PARKER 
 The lesson of ?< to the ?4en of
 
 THE LESSON OF 76 TO THE MEN OF '56. 
 
 ' 
 
 AN 
 
 ORATION 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES 
 
 CITY OF BOSTON, 
 
 AT THE CELEBRATION OB 1 THE 
 
 0f 
 
 4, 1856. 
 
 BY EDW. GRIFFIN PARKER. 
 
 BOSTOIOA 
 
 CONBITA.ATS. 
 
 1630. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 GEO. C. RAND & AVERY, CITY PRINTERS, 
 No. 3, CORN H ILL. 
 
 1856.
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF C ALIFORM; 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 CITY OF BOSTON. 
 
 Ordered, That the thanks of the City Council be and they are 
 hereby tendered to EDWARD GRIFFIN PARKER, Esq., for the truly 
 patriotic Oration delivered by him before the Municipal Authorities of 
 Boston, on the occasion of the celebration of the EIGHTIETH ANNIVER- 
 SARY OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, and that a 
 copy thereof be requested for publication. 
 
 In Board of Aldermen, July 7, 1856. 
 Passed. Sent down for concurrence. 
 
 PELHAM BONNEY, Chairman. 
 
 In Common Council, July 10, 1856. 
 Passed in concurrence. 
 
 OLIVER STEVENS, President. 
 
 Approved July 12, 1856. 
 
 ALEXANDER H. RICE, Mayor.
 
 ORATION. 
 
 THE LESSON OF 'SEVENTY-SIX TO THE MEN OF 
 'FIFTY-SIX. 
 
 ON this our eightieth national birth-day, fellow 
 citizens, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that we 
 are fallen on times which try men's devotion to their 
 country, their principles and their age. The republic 
 is trembling in the shocks of a moral earthquake. 
 Events have transpired within a twelvemonth, which, 
 if they could be only blotted out, our golden state 
 itself would be a cheap payment to obliterate. Upon 
 the borders of the republic ruin hangs imminent; a 
 virgin territory, broad enough and bright enough to 
 tempt another Cortes with an iron crew, has been 
 despoiled of the purity of its electoral franchise. In 
 the capitol of the republic an awful blow has been 
 struck a blow upon the forehead of a sovereign 
 state ; that blow was not loud, but it resounded through
 
 sixteen free states, and if the spirits of dead patriots 
 do indeed sympathize even yet with their unforgotten 
 country, I know that from one sacred spot in a state 
 not free, there was an echo of that deep reverberation 
 for there must have been, as that sad blow came 
 down, not solely upon the brows of a senator, but upon 
 the young heart of the republic a groan from the 
 tomb of Washington. Well may we ask as we watch 
 the blood from that blow, trickling down the steps 
 of the senate-house, "Will all great Neptune's ocean 
 ever wash out that scarletrlegend of our capitol ? " 
 
 And now, while the garments of the genius of the 
 republic are trailing along draggled and bespattered, and 
 her eyes are so full of tears that she can hardly see 
 that road of empire on which she has been travelling 
 for seventy-three years with such stately impetuosity, 
 men are every where asking "What shall we do?" 
 This question I think the thoughts of to-day may well 
 be asked to answer. Every pure-minded lover of his 
 country may well seek inspiration from the fountain 
 head of the life of the republic her first, her hero- 
 age. 
 
 It was the habit of the statesmen of Spain, (a country 
 which the genius of Boston, in the person of her two
 
 historians, Prescott and Motley, has just made familiar 
 to us all,) long after the great Philip was with the dust 
 of other tyrants, to say in every hour of Spanish emer- 
 gency, " Let us consult the genius of Philip the Second." 
 This republic is equally august with that empire-realm 
 which rested on both the Indies, for it reposes on both 
 the oceans, and in every sense is canopied by stars. 
 And we too have our oracle to approach, for Americans 
 should say when the steppings of the republic are cur- 
 tained with clouds, " Let us consult the genius of the 
 Fourth of July." Yes, go back to the birth of our na- 
 tion. Summon up the scenery of its cradle, look in the 
 face the men who stood sponsers to it, breathe the 
 atmosphere in which it began to heave its little-giant 
 lungs ; contemplate the true conscript fathers in their 
 austere devotion to principle, to true freedom, and in 
 their wholly disinterested sacrifices for their principles 
 those men, " as pure as if they were not great, and 
 as great as if they were not pure" and although it may 
 be true that they fought in a moral panoply, the mere 
 weight of which would crush us, yet by drinking of the 
 true hero-tonic the sentiments of the Revolution 
 we may brace up for one day to something of their 
 heroic proportions and at least aspire unto the grandeur 
 of their moral stature.
 
