in the bottomless abyss beneath, or you feast your eyes 
 with the green foliage and rocky glens of the horse-shoe 
 bend in the eastern mountains ; and in your six days' 
 journey you encounter every variety of soil, climate, and 
 habitation which have been developed and brought into the 
 
(17) 
 
 civilization of the white man since the days that we were 
 young. If in such a journey you are jaded and worn out, 
 you rest as if in your own dwelling by your own fireside ; 
 or if you are on business, you write in offices provided for 
 your convenience. At the windows, made of plate glass,, 
 you can enjoy in comfort the prospect of the snow-clad 
 mountains winch tower up in the distance one hundred 
 miles away, or you can contemplate the boundless plains 
 growing only the sage bush, and tenanted only by the 
 prairie dog, the owl, and the reptile. At night, when ex- 
 hausted with the novelties of the day, you go to bed in a 
 luxurious couch which has been folded up and out of sight, 
 and you wake up in the morning refreshed with sleep, to 
 contemplate a different natural world from the one you saw 
 at night. 
 
 At the end of a six days' journey you have traveled across 
 the continent of North America; you have seen every varie- 
 ty of soil, and felt every variety of climate which exists in 
 the same latitude across the United States. You have left 
 the Atlantic Ocean, with its storms and tempests, and you 
 have landed at the golden gate of the quiet Pacific ; you 
 have gone from the commercial capital of your country on 
 the east, to the new seat of empire of the west. 
 
 Fifty years ago the invention of Robert Fulton had furn- 
 ished our inland waters with the perfection of steamboat 
 travel and transport, and the navigable rivers were the sole 
 highways of commerce. The railway has changed all that. 
 Our western commerce once was by the waters inland, north 
 and south, but now commerce seeks the east from the west. 
 Great as was the achievement of Fulton fifty years ago, no 
 -man believed that the ooean could be crossed with a steam- 
 ship. When the project was talked of in 1837 it was believed 
 impracticable. Learned men discussed the approaching 
 steaming of the Syrius from England to America as an 
 impossibility. The great newspapers of the old world wrote 
 their articles ridiculing the project and sent them by the: 
 2 
 
(IS) 
 
 packet ships to New York ; and before the sailing vessel's 
 reached the harbor containing the speculations of the 
 learned against the project, the Syrius had landed at the 
 docks in safety and confronted them with the solution of 
 the problem. At this day the whole of the oceans are 
 threaded with steam propellers. They go by the score a 
 week between Europe and America, and they send the 
 echoes of their thunder to Afric's sunn}' fountains and Indies 
 coral strands. They go to China and Japan for teas, to 
 India, to Africa, and to America for cotton. They exchange 
 the woods, the wool, and the cordage, and the gold and silver 
 of New Zealand and Australia, for the cotton goods of Eng- 
 land, the silks and luxuries of the European Continent, the 
 ^carriages and plows, and reaping machines, the engines and 
 cars of America. They go in the heats of summer to the 
 very limits of animal life, within sight of the north pole. 
 
 But, wondeiful as has been the progress in our day of the 
 railroad and steamer, they have been surpassed in the bril- 
 liant achievements', the very heavenly conception of the 
 telegraph, and just now the telephone, which have utilized 
 thelightning which Franklin brought down from the realms 
 above, and made it speak throughout the whole world and 
 across the sea, in an instant of time. 
 
 The invention of the telegraph belongs to our half cen- 
 tury, and the useful invention belongs to our countryman. 
 •Great inventions are often the results of the labors of not 
 one, but many minds, and the beginning of the discoveries 
 ■that led to that of the telegraph rurs back a hundred years. 
 
