streams which irrigate and keep green the broad fields of truth, justice, and freedom. The rod of its dominion stretches across the continents and oceans, and its voice is as terrible as an army with banners. It has built bridges of communication with all parts of the earth, and everywhere established reservoirs for the more abundant fructification of knowledge. As the dragon protected the fruit of the Hesperides, so its faithful sentinels, with sleepless vigilance, guard constitutional liberty. It possesses the liberty of discussing without fear or favor every subject within the compass of the human mind. In its mighty grasp it holds all the great problems of thought; upon its strong arm the nation has rested in the past, and will in the future lean for support when the great events now in the loom of time shall be fully developed.
It was chiefly through the agency of this mighty power that the conditions of the past were moulded and forced into the splendid liberal triumphs resulting in the amendments. Its vision first pierced the pitchy cloud of darkness which brooded over America in the days of human bondage. Its voice was first lifted up for the release of America from the shameful reproach of constitutional slavery; its efforts in her disenthralment from the slave-oligarchy have wonderfully stimulated and increased economic prosperity in America; and without its intelligent guidance, only imperfect results can be attained when the time arrives for the final adjustment of the great issues now rising before us. Upon the public press rests the obligation of extending the old and faithfully maintaining the new boundaries of freedom, by the thorough emancipation of the American people from that traditional spirit of evil which is even now striving to arise from the tomb in which slavery is buried,—a tomb which should be sealed for all time. It was the public press which first taught the necessity of the sacrifice of national prejudice to the national welfare. When impending changes in the polity of the nation encountered the scorn and hatred, as well as the purblind ignorance, the pompous vanity, and the pitiful sophisms of slavery, then the public press warned those feeble-minded and superficial observers that God's providence rules supreme over America, and that the deformed thing which