 8 
 
 This, then, is what I call consulting the genius of the 
 Fourth of July ; to get ourselves, as the spiritualists say, 
 " into communication" with the creators of the Fourth 
 of July, to feel the same as to the republic, and then 
 our own minds and impulses will announce to us the 
 line of action which the fathers would have followed 
 in whatever shall turn out to be the present emer- 
 gency ; and thus in all our conjunctures the sentiment 
 of the Kevolution should be brought to bear upon the 
 crisis of the republic. 
 
 And now, as the particular means for freshening up 
 in our minds and hearts the elder memories and the 
 elder virtues of our history, we are giving one day 
 expressly to laud and magnify our golden age, and to 
 read over the golden bead-roll of our really great men. 
 And in doing this we are following an example as 
 ancient as the pyramids, and yet as recent as the four 
 year old dynasty encamped in France, which far from 
 being ancient is as bright and brassy as a new stamped 
 cent. For it has been the habit of all the first class na- 
 tions since the tower of Babel was tipped over, to try to 
 raise the character of the people to their best standard 
 and to quicken the sentiment on which the government 
 rested by something significant to the senses of that
 
 people's heroism and their government's glory ; some- 
 times a monument, sometimes a celebration, the one 
 embodying a memory and a sentiment in architecture, 
 the other embodying a memory and a sentiment in 
 dramatic action. Thus in the region of the eldest 
 time the traditions, recently corroborated by Layard, 
 the great rummager of Nineveh, tell us that the people 
 of that original mistress of the East assembled at 
 intervals in a sort of mass meeting around the mon- 
 umental mausoleum of Ninus, the founder of Nineveh, 
 and from the contemplation of his glories gained new 
 energies to invigorate the Assyrian empire. 
 
 Thus in the most absolute democracy of the world, 
 Athens, the great Panathenaic festival played exactly 
 the same part for the Athenians that the Fourth of 
 July celebration acts for the Americans, and there is 
 even an identity in its very details. Unlike ours, it 
 occurred but once in five years, but just like ours it 
 consisted of speeches, sports, and a grand procession. 
 The Hellenic rhapsodists recited to the multitude the 
 lines in which the first poet of the world had married 
 
 M 
 
 to immortal words the immortal memories of Athenian 
 bravery, just as the American speakers to-day try to 
 invent eulogiums fit to be made about those Americans
 
 10 
 
 whose moral heroism baffles words; choral music as 
 sweet as that which to-day has rolled its harmonies 
 along the arches of this temple, lifted the hearts of the 
 Grecian people ; athletic games and open air sports 
 and races for prizes carried out the perfect parallel 
 with us still farther ; and though the men of Athens, 
 perhaps, were quite unconscious of balloons, a foot-race 
 with lighted torches, in which the prize was won by 
 hun who got to the goal first with his torch still lighted, 
 made up in some degree for their profound ignorance of 
 these serial gas-bags ; while as to fire-works, instead of 
 having a work-of-fire, as we do, flashing out upon the 
 face of evening the ramparts of Sebastopol, the figure- 
 head of Washington and '76, they had a wonderfully 
 rich curtain spread like a sail upon a ship, and dragged 
 throughout the city, and upon this curtain the Athe- 
 nians saw, worked there in embroidery, by the delicate 
 fingers of the fairest daughters of Athens, the story all 
 spread out, not of " the Father of his country," but of 
 the Mother of their country, Minerva. And finally, to 
 make the parallel with us complete, a great procession 
 swept along their streets too, in which every body 
 participated, full as many dignitaries as figure in the 
 newspaper programme of our procession, the old men 
 carrying olive branches, the young men carrying arms,
 
 11 
 
 the young women carrying baskets on their heads, and 
 the heralds at the head of the column prayed for the 
 good of the citizens, and the first artists caught the 
 image of this procession as it went by, and fixed it in 
 marble, so that you can see to-day that first Fourth of 
 July procession just as Herodotus and Pericles saw it ; 
 for it is kept in the bas-reliefs of Phidias, in the British 
 Museum among the Elgin marbles. 
 
 And coining down to modern tunes, England has her 
 monumental things, by which she has sustained the 
 spirit of her earlier great deeds, her Agincourt and her 
 Magna Charta deeds, in which we have a common 
 heritage. When her soldiery saw the French eagles 
 flying on the MalakofF, as they fled from the Redan 
 tower of Sebastopol, the national heart did not droop, 
 for she turned to her trophies of the past to the 
 grandest commemorative temple on this earth, West- 
 minster Abbey where the effigies and the epitaphs 
 of the greatest men who have made our common race 
 upon the whole the first in the world, are all kept in 
 stone, where the bodies of the heroes lie firm in death's 
 marble, and the recorded honors of our Saxon ancestry 
 are as thick as the captured flags in Henry the Sev- 
 enth's chapel, which fan the air above them like so 
 many wings of victory. Thus the solemn temple is an
 
 ever-flowing fountain head of national sentiment. For 
 "Westminster Abbey is an "everlasting celebration" hard- 
 ened into stone ; it is as if their most splendid national 
 fete-day, with all its shifting scenery of deeds and tombs, 
 with all its pomp of blazon and banner, had been sud- 
 denly and forever petrified into permanency. 
 