 In October, 1832, on board a packet ship bound from 
 France to the United States, was a talented American artist 
 who had gained some reputation in his profession as a por- 
 trait painter. A casual conversation with his fellow pas- 
 sengers on electricity and the plan by which Franklin drew 
 it from the clouds along a slender wire, suggested to him 
 the possibility of thus communicating intelligence by sig- 
 nals at a distance. A fellow passenger, Jackson, had a gal- 
 
(19) 
 
 vanic battery and an electro-magnet on board, and these he 
 described to the painter, by the aid of rough sketches. Here 
 two men came together by accident — a seed-word, sown per- 
 haps by some purposeless remark, took root in fertile soil — 
 the one profiting by that which he had seen and read, made 
 suggestions and gave explanations of phenomena and con- 
 structions only imperfectly undeistood by himself, and en- 
 tirely new to the other. The theme interested both and be- 
 came a subject of daily conversation. When they parted 
 the one forgot or was indifferent to the matter; while the 
 other, more in earnest, followed it up with diligence, testing 
 and scheming and devising ways and means to realize what 
 had been only a dream to both. His labors brought him 
 to the adoption of a method not discovered by either, and 
 Morse became the inventor of the telegraph. This inven- 
 tion was first put to a practical test in 1836, between Balti- 
 more and Washington, by an appropriation by Congress. 
 
 The telegraph in this day is just as much a life necessity 
 to the affairs of men as light is to the health of the human 
 body. 
 
 Another invention, of perhaps as much importance to the 
 better half of our race, entirely American in conception and 
 invention, is the sewing machine; which increases the ca- 
 pacities of woman's employment beyond calculation, and 
 relieves her from Ihe everlasting stitch, stitch of her pecu- 
 liar vocation, which has been a burden from the time the 
 needle was invented. The needle is a necessity of human 
 life, the sewing machine has made it the finest of arts. 
 Whether for use or ornament, the sewing machine — guided 
 by the hand, and driven by the foot, whether in the log 
 cabin, roofed with boards and tenanted, by poverty, or in 
 the mansions of the rich— is the necessity, the luxury, the or- 
 nament of woman's household. 
 
 In our day, too, mankind have learned more of the uses 
 and nature of light than was ever known before. 
 
 No other invention of the last fifty years, or of any period 
 
(20) 
 
 of years or any era of history, is so beautiful, so attractive 
 to the eye, or pleasing to the moral sentiments of man's na- 
 ture as photograph} 7 . The first step in this discovery was 
 begun by Daguerre, in the year 1839. It has, from its first 
 crude efforts by him in taking pictures by sun-light, until 
 this day, when it seemed to have attained its greatest excel- 
 lence, exercised a beneficial influence over the social senti- 
 ments, the arts and sciences of the whole world, an influ- 
 ence not less real because it is now unobtrusive and com- 
 mon. It cherishes domestic and friendly relations by its re- 
 peated copies of familiar faces; keeps fresh in our memories 
 friends, relatives, honored people distant or dead — it keeps 
 alive our admiration of the great and the good by preserving 
 the features of heroes, statesmen, learned and good men — 
 it pleases our sight by copies from all the beautiful and 
 grand scenes in nature; the mountains, the valleys, the 
 green fields and ] leasant pastures, the ocean and its great 
 storms; the sun in its eclipses — are. brought to our firesides 
 without the labor and expense of travel ; it has improved 
 the pictorial art by furnishing the painter in his study with 
 copies of nature — it reproduces his works, multiplying 
 copies with an exactness which he in vain strives to accom- 
 plish — it reproduces the finest works of sculpture — it lends 
 invaluable aid to almost every science; the astronomer uses 
 it to copy the pictures of the sun, moon and stars — "by it 
 the architect superintends the erection of distant buildings, 
 the engineer watches over the progress of his designs in re- 
 mote lands, the medical man amasses the records of morbid 
 anatomy, the geologist studies the structure of the earth, 
 the ethnologist compares the features of every race." Not a 
 village or hamlet in the land that does not have its school 
 of art, where all classes, old and young, rich and poor, con- 
 gregate to study the human face divine; and the love of 
 the beautiful in art and nature is fostered and cultivated in 
 life among the lowly as well as among the refined and edu- 
 cated. 
 
