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Extra No. 33. Independence, Day rattens, July 4, 1876. 25 Cer^s. 
 
 WHAT THE AGE OWES TO AMERICA. 
 
 THE HON. WILLIAM M. EVARTS AT PHILADELPHIA. 
 
 I. 
 The event which to-day we commemorate 
 
 supplies its own reflections and enthusiasms and brings 
 its own plaudits. They do not at all bang on the voice of 
 the speaker, nor do they greatly depend upon the con 
 tacts and associations of the place. The Declaration of 
 American Independence was, when it occurred, a capital 
 transaction in human affairs ; as such it has kept its 
 place in history ; as such it will maintain itself while 
 human interest in human institutions shall endure. The 
 scene and the actors, for their profound impression upon 
 the world, at the time and ever since, have owed nothing 
 to dramatic effects, nothing to epical exaggerations. To 
 the eye there was nothing wonderful, or vast, or splendid, 
 or pathetic in the movement or the display. Imagina 
 tion or art can give no sensible grace or decoration to the 
 persons, the place, or the performance, which made up 
 the business of that day. The worth and force that be 
 long to the agents and the action rest wholly on the wis 
 dom, the courage, and the faith that formed and exe 
 cuted the great design, and the potency and permanence 
 of its operation upon the affairs of the world which, as 
 foreseen and legitimate consequences, followed. The 
 dignity of the act is the deliberate, circumspect, open, 
 and serene performance by these men in the 
 clear light of day, and by a concurrent purpose 
 of a civic duty, which embraced the greatest 
 hazards to themselves and to all the people 
 from whom they held this deputed discretion, but which, 
 to their sober judgments, promised benefits to that 
 people and their posterity, from generation to generation, 
 exceeding these hazards and commensurate with its own 
 fitness. The question of their conduct is to be measured 
 by the actual weight and pressure of the manifold con 
 siderations which surrounded the subject before them, 
 and by the abundant evidence that they comprehended 
 
 their vastness and variety. By a voluntary and responsi 
 ble choice they willed to do what was dene, and *a"*st 
 without their will would not have been done. Thus 
 estimated, the illustrious act covers all who participated 
 in it with its own renown, and makes them forever con 
 spicuous among men, as it is forever famous among 
 events. And thus the signers of the Declaration of our 
 Independence, " wrote their names where all nations 
 should behold them, and all time should not efface there." 
 It was, " in the course of human events," intrusted to 
 them to determine whether the fullness of time had 
 come when a nation should be born in a day. They 
 declared the independence of a new nation in the sense 
 in which men declare emancipation or declare war ; the 
 declaration created what was declared. 
 
 Famous, always, among men are the founders of 
 States, and fortunate above all others in such fame are 
 these, our fathers, whose combined wisdom and courage 
 began the great structure of our national existence, and 
 laid sure the foundations of liberty and justice on which 
 it rests. Fortunate, first, in the clearness of their title 
 and in the world s acceptance of their rightful claim. 
 Fortunate, next, in the enduring magnitude of the State 
 they founded and the beneficence of its protection of the 
 vast interests of human life and happiness which have 
 here had their home. Fortunate, again, in the admiring 
 imitation of their work, which the institutions of the 
 most powerful and most advanced nations more and 
 more exhibit ; and, last of all, fortunate in the full demon 
 stration of our later time that their work is adequate to 
 withstand the most disastrous storms of human fortunes, 
 and survive unwrecked, unshaken, and unharmed. 
 
 This day has now been celebrated by a great people, 
 at each recurrence of its anniversary, for a hundred 
 years, with every form of ostentatious joy, with every 
 demonstration of respect and gratitude for the 
 
 M43605 
 
Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 ancestral virtue which gave it its glory, and 
 with the firmest faith that growing time 
 should neither obscure its luster nor reduce the ardor or 
 discredit the sincerity of its observance. A reverent 
 spirit has explored the lives of the men \vho took part in 
 the great transaction ; has unfolded their characters and 
 exhibited to an admiring posterity the purity of their 
 motives ; the sagacity, the bravery, the fortitude, the 
 perseverance which marked their conduct, and which se- 
 cuied the nr^pe/ity an d^ permanence cf their work. 
 
 "" Vir, :> : : .. : 
 GRAr|i>ij&:Ur;TSji; w<Hj* oF ITTG. 
 
 Philosop hy has diviued thV s e crets *of*all this power, 
 land eloquence emblazoned the magnificence of all its re- 
 ults. The heroic war which fought out the acquies 
 cence of the Old World in the independence of the New ; 
 the manifold and masterly forms of noble character and 
 of patient and serene wisdom which the great influences 
 of the tin.es begat ; the large and splendid scale on which 
 these elevated purposes were wrought out, and the majes 
 tic proportions to which they have been filled up; the un- 
 ended line of eventful progress, casting ever backward a 
 flood of light upon the sources of the original energy, and 
 ever forward a promise and a prophecy of unexhausted 
 power all these have been made familiar to our people 
 by the genius and the devotion of historians and orators. 
 The greatest statesmen ol the Old World for this same 
 period of 100 years have traced the initial steps in these 
 events, looked into the nature of the institutions 
 thus founded, weighed by the Old World wisdom, 
 and measured by recorded experience, the probable for 
 tunes of this new adventure on an unknown sea. This 
 circumspect and searching survey of our wide field of 
 political and social experiment, no doubt, has brought 
 them a diversity of judgment as to the past and of ex 
 pectation as to the future. But of the magnitude and the 
 novelty and the power of the forces set at work by the 
 event we commemorate, no competent authorities have 
 ever greatly differed. The cotemporary judgment of 
 Burke is scarcely an overstatement of the European 
 opinion of the immense import of American indepen 
 dence. He declared : " A great revolution has happened 
 a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of 
 power in any of the existing States, but by the appear 
 ance of a new State, of a new species, in a new part of 
 the globe. It has made as great a change in all the rela 
 tions and balances and gravitations of power as the ap 
 pearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar 
 world." 
 
 It is easy to understand that the rupture between 
 the Colonies and the mother country might have worked 
 a result of political independence that would have in 
 volved no such mighty consequences as are here so 
 
 strongly announced by the most philosophic statesman 
 
 of Ms age. The resistance of the Colonies, which came 
 
 to a head in the revolt, was led in the name and for 
 the maintenance of the liberties of Englishmen, against 
 Parliamentary usurpation and a subversion of the Brit 
 ish Constitution. A triumph of those liberties might 
 have ended in an emancipation from the rule of the 
 English Parliament, and a continued submission to the 
 scheme and system of the British monarchy, with an 
 American Parliament adjusted thereto, upon the Vue 
 principles of the English Constitution. Whether this 
 new political establishment should have maintained 
 loyalty to the British sovereign, or should have been or 
 ganized under a crown and throne of its own, the trans 
 action would, then, have had no other importance than 
 such as belongs to a dismemberment of existing empire, 
 but with preservation of existing institutions. There 
 would have been, to be sure, a " new state," but not " of 
 a new species," and that it was " in a new part of the 
 globe " would have gone far to make the dismember 
 ment but a temporary and circumstantial disturbance in 
 the old order of things. Indeed, the solidity and perpe 
 tuity of that order might have been greatly confirmed by 
 this propagation of the model of the European monarchies 
 on the boundless regions of this continent. It is pre 
 cisely here that the Declaration of Independence has its 
 immense importance. As a civil act, and by the people s 
 decree and not by the achievement of the army, or 
 through military motives at the first stage of the con 
 flict it assigned a new nationality, with its own institu 
 tions, as the civilly preordained end to be fought for and 
 secured. It did not leave it to be an after-fruit of trium 
 phant war, shaped and measured by military power, and 
 conferred by the army on the people. This assured at 
 the outset the supremacy of civil over military author 
 ity, the subordination of the army to the unarmed people. 
 This deliberative choice of the scope and goal of the Rev 
 olution made sure of two things, which must 
 have been always greatly in doubt, if military 
 reasons and events had held the mastery 
 over the civil power. The first was, that noth 
 ing less than the independence of the nation, and its sep- 
 araiion from the system of Europe, would be attained if 
 our arms were prosperous ; and the second, that the new 
 nation would always be the mistress of its own institu 
 tions. This might not have been its fate had a trium 
 phant army won the prize of independence, not as a 
 task set for it by the people, and done in its service, but 
 by its own might, and held by its own title, and ao to be 
 shaped and dealt with by its own will. 
 
 III. 
 
 OBJECTS OF THE REVOLUTION. 
 There is the best reason to think that the Congress 
 which declared our independence gave its chief solici 
 tude, not to the hazards of military failure, not to the 
 chance of miscarriage in the project of separation from 
 Ensrlaud, but to the grave responsibility of the military 
 
What Ute Age Owes io America. Evarts. 
 
 success of which they made no doubt and as to what 
 should replace, as government to the new nation, the 
 monarchy of England, which they considered as gone to 
 them forever from the date of the Declaration. 
 
 Nor did this Congress feel any uncertainty, either in 
 disposition or expectation, that the natural and neces 
 sary result would preclude the formation of the new 
 Government out of any other materials than such as were 
 to be found in society as established on this side of the 
 Atlantic. These materials they foresaw were capable of, 
 and would tolerate, only such political establishment as 
 would maintain and perpetuate the equality and liberty 
 always enjoyed in the several colonial communities. 
 
 But all these limitations upon what was possible still 
 left a large range of anxiety as to what was probable, 
 and might become actual. One thing was too essential 
 to be left uncertain, and the founders of this nation de 
 termined that there never should be a moment when the 
 several communities of the different colonies should lose 
 the character of component parts of one nation. By 
 their plantation and growth up to the day of the Declara 
 tion of Independence they were subjects of one sov 
 ereignty, bound together in one political connection, 
 parts of one county, under one constitution, with one 
 destiny. Accordingly the Declaration, by its very terms, 
 made the act of separation a dissolving by " one people" 
 of " the political bands that have connected them with 
 another," ana the proclamation of the right and of the 
 fact of independent nationality was, " that these United 
 Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independ 
 ent States." 
 
 It was thus that, at one breath, " independence and 
 union" were declared and established. The confirma 
 tion of the first by war and of the second by civil wisdom 
 was but the execution of the single design which it is 
 the glory of this great instrument of our National ex 
 istence to have framed and announced. The recognition 
 of our independence, first by France and then by Great 
 Britain, the closer union by the Articles of Confederation, 
 and the final unity by the Federal Constitution were all 
 but muniments of title of that " liberty and union, one 
 and inseparable," which- were proclaimed at this place 
 and on this day 100 years ago, which have been our pos 
 session from that moment hitherto, and which we surely 
 avow shall be our possession forever. 
 
 Seven years of revolutionary war and twelve years of 
 consummate civil prudence brought us, in turn, to the 
 conclusive peace of 1783 and to the perfected Constitu 
 tion of 1787. Few chapters of the world s history cov 
 ering such brief periods are crowded with so many illus 
 trious names or made up of events of so deep and per 
 manent interest to mankind. I cannot stay to recall to 
 your attention these characters, or these incidents, or to 
 renew the gratitude and applause with which we never 
 f ease to contemplate them. It is only their relation to 
 the Declaration of Independence itself that I need to 
 
 insist upon and to the new State which it brought into 
 existence. In this view these progressive processes were 
 but the articulation of the members of the State and the 
 adjustment of its circulation to the new centers of its 
 vital power. These processes tvere all implied and in 
 cluded in this political creation, and were as necessary 
 and as certain, if it were not to languish and to die, as in 
 any natural creature. 
 
 Within the hundred years whose flight in our national 
 history we mark to-day we have had occasion to corrob 
 orate by war both the independence and the unity of the 
 nation. In our war against England for neutrality we 
 asserted and we established the absolute right to be free 
 of European entanglements in time of war as well as in 
 time of peace, and so completed our independence of 
 Europe. And by the war of the Constitution a war 
 within the nation the bonds of our unity were tried and 
 tested, as in a fiery furnace, and proved to be dependent 
 upon no shifting vicissitudes of acquiescence, no partial 
 dissents or discontents, but, so far as is predicable of hu 
 man fortunes, irrevocable, indestructible, perpetual, 
 Casibns hcec nullis, nullo delebilis cevo. 
 
 IV. 
 OUR NEW POLITICAL SYSTEM. 
 
 We may be quite sure that the high resolve to stake the 
 futuie of a great people uyon a system of society and of 
 polity that should dispense with the dogmas,* the expe 
 rience, the traditions, the habits, and the sentiments 
 upon which the firm and durable fabric of the British 
 Constitution had been built up, was not taken without a 
 solicitous and competent survey of the history, the con 
 dition, the temper, and the moral and intellectual traits 
 of the people for whom the decisive step was taken. 
 
 It may, indeed, be suggested that the main body of the 
 elements, and a large share of the arrangements, of the 
 new government were expected to be upon the model of 
 the British system, and that the substantial of civil and 
 religious liberty and the institutions for their mainte 
 nance and defense were already the possession of the 
 people of England and the birthright of the colonists. 
 But this consideration does not much disparage the re 
 sponsibility assumed in discarding the correlative parts 
 of the British Constitution. I mean the Established 
 Church and Throne ; the permanent power of a heredi 
 tary peerage ; the confinement of popular representa 
 tion to the wealthy and educated classes; and the ideas 
 of all participation by the people in their own govern 
 ment coining by gracious concession Iroui the royal pre 
 rogative and not by inherent right in themselves. In 
 deed, the counter consideration, so far as the question 
 was to be solved by experience, would be a ready one. 
 The foundation, and the wails, and the roof of this firm 
 and noble edifice, it would be said, are all fitly framed 
 together in the substantial institutions you propose to 
 omit from your plan and model. The convenience and 
 
Independence Day Orations, July 4, 187C. 
 
 safety and freedom, the pride and happiness which the 
 inmates of this temple and fortress enjoy, as the rights 
 and liberties of Englishmen, are only kept in place and 
 play because of the firm structure of these ancient 
 strongholds of religion and law, which you now desert 
 and refuse to build anew. 
 
 Our fathers had formed their opinions upon wiser and 
 deeper views of man and Providence than these, and 
 they had the courage of their opinions. 
 
 Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path 
 of civilization, enlightenment, and moral and intellectual 
 culture, they found that the Divine ordinance of govern 
 ment, in every stage of the ascent, was adjustable on 
 principles of common reason to the actual condition of a 
 people, and always had for its objects, in the benevolent 
 counsels of the Divine wisdom, the happiness, the ex 
 pansion, the security, the elevation of society, and the 
 redemption of man. They sought in vain tor any title of 
 authority of man over man, except of superior capacity 
 and higher moralit3 T . They found the origin of castes 
 and ranks, and principalities and powers, temporal or 
 spiritual, in this conception. They recognized the people 
 as the structure, the temple, the fortress, which the 
 great Artificer all the while cared for and built up. As 
 through the long march of time this work advanced, the 
 forms and fashions of government seemed to them to be 
 but the scaffolding and apparatus by which the develop 
 ment of it people s greatness was shaped and sustained. 
 Satisfied that the people whose institutions were now to 
 be projected had reached all that measure of strength 
 and fitness of preparation for self-government which old 
 institutions could give, they fearlessly seized the happy 
 opportunity to clothe the people with the majestic attri 
 butes of their own sovereignty, and consecrate them to 
 the administration of their own priesthood. 
 
