achievements, the more especially as it has found time on the way for
one feat of labor and endurance which may be matched without fear
against any historic deed. When civilization took possession of
this continent, it found one vast coating of almost unbroken forest
overspreading it from shore to prairie. To make room for civilization,
that forest must go. What were Indians, however deadly,--what
starvation, however imminent,--what pestilence, however lurking,--to a
solid obstacle like this? No mere courage could cope with it, no mere
subtlety, no mere skill, no Yankee ingenuity, no labor-saving machine
with head for hands; but only firm, unwearying, bodily muscle to every
stroke. Tree by tree, in two centuries, that forest has been felled.
What were the Pyramids to that? There does not exist in history an
athletic feat so astonishing.

But there yet lingers upon this continent a forest of moral evil more
formidable, a barrier denser and darker, a Dismal Swamp of inhumanity,
a barbarism upon the soil, before which civilization has thus far been
compelled to pause,--happy, if it could even check its spread. Checked
at last, there comes from it a cry as if the light of day had turned to
darkness,--when the truth simply is, that darkness is being mastered and
surrounded by the light of day. Is it a good thing to "extend the area
of freedom" by pillaging some feeble Mexico? and does the phrase become
a bad one only when it means the peaceful progress of constitutional
liberty within our own borders? The phrases which oppression teaches
become the watchwords of freedom at last, and the triumph of
Civilization over Barbarism is the only Manifest Destiny of America.