And how magnificent the field on which the trophy of this final
victory of a true civilization was to be erected! No empire or
kingdom, at least since imperial Rome perished from the earth, ever
unrolled a surface so vast and so variegated, so manifold in its
fertilities and so various in its aspects of beauty and
sublimity. From the Northern wastes, where the hunter and the trapper
pursue by force or guile the fur-bearing animals, to the ever-perfumed
latitudes of the lemon and the myrtle,--from the stormy Atlantic,
where the skiff of the fisherman rocks fearlessly under the menace of
beetling crags amid the foam of angry breakers, to where the solemn
surge of the Pacific pours itself around our Western continent, boon
Nature has spread out fields which ask only the magic touch of Labor
to wave with every harvest and blush with every fruitage. Majestic
forests crown the hills, asking to be transformed into homes for man
on the solid earth, or into the moving miracles in which he flies on
wings of wind or flame over the ocean to the ends of the
earth.
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