 And speaking of the Redan naturally leads me to 
 France. The dynasty there, triple-headed with its three 
 heads of the great Napoleon, the lesser Napoleon, and 
 the little Napoleon, must have its celebration also to 
 stabilitate its rickety throne ; and that commemoration 
 was upon the day when the bronzed warriors, returning 
 from the most glittering of modern wars, marched in 
 the greatest pomp of modern triumphs along the Boule- 
 vards of Paris. As column after column of men of war 
 marched on, with the terrors of the trenches yet seem- 
 ing to hang over them, as rank after rank of the 
 wounded and torn were borne along with the yellings 
 of Crimean surgery yet seeming to echo round them, 
 and Paris, gay and glittering with the splendors of a 
 monarch munificent as Louis the Fourteenth Paris 
 clapped her proud hands and showered down flowers 
 and benedictions on the returning braves, the soldicr- 
 sentiment upon which the throne rests grew stronger
 
 13 
 
 and stronger as the pageant moved on, and at every 
 step of that laurelled soldiery France was Napoleonized. 
 
 They forgot as they gazed on the conquering brig- 
 ades of Bonaparte's nephew, that the last immense rush 
 of the French conscripts right up the horrid steep of 
 the Malakoff was made to a very different music from 
 " long live the Emperor ;" that it was to the hymn of 
 French liberty, the Marseillaise Hymn, and that alone, 
 that the living tide of valor surged upward and over 
 that invincible crest ; they forgot that the money of 
 France, which was stamped with the effigy of " Liberty," 
 was forbidden to be a legal tender ; they remembered 
 only that under the Emperor's auspices, amid those 
 infernal fires, France had for the second time wrung 
 from reluctant Europe her diploma as the first power 
 on the continent, and that night Louis Napoleon slept 
 more soundly on his palace bed than on any since he 
 crossed the palace threshold. 
 
 Tin's world-wide example of commemoration, then, 
 we follow; but we have not thought that a common 
 monument or arch of triumph, or one single triumphal 
 procession, sufficiently commemorated our most bloody 
 and most brilliant age, but we have devoted a day 
 annually to its commemoration, and thus we have
 
 14 
 
 actually carved one of the days of the year into an ever- 
 lasting monument. 
 
 And now on this our monumental day we consult 
 the genius of the republic by every act, from the least 
 unto the greatest, which tends to deepen the revolu- 
 tionary sentiment on which the government stands 
 and by which it must go on. Every fire-cracker touched 
 off to-day by young America is an embryo sentiment of 
 patriotic piety ; every regimental flag borne up against 
 the breeze by a column of soldiers to-day through these 
 Sahara-like heats is one fluttering leaf more for the tree 
 of liberty whose roots grope among the bones of the 
 fathers; every ring of salutation musketry or peal 
 of cannon is one note more in 'the coronation anthem 
 of republicanism, whose key-note caught the pitch in 
 the first volley on Bunker Hill ; and every formal oration 
 to-day spoken in any and every part of the land ought 
 to tremble through all its threads of thought, as if they 
 were so many alarm-wires leading from one common 
 centre the tomb of Washington. 
 
 For we gather to-day in the ranks of no parties 
 to remember the spring-time of the republic. I stand 
 here as one of the humblest mouth-pieces of the feel- 
 ings of to-day, invited to this platform by no party but 
 the universal party of free America. For the Revo-
 
 15 
 
 lution belongs to no party ; no party owns that record. 
 No party can say " that's my thunder." No, it is the 
 thunder of America. The question has been taunt- 
 ingly asked in the Senate within a few days, " how 
 many battles did Massachusetts fight in the Revolu- 
 tion ? " She fought all the battles, every where. When 
 her arm wasn't there, her nerve and spirit were 
 the electricity of Bunker Hill sparkled through every 
 man and every action of the Revolution, from John 
 Hancock in Beacon street to George Washington at 
 Yorktown ; but no grass was green any where with the 
 nourishment of battle that did not freshen over some 
 mouldering hand and broken heart from New England. 
 No, all the battles belong to all the states, just as ah 1 
 the stars on the flag belong to every state that holds up 
 the flag. In this spirit I trust we may be ever able 
 to keep the Fourth of July ; let other places and other 
 days unfurl their local and party standards tattered 
 with the war-storms of their bloodless victories, but 
 to-day let no banner flout the sky, but the one great 
 flag of the Revolution-Congress, still gorgeous with all 
 its arms and trophies, and streaming out over the heads 
 of thirty millions of Americans an emblem of union 
 and beauty and power. 
 