 The repudiation by England of the spiritual power of 
 Rome at the Reformation was by every estimate a stu 
 pendous innovation in the rooted allegiance of the 
 people, a profound disturbance of all adjustments of au 
 thority. But Henry VIII., when he displaced the domin 
 ion of the Pope, proclaimed himself the head of the 
 Church. The overthrow of the ancient monarchy of 
 France by the fierce triumph of an enraged people was a 
 catastrophe that shook the arrangements of society from 
 center to circumference. But Napoleon, when he pushed 
 aside the royal line of St. Louis, announced, "I am the 
 people crowned," and set up a plebeian Emperor as the 
 impersonation and depositary in him and his line forever 
 of the people s sovereignty. The. founders of our Com 
 monwealth conceived that the people of these colonies 
 needed no interception of the supreme control of their 
 own affairs, no conciliations of mere names and images 
 of power from which the pith and vigor of authority had 
 departed. They, therefore, did not hesitate to throw 
 down the partitions of power and right and break up the 
 distributive shares in. authority of ranks and orders of 
 
 men which indeed had ruled and advanced the develop 
 inent of society in civil and religious liberty, but might 
 well be neglected when the protected growth was as 
 sured and all tutelary supervision for this reason hence 
 forth could only be obstructive and incongruous. 
 
 V. 
 ENGLISH AND FRENCH REPUBLICS. 
 
 A glance at the fate of the English essay at a com 
 monwealth, which preceded, and to the French experi 
 ment at a republic, which followed our own institution 
 " of a new State of a new species," will show the marvel 
 ous wisdom of our ancestors, which struck the line 
 between too little and too much ; which walked by faith 
 indeed for things invisible, but yet by sight for things 
 visible ; which dared to appropriate everything to the 
 people which had belonged to Caesar, but to assume for 
 mortals nothing that belonged to God. 
 
 No doubt it was a deliberation of prodigious difficulty, 
 and a decision of infinite moment, which should settle 
 the new institutions of England after the execution of 
 the King, and determine whether they should be popular 
 or monarchical. The problem was too vast for Cromwell 
 and the great men who stood about him, and, halting 
 between the only possible opinions, they simply robbed 
 the throne of stability, without giving to the people the 
 choice of their rulers. Had Cromwell assumed the state 
 and style of King, and assigned the constitutional limits 
 of prerogative, the statesmen of England would have 
 anticipated the establishment of 1688, and saved the 
 disgraces of the intervening record. If, on the other 
 hand, the ever-recurring consent of the people in vesting 
 the Chief Magistracy had been accepted for the Constitu 
 tion of the State, the revolution would have been intelli 
 gible, and might have proved permanent. But what a 
 " Lord Protector " was nobody knew, and what he might 
 grow to be everybody wondered and feared. The aris 
 tocracy could endure no dignity above them less than a 
 king s. The people knew the measure and the title of 
 the chartered liberties which had been wrested or 
 yielded from the King s prerogative ; but what the divis 
 ion between them and a Lord Protector would be no one 
 could forecast. A brief fluttering between the firmament 
 above and the firm earth beneath, with no poise with 
 either, and the discordant scheme was rolled away as a 
 scroll. A hundred years afterward Montesquieu derided 
 "this impotent effort of the English to establish a de 
 mocracy," and divined the true cause of its failure. The 
 supreme place, no longer sacred by the divinity that 
 doth hedge about a king, irritated the ambitious to which 
 it was inaccessible, except by faction and violence. 
 "The Government was incessantly changed, and the 
 astonished people sought for democracy and found it 
 nowhere. Alter much violence and many shocks atfd* 
 blows, they were fain to fall back upon the same govern 
 ment they had overthrows. " 
 
IVIiat the Age Owes to ADI erica. Evarts. 
 
 The English experiment to make a commonwealth 
 without sinking its foundations into the firm bed of 
 popular sovereignty, necessarily failed. Its example 
 and its lesson, unquestionably, were of the greatest ser 
 vice in sobering the spirit of English reform in govern 
 ment, to the solid establishment of constitutional mon 
 archy, on the expulsion of the Stuarts, and in giving 
 courage to the statesmen of the American Revolution to 
 push on to the solid establishment of republican govern 
 ment, with the consent of the people as its every -day 
 -working force. 
 
 But if the English experiment stumbled in its logic 
 by not going far enough, the Frencii philosophers came 
 to greater disaster by overpassing the lines which mark 
 the limits of human authority and human liberty, when 
 they undertook to redress the disordered balance between 
 people and rulers, and renovate the Government of 
 France. To the wrath of the people against kings and 
 priests they gave free course, not only to the overthrow 
 of the establishment of the Church and State, but to the 
 destruction of religion and society. They deified man, 
 and thought to raise a tower of man s building, as of old 
 on the plain of Shinar, which should overtop the bat 
 tlements of heaven, and frame a constitution of human 
 affairs that should displace the providence of God. A 
 contusion of tongues put an end to this ambition. And 
 now out of all its evil have come the salutary checks 
 and discipline in freedom, which have brought passion 
 ate and fervid France to the scheme and frame of a 
 sober and firm republic like our own, and, we may hope, 
 us durable. 
 
 VI. 
 
 OUR DEBT TO THE MEN OF 1776. 
 
 How much, then, hung upon the decision of the great 
 day we celebrate, and upon the wisdom and the will of 
 the men who fixed the immediate, and if so, the present 
 fortunes of this people. If the body, the spirit, the 
 texture of our political life had not been collectively de 
 clared on this day, who can be bold enough to say when 
 and how independence, liberty, union* would have been 
 combined, confirmed, assured to this people ? Behold, 
 now, the greatness of our debt to this ancestry, and the 
 fountain, as from a rock smitten in the wilderness, from 
 which the stream of this nation s growth and power 
 takes its source. For it is not alone in the memory of 
 their wisdom and virtues that the founders of a State 
 transmit and perpetuate their influences in its lasting 
 fortunes, and shape the character and purposes of its 
 future rulers. " In the birth of societies," says 
 Montesquieu, " it is the chiefs of a State that ma7*e its 
 institutions ; and afterward it is these institutions that 
 form the chiefs of the State." 
 
 And what was this people and what their traits and 
 training that could justify this congress of their great 
 men in promulgating the profound views of government 
 
 and human nature which the Declaration embodies and 
 expecting their acceptance as " self-evident ?" How had 
 their lives been disciplined and how their spirits pre 
 pared that the new-launched ship, freighted with all 
 their fortunes, could be trusted to their guidance with 
 no other chart or compass than these abstract truths? 
 What warrant was there for the confidence that upon 
 these plain precepts of equality of right, community of 
 interest, reciprocity of duty, a polity could be framed 
 which might safely discard Egyptian mystery, and He 
 brew reverence, and Grecian subtlety, and Roman 
 strength dispense, even, with English traditions of 
 
 " Primogenity and due of birth, 
 
 Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels." 
 
 To these questions the answer was ready and sufficient. 
 The delegates to this immortal assembly, speaking for 
 the whole country and for the respective colonies, their 
 constituents, might well say : 
 
 " What we are, such are this people. We are not here 
 as volunteers, but as their representatives. We have 
 been designated by no previous official station, taken 
 from no one employment or condition of life, chosen 
 from the people at large because they cannot assemble 
 in person, and selected because they know our senti 
 ments, and we theirs, on the momentous question which 
 our deliberations are to decide. They know that the re 
 sult of all hangs on the intelligence, the courage, the con 
 stancy, the spirit of the people themselves. If these have 
 risen to a hight, and grown to a strength and unanimity 
 that our judgment measures as adequate to the struggle 
 for independence and the whole sum of their liberties, 
 they will accept that issue and follow that lead. They 
 have taken up arms to maintain their rights, and will 
 not lay them down till those rights are assured. What 
 the nature and sanctions of this security are to be they 
 understand must be determined by united counsels and 
 concerted action. These they have deputed us to settle 
 and proclaim, and this we have done to-day. What we 
 have declared the people will avow and confirm. Hence 
 forth it is to this people a war for the defense of their 
 united independence against its overthrow by foreign 
 arms. Of that war there can be but one issue. And for 
 the rest, as to the Constitution of the new State, its 
 species is disclosed by its existence. The condition of 
 the people is equal, they have the habits of freemen and 
 possess the institutions of liberty. When the political 
 connection with the parent State is dissolved they will 
 be self-governing and self-governed of necessity. As all 
 governments in this world, good and bad, liberal or des 
 potic, are of men, by men, and for men, this new State, 
 having no castes or ranks, or degrees discriminating 
 among men in its population, becomes at once a govern 
 ment of the people, by the people, and for the people. So 
 it must remain, unless foreign conquest or domestic usur 
 pation shall change it. Whether it shall be a just, wise, 
 
t> 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 or prosperous government, it must be a popular govern 
 ment, and correspond with the wisdom, justice, and for 
 tunes of the people." 
 
 VII. 
 ATTRACTIONS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT. 
 
 And so this people, of various roots and kindred of the 
 Old World settled and transfused in their cisatlantic 
 home into harmonious fellowship in the sentiments, the 
 interests, the habits, the affections which develop and sus 
 tain a love of country were committed to the common 
 fortunes which should attend an absolute trust in the 
 primary relations between man and his fellows and be 
 tween man and his Maker. This Northern Continent of 
 America had been opened and prepared for the trans 
 plantation of the full-grown manhood of the highest civil 
 ization of the Old World to a place where it could be free 
 from mixture or collision with competing or hostile ele 
 ments, and separated from the weakness and the burdens 
 which it would-leave behind. The impulses and attrac 
 tions which moved the emigration and directed it hither, 
 various in form, yet had so much a common character as 
 to merit the description of being public, elevated, moral, 
 or religious. They included the desire of new and better 
 opportunities for institutions consonant with the dignity 
 of human nature and with the immortal and infinite rela 
 tions of the race. In the language of the times, the search 
 for civil and religious liberty animated the Pil 
 grims, the Puritans, and the Churchmen, the Pres 
 byterians, the Catholics, and the Quakers the Hugue 
 nots, the Dutch, and the Walloons the Waldeneses, the 
 Germans, and the Swedes, in their several migrations 
 which made up the colonial population. Their experi 
 ence and fortunes here had done nothing to reduce, 
 everything to confirm, the views and traits which brought 
 them hither. To sever all political relations, then, with 
 Europe, seemed to these people but the realization of the 
 purposes which had led them across the ocean but the 
 one thing needful to complete this continent for their 
 home, and to give the absolute assurance of that higher 
 life which they wished to lead. The preparation of the 
 past and the enthusiasms of the future conspired to 
 favor the project of self-government and invest it with a 
 moral grandeur which furnished the best omens and the 
 best guarantees for its prosperity. Instead of a capri 
 cious and giddy exaltation of spirit, as at new-gained 
 liberty, a sober and solemn sense of the larger trust and 
 duty took possession of their souls ; as if the Great 
 Master had found them faithful over a few things, and 
 had now made them rulers over many. 
 
 These feelings, common to the whole population, were 
 not of sudden origin and were not romantic, nor had they 
 any tendency to evaporate in noisy boasts or run wild in 
 air-drawn projects. The difference between equality and 
 privilege, between civil rights and capricious favors, be 
 tween freedom of conscience and persecution for con 
 
 science sake, were not matters of most debate or ab 
 stract conviction with our countrymen. The story 
 of these battles of our race was the warm and 
 living memory of their forefathers siare in them, for 
 which, " to avoid insufferable grievances at home, they 
 had been enforced by heaps to leave their native coun 
 tries." They proposed to settle forever the question 
 whether such grievances should possibly befall them or 
 their posterity. They knew no plan so simple, so com 
 prehensive, or so sure to this end as to solve all the minor 
 difficulties in the government of society by a radical 
 basis for its source, a common field for its operation, and 
 an authentic and deliberate method for consulting and 
 enforcing the will of the people as the sole authority of 
 the State. 
 
 By this wisdom they at least would shift, within the 
 sphere of government, the continuous warfare of human 
 nature, on the field of good and evil, right and wrong, 
 
 " Between whose endless jar justice resides," 
 from conflicts of the strength of the many against the 
 craft of the few. They would gain the advantage of sup 
 plying as the reason of the State, the reason of the peo 
 ple, and decide by the moral and intellectual influences 
 of instruction and persuasion, the issue of who should 
 make and who administer the laws. This involved no 
 pretensions of the perfection of human nature, nor did it 
 assume that at other times, or under other circumstances 
 they would themselves have been capable of self-govern 
 ment ; or, that other people then were, or ever would be 
 so capable. Their knowledge of mankind showed them 
 that there would be faults and crimes so long as there 
 were men. Their faith taught them that this corruptible 
 would put on incorruption only when this mortal should 
 put on immortality. Nevertheless they believed in man 
 and trusted in God, and on these imperishable supports 
 they thought they might rest civil government for a peo 
 ple who had these living conceptions wrought into their 
 own characters and lives. 
 
 The past and the present are the only means by which 
 man foresees or shapes the future. Upon the evidence 
 of the past, the ^contemplation of the present of this 
 people, our statesmen were willing to commence a sys 
 tem which must continually draw, for its sustenance and 
 growth, upon the virtue and vigor of the people. From 
 this virtue and this vigor it can alone be nourished ; it 
 must decline in their decline and rot in their decay. 
 They traced this vigor and virtue to inexhaustible 
 springs. And, as the unspent heat of a lava soil, quick 
 ened by the returning Summers, through the vintages of 
 a thousand years, will still glow in the grape and sparkle 
 in the wine, so will the exuberant forces of a race sup 
 ply an unstinted vigor to mark the virtues of immense 
 populations and to the remotest generations. 
 
 To the frivolous philosophy of human life which makes 
 all the world a puppet show, and history a book of anec 
 dotes, the moral warfare which fills up the life of niair 
 
What the Age Owes 
 
 and the record of his race seems as unreal and as aimless 
 as tliQ conflicts of the glittering hosts upon an airy Held, 
 whose display lights up the fleeting splendors of a 
 northern night. But free government for a great people 
 nover comes from or gets aid from such philosophers. 
 To a true spiritual discernment there are few things 
 more real, few things more substantial, few things more 
 likely to endure in this world than human thoughts, 
 human passions, human interests, thus molten into the 
 frame and model of our State. " O morem prceclaram, 
 disciplinamque, quam a majoribus accepirmis, si quidem 
 ieneremus !" 
 
