a season to embark in visionary schemes, the revulsions of 1837 and 1839, have doubtless convinced them that it is not wise to make haste to be rich.

Our citizens are too sagacious not to see their position; and I feel confident they will promptly put in operation the measures which will insure the execution of the requisite improvements. To effect these objects, the main reliance must be upon our own resources and our own energies. These have always been the chief reliance of the citizens of Troy. Its growth has not been so rapid as some of its sister cities in the west, but its progress has been steady and healthful. At the close of a little more than fifty years from its origin, it contains a population of over twenty thousand; has sixteen edifices for religious worship, employs a dozen large flouring mills, possesses numerous manufacturing establishments, has a banking capital amounting to a million an a half of dollars, employs more than a hundred vessels, and two steam towing boat lines in its transportation business on the Hudson, and possesses an amount of active commercial capital, which, in the hands of its enterprising business men, is sufficient to enable them to sustain the high commercial character of Troy.

THE WESTERN CONTINENT.

BY REV. N. S. S. BEMAN.

THE discovery of this continent by Columbus, whether contemplated as an effect or a cause, must ever occupy a high place among the illustrious events of our world. While we should ascribe this eventful discovery to the wise providence of God, we may, at the same time, consider it as the necessary result of the progress of human improvement. It was an end naturally attained by that spirit of active enterprise which had already begun its career in Europe, and which, for many years anterior to this period, had exerted an influence upon the various interests of human life.

The fifteenth century was an age of mind. We must not expect, however, to see the human intellect, at that time, highly cultivated or richly stored; nor to find knowledge generally or widely diffused but the darkness which had, for centuries, brooded over the nations, was now passing away, and the fetters which had fast bound the human powers, were greatly relaxed, though not effectually broken. A new era had begun. If the sun had not already purpled the east, or gilded the mountain-tops, the morning star had arisen,

as a commissioned herald, bearing his credentials with him, and making his own proclamation, had prophesied of a bright and coming day.

The rotundity of the earth was now fully believed by men of knowledge and research; the mariner's compass had been invented and applied to the purposes of navigation; the art of printing had taught men, to some extent, to give permanency and rapid circulation to thought; and at the very dawn of the next century, originating, no doubt, in the same spirit of intellectual emancipation, the lights of religious liberty, which have never since been extinguished, were kindled up in some parts of Germany, and blazed on the mountains, amid the pure air and the clear streams of Switzerland. In one word, the old world was prepared for the birth of the new. The time appointed of heaven, and matured by the progress of man, and clearly indicated by the position and relations of the world, had arrived for the consummation of the grand result of pre-existing causes; and in that result to furnish a future cause which should, for centuries, and probably through all coming ages, put forth an influence, in shaping the destinies of the world, as powerful as any other event recorded on the page of history.

And since that period, the discovery of this country, with its affiliated and kindred events, has exerted an almost unbounded influence over man.

It has changed the course of human affairs from the channel in which they were flowing along, and in which they might have continued to flow, for many ages, if this continent had not emerged from the dark ocean in which it had been buried, perhaps from the infancy of its being, or certainly from time immemorial, from the eye of civilized

man.

It is my purpose to trace, on the present occasion, the already ascertained, and the future probable, results of the discovery and settlement of this Western Hemisphere; and especially that portion of it which constitutes our own Republic.

Many things connected with this inquiry, and deeply interesting to man, are now matters of history, and may be appealed to as authentic facts; and others are among the coming events which have indicated their future existence by casting their shadows before them; and may be foreseen with probability, and, in some instances, with certainty, by an eye accustomed to trace the connection of cause and effect, and to follow, in successive order, a long series of political and moral acts and their results.

The earliest and the most obvious influence exerted by the discovery of the new world, was seen and felt in the impulse given to industry and enterprise throughout the greater part of Europe. If this discovery was originally one of the numerous achievements of that spirit, as already inti

mated, its relations were soon changed, and it became, in its turn, the parent of a similar, and a more vigorous offspring; and every land, and every department of life, was at once cheered by its presence, and resuscitated by its power. The maritime countries where this spirit was first awakened, and whose connections with this subject were more direct and intimate than others, felt, as we may readily suppose, the earliest and strongest sympathy with every thing which related to this continent; but these, by new relations and extending interests, soon communicated their impulse to others, till central Europe, and the commercial islands of the sea, and the whole civilized world, were made to feel the magic touch of a single fact. America blazed as a new star in the western sky; and the vast interests, real and imaginary, which threw a halo of brightness around it, attracted the gaze of every eye, and kindled up an unwonted ardor among the nations. The best informed and the most civilized communities of the eastern hemisphere, from the centre to the extremities, became interested, directly or indirectly, in the new state of things. The human mind, which was beginning to emerge from ages of darkness, was now brought under the influence of new motives, and was moved by strong attractions. Kings and cabinets felt their power; and all their resources, intellectual and physical, were laid under contribution, that they