 And as we gather to-day in all our towns, beneath
 
 16 
 
 that Revolutionary flag, the whole spirit of the Revolu- 
 tionary day will insensibly come back and take posses- 
 sion of us, not so much by cheap words as by intuitive 
 sympathies ; we shall feel that the spirit of the fathers 
 still " rules us from their urns," and that tried by the 
 Revolutionary standard, however the politicians may 
 be, the people are " all right ;" that there still glows 
 high in the heart of the million the inextinguishable, 
 unappeasable spirit of our first days the love of free 
 speech and free action, the love of law, the fear of God. 
 And now how providential it appears, when we so 
 much need the earlier wisdom of the land, there is an 
 auspicious concurrence of all the arts which illuminate 
 the past upon this very revolutionary time, the sunrise 
 of the republic, the age of Washington ! For just at 
 this tune the universal Yankee genius, tired of aston- 
 ishing the old world by its marvellous patterns of 
 clipper-ships and reaping machines, has taken to in- 
 structing the new world in history, oratory, and the fine 
 arts, and every one of these activities seems just now 
 crystalizing with involuntary determination around the 
 name of George Washington. For Bancroft, first in 
 the historic choir, hast just brought down the greatest 
 of our histories to the period in which Washington 
 steps into the foreground of the national scene ; Irving,
 
 17 
 
 called at his birth Washington Irving as if by pro- 
 phetic anticipation of the day when he should consum- 
 mate his own celebrity by recording that of the man 
 he was named for, Irving is retouching with the magic 
 of his pen the revered lineaments of the first President, 
 fading a little with the erasive touch of Time; the 
 twenty-second of February, the birth-day of Wash- 
 ington, is beginning to be one of the people's holidays ; 
 Leutze, the painter of history, German by name, but 
 native American by birth, unrolls before Americans the 
 broad canvas of General Washington's passage of the 
 Delaware ; Crawford, our sculptor, with emulous patri- 
 otism, in his sister art fashions the clay into the same 
 standard pattern, the clay which Munich shall cast in 
 its enduring bronze, and the Danube is even now 
 floating down its current on a raft to a pedestal with 
 us, where it will stand above a clustering-star of stat- 
 ues of great men who supported him in his life ; and 
 even the Titan pulse of the imperial city of our trade, 
 New York, pauses for a moment in its giant play as the 
 Babylonic city this day places her new statue of the 
 Chief upon his war-horse in that park of hers which 
 then with a new propriety will claim its title, Union 
 Square ; while to crown all, the sweet tongue of oratory
 
 18 
 
 comes in aid of history, and canvas and bronze, for the 
 most dulcet-tongued of our living speakers is seen going 
 about the country like another Peter the Hermit, 
 preaching a bloodless crusade for the rescue of another 
 holy sepulchre from the grasp of an infidel's hand. 
 Amid this firm consent of all the instrumentalities by 
 which men fasten fame forever to a name, amid this 
 chorus of all the historic arts, all vocal and visible with 
 one beloved name, literally earth, air and sky alive 
 with Washington, does it not seem as if the Eevolution 
 might burst through the thin film of years which 
 curtains it, and take its place to-day as the central sun 
 of our national system ? 
 
 And now in turning our eyes directly upon the 
 Revolution, glaring upon us with these broad lights, 
 one or two of its most impressive thoughts seem to 
 rumble and mutter forth from that thunder-cloud 
 period a challenge to our notice ; and these relate to, 
 first, the lesson of the Revolution itself; second, what 
 it has done for us and the world. And first, I think if 
 we roll out before our eyes the whole panoramic 
 picture of the Revolutionary action as it displayed 
 itself under the tongue of debate as well as the trumpet 
 of battle, we shall be forced to admit that the capital 
 sentiment of our fathers, underlying and ever-living
 
 19 
 
 was the love of liberty protected bylaw; legal liberty, 
 constitutional liberty. They worshipped liberty with 
 a measureless love ; free speech and free action were 
 what our English ancestors spread their flag for at 
 Runnymede when they wrenched magna charta from 
 King John. Free speech and free action were what 
 our American ancestors spread the flag of the thirteen 
 fighting colonies for, on the first Fourth of July. But 
 in the long struggle of the people with the throne, by 
 which the emigrants to this country were educated for 
 freedom, especially in the struggles with the Stuarts 
 and under William the Deliverer, which Macaulay has 
 so gaily painted, they had learned that liberty and law 
 were the mutual props of each other that the love 
 of liberty and respect for law ought to go hand in 
 hand, in short that liberty and law were Siamese twins. 
 Therefore they were always careful that then: liberty 
 should appear in the shape of well-considered law. So 
 when they came to rebel against the Georges, they 
 didn't break out into a devastating fillibustering up- 
 rising of an outraged people, but all was done decently, 
 and deliberately and legally. First they set forth that 
 stately manifesto to mankind which has been read 
 to-day to America; then they made a confederated 
 nationality by a Continental Congress, and in every
 