 I have made no account, as unsuitable to the occasion, 
 of the distribution of the national power between the 
 General and the State governments, or of the special ar 
 rangements of executive authority, of legislatures, courts, 
 and magistracies, whether of the General or of the State 
 establishments. Collectively they form the body and the 
 frame of a complete government for a great, opulent, and 
 powerful people, occupying vast regions, and embracing 
 in their possessions a wide range of diversity of climate, 
 of soil, and of all the circumstantial influences of ex 
 ternal nature. I have pointed your attention to the prin 
 ciple and the spirit of the government for which all this 
 frame and body exists, to which they are subservient, 
 and to whose mastery they must conform. The life of 
 the natural body is the blood, and the circulation of the 
 moral and intellectual forces and impulses of the body 
 politic shapes and molds the national life. I have 
 touched, therefore, upon the traits that determined this 
 national life, as to be of, from, and for the people, and 
 not of, from, or for any rank, grade, part, or section of 
 them. In these traits are found the " ordinances, consti 
 tutions, and customs" by a wise choice, of which the 
 founders of States may, Lord Bacon says, " sow greatness 
 to their posterity and succession." 
 
 And now, after a century of growth, of trial, of expe 
 rience, of observation, and of demonstration, we are 
 met, on the spot and on the date of the great Declaration 
 to compare our age with that of our fathers, our struc 
 ture with their foundation, our intervening history and 
 present condition with their faith and prophecy. That 
 " respect to the opinion of mankind," in attention to 
 which our statesmen framed the Declaration of Inde 
 pendence, we, too, acknowledge as a sentiment most fit 
 to influence us in our commemorative gratulations to 
 day. 
 
 VITI. 
 
 RESULTS OF THE CENTURY. 
 
 To this opinion of mankind, then, how shall we answer 
 the questioning of this day ? How have the vigor and 
 success of the country s warfare comported with the 
 sounding phrase of the great manifesto 1 Has the new 
 nation been able to hold its territory on the eastern rim 
 of the Continent, or has covetous Europe driven in its 
 
 to America. Evarts. 7 
 
 boundaries, or internal dissensions dismembered its in 
 tegrity? Have its numbers kept pace with natural 
 incrpase, or have the mother countries received back to 
 the shelter of firmer institutions the repentant tide of 
 emigration? or have the woes of unstable society dis* 
 tressed and reduced the shrunken population ? Has tha 
 free suffrage, as a quicksand, loosened the foundations 
 of power and undermined the pillars of the State \ 
 Has the free press, with illimitable sweep, blown, 
 down the props and buttresses of order and authority in 
 Government, driven before its wind the barriers which 
 fence in society, and unroofed the homes which once 
 were castles against the intrusion of a King? Has free 
 dom in religion ended in freedom from religion ? and in 
 dependence by law run into independence of law ? Have 
 free schools, by too much learning, made the people 
 mad? Have manners declined, letters languished, art- 
 faded, wealth deca3 r ed, public spirit withered ? Have 
 other nations shunned the evil example, and heid aloof 
 from its infection ? Or have reflection and hard fortune 
 dispelled the illusions under which th:s people " burned, 
 incense to vanity, and stumbled in their ways from the 
 ancient paths ?" Have they, fleeing from the double 
 destruction which attends folly and arrogance, restored 
 the throne, rebuilt the altar, relaid the foundations of 
 society, and again taken shelter in the old protections 
 against the perils, shocks, and changes in human affairs, 
 which 
 
 " Divert and crack, rend and deracinate 
 
 The unity and married calm of States 
 
 Quite from their fixture 1" 
 
 Who can recount in an hour what has been done in a 
 century, on so wide a field, and in all its multitudinous 
 aspects? Yet I may not avoid insisting upon some 
 decisive lineaments of the material, social, and political 
 dtvelopment of our country which the record of the- 
 hundred years displays, and thus present to " the opinion 
 of mankind," for its generous judgment, our nation as it 
 is to-day our land, our people, and our laws. And, 
 first, we notice the wide territory to which we have 
 steadily pushed on our limits. Lines of climate mark our 
 boundaries north and south, and two oceans east and 
 west. The space between, speaking by and large, covers 
 the whole temperate zone of the Continent, and in area 
 measures near tenfold the possessions of the thirteen 
 colonies ; the natural features, the climate, the produc 
 tions, the influences of the outward world, are all im 
 plied in the immensity of this domain, for they embrace 
 all that the goodness and the power of God have planned 
 for so large a share of the habitable globe. The steps of 
 the successive acquisitions, the impulses which assisted, 
 and the motives which retarded the expansion of our 
 territory ; the play of the competing elements in our 
 civilization and their incessant struggle each to outrun 
 the other ; the irrepressible conflict thus nursed in the 
 bosom of the State; the lesson in humility and patience, 
 
Independence Day Orations, July 4. 187G. 
 
 in charity for all and malice toward none," which the 
 study of the manifest designs of Providence so plainly 
 teach us these may well detain us for a moment s 
 illustration. 
 
 IX. 
 
 EMANCIPATION. 
 
 And this calls attention to that ingredient in the popu 
 lation of this country which came, not from the culmi 
 nated pride of Europe, but from the abject despondency 
 of Africa. A race discriminated from all the converging 
 streams of immigration which I have named by inefface 
 able distinctions of nature ; which was brought hither by 
 a forced migration and into slavery* while all others 
 came by choice and for greater liberty; a race unrepre 
 sented in the Congress which issued the Declaration of 
 Independence, but now, in the persons of 4,000,000 of 
 our countrymen raised, by the power of the great truths 
 then declared, as it were from the dead, and rejoicing in 
 one country and the same constituted liberties with our 
 selves. 
 
 In August, 1620, a Dutch slave-ship landed her freight 
 in Virginia, completing her voyage soon after that of the 
 Mayflower commenced. Both ships were on the ocean 
 at the same time, both sought our shores, and planted 
 their seeds of liberty and slavery to grow together on 
 this chosen field until the harvest. Until the separation 
 from England the several colonies attracted each their 
 own emigration, and from the sparseness of the popula 
 tion, both in the Northern and Southern colonies and 
 the policy of England in introducing African slavery, 
 wherever it miarht, in all of them, the institution of 
 slavery did not raise a definite and firm line of division 
 between the tides of population which set in upon New- 
 England and Virgina from the Old World, and from them 
 later, as from new points of departure, were diffused over 
 the continent. The material interests of slavery had not 
 become very strong, and in its moral aspects no sharp 
 division of sentiment had yet shown itself. But when 
 unity and independence of government were accepted 
 by the colonies, we shall look in vain for any adequate 
 barrier against the natural attraction of the softer cli 
 mate and rich productions of the South, which could 
 keep the Northern population in their harder climate 
 and on their less grateful soil, except the repugnancy of 
 the two systems of free and slave labor to commixture. 
 Out of this grew the impatient, and apparently prema 
 ture, invasion of the Western wilds, pushing constantly 
 onward, in parallel lines, the outposts of the two rival 
 interests. What greater enterprise did for the Northern 
 people in stimulating this movement was more than 
 supplied to the Southern by the pressing necessity 
 for new lands, which the requirements of the sys 
 tem of slave cultivation imposed. Under the opera 
 tion of these causes the political divisions of the eountry 
 built up a wall of partition ranuiug cust and wost, -with 
 
 the novel consequences of the " Border States" of the 
 country being ranged, not on our foreign boundaries, but 
 on this middle line, drawn between the free and slave 
 States. The successive acquisitions of territory, by the 
 Louisiana purchase, by the annexation of Texas, and by 
 the Treaty with Mexico, were ail in the interest of the 
 Southern policy, and, as such, all suspected or resisted 
 by the rival interest in the North. On the other hand, 
 all schemes or tendencies toward the enlargement of our 
 territory on the north were discouraged and defeated by 
 the South. At length, with the immense influx of foreign 
 immigration, reenforcing the flow of population, the 
 streams of free labor shot across the continent. The end 
 was reached. The bounds of our habitation were se 
 cured. The Pacific possessions became ours, and the 
 discovered gold rapidly peopled them from the hives of 
 free labor. The rival energies and ambitions which had 
 fed the thirst for territory had served their pui pose, in 
 completing and assuring the domain of the nation. The 
 partition wall of slavery was thrown down-; the line of 
 Border States obliterated ; those who had battled for 
 territory, as an extension and perpetuation of slavery, 
 and those who fought against its enlargement, as a dis 
 paragement and a danger to liberty, were alike con 
 founded. 
 
 Those who feared undue and precipitate expansion of 
 our possessions, as loosening the ties of union, and those 
 who desired it, as a step toward dissolution, have suf 
 fered a common discomfiture. The immense social and 
 political forces which the existence of slavery in this 
 country, acd the invincible repugnance to it of the vital 
 principles of our state, together, generated, have had 
 their play upon the passions and the interests of this 
 people, have formed the basis of parties, divided sects, 
 agitated and invigorated the popular mind, inspired the 
 eloquence, inflamed the zeal, informed the understand 
 ings, and fired the hearts of three generations. At last 
 the dread debate escaped all bounds of reason, and the 
 nation in arms solved, by the appeal of war, what was 
 too hard for civil wisdom. With our territory uuinuti- 
 lated, our Constitution uncorrupted, a united, people, in 
 the last years of the century, crowns with new glory 
 the immortal truths of the Declaration of Independence 
 by the emancipation of a race. 
 
 X. 
 
 PROMISE OF NATIONAL LONGEVITY. 
 
 I find, then, in the method and the results of the cen 
 tury s progress of the nation in this amplification of its 
 domain, sure promise of the duration of the body politic, 
 whose growth to these vast proportions has, as yet, but 
 laid out the ground plan of the structure. For I find 
 the vital forces of the free society and the people s gov 
 ernment, here founded, have by their own vigor made 
 this a naluraJ crowtli. Strength ?iui syf uauj fcv e 
 
What the Age Owes to America Evarls. 
 
 knit together the great frame as its bulk increased, and 
 the spirit of the nation animates the whole : 
 
 "totarnqtie, infusa per artna, 
 
 Mensagitat molem, et niagnose, corpore miscet." 
 
 We turn now from the survey of this vast territory, 
 which the closing century has consolidated and confirmed 
 as the ample home for a nation, to exhibit the greatness 
 in numbers, the spirit, the character, the port and mien 
 of the people that dwell in this secure habitation. That 
 in these years, our population has steadily advanced, till 
 it counts 40,000,000 intead of 3,COO,000, bears witness, 
 not to be disparaged or gainsaid, to the general congruity 
 of our social and civil institutions with the happiness 
 and prosperity of man. But if we consider further the 
 variety and magnitude of foreign elements to which we 
 have been hospitable, and their ready fusion with the 
 earlier stocks, we have new evidence of strength and 
 vivid force in our population, which we may not refuse 
 to admire. The disposition and the capacity thus shown 
 give warrant of a powerful society. " All nations," says 
 Lord Bacon, " that are liberal of naturalization are fit for 
 empire." 
 
 Wealth in its mass, and still more in its tenure and 
 diffusion, is a measure of the condition of a people which 
 touches both its energy and morality. Wealth has no 
 source but labor. "Life has given nothing valuable to 
 man without great labor." This is as true now as when 
 Horace wrote it. The prodigious growth of wealth in 
 this country is not only, therefore, a signal mark of pros 
 perity, but proves industry, persistency, thrift as the 
 habits of the people. Accumulation of wealth, too, 
 requires and imports security, as well as unfettered 
 activity ; and thus it is a fair criterion of sobriety and 
 justice in a people, certainly, when the laws and their 
 execution rest wholly in their hands. A careless observa 
 tion of the crimes and frauds which attack prosperity, 
 in the actual condition of our society, and the imperfec 
 tion of our means for their prevention and redress, leads 
 sometimes to an unfavorable comparison between the 
 present and the past, in this country, as respects the 
 probity of the people. No doubt covetousness has not 
 ceased in the world, and thieves still break through and 
 steal. But the better test upon this point is the vast 
 profusion of our wealth and the infinite trust shown by 
 the manner in which it is invested. It is not too much 
 to say that in our times, and conspicuously in our 
 country, a larere share of every man s property is in other 
 men s keeping and management, unwatched and beyond 
 personal control. This confidence of man in man is ever 
 increasing, measured by our practical conduct, and re 
 futes these disparagements of the general morality. 
 
 Knowledge, intellectual activity, the mastery of 
 nature, the discipline of life all that makes up the edu 
 cation of a people are developed and diffused through 
 the masses of our population, in so ample and generous a 
 distribution as to make this the conspicuous trait in our 
 
 national character, as the faithful provision and exten 
 sion of the means and opportunities of this education, 
 are the cherished institution of the country. Learning, 
 literature, science, art, are cultivated, in their widest 
 range and highest reach, by a larger and larger number 
 of our people, not, to their praise be it said, as a personal 
 distinction or a selfish possession, but, mainly, as a gen 
 erous leaven, to quicken and expand the healthful fer 
 mentation of the general mind, and lift the level of pop 
 ular instruction. So far from breeding a distempered 
 spirit in the people, this becomes the main prop of au 
 thority, the great instinct of obedience. "It is by edu 
 cation," says Aristotle, " I have learned to do by choice 
 what other men do by constraint of fear." 
 
 SPIRIT OF OUR PEOPLE. 
 
 The " breed and disposition" of a people, in regard of 
 courage, public spirit, and patriotism, are, however, the 
 test of the working of their institutions, which the world 
 most values, and upon which the public safety most de 
 pends. It has been made a reproach of democratic ar 
 rangements of society and government that the senti 
 ment of honor, and of pride in public duty, decayed ill 
 them. It has been professed that the fluctuating cur 
 rents and the trivial perturbations of their public life 
 discouraged strenuous endeavor and lasting devotion in 
 the public ser nee. It has been charged that, as a conse 
 quence, the distinct service of the State suffered, office 
 and magistracy were belittled, social sympathies cooled, 
 love of country drooped, and selfish affections absorbed 
 the powers of the citizens, and eat into the heart of the 
 commonwealth. 
 
 The experience of our country rejects these specula 
 tions as misplaced and these fears as illusory. They be 
 long to a condition of society above which we have long 
 since been lifted, and toward which the very scheme of 
 our national life prohibits a decline. They are drawn 
 from the examples of history, which lodged power for 
 mally In the people, but left them ignorant and abject, 
 unfurnished with the means of exercising it in their own 
 right and for their own benefit. In a democracy wielded 
 by the arts, and to the ends of a patrician class, the less 
 worthy members of that class, no doubt, throve by the 
 disdain which noble characters must always feel for 
 methods of deception and insincerity, and crowded them 
 from the authentic service of the State. But, through 
 the period whose years we count to-day, the greatest 
 lesson of all is the preponderance of public over private, 
 of social over selfish, tendencies and purposes in the 
 whole body of the people, and the persistent fidelity to the 
 genius and spirit of popular institutions, of the educated 
 classes, the liberal professions, and the great men of the 
 country. These qualities transfuse and blend the hues 
 and virtues of the manifold rays of advanced civilization 
 into a sunlight of public spirit and fervid patriotism, 
 
10 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1870. 
 
 which warms and irradiates the life of the nation. Ex 
 cess of publicity as the animating spirit and stimulus of 
 society more probably than its lack will excite our solici 
 tudes in the future. Even the public discontents take on 
 this color, and the mind and heart of the whole people 
 ache with anxieties and throb with griefs which have no 
 meaner scope than the honor and the safety of the nation. 
 