(21) 
 
 The nations that go down to the sea in ships had perhaps 
 before the Pharos of Alexandria used some means to throw 
 the beams of light across the dark waters of the sea at night 
 to snide the mariner in his course and Warn him of his 
 perils from the sunken rock or treacherous shoal. The 
 modern light-house, with its beautiful appliances, is entirely 
 the results of the applied science of our age. Formerly the 
 lofty structures for this purpose burned on their summits 
 fires of wood, and whatever beacons existed down to the end 
 of the last century were mere blazing fires. In olden times 
 the beacon fires on the coast of this State were said to be 
 pine torches on the shore: and tradition says that they were 
 sometimes conveniently carried in the hand to lure the un- 
 lucky ships that visited the inhospitable coast to the shoals 
 where the wrecker most frequented. But now every head- 
 land has its tall spire and immense lamps, which throws a 
 halo a score of miles over the sea, and science has given an 
 additional security to the mariner to that furnished him in 
 the compass, the chronometer, and the sextant ; when he 
 approaches the land in shadows, clouds, darkness, and 
 storm he scans the horizon for the first glimpse of the hos- 
 pitable light-house, which seems to say that the country he 
 is approaching has been watching for his coming and wel- 
 comes him to its shores. 
 
 Though science in its diligent search into the phenomena 
 of electricity has not been able to ascertain what it is and 
 what creates it, it has made in our day remarkable discov- 
 eries in celestial chemistry and physics. 
 
 Chemistry fifty years ago, like geology and mineralogy, 
 was in its infancy as a science. Within the last twenty 
 years chemistr}* has not been content with its researches on 
 earth. The spectroscope has revealed to our admiration 
 and added to our knowledge unexpected discoveries in the 
 universe by means apparently wholly inadequate to accom- 
 plish them. A little triangular piece of glass gives us the 
 power to rob the stars of their mysteries, and tells more 
 
(22) 
 
 about these distant worlds than the wildest imagination 
 could have believed attainable to human knowledge. 
 
 One of the most astute philosophers of the present cen- 
 tury declared, not many years ago, that all we could know 
 of the heavenly bodies must ever be confined to an acquain- 
 tance with their motions, and to such limited knowledge of 
 their features, as the telescope reveals in those nearest to us. 
 A knowledge of their composition, he asserted, could never 
 be attained, because we had no means of chemically exam- 
 ining the matter of which they are constituted. Such was 
 the deliberate utterance of a man by no means disposed to 
 underrate the power of the human mind in the pursuit of 
 truth; and such might still have been the opinion of the 
 wise and well as the ignorant, but for the remarkable train 
 of discoveries which has led us to the construction of in- 
 struments revealing to us the nature of the heavenly bodies. 
 We have, by means of the analysis of the rays of light, and 
 the substances which produce them, the same certainty 
 about the existence of iron in the sun as we have of its ex- 
 istence in the hills around us, a fact unknown to us fifty 
 years ago. The last few years have seen the dawn of a new 
 science in this regard; and two branches of knowledge, 
 which formerly seemed as far as the poles asunder — astron- 
 omy and chemistry — have thus assisted in the learning of 
 the celestial bodies. The progress which has been made in 
 this department of spectroscopic research is so rapid, and 
 the field so promising, that the well-instructed juvenile of 
 the future, instead of wondering what the little stars are, 
 will probably only have to direct his sidereal spectroscope 
 to the object of his admiration, in order to obtain exact in- 
 formation as to what that star is, chemically and physically. 
 These chemical experiments, often repeated, have shown 
 that certain substances invariably produce only certain rays 
 of light, and hence, whenever these rays are found to come 
 from the heavenly bodies, their physical texture is demon- 
 strated. The revelations of the spectroscope awaken new 
 
(23) 
 
 thoughts in the mind which has obtained even a glimpse 
 of the wonders which it discloses in relation to the mechan- 
 ism of the heavens. In every age and in every county the 
 stars have attracted the gaze, and excited the admiration of 
 men. The wise men of the East were led by the stars to 
 the discovery of the author of a new religion, and followed 
 by their course to seek his abode and worship him. The 
 belief in their influence over human affairs has been pro- 
 found, universal and enduring. It survived the dawn of 
 modern science, being among the last shades of the night of 
 superstition which melted away in the morning of true 
 knowledge. In our own day the belief among even persons 
 of intelligence is not uncommon that the moon exercises 
 an influence over the productions of the soil; and the spec- 
 troscope may in its researches tell why and how the light 
 influences the growth as well as the color of plants. Even 
 Francis Bacon, the father of inductive philosophy, and old 
 Sir Thomas Brown, the exposer of "vulgar errors," believed 
 in the influence of the stars, for, while recognizing the im- 
 postures practiced by its professors, they still believed as- 
 trology not altogether a vain science. 
 
