Excerpt from A Bi-Centennial Oration: Made in West Brookfield, July 4, 1860; At the Celebration of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of Brookfield The great and terrible forces impelling our forefathers to the New World, you all well know. The impulses which scattered the children of the first emigrants, and the new-come emigra tions after the earliest, from the first homes along the sea coast, - are not as familiar. We, looking at their case, a slender chain of settlements clinging to the sea-side, as if need ing land and sea both, to supply daily food or as if, tarrying on the threshold of the continent, so they could more readily flee back, if they could not stay here, - naturally ask, Why do not those coming after, in equal prudence, stay with this line of plantations, where certain sustenance, and all the comforts scanty and poor, indeed - which the new world had, were gathered? Instead of this, from all the sea-side settlements. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.