 Our estimate of the condition of this people at the 
 close of a century as bearing on the value and effi 
 ciency of the principles on which the Government was 
 founded, in maintaining and securing the permanent 
 well-being of a nation would, indeed, be incomplete if 
 we failed to measure the power and purity of the relig 
 ious elements which pervade and elevate our society. 
 One might as well expect our land to keep its climate, its 
 fertility, its salubrity, and its beauty were the globe 
 loosened from the law which holds it in an orbit, where 
 we feel the tempered radiance of the sun, as to count 
 upon the preservation of the delights and glories of 
 liberty for a people cast loose from religion, whereby 
 man is bound Is harmony with the moral government of 
 the world. 
 
 It is quite certain that the present day shows no such 
 solemn absorption in the exalted themes of contem 
 plative piety, as marked the prevalent thought of the 
 people a hundred years ago ; nor so hopeful an enthu 
 siasm for the speedy renovation of the world, as burst 
 upon us in the marvelous and wid* 1 system of vehement, 
 religious zeal, and practical good works, in the early part 
 of the nineteenth century. But these fires are less 
 splendid, only because they are more potent, and diffuse 
 their heat in well-formed habits and manifold agencies 
 of beneficent activity. They traverse and permeate so 
 ciety in every direction. They travel with the outposts 
 of civilization and outrun the caucus, the convention, 
 and the suffrage. 
 
 The Church, throughout this land, upheld by no politi 
 cal establishment, rests all the firmer on the rock on 
 which its founder built it. The great mass of our 
 countrymen to-day find in the Bible the Bible in their 
 worship, the Bible in their schools, the Bible in their 
 households the sufficient lessons of the fear of God and 
 the love of man, which make -them obedient servants to 
 the free constitution of their country, in all civil duties, 
 and ready with their lives to sustain it on the fields of 
 war. And now at the end of a hundred years the Chris 
 tian faith collects its worshipers throughout our land, as 
 at the beginning. What half a century ago was hopefully 
 prophesied for our far future, goes on to its fulfillment : 
 "As the sun rises on a Sabbath morning and travels 
 westward from Newfoundland to the Oregon, he will be 
 hold the countless millions assembling, as if by a common 
 impulse, in the temples with which every valley, moun 
 tain, and plain will be adorned. The morning psalm and 
 the evening anthem will commence with the multitudes 
 on the Atlantic Coast, be sustained by the loud chorus of 
 
 ten thousand times ten thousand in the Valley of the 
 Mississippi, and be prolonged by the thousands of thou 
 sands on the shores of the Pacific." 
 
 XII. 
 STRENGTH OP OUR SYSTEM. 
 
 What remains but to search the spirit of the laws of the 
 land as framed by and modeled to the popular govern 
 ment to which our fortunes were committed by the 
 Declaration of Independence ? I do not mean to exam 
 ine the particular legislation, State or General, by which 
 the affairs of the people have been managed, sometimes 
 wisely and well, at others feebly and ill, nor even the 
 fundamental arrangement of political authority, or the 
 critical treatment of great junctures in our policy and 
 history. The hour and the occasion concur to preclude 
 so intimate an inquiry. The chief concern in this regard, 
 to us and to the rest of the world, is, whether the proud 
 trust, the profound radicalism, the wide benevolence 
 which spoke in the " Declaration " and were infused into 
 the " Constitution" at the first have been in good faith ad 
 hered to by the people, and whether now these principles 
 supply the living forces which sustain and direct Govern 
 ment and society. 
 
 He who doubts needs but to look around to find all 
 things full of the original spirit and testifying to its wis 
 dom and strength. We have taken no steps backward, 
 nor have we needed to seek other paths in our progress 
 than those in which our feet were planted at the be 
 ginning. Weighty and manifold have been our obliga 
 tions to the great nations of the earth, to their scholars, 
 their philosophers, tlieir men of genius and of science, to 
 their skill, their taste, their invention, to their wealth, 
 their arts, their industry. But in the institutions and 
 methods of government in civil prudence, courage, or 
 policy in statesmanship, in the art of " making of a 
 small town a great city "in the adjustment of authority 
 to liberty in the concurrence of reason and strength in 
 peace, of force and obedience in war we have found 
 nothing to recall us from the course of our fathers, noth 
 ing to add to our safety or to aid our progress in it. So 
 far from this, all modifications of European politics ac 
 cept the popular principles of our system, and tend to 
 our model. The movements toward equality of repre 
 sentation, enlargement of the suffrage, and public educa 
 tion in England the restoration of unity in Italy the 
 confederation of Germany under the lead of Prussia the 
 actual Republic in France the unsteady throne of Spain 
 the new liberties of Hungary the constant gain to the 
 peop e s share in government throughout Europe all 
 tend one way, the way pointed out in the Declaration of 
 our Independence. 
 
 The care and zeal with which our people cherish and 
 invigorate the primary supports and defenses of their 
 own sovereignty have all the unswerving force and con 
 fidence of instincts. The community and publicity of 
 
What the Age Owes to America -Evarts. 
 
 11 
 
 education, at the charge and as an institution of the 
 State, is firmly imbedded in the wants and the desires of 
 the people. Common schools are rapidly extending 
 through the only part of the country which had been 
 hut against them, and follow close upon the footsteps 
 of its new liberty to eulighten the enfranchised race. 
 Freedom of conscience easily stamps out the first 
 sparkles of persecution, and snaps as green withes the 
 first bonds of spiritual domination. The sacred oracles 
 of their religion the people wisely hold in their own 
 keeping as the keys of religious liberty, and refuse to be 
 beguiled by the voice of the wisest charmer into loosing 
 their grasp. 
 
 Freedom from military power and the maintenance of 
 that arm of the Government in the people ; a trust in 
 their own adequacy as soldiers, when their duty as citi- 
 sens should need to take on that form of service to the 
 State; these have gained new force by the experience of 
 foreign and civil war, and a standing army is a remoter 
 possibility for this nation, in its present or prospective 
 greatness, than in the days of its small beginnings. 
 
 But in the freedom of the press, and the universality of 
 the suffrage, as maintained and exercised to-day through 
 out the length and breadth of the land, we find the most 
 conspicuous and decisive evidence of the unspent force 
 of the institutions of liberty and the jealous guard of its 
 principal defenses. These indeed are the great agencies 
 and engines of the people s sovereignty. They hold the 
 same relations to the vast democracy of modern society 
 that the persuasions of the orators and the personal 
 voices of the assembly did in the narrow confines of the 
 Grecian States. The laws, the customs, the impulses, 
 and sentiments of the people have given wider and wider 
 range and license to the agitations of the press, multi 
 plied and more frequent occasions for the exercise of the 
 suffrage, larger and larger communication of its fran 
 chise. The progress of a hundred years finds these pro 
 digious activities in the fullest play incessant and all- 
 powerful indispensable in the habits of the people, 
 and impregnable in their affections. Their public 
 service, and their subordination to the public safety, 
 stand, in their play upon one another and in 
 their freedom thus maintained. Neither could long 
 exist in true vigor in our system without the 
 other. Without the watchful, omnipresent and indom 
 itable energy of the press, the suffrage would languish, 
 would be subjugated by the corporate power of the 
 legions of placemen which the administration of the 
 affairs of a great nation imposes upon it, and fall a prey 
 to that "vast patronage which," we are told "dis 
 tracted, corrupted, and finally subverted the Roman 
 Eepublic." On the other hand, if the impressions of the 
 press upon the opinions and passions of the people found 
 no settled and ready mode of their working out, through 
 the frequent and peaceful suffrage, the people would be 
 driven, to satisfy their displeasure at government or 
 
 vheir love of change, to the coarse methods of barricade* 
 and batteries. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 OUR COUNTRY TO-DAY. 
 
 We cannot then hesitate to declare that the original 
 principles of equal society and popular government still 
 inspire the laws, live in the habits of the people, and ani 
 mate their purposes and their hopes. These principles 
 have not lost their spring or elasticity. They have suf 
 ficed for all the methods of government in the past ; we 
 feel no fear for their adequacy in the, future. Released 
 now from the tasks and burdens of the formative period, 
 these principles and methods can be directed with undi 
 vided force to the every-day conduct of government^ to 
 the staple and steady virtues of administration. The 
 feebleness of crowding the statute-books with unexecuted 
 laws ; the danger of power outgrowing or evading re 
 sponsibility ; the rashness and fickleness of temporary 
 expedients; the constant tendency by which parties de 
 cline into factions and end in conspiracies ; all these mis 
 chiefs beset all governments and are part of the life of 
 each generation. To deal with these evils the tasks and 
 burdens of the immediate future the nation needs no 
 other resources than the principles and the examples of 
 our past history supply. These principles, these exam 
 ples of our fathers, are the strength and the safety of our 
 State to-day: " Moribus antiquis, stat res Romana, vir- 
 isque." 
 
 Unity, liberty, power, prosperity these are our pos 
 sessions to-day. Our territory is safe against foreign 
 dangers; its completeness dissuades from further am 
 bitions to extend it, and its rounded symmetry dis 
 courages all attempts to dismember it. No division into 
 greatly unequal parts would be tolerable to either. No 
 imaginable union of interests or passions, large enough 
 to include one-half the country, but must embrace much 
 more. The madness of partition into numerous and 
 feeble fragments could proceed only from the hopeless 
 degradation of the people, and would form but an inci 
 dent in general ruin. 
 
 The spirit of the nation is at the highest its triumph- 
 over the inborn, inbred perils of the Constitution has 
 chased away all fears, justified all hopes, and with uni 
 versal joy we greet this day. We have not proved un 
 worthy of a great ancestry ; we have had the virtue to 
 uphold what they so wisely, so firmly established. With 
 these proud possessions of the past, with powers ma 
 tured, with principles settled, with habiis formed, the 
 nation passes as it were from preparatory growth to re 
 sponsible development of character, and the steady per 
 formance of duty. What labors await it, what trials 
 shall attend it, what triumphs for human nature, what 
 glory for itself, are prepared for this people iu the 
 coming century, we may not assume to foretell. " One 
 generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, 
 but the earth abideth forever," and we reverently hop c 
 
12 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 that these our constituted liberties shall be maintained to 
 the unending line of our posterity, and so long as the 
 earth itself shall endure. 
 
 In the great procession of nations, in the great march 
 of humanity, we hold our place. Peace is our duty, 
 peace is our policy. In its arts, its labors, and its vic 
 tories, then, we find scope for all our energies, rewards 
 for all our ambitions, renown enough for all our love and 
 fame. In the august presence of so many nations, which, 
 by their representatives, have done us the honor to be 
 witnesses of our commemorative joy and gratulation, 
 and in sight of the collected evidences of the greatness 
 of their own civilization with which they grace our cele- 
 "bration, we may well confess how much we fall short, 
 how much we have to make up, in the emulative compe 
 titions of the times. Yet, even in this presence, and with 
 a just deference to the age, the power, the greatness of 
 the other nations of the earth, we do not fear to appeal 
 to the opinion of mankind whether, as we point to our 
 land, our people, and our laws, the contemplation should 
 not inspire us with a lover s enthusiasm for our country. 
 
 Time makes no pauses in his march. Even while I 
 peak the last hour of the receding is replaced by the 
 
 first hour of the coming century, and reverence for the 
 past gives way to the joys and hopes, the activities and 
 the responsibilities of the future. A hundred years hence 
 the piety of that generation will recall the ancestral 
 glory which we celebrate to-day, and crown it with the 
 plaudits of a vast population which no man can number. 
 By the mere circumstance of this periodicity our genera 
 tion will be in the minds, in the hearts, on the lips of our 
 countrymen at the next Centennial commemoration in 
 comparison with their own character and condition and 
 with the great founders of the nation. What shall they 
 say of us 1 ? How shall they estimate the part we bear iu 
 the unbroken line of the nation s progress ? And so on, 
 in the long reach of time, forever and forever, our place 
 in the secular roll of the ages must always bring us into 
 observation and criticism. Under this double trust, 
 then, from the past and for the future, let us take heed 
 to our ways, and while it is called to-day, resolve that 
 the great heritage we have received shall be handed 
 down through the long line of the advancing generations, 
 the home of liberty, the abode of justice, the stronghold 
 of faith among men, " which holds the moral elements 
 of the world together," and of faith in God, which binds 
 that world to His throne. 
 
 EISE OF CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY. 
 
 THE REV. DR. STORES AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC, NEW-YORK. 
 
 1. 
 
 MR. PRESIDENT FELLOW-CITIZENS : The 
 long-expected day has come, and passing peacefully the 
 Impalpable line which separates ages, the Republic com 
 pletes its hundredth year. The predictions in which af 
 fectionate hope gave inspiration to political prudence 
 are fulfilled. The fears of the timid, and the hopes of 
 those to whom our national existence is a menace, are 
 alike disappointed. The fable of the physical world be 
 comes the fact of the political ; and after alternate sun- 
 ehine and storm, after heavings of the earth which only 
 deepened its roots, and ineffectual blasts of lightning 
 whose lurid threat died in the air, under a sky now rain 
 ing on it benignant influence, the century-plant of Amer 
 ican Independence and popular government bursts into 
 this magnificent blossom of a joyful celebration illumi 
 nating the land! 
 
 With what desiring though doubtful expectation those 
 whose action we commemorate looked for the possible 
 coming of this day, we know from the records which 
 they have left. With what anxious solicitude the states 
 men and the soldiers of the following generation antici 
 pated the changes which might take place before this 
 
 Centennial year should be reached, we have heard our 
 selves, in their great and fervent admonitory words. 
 How dim and drear the prospect seemed to our own 
 hearts fifteen years since, when, on the Fourth of July, 
 1861, the XXXVIIth Congress met at Washington with 
 no representative in either House from any State south 
 of Tennessee and Western Virginia, and when a deter 
 mined and numerous army, under skillful commanders, 
 approached and menaced the capital and the Govern 
 mentthis we surely have not forgotten ; nor how, in 
 the terrible years which followed, the blood and fire, and 
 vapor of smoke, seemed oftentimes to swim as a sea, or 
 to rise as a wall, between our eyes and this anniversary. 
 " It cannot outlast the second generation from those 
 who founded it," was the exulting conviction of the 
 many who loved the traditions and state of monarchy, 
 and who felt them insecure before the widening fame in 
 the world of our prosperous Republic. " It may not 
 reach its hundredth year," was the deep and sometimes 
 the sharp apprehension of those who felt, as all of us felt, 
 that their own liberty, welfare, hope, with the brigfitest 
 political promise of the world, were bound up with the 
 unity ana the life of our nation. Never was solicitud^ 
 
Rise of Constitutional Liberty Storrs. 
 