 It was reserved for the mighty genius of Newton to prove 
 that there are invisible ties connecting the earth with those 
 remote and brilliant bodies, more potent than astrology 
 divined. He showed that even the most distant bodies are 
 bound to their companions by the same power that directed 
 the fall of the apple. And now the spectroscope is revealing 
 other lines of connection, and showing that there is a closer 
 tie of a common constitution, and that they are all made of 
 the same matter, and obey the same physical and chemical 
 laws, which belong to the earth. We learn that hydrogen, 
 and magnesium, and iron, and other familiar substances, 
 exist in these inconceivably distant suns, with the same 
 properties which they exhibit here. We confirm, by the 
 spectroscope, the fact, partially revealed by other researches, 
 that the apparently fixed stars are in reality careering 
 
(24) 
 
 through space, each with its proper motion. We learn that 
 they are the theatres of vast changes and convulsions like 
 our own earth, the rapidity and extent of which surprise 
 credulity. A wonderful star in the constellation of the 
 Crown, in 1866, suddenly blazed out from a scarcely dis- 
 cernable telescopic star, to become one of the most conspicu- 
 ous in the heavens, and the bright lines it3 beams produced 
 on the spectroscope revealed that this abrupt splendor was 
 due to masses of burning hydrogen. When this fire went 
 out the star reverted to its obscurity. Everywhere in the 
 universe there is motion and change. There is no pause, 
 no rest; but a continual unfolding, an endless progression. 
 
 Our day and generation has witnessed the discovery of 
 the true nature of the earth, in its geological structure and 
 its minerals, and all the former mysteries of nature in this 
 respect have been cleared away. Even the richest and most 
 beautiful of colors are now extracted from the black refuse 
 of coal. The bowels of the earth have been discovered not 
 only to contain vast bodies of burning materials unknown 
 before, but great lakes of fuel have been found, and pumped 
 up from the dark caverns below, and give light and heat to 
 our upper world. Not only have new metals been discov- 
 ered, but the exudations of gums from the trees of the forest 
 have been utilized in the manufacture of almost everything 
 required by the world's business. Ships, cars, engines, 
 furniture, clothing — nearly every useful thing — are now 
 made of india rubber and gutta percha. 
 
 Nor has the advance in mechanical arts been limited to 
 the loom or the anvil. In the cultivation of the soil every 
 year of the last half century has made some new progress. 
 We plant no longer by hand, but by machine labor, guided 
 and controlled by hands directed by brain power. We 
 mount the plow on wheels ; we cultivate the land with half 
 a dozen plows together; we reap by machinery, we thresh 
 by machinery, and we expect in our day to see the Indian 
 corn gathered, and the cotton picked, by machine labor. 
 
(25) 
 
 We have duplicated our capacity to till the soil by the 
 machines which ingenuity has invented to take the place of 
 hand labor. 
 
 A hundred years ago not a pound of coal, nor a cubic 
 foot of illuminating gas, was burned in this country. No 
 iron stoves were used, and no contrivances for economizing 
 heat were employed, until Benjamin Franklin invented the 
 iron-frame fire-place, which still bears his name. All the 
 cooking and warming, in town as well as country, was done 
 by the aid of fire kindled on the brick hearth, or in the 
 brick ovens. Pine knots or tallow candles furnished the 
 light for the long winter nights, and sanded floors supplied 
 the place of carpets and rugs and mats. The water used 
 for household purposes was drawn from deep wells by the 
 creaking sweep. There were no friction matches in those 
 early days, by the aid of which a fire could be easily kindled, 
 and if the fire went out upon the hearth overnight, or the 
 tinder was so damp that the spark would not catch, the only 
 means remaining was that of wading through the snow or 
 the mud a mile or so to borrow a brand from a neighbor. 
 Only one room in the house was warmed unless some mem- 
 ber of the family was ill ; in all the rest the temperature 
 was below the freezing point during many nights of winter. 
 The men and the women of a hundred years ago went to 
 their beds in a temperature colder than our modern barns 
 and wood-sheds, and they never complained, for the}' had 
 no idea of anything better. 
 