 negotiation with the enemy they insisted that the legal 
 titles of their respective officers should be recognized. 
 Washington would never open an official letter which 
 was not directed to him by the title Congress had 
 given him General Washington. And finally, in our 
 own state, the Massachusetts fathers took our ideas of 
 liberty, framed in the grand old phrases of magna 
 charta, the English petition of rights and Lord Somers's 
 bill of rights, and cast them into our own constitution 
 
 and bill of rights ; a great foundation state-paper whose 
 
 i 
 features the world has already looked at, and will yet 
 
 have to study ; and they summed up its whole essence 
 in its last consummate sentence, wherein they said, in 
 the words of the republican Harrington, which he got 
 from Aristotle, we do this " to the end that this may 
 be a government of laws and not of men." 
 
 Therefore the leading sentiment of the Kevolution 
 is liberty and law, one and inseparable. And whenever 
 we find that the laws which we have, inevitably shut 
 us off from the liberties we ought to have, we must 
 change the law-making machine, or in the last ex- 
 tremity break the law-making machine. Massachusetts 
 men must love liberty, and by the same ancestral 
 instinct will love law. And happily our governmental 
 system is so contrived that the people can generally,
 
 21 
 
 by a little patience, self-denial and resolution, force 
 their laws into harmony with their liberties, and make 
 them square with each other. Every year's elections 
 offer us some chance, but once in four years there 
 comes a chance to put a new face on our laws and a 
 new heart in the body politic. Once in four years 
 those who may think that the government of independ- 
 ence is crumbling away from its eternal principles, 
 can muster at the polls, and in no factious spirit, but 
 in a national spirit, their motto indeed " union for the 
 sake of the Union," all hands together can right the 
 republic. Once in four years the millions can rush 
 to the fortress box, which is justly called the mightiest 
 of the three boxes which command the world the 
 cartridge-box, the band-box and the batlot-bo~K ; and 
 there in a perfect snow storm of ballots can cleanse the 
 soiled seats of the nation, a snow storm of those little 
 papers 
 
 " Which fall as snow flakes fall upon the sod, 
 But execute the people's will, as lightning does the voice of God." 
 
 It may happen sometimes that the people may 
 be, under our wise constitutional system, temporarily 
 crippled and cut off in their rights and desires, 
 but when the day of reform comes the retribution 
 is only the more decisive and tremendous. TJicn 
 when the great lazy people are goaded at length
 
 22 
 
 into majestic unanimity, when all considerations are 
 thrown aside but the salvation of their native land, 
 when they crowd together, 
 
 " Roused like lions out of slumber, 
 In unvanquishable number," 
 
 what wrong or what wrong-doer can stand up before 
 them ? If under the constitutional guard of office 
 anybody, great or small, has used his power to 
 decree a short-lived divorce between the laws and 
 liberties of the people, the omnipotent people will 
 not therefore tear down their own image they will 
 not weaken the arm of the law, but they will look on 
 to their constitutional day of judgment ; then, thrice 
 armed by their own long submission, they can hurl 
 upon the head of the great wrong-doer the malediction 
 of the poet, with a terrible practical force, 
 
 " Ruin seize thee, ruthless king ; 
 Confusion on thy banners wait; 
 Though fanned by conquest's crimson wing," 
 
 Now 
 
 "They mock the air with idle state." 
 
 But if the time should come upon us, which God 
 avert and which I pray may never open on my sight, 
 when our liberties and our laws cannot be made one 
 and alike at the electoral urns, then let Massachusetts 
 do as the fathers did, let her declare a second Revo- 
 lutionary war ; let her meet the law openly and like a
 
 23 
 
 free commonwealth, not secretly nullify it like a slave 
 commonwealth. Let her march out and encamp on 
 Bunker Hill, and let her announce with the solemn 
 gravity befitting so awful a transaction, that Massachu- 
 setts has taken her Bunker Hill in her arms and gone 
 out by herself, and she appeals to God and man for 
 the justice of her cause. But even as our fathers 
 suffered long and forbore ere they struck the remedi- 
 less blow, so should we struggle long with ourselves 
 ere we dash in pieces the golden bowl of our national 
 life, and cut the silver cord which ties us into one 
 magnificent nation. And surely to-day from thirty 
 millions of Americans should go up thirty millions of 
 prayers to save to us, to save to the world, this har- 
 bor of republicanism, this citadel of man's last hope. 
 Whoever would pray otherwise must be in a conspiracy 
 against mankind. 
 