 13 
 
 more intense, never was prayer to Almighty God more 
 fervent and constant not in the earliest beginnings of 
 our history, when Indian ferocity threatened that history 
 with a swift termination; not in the days of supremest 
 trial amid the Revolution than in those years when the 
 nation seemed suddenly split asunder, and forces which 
 had been combined for its creation were clinched and 
 rocking back and forth in bloody grapple on the question 
 of its maintenance. 
 
 The prayer was heard. The effort and the sacrifice 
 have come to their fruitage, and to-day the nation still 
 one, as at the start, though now expanded over such im 
 mense spaces, absorbing such incessant and diverse ele 
 ments from other lands, developing within it opinions so 
 conflicting, interests so various, and forms of occupation 
 so novel and manifold to-day the nation, emerging from 
 the toil and the turbulent strife, with the earlier and the 
 later clouds alike swept out of its resplendent stellar 
 arch, pauses from its work to remember and rejoice ; 
 with exhilarated spirit to anticipate its future, with rev 
 erent heart to offer to God its great Te Deum. 
 
 II. 
 A DAY OF COSMOPOLITAN JOY, 
 
 Not here alone, in thi ( s great city, whose lines have gone 
 out into all the earth, and whose superb progress in 
 wealth, in culture, and in civic renown is itself the most 
 illustrious token of the power and beneficence of that 
 frame of government under which it has been realized ; 
 not alone in yonder I had almost said adjoining city, 
 whence issued the paper that first announced our na 
 tional existence, and where now rises the magnificent 
 Exposition, testifying for all progressive States to their 
 respect and kindness toward us, the radiant clasp of dia 
 mond and opal on the girdle of the sympathies which in 
 terweave their peoples with ours ; not alone in Boston, 
 the historic town, first in resistance to British aggression 
 and foremost in plans for the new and popular organiza 
 tion, one of whose citizens wrote his name, as if cutting 
 it with a plowshare, at the head of all on our great 
 charter, another of whose citizens was its intrepid and 
 powerful champion, aiding its passage through the Con 
 gress ; not there alone, nor yet in other great cities of the 
 land, but in smaller towns, in villages and hamlets, this 
 day will be kept, a secular Sabbath, sacred alike to mem 
 ory and to hope. 
 
 Not only, indeed, where men are assembled, as we are 
 here, will it be honored. The lonely and remote will 
 have their parts in this commemoration. Where the 
 boatman follows the winding stream or the woodman ex 
 plores the forest shades ; where the miner lays down his 
 eager drill beside rocks which guard the precious veins, 
 or where the herdsman, along the sierras, looks forth on 
 the seas which now reflect the rising day, which at our 
 midnight shall be gleaming like gold in the setting sun ; 
 there also will the day be regarded as a day of memorial. 
 
 The sailor on the sea will note it, and dress his ship in its 
 brightest array of flags and bunting. Americans dwell 
 ing in foreign lands will note and keep it. 
 
 London itself will to-day be more festive because of the 
 event which a century ago shadowed its streets, incensed 
 its Parliament, and tore from the crown of its obstinate 
 King the chiefest jewel. On the boulevards of Paris, iu 
 the streets of Berlin, and along the leveled bastions of 
 Vienna, at Marseilles, and at Florence, upon the silent 
 liquid ways of stately Venice, in the passes of the Alps, 
 under the shadow of church and obelisk, palace and 
 ruin, which still prolong the majesty of Rome ; yet, fur 
 ther east, on the Bosphorus and in Syria ; in Egypt 
 which writes on the front of its compartment in the great 
 Exhibition : " The oldest people of the world sends its 
 morning greeting to the youngest nation;" along the 
 hights behind Bombay, in the foreign hongs of Canton 
 in the " Islands of the Morning," which found the dawn 
 of their new age in the startling sight of an American 
 squadron entering their bays everywhere will be those 
 who have thought of this day, and who join with us to 
 greet its comitig. 
 
 No other such anniversary, probably, has attracted 
 hitherto such general notice. You have seen Rome, per 
 haps, on one of those shining April days when the tradi 
 tional anniversary of the founding of the city fills its 
 streets with civic processions, with military display, and 
 the most elaborate fireworks in Europe ; you may have 
 seen Holland in 1872, when the whole country bloomed 
 with orange on the three-hundredth aaniversary of the 
 capture by the sea-beggars of the City of Briel, and of 
 the revolt against Spanish domination which thereupon 
 flashed on different sides into sudden explosion. But 
 these celebrations, and others like them, have been 
 chiefly local. The world outside has taken no wide im 
 pression from them. This of ours is the first of which 
 many lands, in different tongues, will have had report. 
 Partly because the world is narrowed in our time, and 
 its distant peoples are made neighbors by the fleeter ma 
 chineries now in use ; partly because we have drawn sa 
 many to our population from foreign lands, while the 
 restless and acquisitive spirit of our people has made 
 them at home on every shore ; but partly, also, and es 
 sentially, because of the nature and the relations of that 
 event which we commemorate, and of the influence ex 
 erted by it on subsequent history, the attention of men 
 is more or less challenged, in every center of commerce 
 and of thought, by this anniversary. 
 
 Indeed it is not unnatural to feel certainly it is not 
 irreverent to feel that they who by wisdom, by valor, 
 and by sacrifice, have contributed to perfect and main 
 tain the institutions which we possess, and have added 
 by death as well as by life to the luster of our history, 
 must also have an interest in this day ; that in their 
 timeless habitations they remember us beneath the lower 
 circle of the heavens, are glad in our joy, and share and 
 
14 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 Jead onr grateful praise. To a spirit alive with the memo 
 ries of the time, and rejoicing in its presage of nobler 
 futures, recalling the great, the beloved, the heroic, who 
 have labored and joyfully died for its coming, it will not 
 seem too fond an enthusiasm to feel thattbe air is quick 
 with shapes we cannot see, and glows with faces whose 
 light serene we may not catch ! They who counseled in 
 the Cabinet, they who denned and settled the law in de 
 cisions of the bench, they who pleaded with mighty elo 
 quence in the Senate, they who poured out their souls in 
 triumphau t effusion for the liberty which they loved in 
 forum or pulpit, they who gave their young and glorious 
 life as an offering on the field, that government for the 
 people and by the people might not perish from the earth- 
 it cannot be but that they too have part and place in this 
 jubilee of our history ! God make our doings not un 
 worthy of such spectators, and make our spirit sympa 
 thetic with theirs, from whom all selfish passion and 
 pride have now forever passed away ! 
 
 The interest which is felt so distinctly and widely in 
 this anniversary reflects a light on the greatness of the 
 action which it commemorates. It shows that we do not 
 unduly exaggerate the significance or the importance of 
 that ; that it had really large, even world-wide, relations, 
 and contributed an effective and a valuable force to the 
 furtherance of the cause of freedom, education, humane 
 institutions, and popular advancement, wherever its in 
 fluence has been felt. Yet when we consider the action 
 itself it may easily seem but slight in its nature, as it 
 was certainly commonplace in its circumstances. There 
 was nothing even picturesque in its surroundings, to en 
 list for it the pencil of the painter, or help to fix any 
 luminous image of that which was done on the popular 
 memory. 
 
 In this respect it is singularly contrasted with other 
 great and kindred events in general history ; with those 
 heroic and fruitful actions in English history which had 
 especially prepared the way for it, and with which the 
 thoughtful student of the past will always set it in inti 
 mate relations. 
 
 III. 
 
 KING JOHN AND MAGNA CHARTA. 
 When, five centuries and a half before, on the 15th of 
 June, and the following days, in the year of our Lord 
 1215, the English barons met King John in the long 
 meadow of Runnymede, and forced from him the Magua 
 Charta the strong foundation and steadfast bulwark of 
 English liberty, concerning which Mr. Hallam has said 
 in our own time that " all which has been since obtained 
 is little more than as confirmation- or commentary" no 
 circumstance was wanting of outward pageantry to 
 give dignity, brilliance, impressiveness to the scene. On 
 the one side was the King, with the Mshops and 
 gentry who adhered to him, and the Papal legate before 
 whom he had lately rendered his homage. On the other 
 side was the great and determined majority of the barons 
 
 of England, with multitudes of knights, armed vassals, 
 and retainers. Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canter 
 bury, the head of the English clergy, was with them ; 
 the Bishops of London, Winchester, Lincoln, Worces 
 ter, Rochester, and of other great Sees. The Earl 
 of Pembroke, daring and wise, of vast and increasing 
 power in the realm, was at their head. Robert Fitz 
 Walter, whose lair daughter Matilda the profligate King 
 had forcibly abducted, was Marshal of the Army the 
 "Army of God and the Holy Church." William Long- 
 sword, Earl of Salisbury, half-brother of the King, was 
 with the barons. The Earls of Albemarle, Arundel, 
 Gloucester, Hereford, Norfolk, Oxford, were in the array ; 
 the great Earl Warrenne, who claimed the same right of 
 the sword in his barony which William the Conqueror 
 had had in the Kingdom ; the Constable of Scotland, 
 Hubert de Burgh, Seneschel of Poictou, and many othei 
 powerful nobles. Some burgesses of London were 
 present as well ; and doubtless there mingled with the 
 throng those skillful clerks whose pens had drawn the 
 great instrument of freedom, and whose training in 
 language had given a remarkable precision to its exact 
 clauses and cogent terms. 
 
 Pennons and banners streamed at large, and spear 
 heads gleamed above the host. The Juno sunshine 
 flashed, reflected from inlaid shields and damascened 
 armor. The terrible bows of the English yeomen hung 
 on their shoulders. The voice of trumpets and clamoring 
 bugles was in the air. The whole scene was va&t as a 
 battle, though bright as a tournament; splendid, but 
 threatening, like burnished clouds, in which lightnfngs 
 sleep. The King, one of the handsomest men of the 
 time, though cruelty, perfidy, and every foul passion 
 must have left their traces on his face, was especially 
 fond of magnificence in dress, wearing, we are told, on 
 one Christmas occasion a rich mantle of red satin, em 
 broidered with sapphires and pearls, a tunic of white 
 damask, a girdle lustrous with precious stones, and a 
 baldric from his shoulder, crossing his breast, set with 
 diamonds and emeralds, while even his gloves as indeed 
 is stiH indicated on his fine effigy in Worcester Cathedral 
 bore similar ornaments, the one a ruby, the other a 
 sapphire. 
 
 Whatever was superb, therefore, in that consummate 
 age of royal and baronial state, whatever was splendid 
 in the glittering and grand apparatus of chivalry, what 
 ever was impressive in the almost more than princely 
 pomp of the prelates of the Church 
 
 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power 
 And all that beauty, all that wealth e er gave 
 
 all this was marshaled on that historic plain in Surrey 
 where John and the barons faced each other, where 
 Saxon King and Saxon Earl had met in council before the 
 Norman had footing in England ; and all combined lo 
 give a fit magnificence of setting to the great charter 
 there granted and sealed. 
 
llise of Constitutional Liberty Starrs. 
 
 15 
 
 The tower of Windsor not of the present castle and 
 palace, but of the earlier detached fortress which already 
 crowned the cliff, and from which John had come to the 
 field looked down on the scene. On the one side low 
 hills inclosed the meadow ; on the other the Thames 
 flowed brightly by, seekiner the capital and the sea. 
 Every feature of the scene was English, save one ; but 
 over all loomed, in a portentous and haughty stillness, 
 in the ominous presence of the envoy from Rome, that 
 ubiquitous power, surpassing all others, which already 
 had once laid the kingdom under interdict, and had 
 exiled John from Church and throne, but to which, later, 
 he had been reconciled, and on which now he secretly 
 relied to annul the charter which he was granting. 
 
 The brilliant panorama illuminates the page which 
 bears its story. It rises still as a vision before one, as he 
 looks on the venerable parchment originals, preserved to 
 our day in the British Museum. Tf it be true, as Hallam 
 has said, that from that era there was a new soul in the 
 people of England, it must be confessed that the place, 
 the day, and aU the circumstances of that new birth 
 were fitting: to the great and the vital event. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE ENGLISH PETITION OF EIGHT. 
 
 That age passed away, and its peculiar splendor of 
 aspect was not thereafter to be repeated. Yet when, 400 
 years later, on the 7th of June, 1628, the Petition of 
 Eight, the second great charter of the liberties of En 
 gland, was presented by Parliament to Charles I., the 
 scene and its accessories were hardly less impressive. 
 
 Into that law called a petition, as if to mask the 
 deadly energy of its blow upon tyranny had been col 
 lected by the skill of its framers all the heads of the 
 despotic prerogative which Charles had exercised, that 
 they might all together be smitten with one tremendous 
 destroying stroke. The King, enthroned in. his chair of 
 state, looked forth on those who waited for his word, as 
 still he looks, with his forecasting and melancholy face, 
 from the canvas of Van Dyke. Before him were assem 
 bled the nobles of England in peaceful array, and not in 
 armor, but with a civil power in their hands which the 
 older gauntlets could not have held, and with the 
 memories of a long renown almost as visible to them 
 selves and to the King, as were the tapestries suspended 
 on the walls. 
 
 Crowding the bar, behind these descendants of the 
 earlier barons, were the members of the House of Com- 
 mocs, with whom the law now presented to the King 
 had had its origin, and whose boldness and tenacity had 
 constrained the peers, after vain endeavor to modify its 
 provisions, to accept them as they stood. They were the 
 most powerful body of representatives of the kingdom 
 that had yet been convened ; possessing a private wealth, 
 it was estimated, surpassing threefold that of the Peers, 
 
 and representing not less than they the best life and the 
 oldest lineage of the Kingdom which they loved. 
 
 Their dexterous, dauntless, and far-sighted sagacity i? 
 yet more evident, as we look back, than their wealth or 
 their breeding ; and among them were men whose names 
 will be familiar while England continues. Wentworth 
 was there, soon to be the most dangerous of traitors to the 
 cause of which he was then the champion, but who 
 then appeared as resolute as ever to vindicate the an 
 cient, lawful, and vital liberties of the kingdom ; and 
 Pym was there, who not long after was to warn the dark 
 and haughty apostate that he never again would leave 
 pursuit of him so long as his head stood on his shoulders 
 Hampden was there, considerate and serene, but inflex 
 ible as an oak ; once imprisoned already for his resistance 
 to an unjust taxation, and ready again to suffer and to 
 conquer in the same supreme caus?. Sir John Eliot was 
 there, eloquent and devoted, who had tasted also the 
 bitterness of imprisonment, and who, after years of its 
 subsequent experience, was to die a martyr in the Tower. 
 Coke was there, 77 years of age, but full of fire as full of 
 fame, whose vehement and unswerving hand had had 
 chief part in framing the petition. Selden was there, the 
 repute of whose learning was already Continental. Sir 
 Francis Seymour, Sir Robert Philips, Strode, Hobart, 
 Denzil Holies, and Valentine such were the Commoners; 
 and there, not impossibly for the first time in his life, faced 
 the King, a silent young member who had come now to 
 his first Parliament, at the age of 29, from the borough of 
 Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 In a plain cloth suit he stood among his colleagues. 
 But they were often splendid and even sumptuous in 
 dress; with embroidered doublets and coats of velvet, 
 with flowing collars of rich lace, the swords by their sides 
 with flashing hilts, their very hats jeweled and plumed, 
 the abundant dressed and perfumed hair falling in curls 
 upon their shoulders. Here and there were those who 
 still more distinctly symbolized their spirit with steel 
 corselets, overlaid with lace and rich embroidery. 
 
