OUR COUNTRY'S PROGRESS

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, February 19, 1880.

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 8

OUR COUNTRY'S PROGRESS.

FROM an article in America of Feb. 7, 1880, we take the following paragraphs concerning the grand features, resources, and rapid development of our country, all of which evidence strengthens the consistency of our position that this nation is a subject of prophecy:—

The greatest glory that falls to an American is, that like the old Roman, he has a country to be proud of in all that constitutes a country,—power, wealth, refinement, honor, boundless resources in minerals and cereals, and all that makes a nation prosperous and happy; grand mountain scenery; waterfalls that are the wonder of the world; lakes, salt and fresh, which are inland seas, and valleys the largest, most wonderful and extensive, as they are also the richest in the world. A climate that has no equal, and a land most productive, as if Nature had exhausted herself in her efforts to render our people happy. The time is fast approaching when Americans will pay more regard to America and less to Europe, except to visit her decaying monuments, and, like Gibbon moralizing in the gloomy ruins of the Roman Coliseum, view with pity her fallen greatness.

The nations of Europe are so incumbered, the different superstructures so weighted down by taxation, that gaunt famine is stalking with giant strides through that continent. Huge armies are always ready to cut each other's throats at the command of privileged classes and designing statesmen, whose ambition is power, and whose ultimate object is the extermination

of one another, that, like marauding robbers, the victors may gather in the spoils. The cumbersome fabrics raised by centuries of oppression are falling to pieces from their own inward rottenness, and millions of her people are already seeking refuge on our hospitable shores from the impending wreck.

Europe is only repeating her history at the present time. Let us wish that her people may rise from the chaotic wreck redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled from the incubus of ages, and that America may profit by her example.

The great immigration from European countries to America is centering in the West. The movement of population is striking the Mississippi Valley with a crash, waking with rude affright from happy dreams the lone tenant of the border, who opens his eyes and stands aghast in mute bewilderment, thinking of the sudden transformation that has taken place in his immediate vicinity during the past ten years. The whole history of the world does not furnish us such another instance of rapid colonization and development as that of the Mississippi Valley and western Territories; and before the next World's Fair in New York, four years hence, we shall, as a nation, so far eclipse every other in history that we shall wonder at ourselves, and perhaps the world may then learn a lesson from our example.