possible in an old community. But this explanation does not take into account the breadth and duration of the movement of men from the East to the West; it attempts to account for a universal phenomenon by a circumstance and an accident. You cannot predicate individual motives of the masses of men. Each chivalrous knight who went to the rescue of the holy places, was inspired by a desire for personal glory, but that most picturesque procession of the Crusaders gathered out of every Christian people, was marshaled by no such accident, but rather by an enthusiasm encompassing all Europe, to redeem the sanctities of their religion from the sacrilegious hands of the Saracen. A solution of our question which refers the general and perpetual act of emigration to the individual, is like attributing to the single drops of the water of the sea, the universal fact of the great tide, which, following the heavenly order and compassing all oceans, pours its mighty course from continent to continent. Nor may the fact be attributed to a natural love of adventure and change. Doubtless the charm of adventure is something; the mere fact of removal is something. The exchange of familiar and therefore tame scenes and companionship for other lands, other seas, other skies, and other air, strangely quickens, freshens, and stimulates the pulses, sensations, thoughts, emotions, and aspirations. This is a common experience, and touching the universal fact is something, and yet it is inadequate to account for the sacrifice of so much that the heart loves, and for the endurance of so much that the heart revolts from. The American has certain qualities of the Roman of the ancient, and the Briton of modern times-tenacity of purpose, love of dominion, and an aggressive egotism. Like them, he is fitted by nature for foreign enterprise. And as these qualities with him are enlivened by vivacity, sensibility, emotion, he, far more than they, delights in adventure. The risks, the struggle, the promise, the freedom of colonial life have for him even more than for others a charm and an attraction. But there is another quality which he has in common with the Roman and the Briton-he is passionately political-he is the citizen. The training of the schools arouses this passion; his first lessons are of the contests of Roman freedom, and the great names and great events of Roman history live forever in his imagination. The story of English liberty, the field where arms have conquered it, and high disputes in which it has been vindicated, are familiar passages of his early reading. His mind has been developed, his memory stored, his reason disciplined, by the study of the politics of his own country— the grand contentions which preceded the Revolution and the Rebellion, the due measure of state and national jurisdiction, the modes and results of elections, the awful question of human slavery, its extinction and abolition, its sanctity under the constitution, and iniquity under a just morality, finance, reconstruction, wars, conquests, purchases of territory, and the achievements of peaceful, beneficent, wide-spreading commerce, and the arts, and literature, and invention. Our annals, too, have been full. To the solution of the problems they reveal, no people ever brought a profounder spirit, a more resolute inquiry, a more vigorous contention. When entering upon the field of daily action, the American citizen encounters the intense activity of our civil life. Our institutions are intensely social, and our society is intensely political. The ballot is in every hand, and every office is the potential inheritance of every citizen. Elections are of annual or more frequent occurrence, and measures nearly affecting the interests of every person are in constant agitation. Public assemblies, public speech, newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets, and the full publication of all deliberative and legislative bodies, hold the public attention to public affairs and keep it excited, curious, and in ferment. The conditions of the West offer to the young and adventurous opportunity for the most abundant gratification of the political passion. Ease in acquiring land, freedom from prescriptive rights, unsettled methods, immature institutions, lax social customs, and opportunity for adventure, a free field for struggle, invite with alluring promises. The young citizen, with all the world before him where to choose, bids adieu to the home of his father, its settled, prescribed, regular, inflexible modes, and its constrained, contracted promises and hopes, with a sense of relief, and tries the new life of unformed society, resolved to be a man, to do a man's part in the ordering of the new community, to assert himself among its active forces, impress them with his personality, guide them by his intelligence, and have a part in the making and be a part of the product of the immortal state. This is the solution of the phenomenon of cultivated mind turning to uncultivated nature in the pioneer settlements of the West. It is not personal, although personal motives mingle with it; it is not individual, but it stimulates and ennobles individuals; it is not local, but so general that it is assisted by the national policy, and in turn ministers to the national glory. And so it has happened that Indian country after Indian country is ceded to the government; that territory after territory is organized; that men come, and plant, and sow, and reap, and ply commerce, and contrive institutions, and wage the awful strife of life; that state after state is admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original thirteen; in order that men may live in peace and social rest, bear among them the various lots of life, perform the great social labors, and thrive and rejoice in the arts of usefulness and of beauty, and perfect the loftier arts of virtue and of empire, and share together the protection and the glory of the nation that is one formed of many-the Union of