 So stood they in the presence, representing to the full 
 the wealth and genius and stately civic pomp of England, 
 until the King had pronounced his assent, in the express 
 customary form, to the law which confirmed the popular 
 liberties ; and when, on hearing his unequivocal final as 
 sent, they burst into loud, even passionate, acclamations 
 of victorious joy, there had been from the first no scene 
 more impressive in that venerable hall, whose history- 
 went back to Edward the Confessor. 
 
 In what sharp contrast with the rich ceremonial and 
 the splendid accessories of these preceding kindred 
 events, appears that modest scene at Philadelphia, from 
 which we gratefully date to-day a hundred years of con 
 stant and prosperous national life 1 
 
14 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 Jead oar grateful praise. To a spirit alive with the memo 
 ries of the time, and rejoicing in its presage of nobler 
 futures, recalling the great, the beloved, the heroic, who 
 have labored and joyfully died for its coming, it will not 
 seem too fond an enthusiasm to feel that the air is quick 
 with shapes we cannot eee, and glows with faces whose 
 light serene we may not catch ! They who counseled in 
 the Cabinet, they who denned and settled the law in de 
 cisions of the bench, they who pleaded with mighty elo 
 quence in the Senate, they who poured out their souls in 
 triumphant effusion for the liberty which they loved in 
 forum or pulpit, they who gave their young and glorious 
 life as an offering on the field, that government for the 
 people and by the people might not perish from the earth- 
 it cannot be but that they too have part and place in this 
 jubilee of our history ! God make our doings not un 
 worthy of such spectators, and make our spirit sympa 
 thetic with theirs, from whom all selfish passion and 
 pride have now forever passed away ! 
 
 The interest which is felt so distinctly and widely in 
 this anniversary reflects a light on the greatness of the 
 action which it commemorates. It shows that we do not 
 unduly exaggerate the significance or the importance of 
 that ; that it had really large, even world-wide, relations, 
 and contributed an effective and a valuable force to the 
 furtherance of the cause of freedom, education, humane 
 institutions, and popular advancement, wherever its in 
 fluence has been felt. Yet when we consider the action 
 itself it may easily seem but slight in its nature, as it 
 was certainly commonplace in its circumstances. There 
 was nothing even picturesque in its surroundings, to en 
 list for it the pencil of the painter, or help to fix any 
 luminous image of that which was done on the popular 
 memory. 
 
 In this respect it is singularly contrasted with other 
 great and kindred events in general history ; with those 
 heroic and fruitful actions in English history which had 
 especially prepared the way for it, and with which the 
 thoughtful student of the past will always set it in inti 
 mate relations. 
 
 III. 
 
 KING JOHN AND MAGNA CHARTA. 
 When, five centuries and a half before, on the loth of 
 June, and the following days, in the year of our Lord 
 1215, the English barons met King John in the long 
 meadow of Runnymede, and forced from him the Magna 
 Charta the strong foundation and steadfast bulwark of 
 English liberty, concerning which Mr. Hallam has said 
 in our own time that " all which has been since obtained 
 is little more than as confirmation or commentary" no 
 circumstance was wanting of outward pageantry to 
 give dignity, brilliance, impressiveness to the scene. On 
 the one side was the King, with the Mshops and 
 gentry who adhered to him, and the Papal legate before 
 whom he had lately rendered his homage. On the other 
 side was the great and determined majority of the barons 
 
 of England, with multitudes of knights, armed vassals, 
 and retainers. Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canter 
 bury, the head of the English clergy, was with them ; 
 the Bishops of London, Winchester, Lincoln, Worces 
 ter, Rochester, and of other great Sees. The Earl 
 of Pembroke, daring and wise, of vast and increasing 
 power in the realm, was at their head. Robert Fitz 
 Walter, whose fair daughter Matilda the profligate King 
 had forcibly abducted, was Marshal of the Army the 
 "Army of God and the Holy Church." Williaon Long- 
 sword, Earl of Salisbury, half-brother of the King, was 
 with the barons. The Earls of Albemarle, Arundel, 
 Gloucester, Hereford, Norfolk, Oxford, were in the array ; 
 the great Earl Warrenne, who claimed the same right of 
 the sword in his barony which William the Conqueror 
 had had in the Kingdom ; the Constable of Scotland, 
 Hubert de Burgh, Seneschel of Poictou, and many othei 
 powerful nobles. Some burgesses of London were 
 present as well ; and doubtless there mingled with the 
 throng those skillful clerks whose pens had drawn the 
 great instrument of freedom, and whose training in 
 language had given a remarkable precision to its exact 
 clauses and cogent terms. 
 
 Pennons and banners streamed at large, and spear 
 heads gleamed above the host. The Juno sunshine 
 flashed, reflected from iniaid shields and damascened 
 armor. The terrible bows of the English yeomen hung 
 on their shoulders. The voice of trumpets and clamoring 
 bugles was in the air. The whole scene was va&t as a 
 battle, though bright as a tournament; splendid, but 
 threatening, like burnished clouds, in which lightnings 
 sleep. The King, one of the handsomest men of the 
 time, though cruelty, perfidy, and every foul passion 
 must have left their traces on his face, was especially 
 fond of magnificence in dress, wearing, we are told, on 
 one Christmas occasion a rich mantle of red satin, em 
 broidered with sapphires and pearls, a tunic of white 
 damask, a girdle lustrous with precious stones, and a 
 baldric from his shoulder, crossing his breast, set with 
 diamonds and emeralds, while even his gloves as indeed 
 is stiH indicated on his fine effigy in Worcester Cathedral 
 bore similar ornaments, the one a ruby, the other a 
 sapphire. 
 
 Whatever was superb, therefore, in that consummate 
 age of royal and baronial state, whatever was splendid 
 in the glittering and grand apparatus of chivalry, what 
 ever was impressive in the almost more than princely 
 pomp of the prelates of the Church 
 
 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power 
 And all that beauty, all that wealth e er gave 
 
 all this was marshaled on that historic plain in Surrey 
 where John and the barons faced each other, where 
 Saxon King and Saxon Earl had met in council before the 
 Norman had footing in England; and all combined to 
 give a fit magnificence of setting to the great charter 
 there granted and sealed. 
 
llise of Constitutional Liberty Starrs. 
 
 15 
 
 The tower of Windsor not of the present castle and 
 palace, but of the earlier detached fortress which already 
 crowned the cliff, and from which John had come to the 
 field looked down on the scene. On the one side low 
 hills inclosed the meadow ; on the other the Thames 
 flowed brightly by, seeking the capital and the sea. 
 Every feature of the scene was English, save one ; but 
 over all loomed, in a portentous and haughty stillness, 
 in the ominous presence of the envoy from Rome, that 
 ubiquitous power, surpassing all others, which already 
 had once laid the kingdom under interdict, and had 
 exiled John from Church and throne, but to which, later, 
 he had been reconciled, and on which now he secretly 
 relied to annul the charter which he was granting. 
 
 The brilliant panorama illuminates the page which 
 bears its story. It rises still as a vision before one, as he 
 looks on the venerable parchment originals, preserved to 
 our day in the British Museum. Tf it be true, as Hallam 
 has said, that from that era there was a new soul in the 
 people of England, it must be confessed that the place, 
 the day, and aU the circumstances of that new birth 
 were fitting to the great and the vital event. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE ENGLISH PETITION OF EIGHT. 
 
 That age passed away, and its peculiar splendor of 
 aspect was not thereafter to be repeated. Yet when, 400 
 years later, on the 7th of June, 1628, the Petition of 
 Right, the second great charter of the liberties of En 
 gland, was presented by Parliament to Charles I., the 
 scene and its accessories were hardly less impressive. 
 
 Into that law called a petition, as if to mask the 
 deadly energy of its blow upon tyranny had been col 
 lected by the skill of its framers all the heads of the 
 despotic prerogative which Charles had exercised, that 
 they might all together be smitten with one tremendous 
 destroying stroke. The King, enthroned in his chair of 
 state, looked forth on those who waited for his word, as 
 still he looks, with his forecasting and melancholy face, 
 from the canvas of Van Dyke. Before him were assem 
 bled the nobles of England in peaceful array, and not in 
 armor, but with a civil power in their hands which the 
 older gauntlets could not have held, and with the 
 memories of a long renown almost as visible to them 
 selves and to the King, as were the tapestries suspended 
 on the walls. 
 
 Crowding the bar, behind these descendants of the 
 earlier barons, were the members of the House of Com 
 mons, with whom the law now presented to the King 
 had had its origin, and whose boldness and tenacity had 
 constrained the peers, after vain endeavor to modify its 
 provisions, to accept them as they stood. They were the 
 most powerful body of representatives of the kingdom 
 that had yet been convened ; possessing a private wealth, 
 it was estimated, surpassing threefold that of the Peers, 
 
 and representing not less than they the best life and the 
 oldest lineage of the Kingdom which they loved. 
 
 Their dexterous, dauntless, and far-sighted sagacity i? 
 yet more evident, as we look back, than their wealth or 
 their breeding ; and among them were men whose names 
 will be familiar while England continues. Wentworth 
 was there, soon to be the most dangerous of traitors to the 
 cause of which he was then the champion, but who 
 then appeared as resolute as ever to vindicate the an 
 cient, lawful, and vital liberties of the kingdom ; and 
 Pym was there, who not long after was to warn the dark 
 and haughty apostate that he never again would leave 
 pursuit of him so long as his head stood on his shoulders 
 Hampden was there, considerate and serene, but inflex 
 ible as an oak ; once imprisoned already for his resistance 
 to an unjust taxation, and ready again to suffer and to 
 conquer in the same supreme cause. Sir John Eliot was 
 there, eloquent and devoted, who had tasted also the 
 bitterness of imprisonment, and who, after years of its 
 subsequent experience, was to die a martyr in the Tower. 
 Coke was there, 77 years of age, but full of fire as full of 
 fame, whose vehement and unswerving hand had had 
 chief part in framing the petition. Selden was there, the 
 repute of whose learning was already Continental. Sir 
 Francis Seymour, Sir Robert Philips, Strode, Hobart, 
 Denzil Holies, and Valentine such were the Commoners; 
 and there, not impossibly for the first time in his life, faced 
 the King, a silent young member who had come now to 
 his first Parliament, at the age of 29, from the borough of 
 Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 In a plain cloth suit he stood among his colleagues. 
 But they were often splendid and even sumptuous in 
 dress; with embroidered doublets and coats of velvet, 
 with flowing collars of rich lace, the swords by their sides 
 with flashing hilts, their very hats jeweled and plumed, 
 the abundant dressed and perfumed hair falling in curls 
 upon their shoulders, Here und there were those who 
 still more distinctly symbolized their spirit with steel 
 corselets, overlaid with lace and rich embroidery. 
 
 So stood they in the presence, representing to the full 
 the wealth and genius and stately civic pomp of England, 
 until the King had pronounced his assent, in the express 
 customary form, to the law which confirmed the popular 
 liberties ; and when, on hearing his unequivocal final as 
 sent, they burst into loud, even passionate, acclamations 
 of victorious joy, there had been from the first no scene 
 more impressive in that venerable hall, whose history 
 went back to Edward the Confessor. 
 
 In what sharp contrast with the rich ceremonial and 
 the splendid accessories of these preceding kindred 
 events, appears that modest scene at Philadelphia, from 
 which we gratefully date to-day a hundred years of con 
 stant and prosperous national life I 
 
18 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 only 12 colonies Toted at first for the great Declaration, 
 and that New-York was not joined to the number till live 
 days later. But Jay knew, and all knew, that, numerous, 
 wealthy, eminent in character, high in position as were 
 those here and elsewhere in the country in Massa 
 chusetts, in Virginia, and in the Carolinas who were by 
 no means yet prepared to sever their connection with 
 Great Britain, the general and governing mind of the peo 
 ple was fixed upon this with a decision which nothing could 
 change, with a tenacity which nothing could break. The 
 forces tending to that result had wrought to their de 
 velopment with a steadiness and strength which the 
 stubbornest resistance had hardly delayed. The spirit 
 -which now shook light and impulse over the land was 
 recent in its precise demand, but as old in its birth as the 
 first Christian settlements, and it was that spirit not of 
 one, nor of fifty, not of all the individuals in all the con 
 ventions, but the vaster spirit which lay behind which 
 put itself on sudden record through the prompt and ac 
 curate pen of Jefferson. 
 
 VI [I. 
 WHY THE DECLARATION WILL ENDURE. 
 
 He was himself in full sympathy with it, and only by 
 reason t jtf that sympathy could give it such consummate 
 expression. Not out of books, legal researches, histori 
 cal inquiry, the careful and various studies of language, 
 came that document ; but out of repeated public debate, 
 cut of manifold personal and private discussion, out of 
 his clear, sympathetic observation of the changing feel 
 ing and thought of men, out of that exquisite personal 
 sensibility to vague and impalpable popular impulses 
 which was in him innately combined with artistic taste, 
 an ideal nature and rare power of philosophical thought. 
 The voice of the cottage as well as the college, of the 
 Church as well as the legislative assembly, was in the 
 paper. It echoed the talk of the farmer in homespun, as 
 well as the classic eloquence of Lee, or the terrible 
 tones of Patrick Henry. It gushed at last from the pen 
 of its writer, like the fountain from the roots of Lebanon, 
 abrhnrniug river when it issues from the rock ; but it 
 was because its sources had been supplied, its fullness 
 filled by unseen springs; by the rivulets winding far up 
 among the cedars, and percolating through hidden 
 crevices in the stone; by melting snows, whose white 
 sparkle seemed still on t he stream ; by fierce rains, with 
 which tlie basins above were drenched ; by even the 
 dews, silent and wide, which had lain in stillness all 
 night upon the hill. 
 
 The Platonic idea of liie development of the State was 
 thus realized here ; first ethics, then politics. A public 
 opinion, energetic and dominant, took its place from the 
 start as the chief instrument of the new civilization. No 
 dashing maneuvers of skillful commanders, no sudden 
 burst of popular passion, was in the Declaration ; but the 
 vast mystery of a supreme and imperative public life, at 
 
 once diffused and intense behind all persons, before all 
 plans, beneath which individual wills are exalted, at 
 whose touch the personal mind is inspired, and under 
 whose transcendent impulse the smallest instrument be 
 comes of a terrific force. That made the .Declaration ; 
 and that makes it now, in its modest brevity, take its 
 place with Magna Charta and the Petition of Right, as 
 full as they of vital force, and destined to a parallel per 
 manence. 
 
