With these stupendous results in his own time as the unit of calculation; beholding under Providence with each decade of years, a new people, millions strong, emigrants in part from the Old World, but mainly bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, the children of the soil, growing up to inhabit the waste places of the continent, to inherit and transmit the rights and blessings which we have received from our fathers; recognizing in the Constitution and in the Union established by it the creative influence which, as far as human agencies go, has wrought these miracles of growth and progress, and which wraps up in sacred reserve the expansive energy with which the work is to be carried on and perfected, he looked forward with patriotic aspiration to the time, when, beneath its ægis, the whole wealth of our civilization would be poured out, not only to fill up the broad interstices of settlement, if I may so express myself, in the old thirteen and their young and thriving sister States, already organized in the West, but, in the lapse of time, to found a hundred new republics in the valley of the Missouri and beyond the Rocky Mountains, till our letters and our arts, our schools and our churches, our laws and our liberties, shall be carried from the arctic circle to the tropics, "from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof."
This prophetic glance, not merely at the impending, but the distant future, this reliance on the fulfillment of the great design of Providence, illustrated through our whole history, to lavish upon the people of this country the accumulated blessings of all former stages of human progress, made Webster more tolerant of the tardy and irregular advances and temporary wanderings from the path of what he deemed a wise and sound policy, than those fervid spirits, who dwell exclusively in the present, and make less allowance for the gradual operation of moral influences. This was the case in reference to the great sectional controversy, which now so sharply divides and so violently agitates the country. He not only confidently anticipated, what the lapse of seven years since his decease has witnessed and is witnessing, that the newly acquired and the newly organized territories of the Union would grow up into free States; but in common with all or nearly all the statesmen of the last generation, he believed that free labor would ultimately prevail throughout the country. He thought he saw that, in the operation of the same causes which have produced this result in the Middle and Eastern States, it was visibly taking place in the States north of the cotton-growing region; and he inclined to the opinion that there also, under the influence of physical and economical causes, free labor would eventually be found more productive, and would therefore be ultimately established.