 But another thing which forces itself upon the 
 attention of the student of the Revolution is the im- 
 mense heroism of our fathers, the signers of the 
 Declaration. There they stood, the representatives of 
 thirteen infant colonies, which hadn't cut their mother's 
 apron strings, and defied that unnatural but mighty 
 mother, whose armaments they heard roaring round 
 the world. And the awful alternative was not victory
 
 24 
 
 or death, oh no ! that would have been easy it 
 was victory or the gibbet of the rebel. And it ought 
 always to be remembered, that they fought not alone 
 against the red-coat army which confronted them, but 
 against the whole red-coat nation behind the army, and 
 supplying the army and lending the immense moral 
 prestige of one of the very first powers of the earth 
 to those red-coat regiments and against this they 
 fought with the gibbet in their faces ! 
 
 Talk about back-bone ! Why, old John Adams in 
 those "sink or swim" days when he drove the Declara- 
 tion of Independence through Congress to a victorious 
 vote, had more back-bone in him than would suffice in 
 these days for the vertebral column of a whole army 
 of professed politicians. 
 
 Another thing which I can never overlook in our 
 Continental Captains and Congressmen, was their abso- 
 lute disinterestedness in following their principles of 
 freedom. They had no offices in their eye, nor fat 
 jobs, nor fame-giving posts; every one of them lost 
 something or suffered something in consequence of the 
 Declaration of Independence. They never dreamed of 
 the creed of the professed politician who feathers his 
 own nest in the sacred name of his country. They 
 lived, they contended and they died in the day of small
 
 25 
 
 things to them personally ; but they were men of that 
 grand type, the largest mould in which men are ever 
 made, the men who live for posterity, for others' wel- 
 fare, and the future of a thousand years. Most men 
 live in the immediate scene around them, and in their 
 sensations; but some there are who live above sen- 
 sations and above sorrows, in then* sentiments and 
 thoughts, and for the " all hail hereafter ! " of those who 
 shall be blessed through them. And these are first of 
 men ; for " first of men," says Lord Bacon, " are the 
 conditores imperil" the founders of empire. But al- 
 most always such men suffer in their lives, and in the 
 end they only stand like Moses on Mount Pisgah, and 
 see afar off their country going by in her coronation 
 robes. 
 
 And then what a severe contrast there is between 
 our great Captain and other conquerors ! When I 
 read, for example, about Alexander parcelling out 
 between himself and his followers the gorgeous satra- 
 pies of the jewelled East, as the recompense of their 
 successful struggle, I cannot help thinking of our Wash- 
 ington's words, when he modestly stood up in his place 
 in Congress and accepted the generalship of our armies. 
 Said that model conqueror, "I take the office, but 
 I shall accept no pay for my services ; I shall keep a
 
 26 
 
 strict account of my actual expenses ; these I hope Con- 
 gress may be able to discharge." There's a platform 
 of patriotic principles for you. 0, that the same 
 purity of heart, and self-sacrificing loyalty to principle 
 pervaded all men's hearts now! 0, that the same 
 contempt of office, for office' sake were universal now ! 
 Then never, never should we have seen that newest 
 specimen of grand larceny, the robbery of a whole 
 territorial legislature ; yes, the robbery of a whole ter- 
 ritorial law-making machine ; nor ever should we have 
 seen with irrepressible indignation the children of men 
 who fell in the Revolution, shot down like hounds on 
 the plains of our territory, almost in the very sight 
 of the infantry of these United States, which the blood 
 of their fathers united and put together. 
 
 But I must hasten to consider briefly what this sen- 
 timent of the Revolution, so martyr-like, so disinter- 
 ested, so freedom-loving, has done for us and for the 
 world. It established this Republic, as its first fruits. 
 It showed that a system could be wrought out, vast in 
 its sweep yet most minute in its provision for individual 
 and local wants ; under which, if properly carried out, 
 the largest liberty could be had with the least law, and 
 under which the true dignity of equal human nature 
 could be vindicated by making every native-born
 
 27 
 
 American eligible to every office, from the Moderator 
 of a town meeting to the Presidency of the nation. 
 At this very moment, as if to illustrate what I say, the 
 third office in the government holds in the chair of the 
 Speakership of the House of Kepresentatives a young 
 man whose eloquence caught its first harmonies in the 
 music of a machine shop. And the superb elevation 
 of the curule chair of the first magistracy of America 
 was filled, in the last term of the Presidency, by a man 
 whose youthful industry was passed in the sweat of 
 his brow in a mechanic's factory. This republican 
 system mankind have been gazing upon as it success- 
 fully got under way ; they have seen America win 
 laurel and credit and crown and prize on many a field 
 of human enterprize and conduct ; they have seen her 
 commanders carry her war-messages by the iron 
 mouths of her cannon and the iron hearts of her 
 Decaturs and Jacksons alike to the barbarous Moor 
 and the polished Frank ; while the supremacy of the 
 meteor-flag of the sea-girt islanders has been rudely 
 shaken. But better even than these attractive em- 
 blems are other stars of nobleness which shine in her 
 insignia. " Peace hath her victories not less renowned 
 than war," and on that field America is three times 
 victor, on the sea, on the land, in the very air.
 