 Because this intense common life of a determined and 
 manifold people has not behind them, other documents, 
 in form similar to this, and in polish and cadence of bal-, 
 anced phrase perhaps its superiors, have no hold like 
 that which it keeps on the memory of men. What papers 
 have challenged the attention of men within the century, 
 in the stately Spanish tongue, in Mexico, New-Granada, 
 Venezuela, Bolivia, or in the Argentine Republic, which 
 the people themselves now hardly remember ? How the 
 resonant proclamations of German or of French Repub 
 licans, of Hungarian or Spanish revolutionists and pat 
 riots, have vanished as sound absorbed in the air ! Elo 
 quent, persuasive, just, as they were, with a vigor of 
 thought, a fervor of passion, a fine completeness and 
 symmetry of expression in which they could hardly be 
 surpassed, they have only now a literary value. They 
 never became great general forces. They were weak, 
 because they were personal : and history is too crowded, 
 civilization is too vast, to take much impression from 
 occasional documents. Only then is a paper of secular 
 force or long remembered when behind it is the ubiquit 
 ous energy of the popular will, rolling through its words 
 in vast diapason, and charging the clauses with tones of 
 thunder. 
 
 Because such an energy was behind it, our Declaration 
 had its majestic place and meaning, and they who 
 adopted it saw nowhere else 
 
 So ricli advantage of a promised g ory 
 
 AS smiled upon the forehead of their action. 
 
 Because of that we read it still, and look to have it as 
 audible as now among the dissonant voices of the world, 
 when other generations in long succession have come 
 and gone ! 
 
 But further, too, it must r be observed that this paper, 
 adopted a hundred years since, was not merely the 
 declaration of a people, as distinguished from eminent 
 and cultured individuals a confession before the world 
 of the public State-faith, rather than a political thesis 
 but it was also the declaration of a people which claimed 
 for its own a great inheritance of equitable laws and of 
 practical liberty, and which now was intent to enlarge 
 and enrich that. It had roots iu the past and a long 
 genealogy, and so it had a vitality Inherent, ar.d an im 
 mense energy. 
 
Rise of Constitutional Liberty Storrs. 
 
 19 
 
 IX. 
 LATENT FORCES PUT IN ACTION. 
 
 They who framed it went back, indeed, to first princi 
 ples. There was something philosophic and ideal in 
 their scheme, as always there is when the general mind 
 is deeply stirred. It was not superficial. Yet they were 
 not undertaking to establish new theories, or to build 
 their State upon artificial plans and abstract specula 
 tions. They were simply evolving out of the past what 
 therein had been latent ; were liberating into free exhibi 
 tion and unceasing activity a vital force older than the 
 history of their colonization, and wide as the lands from 
 which they came. They had the sweep of vast impulses 
 behind them. The slow tendencies of centuries came to 
 sudden consummation in their Declaration, and the force 
 of its impact upon the affairs and the mind of the world 
 was not to be measured by its contents alone, but by the 
 relation in which these stood to all the vehement discus 
 sion and struggle of which it was the latest outcome. 
 This ought to be always distinctly observed. 
 
 The tendency is strong, and has been general, among 
 those who have introduced great changes in the govern 
 ment of States, to follow some plan of political, perhaps 
 of social innovation, which enlists their judgment, ex 
 cites their fancy, and to make a comely theoretical hab 
 itation for the national household, rather than to build 
 on the old foundations, expanding the walls, lifting the 
 night, enlarging the doorways, enlightening with new 
 windows the halls, but still keeping the strength and re 
 newing the age, of an old and venerated structure. You 
 remember how in France, In 1789 and the following 
 years, the schemes of those whom Napoleon called the 
 41 ideologists," succeeded each other, no one of them grain 
 ing a permanent supremacy, though ea<jh included im 
 portant elements, till the armed Consulate of 1799 swept 
 them all into the air, and put in place of them one mas 
 terful genius and ambitious will. You remember how in 
 Spain, in 1812, the new Constitution proclaimed by 
 the Cortes was thought to inaugurate with beneficent 
 provisions a wh lly new era of development and prog 
 ress; yet how the history of the splendid peninsula. 
 1 rom that day to this, has been but the record of a strug 
 gle to the death between the Old and the New, the con 
 test as desperate, it would seem, in our time as it was in 
 the first. 
 
 ! It must be so always when a preceding state of society 
 and government, which has got itself established through 
 many generations, is suddenly superseded by a different 
 fabric, however more evidently conformed to right rea- 
 SCQ. The principle is not so strong as the predjudice. 
 Habit masters invention. The new and theoretic shivers 
 its force on the obstinate coherence of tbe old and the 
 established. Tlic modern structure falls and is replaced, 
 while the grim feudal keep, though scarred and weather 
 worn, tbe very .cement seeming gone from its walls, still 
 
 scowls defiance at the red right hand of the lightning 
 itself. 
 
 It was no such rash speculative change which here was 
 attempted. The people whose deputies framed our 
 Declaration were largely themselves descendants of En 
 glishmen ; and those who were not had lived long enough 
 under English institutions to be impressed with their 
 tendency and spirit. It was therefore only natural that 
 even when adopting that ultimate measure which sev 
 ered them from the British crown, they should retain all 
 that had been gained in the mother land through centu 
 ries of endurance and strife. They left nothing that was 
 good ; they abolished the bad, added the needful, and de 
 veloped into a rule for the continent the splendid pre 
 cedents of great former occasions. They shared still the 
 boast of Englishmen that their Constitution "has no 
 single date from which its duration is to be reckoned," 
 and that " the origin of the English law is as undiscov- 
 erable as that of the Nile." They went back themselves 
 for the origin of their liberties to the most ancient muni 
 ments of English freedom. Jefferson had affirmed, in 
 1774, that a primitive charter of American Independ 
 ence lay in the fact that as the Saxons had left their na 
 tive wilds in the North of Europe, and had occupied 
 Britain the country which they left asserting over them 
 no further co itrol, nor any dependence of them upon it 
 so the Englishmen coming hither had formed, by that 
 act, another State over which Parliament had no rights, 
 in which its laws were void till accepted. 
 
 X. 
 
 ENGLISH IDEAS PRESERVED. 
 But while seeking for their liberties so archaic a basis, 
 neither he nor his colleagues were in the least careless of 
 what subsequent times had done to complete them. 
 There was not one element of popular right, which had 
 been wrested from the crown and nobles in any age, 
 which they did not keep; not an equitable rule for the 
 transfer or the division of property, for the protection of 
 personal rights, or for the detection and punishment of 
 crime, which was not precious in their eyes. Even 
 chancery jurisdiction they retained, with the distinct 
 tribunals, derived from the ecclesiastical courts, for pro 
 bate of wills, and the English tsclmicalities were main 
 tained in the courts almost as if they were sacred things. 
 Especially that of equality of civil rights among all com 
 moners, which Hallam declares the most prominent 
 characteristic of the English Constitution the source of. 
 its permanence, its improvement, and its vigor they per 
 fectly retained; they only more sharply affirmatively de 
 clared it. And even in renouncing their allegiance to theJ 
 King, and putting the United Colonies in his place, they 
 felt themselves acting in intimate harmony with thespiriti 
 and drift of the ancient Constitution. The Executive" 
 here was to be elective, not hereditary, to be limited and 
 not permanent in the term of his functions ; and no 
 
20 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 established peerage should exist. But each State re 
 tained its Governor, Legislature, its ancient statute and 
 common law ; and if they had been challenged for En 
 glish authority for their attitude toward the Crown they 
 might have replied in the words of Bracton, the Lord 
 Chief -Justice, 500 years before, under the reign of Henry 
 III., that the law makes the King : " There is no King 
 where will and not law bears rule ;" " if the King were 
 without a bridle, that is the law, they ought to put a 
 bridle upon him." They might have replied in the words 
 of Fox, speaking in Parliament in daring defiance of the 
 temper of the House, but with many supporting him, 
 when he said that in declaring independence they [the 
 Americans] " had done no more than the English had 
 done against James II." 
 
 They had done no more ; though they had not elected 
 another King in place of him whom they renounced. 
 They had taken no step so far in advance of the then 
 existing English Constitution as these which the Parlia 
 ment of 1640 took in advance of the previous Parliaments 
 which Charles had dissolved. If there was a right more 
 rooted than another in that Constitution, it was the right 
 of the people which was taxed to have its vote in the 
 taxing Legislature. If there was anything more 
 accordant than another with its historic temper and 
 tenor, it was that the authority of the King was deter 
 mined when his rule became tyrannous. Jefferson had 
 but perfectly expressed the doctrine of the lovers of 
 freedom in England for many generations when he said 
 in his " Summary View of the Rights of America," in 
 1774, that " the monarch is no more than the chief officer 
 of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed 
 with definite powers, to assist in working the great 
 machine of government, erected far their use, and, con 
 sequently, subiect to their superintendence;" that 
 " Kings are the servants, not the proprietors, of the 
 people," and that a nation claims its rights " as derived 
 from the laws of nature, not as the gift of their chief 
 magistrate." 
 
 That had been the spirit, if not as yet the formulated 
 doctrine of Raleigh, Hampden, Russel, Sidneyof all the 
 great leaders of liberty in England. Milton had declared 
 it in a prose as majestic as any passage of the Paradise 
 Lost. The Common wealth had been built on it, and the 
 whole Revolution of 1638. And they who now framed it 
 into their permanent organic law, and made it supreme 
 in the country they were shaping, were in harmony with 
 the noblest inspirations of the past. They were not in 
 novating with a rash recklessness. They were simply 
 accepting and reaffirming what they had learned from 
 luminous events and illustrious men. So their work had 
 a dignity, a strength, and a permanence, which can never 
 belong to mere fresh speculations, ft interlocked with 
 that of multitudes going before. It derived a virtue 
 from every field of struggle in Eiig?$ttd; iroiu eve*y 
 scaflold hallowed by free ami consecrated blood; from 
 
 every hour of great debate. It was only the complete 
 development into law for a separated people of that 
 august ancestral liberty, the eerms of which had pre 
 ceded the Heptarchy, the gradual defiuitiou and estab 
 lishment of which had been the glory of English his 
 tory. A thousand years brooded over the room where 
 they asserted hereditary rights. Its walls showed 
 neither portraits nor mottoes ; but the Kaiser-saal at 
 Frankfurt was not hung around with such recollections. 
 No titles were worn by those plain men; but there had 
 not been one knightly soldier or one patriotic and pres 
 cient statesman, standing for liberty in the 1 splendid 
 centuries of its English growth, who did not touch them 
 with unseen accolade and bid them be faithful. The 
 paper which they adopted, fresh from the pen of its 
 young author, and written on his hired piue-table, was 
 already, in essential life, of a venerable age; and it took 
 immense impulse, it derived an instant and vast author 
 ity from its relation to that undying past in which they 
 too had grand inheritance, and from which their public 
 life had come. 
 
 Englishmen themselves now recognize this, and olteii 
 are proud of it. The distinguished representative of 
 Great Britain at Washington may think his Government, 
 as no doubt he does, superior to ours, but his clear eye 
 cannot fail to see that English liberty was the parent of 
 ours, and that the new and broader continent here 
 opened before it suggested that expansion of it which we 
 celebrate to-day. His ancestors, like ours, helped to 
 build the Republic; and its faithfulness to the past, amid 
 all inaovatious, was one great secret of its earliest tri 
 umph, has been one source from that day to this of its 
 enduring and prosperous strength. 
 
 XL 
 THE EIGHT OF REVOLUTION. 
 
 The Congress, and the people behind it, asserted for 
 themselves hereditary liberties, and hazarded everything 
 in the purpose to complete them. But they also affirmed 
 with emphasis and effect another right, more general 
 than this, which made their action significant and impor 
 tant to other people ; which made it indeed a signal to 
 the nations of the right of each to assert for itself the 
 just prerogative of forming its government, electing its 
 rulers, ordaining its laws, as might to it seem most expe 
 dient. Hear ag:iin the immortal words : " We hold these 
 truths to be self-evident: * * * that to secure these 
 fiualieuable] rights, governments are instituted ainoiig 
 men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the 
 governed; that whenever any form of go veruuient be 
 comes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the 
 people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new govern 
 ment, laying its foundations in such principles, and 
 organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall 
 seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." 
 
 This is what the party of Bentham called "the assurnp- 
 
Rise of Constitutional Liberty titorrs. 
 
 21 
 
 tion of natural rights, claimed without the slightest evi 
 dence of their existence, and supported by vague and 
 declamatory generalities." This is what we receive as 
 the decisive and noble declaration, spoken with the sim 
 plicity of a perfect conviction, of a natural right as patent 
 as the continent ; a declaration which challenged at once 
 the attention of mankind, and which now is practically 
 assumed as a premise in international relations and pub 
 lic law. 
 
 Of course, it was not a new discovery. It was old as 
 the earliest of political philosophers ; as old, indeed, as 
 the earliest communities, which becoming established in 
 particular locations had there developed their own insti 
 tutions, and repelled with vehemence the assaults that 
 would change them. But in the growth of political socie 
 ties, and the vast expansion of imperial States, by the 
 conquest of those adjacent and weaker, the right, so 
 easily recognized at the outset, so german to the in 
 stincts, so level with the reason of every community, had 
 widely passed out of men s thoughts ; and the power 
 of a conquering State to change the institutions and 
 laws of a people, or impose on it new ones the 
 power of a parent State to shape the forms and prescribe 
 the rules of the colonies which went from it had been 
 so long and abundantly exercised that the very right of 
 the people thus conquered or colonial, to consult its own 
 interests in the frame of its Government, had been almost 
 forgotten. It might be a high speculation of scholars or 
 a. charming dream of political enthusiasts. But it was 
 rot a maxim for the practical statesman ; and whatever 
 its cori ectness as an ideal principle, it was vain to expect 
 to see it established in a world full of Kings, who claimed 
 each for himself an authority from God, and full of 
 States intent on grasping and governing by their law 
 adjacent domains. The revolt of the Netherlands 
 against Spanish domination had been the one instance 
 in modern history in which the inherent right of a people 
 to suit itself in the frame of its government had been 
 proclaimed and then maintained ; and that had been a 
 paroxysmal revolt against tyranny so crushing and cruel- 
 tics so savage that they took it out of the line of examples. 
 The Dutch Republic was almost as exceptional, through 
 the fierce wickedness which had crowded it into being, as 
 was Switzerland itself on its Alpine hights. For an 
 ordinary State to claim self-regulation, and found its 
 Government on a plebiscite, was to contradict precedent, 
 and to set at defiance European tradition. 
 