 In every department of useful arts the age in which we 
 have lived surpassesall others. In manufactures, the substi- 
 tution of machinery for hand labor ; in the multiplication 
 of printing by the power-press ; the cheapness of books and 
 of knowledge ; the progress in our time exceeds the aggre- 
 gate of all other ages. 
 
 It is just now that the world has seen and felt and realized 
 the commercial value of cutting a canal to join the waters 
 of the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, and the land of the 
 
(26) 
 
 Pharaohs is now cut in two by a great artificial river, in 
 which floats the great steamers of the world. Forty centu- 
 ries have waited for the glory of this achievement, which is 
 changing the commerce of the eastern world as much as the 
 continental railway has changed and enlarged that of the 
 West. 
 
 Nor has the improvement of the weapons of war in our 
 lifetime been less progressive than the arts of peace. The 
 great guns that throw hundred- pound shot many miles, the 
 repeating rifles and pistols, the great iron -clad vessels of 
 war, in our times, are wondrous inventions in the death- 
 dealing instruments, with which civilized, no less than 
 savage nations, settle their quarrels and destro}' each other. 
 
 Our age has, above all others, been an age of utility. Our 
 progress has in every direction been practical, whether in 
 the clothing of the body, in the comfort, convenience, and 
 luxury of our homes that we inhabit, in the food that we 
 eat, the present life has made immense advances over all 
 other ages. 
 
 One century ago the people of the United States num- 
 bered three millions ; four centuries ago the British Islands 
 contained a population of three millions. The Anglo-Saxon 
 race has increased on. this continent in the last fifty years 
 from twelve to more than forty millions, and from twenty- 
 four to thirty-eight States. The British Islands have in- 
 creased their home population in four centuries to nearly 
 thirty millions ; but in the last century, and after they had 
 lost the united colonies with their three millions, the} r have 
 extended their dominion over two hundred and fifty mil- 
 lions of the human race ; and in the last half century they 
 have planted new colonies in Australia and New Zealand, 
 the land of the antipodes, which are as numerous and pow- 
 erful as our revolted colonies of an hundred years ago. 
 
 In a retrospect of the half century of an active life, we are 
 prone to bear in mind the place which we have made our 
 own, and in which a busy life has found employment. It 
 
(27) 
 
 — my country, your country — is, perhaps, as grand a mark 
 of the progress of modern nations as can be found, where 
 the English language is spoken. In June, 1838, Iowa was 
 an unknown land. It was really beyond civilization, and 
 the home of the red man. Only a small strip along the 
 great river was allowed to be trodden by the white man. 
 In June of that year it was organized by Congress as a terri- 
 tory. It had a population of twenty-three thousand people. 
 Now it has nearly two millions. It has nearly six hundred 
 thousand children, between five and twenty-one years of 
 age. Of these nearly five hundred thousand are at school, 
 and they employ ten thousand teachers. Forty years ago 
 it had no railroads — no common roads, for that matter, ex- 
 cept what the prairie lands, destitute of trees, furnished. 
 Now, every county of the State has its railroad, and every 
 township its dozen school-houses and churches. It has two 
 public universities, free to everybody who chooses to go. It 
 produces yearly $200,000,000, and has a valuation of $400,- 
 000,000 of property. 
 
