Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1876 — The Centennial. [ARTICLE]

The Centennial.

• try; I ... TBR American Nation la a hundred , ywra old Ihia month. There la, probably, i name man living to-day. within the lair- ; rferaof tlie country,, who first aaw the | light amid the thunders of the Declare- ■ tins; ao that the Nation haa only lived, so far, to the extreme limit of a man's life ] The man la old, to be sure, but tlie Nation I* only ia its childhood. It is hard for a people of more than forty millions to name this fact of yonth. We have grown so fast, and done so much, that we feet old, and naturally put on the aim of age. We have bad the lienefit of so much - experience wrought out for us on other Adds, and we find our roots planted so •deeply in the old nationalities, that it is hard to separate ourselves from their history and their civilisation. , There will be many editorials upon this topic, and we find ourselves moved only to allude to & few of the circumstances among which this rapid century’s growth has been effected. No century of the world’s history has been markea by such discoveries as have taken place during the laat hundred years If we could nave ■choaen tin* most interesting period that has passed over the world since the morning stars sang together for our first century, we should have chosen that which expires with this month. Steam has revolution - lead tlie world during this century. The steamship on tlie sea, the locomotive on the land, and the stationary engine as a manufacturing power, have taken the place of nearly ail the old forces employed in transportation and propulsion. Oar rapid development has only been rendered possible by the multiplied applications of this discovery. The rapidity with which thought and intelligence can be communicated has been a million times increased by the discovery of the telegraph. We sit now at ear breakfast tables, and read in our morning newspapers—themselves a product of (lie century —tlie whole world’s doings of the previous day. That which fifty vesrs ago would have seemed an impossibility, or a miracle, is to-day a fact so familiar that it has ceased, in tlie com? noon thought, to excite attention. We fly - over land and sea more tirelessly than a bird. We question the Antipodes, and a messenger brings us an answer in less than “ Forty minutes.” Time and space me hindrances no more. We have forestalled tlie declaration of the angel in the Apocalyptic vision. Our Nation has be- * come a family, our w orld a neighborhood, through the ministiy of steam and light- - niag. Space would fail us to speak of the cot- * ton-gin, the power-loom, and the wonderful saving of human labor that they have introduced; of the photograph iu its multiplied relations to science, art and common life; of the improved plow; the ma- . chines for planting, reaping and threshing; of tlie sewing-machine and the knitting-machine all Inventions by which one man and one woman become practically ten men and ten women in tlie varied fields of labor; of oil drawn from tbe depths of the earth, almost as abund- : ant and cheap as water, with which, to . light the homes, not only of this country, but all countries; of gold mines, and sil- ' ver mines, and mountains of iron. It seems as if the great discoveries of the world had been piled into the century just expiring, and we had seen, enjoyea and profited by the development of them alias if they had been hidden from human . right from the foundation of the world, to be uncovered for our benefit, and to give * us such a start in life as no existing Nation ever enjoyed.— JSoribner'e Monthly for -July. __