States, one and inseparable. And so it shall be-nor hardly may we anticipate its period-all this western country, from the British to the Mexican line, half the area of the continent, remains to be populated, fields to be tilled, mines developed, cities planted, arts nourished, and states formed, until they shall be as the stars of Heaven for multitude. Fear not for the mighty growth, it shall not crush, but rather illustrate these benign institutions of nation and of state-co-existing and related, the one the complement of the other—the two together ministering to the common peace, and wielding a different supremacy for the safety of all; and form that very perfectness of political contrivance, which, as it was equal to the small beginnings of the nation, shall still be equal to the exigencies of the mighty empire; under the beneficence of its jurisdiction, under the stable order of its judicious laws, under the stimulating instruction of its temperate agitation, and under the blessings of an intelligent, profound, vital, religious faith, civilization shall be advanced beyond what the heart of man can now conceive. ADMISSION OF NEBRASKA INTO THE UNION. ADDRESS OF HON. CHARLES H. GERE, To discuss the events of 1866 and 1867 at this time has seemed to me presumptuous. Barely a dozen years have elapsed since Nebraska turned the sharp corner from territorial dependency to state sovereignty, and, as in all sharp historical turns, there was a blaze of excitement, a bitter political contest, accompanied by more than the usual amount of bumptiousness and belligerency, of heart-burnings and jealousy, over which fourteen years may have deposited a thin layer of forgetfulness, through which a foolhardy explorer might break, to the discomfiture of himself and the revival of volcanic memories. But, pressed by your esteemed President for a paper upon the admission of Nebraska to the Union, and unable, from present experience and observation, to go back farther than that period, I have consented to take up this subject, and trust that I may handle it with sufficient discretion to obtain your pardon for the presumption in choosing a topic so nearly connected with the stage and actors of to-day. In 1860 the Nebraska legislature submitted to the people a proposition for holding a convention to adopt a constitution and knock at the doors of congress for admission to the Union. But the movement was premature. The people were too poor, the country was not being rapidly settled and improved, and the taxes were high enough without taking upon the handful of settlers then scattered up and down the Missouri valley the responsibility and expense of statehood, and the proposition for a convention was defeated. In 1864 congress passed an act to enable the people of Nebraska to form a constitution and state government, and for the admission of such state into the Union on an equal footing with the original states, in which the usual amount of lands were set apart for school purposes, embracing the sixteenth and thirty-sixth sections of each township; also, twenty sections to be appropriated for each of the public buildings for legislative and judicial purposes, fifty sections for the erection of a penitentiary, seventy-two sections for the erection of a state university, twelve salt springs, with six sections to each, adjoining them or contiguous, as may be, "for the use of the state," and five per centum of the proceeds of all sales of lands within the boundaries of the territory previous to its admission as a state, for a common school fund. By other acts, 90,000 acres of land were granted to the state upon admission, for the endowment of an agricultural college, and 500,000 acres for internal improvements. No action was taken under this act until the meeting of the legislature of 1865 and 1866. During its session, a committee was appointed to draft a constitution for submission to the people. The committee drew up the document. The legislature, by resolution, approved it, and passed an act calling an election to be held on the twenty-first day of June, at which election not only should the question of rejection or adoption of the instrument be voted upon, but candidates for the executive, judicial, and legislative offices authorized by the instrument, should be elected. The question of adopting the constitution was immediately made a political one. The reasons for its resolving itself into a political issue were sufficiently obvious. Under the administration of President Johnson, a considerable change was likely to be made in the boundary lines between the two great parties. The republican party was more or less divided, and the democrats were affiliating with the Johnson or liberal wing. The president was exercising the power of patronage for the success of the coalition, and the liveliest hope pervaded the ranks of the democracy and the Johnson republicans that another election or two would put congress and the government in their hands. Hence the republicans in Nebraska were exceedingly anxious to forestall such a change and assist in holding the national legislature for that party by the immediate admission of Nebraska, in which they seemed to have a good working majority, and sending two senators and one congressman of their faith to re-enforce the party in the national councils. With equal foresight, the democratic leaders saw that it was against their interests to permit this to be done; that by delaying the matter until their expected accession of strength would give them control of the nation, and eventually of Nebraska-where the majority against them was comparatively small-they would assist their friends in Washington, and at the same time keep the coveted senatorship for themselves, to take possession of as soon as they acquired the expected predominance at the polls. For this reason, the canvass became exceedingly lively, and was, in fact, the most thorough and bitterly contested of any that had thus far occurred. Each party, of course, |