ADDRESS OF HON. JOHN H. B. LATROBE, PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN COLONIZATIÓN SOCIETY. Members of the American Colonization Society, Ladies and Gentlemen: IN calling the meeting to order, the Chair has not forgotten that the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Colonization Society has been reached. The Fiftieth Anniversary! Half a century of existence! And yet it seems but a few years since the speaker, then a mere schoolboy, attracted by the lights of a church in Georgetown, peered at nightfall upon a meeting which Francis S. Key was addressing, and where, in all probability, Mercer and Clay and Randolph and Harper and Caldwell and Worthington were present. Dim candles, it is recollected, in tin sconces, lighted up the assembly. To the schoolboy's intelligence, the only interest of the scene was in the familiar voice and the gathered crowd. Of the subject of discussion, nothing was understood, save, as reported at home, that Mr. Key, a well-known friend, was talking about Africa. Circumstances fix this incident. 7 in 1810, half a century ago. How idly would the schoolboy not have regarded any promise then made to him, that he would live to preside at the semi-centennial anniversary of the Society whose feeble beginnings he had just witnessed without comprehending them! And now, how profoundly grateful should not the recipient of so high an honor be, not only to those whose choice gave him the seat which he occupies tonight, but most especially to HIM by whose mercy, while others younger and better have fallen, he has been spared to witness the seed, planted in 1816, germinate, and send forth a tree, which, through winters of discouragement and summers of prosperity, has grown until it has attracted the attention of the nations, and has a nation sheltered beneath its branches! Fifty years! And such years! Of what other fifty years has history told the same wondrous tale? They commenced while the thunder of European wars and of our second contest with Great Britain still echoed in our ears. Wearied with the march of battle, the world was resting and gaining strength for a yet grander march, the march of progress. How astonishing the facts of these fifty years! How extraordinary their developments! In 1816, there were but three steamboats on the Hudson, and but three west of the Alleghanies. In 1867, where are they not? In 1816, the postage of a letter from Washington to Baltimore was ten cents; to Philadelphia, twelve; to New York, eighteen; and to New Orleans, twenty-five. Now the postage to San Francisco is but three cents; and the telegraph has made communication with these places as instantaneous as the thoughts to be communicated. In 1816, if the winds favored, a letter from America reached Europe in three weeks; if adverse, in six. Now, the Secretary of State sends to our minister in Paris what the Emperor of the French receives within the hour that saw it written in Washington. In 1816, it was the labor of days to travel from the capital to New York. Impatient at the nine hours now occupied, the public desire a still more rapid transit. Railroads cover the land as with a net, and are already penetrating the wilderness at the rate of a mile of construction daily, on their route to the Pacific. In 1816, we were staggering under a war-debt of but a few millions. Now we are paying off a war-debt of more than two thousand millions, at the rate of two hundred millions annually. If to these comparisons were to be added the improvements in science and the arts, hours would be required for the enumeration. Progress in science, progress in art, progress in all the appliances of human comfort, have signalized the half century whose close we this night commemorate. But, of all that has been referred to, nothing has been more grand in conception, more wonderful in execution, or of more promising results, than African colonization. Grand in conception, because it solves the |