 28 
 
 In the game for the peaceful harvest of the seas she 
 ruffles out the snowy plumage of her clipper ships, 
 and lo ! the mercantile marine of the old standard 
 nations, with every rag of canvas set, lumbers heavily 
 along the ocean road of commerce, unable to see any 
 thing of the clipper craft of their rival but the broad 
 name u America," fairly painted on her stern. In the 
 equally great game for the harvests of the land, an 
 American reaping machine, a harvesting engine fit for 
 the prairie-like expanse of her western acres, goes 
 slashing about among the agriculturists of the old 
 world, giving ample proof that whatever monster crops 
 her broad acres get up, her inventive energies can 
 harvest and get in. While, as if to demonstrate finally 
 that no realm of nature should be unvexed with her 
 victorious energy, she first, by the hand of her Franklin, 
 seizes the lightning from the sky, and then, by the 
 brains of her Morse and House, she teaches it to run 
 of errands across her vast territorial spaces, and, to cap 
 the climax, makes it tell its own story in fair print 
 when it gets there. And it was meet and proper that 
 a Revolution which begat a republican empire like 
 ours should also beget gigantic energies to correspond 
 with it. If a new race is born into the world, they 
 must have new tools to work with. And only think
 
 29 
 
 what a realm ours is ! It is not measured by miles ; it 
 is not measured even by degrees of latitude ; it is not 
 measured even by different climates ; no it is only 
 to be appropriately measured by one grand standard 
 the length of the king's arm was the integral standard 
 of linear measurement in England but we may with 
 strict justice take our standard from the orb of day ; 
 and when by one single effort of comparison, we would 
 express the measurement of our empire, let us say, 
 (without any exaggeration) the sun takes half of his 
 whole journey round the globe, in getting over our 
 United States. 
 
 But measureless as are the physical results of our 
 Revolution, who shall measure its moral results ? It 
 revolutionized the sentiment of the world as positively 
 as if the climate of the world had suddenly been 
 changed. It gave scope to thoughts which had for 
 generations been cramped in men's minds. It gave 
 life to hopes that had for generations been strangled in 
 their hearts ; in short it ventilated all the pure thought 
 and feeling of the world, and the day after the Decla- 
 ration of Independence this planet was a better place 
 to live in, than it was the day before. 
 
 Look, for instance, at the result of our firmly-fixed 
 policy, to recognize every government, rebel or not, as
 
 30 
 
 soon as it has established itself sufficiently to be, de 
 facto, a government ! When Hungary was fighting with 
 Austria for her Fourth of July, we sent an envoy, to 
 be near them and to encourage them by the assurance 
 that the very moment they could set up a free gov- 
 ernment, de facto, as they should draw their first breath 
 of liberty, we would be on hand to give them aid and 
 comfort; and when Austria growled out her stony- 
 hearted remonstrance to us, the greatest of Americans 
 told her plainly that this republic had so determined, 
 and that her tyrant-empire in comparison with our 
 republican empire was but a patch on the earth's sur- 
 face. And that famous letter you know was followed 
 up by sending a flag-ship, with the star-standard flying 
 over it, for the very man upon whose garments was 
 the dampest mould of an Austrian dungeon. That 
 letter to Austria was powerful, because when Webster 
 wrote it America was standing right behind him ; there 
 was n't an army nor a regulation-sword in sight, when 
 the Austrian read it, but it sent a shiver through every 
 joint of the Holy Alliance. 
 
 When Colombia and her sister states had fought their 
 way into republican life, George Canning, the brilliant 
 Prune Minister of England, boasted in his place that he 
 had hastened to recognize their independence, and thus,
 
 31 
 
 said he proudly, u I called a new world into existence 
 to redress the balance of power in the old world." 
 But when he said this he was not true to the spirit of 
 fact, for it was not George Canning bearing in his 
 hand England's tardy and reluctant recognition, who 
 really gave them the breath of independent life ; it was 
 another land and a nobler leader; it was our own 
 prince of the orators, Henry Clay, the mighty voices of 
 whose eloquence rang like a silver clarion among his 
 countless followers, exhorting them to send a full ac- 
 credited ambassador to the South American Congress 
 at Panama. And therefore it was that when they had 
 achieved their independence, in the halls of their 
 national legislatures the portrait of Henry Clay and 
 not George Canning was hung up high on the wall, 
 where still for aught I know that lordly eye looks 
 down on them. 
 
