[Extract from speech delivered in the United States Senate, March 16, 1846.]
But I oppose war, not simply on the patriotic ground of a citizen
looking to the freedom and prosperity of his own country, but on still
broader grounds, as a friend of improvement, civilization and progress.
Viewed in reference to them, at no period has it ever been so desirable
to preserve the general peace which now blesses the world. Never in its
history has a period occurred so remarkable as that which has elapsed
since the termination of the great war in Europe, with the Battle of
Waterloo, for the great advances made in all these particulars. Chemical
and mechanical discoveries and inventions have multiplied beyond all
former example, adding, with their advance, to the comforts of life in a
degree far greater and more universal than all that was ever known
before.
Civilization has, during the same period, spread its influence
far and wide, and the general progress in knowledge, and its diffusion
through all ranks of society, has outstripped all that has ever gone
before it. The two great agents of the physical world have become
subject to the will of man, and have been made subservient to his wants
and enjoyments; I allude to steam and electricity, under whatever name
the latter may be called. The former has overcome distance, both on land
and water, to an extent which former generations had not the least
conception was possible. It has, in effect, reduced the Atlantic to half
its former width, while, at the same time, it has added threefold to
the rapidity of intercourse by land. Within the same period,
electricity, the greatest and most diffuse of all known physical agents,
has been made the instrument for the transmission of thought—I will not
say with the rapidity of lightning, but by lightning itself.
Magic
wires are stretching themselves in all directions over the earth; and
when their mystic meshes shall have been united and perfected, our globe
itself will become endowed with sensitiveness, so that whatever touches
on any one point will be instantly felt on every other. All these
improvements, all this increasing civilization, all the progress now
making, would be in a great measure arrested by a war between us and
Great Britain. As great as it is, it is but the commencement—the dawn of
a new civilization, more refined, more elevated, more intellectual,
more moral, than the present and all preceding it. Shall it be we who
shall incur the high responsibility of retarding its advance, and by
such a war as this would be?