 In this age and country of progress, in which we have 
 passed our own lives, we irresistibly inquire, on a return 
 from a fifty years' absence, Watchman, what of the night, 
 at the old home? The answer is: The day-star shines 
 here, too, as. well as in other lands; though this pncient 
 seat of learning has been neglected, the common education 
 has not. North Carolina has .made altogether as much pro- 
 gress in the common school education as its most ambitious 
 native could desire. It has always had, and always will 
 have, the draw-back of an iron-bound coast. It were, per- 
 haps, as well if it had no ocean on its borders. It has not 
 had the advantages of trade, or rich lands, which make 
 marts of traffic, or numerous people. It has had a popula- 
 tion of different colors and races, between whom, whether 
 in slavery or freedom, there is and must be some kind of 
 antagonism. And 3 r et, after a disastrous civil war, which 
 reduced more than half its population — most intelligent and 
 
(28) 
 
 most enterprising — to poverty, and gave the smaller half 
 liberty and the same misfortune, the State has provided 
 common schools for both classes, and it numbers two hun- 
 dred and one thousand children at sehool, nearly six thou- 
 sand school districts, and twenty five hundred teachers. 
 Wheeler, the learned, patient, distinguished historian of 
 North Carolina — a man who loved his native State so well 
 as to give his whole life to her history, and is now here, at 
 three-score and ten, to testify his devotion to her service — 
 in his history records the humiliation that a larger propor- 
 tion of its population could not read and write than an} r 
 State in the Union. This humiliation will pass away be- 
 fore the nineteenth century ends. 
 
 Brothers Alumni ! What part have we acted in this grand 
 drama of human life, during this period of progress in the 
 world, in which, we could not, if \\ T e would, have been mere- 
 ly spectators. Have, we so lived in the service of mankind 
 to be a guardian God below ? Have we employed the 
 mind's brave ardor in heroic aims, such as might raise us 
 over the common herd, and make us live forever? 
 
 That is life ! 
 
 Thus far had I prepared to speak, when after the long 
 absence, my e}^es were greeted by the sunset in this heaven 
 kissing hill. 
 
 The young, who grow up under the shade of these noble 
 oaks, become so familiar with the highest type of the beau- 
 tiful in scenery, that they must go to other lands to do 
 justice to its wondrous grace. 
 
 I have traveled in all parts of North America; I live on 
 the most beautiful spot along which the great father of 
 waters wanders from the frozen North to the sea in the 
 South. From the tower of my dwelling, which I have dedi- 
 cated as a shrine to the Goddess Industry, I can see the 
 great river, threading its silver}' way, for twenty miles 
 through the richest pastures of the land, dotted with farm 
 
(29) 
 
 houses and fields of growing corn ; its majestic hill-sides 
 covered with vines and shady groves, but never have my 
 eyes rested on so delightful a prospect as these groves, with 
 their vales below growing the cotton, which' clothes the 
 human race, and the hills on either side standing guard and 
 ever watching around this sacred spot. 
 
 You, lovers of classic Greece, can you picture in your 
 wildest fancy a grove of Academicus like this? And dare 
 you say that Socrates was wiser than Caldwell, or Plato more 
 sagacious than Swain. 
 
 Here is a temple planted and adorned by the Omnipo- 
 tent, more beautiful than the Pantheon or the one which 
 Solomon erected at Jerusalem. Theirs were of marble and 
 ornamented with silver and gold; but this one was made 
 by the everlasting God, and fashioned of forms of beauty 
 which will never decay, and adorned with the splendors of 
 a sun which oblivion can never cloud, and it requires not 
 an oriental fancy to picture that I am standing at the foot 
 of Mount Olympus, and that Jupiter — the thunderer has 
 driven the clouds from its summit — and looking down upon 
 this hill, has descended, with his hundred sons, and every 
 one a God, to give me welcome, and invite me to erect an 
 altar at his feet; and that Juno, with Minerva and Venus, 
 and all her attendant goddesses had assembled to invite the 
 bride of my bosom to a home at the feet of heaven. 
 
 Men of Carolina ! May God's blessing ever attend you ; 
 and I now bid vou Hail and Farewell. 
 
 For manj' of the ideas, and much of the language in this Address, I am 
 indebted to a modern treatise on the subject of which I have been speaking.