 And finally, the other day in Paris, at that notorious 
 Congress where the peace of Europe was made and that 
 " blessed baby was born," you cannot have forgotten 
 that Count Walewski declared that Belgium had too 
 free a tongue in her little head, and that her free 
 press must be padlocked and her free speech must be 
 muzzled. No ! said Lord Clarendon, I never will con- 
 sent to it, England never would submit to see free
 
 32 
 
 speech put down. And what think you drove that 
 Peer of Victoria to say this ? "Was it that gartered 
 peerage, proud as the peerage of Charlemagne, whose 
 broad riband he wore on his shoulder ? No ! it was 
 the Eeformed House of Commons of England, repre- 
 senting the people of England, who were looking over 
 his shoulder and defying him to say any thing else. 
 And what gave England that almost democratic House 
 of Commons ? Does any one need to be told that it 
 wasn't Henry Brougham nor Charles Earl Gray, loud- 
 mouthed as they were in 1830, for reform ? They 
 were only its instruments, not its creators. It was the 
 example of a reformed and revolutionized American 
 Congress which had then for forty-five years been 
 staring in the face the peerage and tax-ridden people 
 of England ; it was the earthquake voice of the inde- 
 pendence days of America. 
 
 No wonder that Louis Napoleon hates us. No won- 
 der our military envoys are repulsed from his dazzling 
 courts, and told to meet at the mouth of cannon. Yes, 
 the time is coming when we shall meet at the cannon's 
 lips, when the genius of Yonng America shall grapple 
 with the genius of decrepit Europe. Not yet every 
 thing in time but as surely as day follows night the
 
 33 
 
 winter of this world's discontent will yet be made glo- 
 rious summer by this new continent of Columbus. 
 
 I do not dream that we shall go with arms to filli- 
 busterize Europe, as Kossuth's earnest but erring zeal 
 demanded, but the silent spectacle of the republic acts 
 upon Europe like an ever-blowing trumpet of sedition. 
 * Sir Harry Vane, Sir Harry Vane," cried Cromwell 
 when he would play the tyrant, " the Lord deliver me 
 from Sir Harry Vane ! " and so cries every crowned 
 man in Europe, " America, America, the Lord deliver us 
 from that George Washington's America ! " 
 
 But that hearty prayer is not to be granted. There 
 is a great book in which the accounts of nations are 
 posted. I see the heading on one side of that ledger 
 of empire is " Despotism." Upon the other side are 
 three fatal words, burning like the letters which blazed 
 on Belshazzar's banquet-wall "Poland, Italy, Hun- 
 gary." Those pages are yet to be balanced. The armed 
 heel is yet to be lifted from the radiant forehead of 
 Poland, the fond dream of Mazzini must yet be real- 
 ized in the rescue of the dear land of Italy from the 
 wild-cat grip of the royal ruffian of Naples, and the lion- 
 paw of Austria; and Hungary, cloven down in the 
 
 dust, shall yet raise her dishonored brow, in time for
 
 34 
 
 Kossuth, if he can do no more, yet to stand upon his 
 mount of promise and see his native land go by in her 
 garments of gladness. And the motive power to all 
 this, is the silent but eloquent example of this Amer- 
 ican republic. If that example can be maintained till 
 after every stone of that great granite shaft on the 
 immortal hill shall have crumbled, as the monuments 
 of Nineveh have crumbled, long ere then I believe this 
 world will all be more or less republicanized. For I 
 cherish a deep conviction that man will not, cannot go 
 backward, but that a good Providence kept back this 
 continent for ages that Columbus might at last lead it 
 forth from its hiding-place behind the waves, into the 
 presence of the world, robed in the regalia of a repub- 
 lic, to be the school-master of mankind. 
 
 At any rate, so long as it can be said, in Byron's 
 winged words, 
 
 " Still one great clime in full and free defiance, 
 Yet rears its head unconquered and sublime 
 Above the far Atlantic," 
 
 so long the course of mankind heads right, and so long 
 the banner of this republic, 
 
 " Torn, but flying, streams upward 
 Like the thunder-cloud against the wind," 
 
 in the very vanguard of humanity.
 
 35 
 
 God grant that the record of the Grecian republics 
 and the Italian republics may not be our record ; and 
 that no future Thucidydes or future Sismondi, may ever 
 tell how the states split to pieces, and the black curtain 
 fell, and the glorious vision was snatched away from the 
 yearning hope of man! No, let us rather hope that, 
 in the farthest East and beyond the islands of the sea, 
 the news may always fly with the sun ; that behind the 
 place of his going down in the West, there the blessing 
 of men is forever rising, for there God keeps a whole 
 Continent consecrated to Freedom.
 
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