In looking around upon the evidences you have brought of mechanical and agricultural improvement, I have viewed it not with the curiosity of a stranger, but with the interest of one who felt that he had a part in it, as an exhibition of the prosperity of his country.  The whole confederacy is my country, and to the innermost fibres of my heart I love it all, and every part.  I could not if I would, and would not if I could, dwarf myself to mere sectionality.  My first allegiance is to the State of which I am a citizen, and to which by affection and association I am personally bound; but this does not obstruct the perception of your greatness, or admiration for much which I have found admirable among you.

Yankee is a word once applied to you as a term of reproach, but you have made it honorable and renowned.  You have borne the flag of your country from the time when it was ridiculed as a piece of striped bunting, until it has come to be known and respected wherever the ray of civilization has reached; and your canvass-winged birds of commerce have borne civilization into regions, where it is not boasting to say, but for your prowess it would not have gone.  You have a right to be proud of your achievements as well on the land as the sea.  Well may you point as you do with satisfaction, to your school houses and your work-shops, and to the fruits they have borne on the forum and in the council chamber, and in the manufactures which have increased the comforts of our own people, and have encircled the globe to find exchangeable products required at home.  Those are the greatest and most beneficent triumphs—­the triumph of mind over matter.  These are the monuments of greatness, which resist both time and circumstance.

I have spoken of diversity among the people of the United States; yet there is probably greater similitude than is to be found elsewhere over the same extent of country, and in the same number of people.  In language, especially, our people are one; surely much more so than those of any other country.  The diversity between the people of the different States, even those most remote from each other, is not as great as that between inhabitants of adjoining countries of England, or departments of France or Spain, where provinces have their separate dialects.  And chief among the causes for this I would place the primary book, in which children of my day learned their letters, and took their first lessons in spelling and reading.  I refer to the good old spelling book of Noah Webster, on which I doubt if there has been any improvement, and which had the singular advantage of being used over the whole country.  To this unity of language and general similitude, is to be added a community of sentiment wherever the American is brought into contrast or opposition to any other people.