 Our fathers, however, in a somewhat vague way, had 
 held from the start that they had right to an autonomy, 
 and that acts of Parliament and appointments of the 
 Crown took proper effect upon these shores only by 
 reason of their assent. Their charters were held to eon- 
 linn this doctrine. This conviction, at first practical and 
 instinctive rather than theoretic, had grown with their 
 growth, and bad been intensified into positive affirma 
 tion and public exhibition as the British lule infringed 
 
 more sharply on their interests and their hopes. It had 
 finally become the general and decisive conviction of 
 the colonies. It had spoken already in armed resistance 
 to the troops of the King. It had been articulated, with 
 gathering emphasis, lu many resolves of assemblies and 
 conventions. I^was now finally, most energetically, set 
 forth to the world in the great Declaration ; and in that 
 utterance, made general not particular, and founding the 
 rights of the people in this country on principles as wide 
 as humanity itself, there lay an appeal to every nation 
 an appeal whose words took unparalleled force, were illu 
 minated and made rubrical, in the fire and blood of the 
 following war. 
 
 When the Emperor Ferdinand visited Innsbruck that 
 beautiful town of the Austrian Tyrol in 1838, it is said 
 that the inhabitants wrote his name in immense bonfires 
 along the sides of the precipitous hills which shelter the 
 town. Over a space of four or five miles extended that 
 colossal illumination, till the heavens seemed on fire in 
 the far-reflected, up-streaming glow. The right of a 
 people, separated from others, to its own institutions 
 our fathers wrote this in lines so vivid and so large that 
 the whole world could see them ; and they followed that 
 writing with the consenting thunders of so many cannon 
 that even the lands across the Atlantic were shaken and 
 filled with the long reverberation. 
 
 XII. 
 REVOLT AGAINST DIVINE RIGHT. 
 
 The doctrine had, of course, in every State its two-fold 
 internal application, as well as its front against external 
 powers. On the one hand it swept with destroying force 
 against the notion so long maintained of the right of 
 certain families in the world, called Hapsburg, Bour 
 bon, Stuart, or whatever, to govern the rest ; and wher 
 ever it was received it made the imagined Divine Right 
 of Kings an obsolete and contemptible fiction. On the 
 other hand, it smote with equal energy against the pre 
 tensions of any minority within the State, whether 
 banded together by the ties of descent, or of neighbor 
 hood in location, or of common opinion, or supposed 
 common interest, to govern the rest ; or even to impair 
 the established and paramount government of the rest 
 by separating themselves organically from it. 
 
 It was never the doctrine of the fathers that the people 
 of Kent, Cornwall, or Lincoln, might sever themselves 
 from the rest of England, and while they had their voice 
 and vote in the public councils might assert the right to 
 govern the whole, under threat of withdrawal if their 
 minor vote were not suffered to control. They were not 
 seeking to initiate anarchy, and to make it thenceforth 
 respectable in the world by support of their suffragee. 
 They recognized the fact that the State exists to meet per 
 manent needs, is the ordinance of God as well as the 
 family ; and that He has determined the bounds of men s 
 habitation, by rivers, seas, and mountain chains, shaping 
 
Independence Day Orations. July 4. 1876. 
 
 countries as well as continents into physical coherence, 
 while giving one man his birth on the north of the Pyre 
 nees, another on the south, one on the terraced banks of 
 the Rhine, another in English meadow or upland. They 
 saw that a common and fixed habitation, in a country 
 thus physically defined, especially when combined with 
 community of descent, of permanent public interest, and 
 of the language on which thought is interchanged that 
 these make a people ; and such a people, as a true and 
 abiding body-politic, they affirmed had right to shape its 
 government, forbidding others to intermeddle. 
 
 But it must bo the general mind of the people which 
 determined the questions thus involved; not a dictating 
 class within the State, whether known as peers or asso 
 ciated commoners, whether scattered widely, as one 
 among several political parties, or grouped together in 
 some one section, and having a special interest to en 
 courage. The decision of the general public mind, as de 
 liberately reached, and authentically declared, that must 
 be the end of debate ; and the right of resistance, or the 
 right of division, after that, if such right exist, it is not 
 to be vindicated from their Declaration. Any one who 
 thought such government by the whole intolerable to 
 Lim was always at liberty to expatriate himself, and find 
 elsewhere such other institutions as he might prefer. 
 But he could not tarry, and still not submit. He was not 
 a monarch, without the crown, before whose contrary 
 ludgment and will the public councils must be dumb. 
 While dwelling in the land and having the same opportu 
 nity with others to seek the amendment of what he dis 
 approved, the will of the whole was binding upon him ; 
 and that obligation he could not vacate by refusing to 
 accept it. If one could not, neither could ten, nor a hun 
 dred, uor a million, who still remained a minority of the 
 whole. 
 
 To allow such a right would have been to make govern 
 ment transparently impossible. Not separate sections 
 only, but counties, townships, school districts, neighbor 
 hoods, must have the same right; and each individual, 
 with his own will for his final law, must be the complete 
 ultimate State. 
 
 It was no such disastrous folly which the fathers of our 
 Republic affirmed. They ruled out kings, princes, peers, 
 from any control over the people ; and they did ot give 
 to a transient minority, wherever it might appear, on 
 whatever question, a greater privilege, because less de 
 fined, than that which they jealously withheld from these 
 classes. Such a tyranny of irresponsible occasional mi 
 norities would have seemed to them only more intolera 
 ble than that of classes organized, permanent, and lim 
 ited by law. And when it was affirmed by some, and 
 silently feared by many others, that in our late immense 
 civil war the States which adhered to the old Constitu 
 tion had forgotten or discarded the principles 
 of the earlier Declaration, those assertions and 
 fears were alike without reason. The people which 
 
 adopted the Declaration when distributed into 
 colonies, was the people which afterward established the 
 Confederation of 1781, imperfect enough, but whose 
 abiding renown it is that under it the war was ended. It 
 was the same people which framed the Constitution 
 when compacted into States. " We the people of the 
 United States," do ordain and establish the following: 
 Constitution, so runs the majestic and vital instrument- 
 It contains provisions for its own emendation. When 
 the people will they may set it aside, and put in place of 
 it one wholly different ; and no other nation can inter 
 vene. But while it continues, it and the laws made 
 normally under it are not subject to resistance by a por 
 tion of the people conspiring to direct or limit the rest, 
 And, whensoever any pretension like this shall appear, 
 if ever again it does appear, it will undoubtedly as in 
 stantly appear that even as in the past so in the future, 
 the people, whose the Government is, and whose com 
 plete and magnificent domain God has marked out for it r 
 will subdue resistance, compel submission, forbid seces 
 sion, though it cost again, as it cost before, four years of 
 war, with treasure uncounted and inestimable life. 
 
 The right of a people upon its own territory, as equally 
 against any classes within it or any external powers, 
 this is the doctrine of our Declaration. We know how it 
 here has been applied, and how settled it is upon these 
 shores for the time to come. liVe know, too, something 
 of what impression it instantly made upon tne minds of 
 other peoples, and how they sprang to greet and accept 
 it. In the fine image of Bancroft, "the astonished 
 nations, as they read that all men are created equal, 
 started out of their lethargy, like those who have been 
 exiles from childhood, when they suddenly hear the 
 dimly-remembered accents of their mother-tongue." 
 
 XIII. 
 
 AMERICA S INFLUENCE ON HISTORY. 
 The theory of scholars was now become the maxim of 
 a State. The diffused ineffectual nebulous light had got 
 itself concentrated into an orb ; and the radiance of it,, 
 penetrating and hot, shone afar. You know how France 
 responded to it ; with passionate speed seeking to be rid 
 of the terrific establishments in Church and State which, 
 had nearly crushed the life of the people, and with a. 
 beautiful though credulous unreason trying to lift by 
 the grasp of the law into intelligence and political 
 capacity the masses whose training for thirteen cen- 
 tures had been despotic. No operation of natural law 
 was any more certain than the failure of that too daring 
 experiment. But the very failure involved progress from 
 it involved, undoubtedly, that ultimate success which 
 it was vain to try to extemporize. Certainly the other 
 European powers will not again intervene, as they did, 
 to restore a despotism which France had abjured, and 
 with forei n bayonets to uphold institutions which it 
 does not desire. Italy. Spain, Germany, England they 
 
are not republican in the form of their government, nor 
 aa yet democratic in the distribution of powers. But 
 each of them is as full of this organic, self-demonstrating 
 doctrine as js our own land ; and England would send no 
 troops to Canada to compel its submission if it should 
 decide to set up for itself. Neither Italy nor Spaiu would 
 maintain a monarchy a moment longer than the general 
 mind of the country preferred it. Germany would be 
 fused in the fire of one passion if any foreign nation 
 whatever should assume to dictate the smallest change 
 In one of its laws. 
 
 The doctrine of the proper prerogative of Kings, de 
 rived from God, which in the last century was more com 
 mon in Europe than the doctrine of the centrality of the 
 sun in our planetary system, is now as obsolete among 
 the intelligent as are the epicycles of Ptolemy. Every 
 government expects to stand henceforth by assent of the 
 governed, and by no otherclaim or right. It is strong by 
 beneficence, not by tradition, and at the hight of its mil 
 itary successes it circulates appeals and canvasses for 
 ballots. Revolution is carefully sought to be averted by 
 timely and tender amelioration of the laws. The most 
 progressive and liberal States are most evidently secure, 
 while, those which stand, like olive trees at Tivoli, with 
 feeble arms supported on pillows and hollow trunks 
 filled up with stone, are palpably only temptiug the 
 blast. An alliance of sovereigns, like that called the 
 Holy, for reconstructing the map of Europe, and parcel 
 ing out the passive peoples among separate governments, 
 would to-day be no more possible than would Charle 
 magne s plan for reconstructing the Empire of the West. 
 Even Murad, Sultan of Turkey, now takes the place of 
 Abdul, the deposed, " by the Grace of God and the will ot 
 the people;" and that accomplished and illustrious 
 prince, whose empire under the Southern Cross rivals our 
 own in its extent, and most nearly approaches it on this 
 hemisphere in stability of institutions and in practical 
 freedom, has his surest title to the throne which he 
 honors in his wise liberality, and his faithful endeavor 
 for the good of his people. As long as in this he con 
 tinues as now a recognized leader among the monarchy 
 ready to take and. seek suggestions from even a demo 
 cratic Republic his throne will be steadfast as the 
 water-sheds of Brazil ; and while his successors maintain 
 his spirit no domestic insurrections will test the Question 
 whether they retain that celerity in movement with which 
 Dom Pedro has astonished Americans. 
 
 It is no more possible to reverse this tendency toward 
 popular sovereignty, and to substitute for it the right of 
 families, classes, minorities, or of intervening foreign 
 States, than it is to arrest the motion of the earth, and 
 make it swing the other way in its annual orbit. In thia, 
 at least, our fathers Declaration has made its impression 
 oa the history of mankind. 
 
 It was the act of a people and not of persons, except as 
 
 Else of Constitutional Liberty Storrs. 23 
 
 not starting out on new theories of government so much 
 as developing into forms of law and practical force a 
 great and gradual inheritance of freedom. It was the 
 act of a people declaring for others as for itself the right 
 of each to its own form of government without interfer 
 ence from other nations, without restraint by privileged 
 classes. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 HLLPS TO THE PROGRESS OF MANKIND. 
 
 It only remains, taeu, to ask the question now far it has 
 contributed to the peace, the advancement, and. the per 
 manent welfare of the people by which it was set forth 
 of other nations which it has affected. And to ask thii 
 question is almost to answer it. The answer is as evi 
 dent as the sun in the heavens. 
 
 It cannot certainly be affirmed that we in America, any 
 more than persons or peoples elsewhere, have reached a* 
 yet the ideal state of private liberty combined with a per 
 fect public order, or of culture complete and a supreme 
 character. The political world, as well as the religious, 
 since Christ was on earth, looks forward, not backward, 
 for its niillennium. That golden age is still to coino 
 which is to shine in the perfect splendor reflected from 
 Him who is ascended; and no prophecy tells us how long 
 before the advancing race shall reach and cross its glow 
 ing marge, or what long effort, or what tumults of battle, 
 are still to precede. 
 
 In this country, too, there have been immense special 
 impediments to hinder wide popular progress in thing* 
 which are highest. Our people have had a continent to- 
 subdue. They have been from the start in constant mi 
 gration. Westward, from the counties of the Hudson 
 and the Mohawk, around the lakes, over the prairies, 
 across the great river; westward still, over alkali plains, 
 across terrible canons, up gorges of the mountains where* 
 hardly the wild goat could find footing ; westward al 
 ways, till the Golden Gate opened out ou the sea which 
 has been made 10,000 miles wide, as if nothing less could 
 stop the march this has been the popular movement 
 Irorn almost the day of the great Declaration. To-mor 
 row s tents have been pitched in new fields, and last 
 year s houses await new possessors. 
 
 With such constant change, such wide dislocation of 
 the mass of the people from early and settled home as 
 sociations, and with the incessant occupation of the 
 thoughts by the great physical problems presented not 
 so much by any struggle for existence as by harvests for 
 which the prairies waited, by mills for which the rivers 
 clamored, by the coal and the gold which offered them 
 selves to the grasp of the miner it would not have been 
 strange if a great and dangerous decadence had occurred 
 in that domestic and private virtue of which home is the 
 nursery, in that generous and reverent public spirit 
 which is but the effluence of its combined rays. It would 
 have been wholly too much to expect that, under such 
 
 these represented and led it. It was the act of a people 
 
 influences, the highest progress should have been re- 
 
24 
 
 alizcd in speculative tliouglit, in artistic culture, or in the 
 researches of pure science. 
 
 Accordingly, we find that in these departments not 
 enough has been accomplished to make our progress 
 signal in them, though here and there the eminent souls, 
 " that are like stars and dwell apart," have illumined 
 themes highest with their high interpretations. But 
 history has been cultivated among us with an enthusiasm, 
 to an extent hardly I think to have been anticipated 
 among a people so recent and expectant ; and Prescott, 
 Motley, Irving, Ticknor, with him upon whose splendid 
 page all American history has been amply illustrated, are 
 known as familiarly and honored as highly in Eu 
 rope as here. We have had, as well, distinguished 
 poets, and have them now, to whom the nation has 
 been respo . ,ive, through whom the noblest poems of 
 the Old World have come into the English toiigue, ren 
 dered in fit and perfect music, and some of whose minds, 
 blossoming long ago in the solemn and beautiful fancies 
 of youth, with perennial energy still ripen to new fruit 
 as they near or cross their four score years. In medicine 
 and law, as well aa in theology, in fiction, biography, 
 and the vivid narrative of exploration and discovery, the 
 people whose birthday we commemorate has added 
 something to the possession of men. Its sculptors and 
 painters have won high places in the brilliant realm of 
 modern art. Publicists like Wheaton, jurists like Kent, 
 have gained a celebrity reflecting honor on the land ; 
 and if no orator so vast in knowledge, so profound and 
 discursive in philosophical thought, so affluent in im 
 agery, and so glorious in diction as Edmund Burke has 
 yet appeared, we must remember that centuries were 
 needed to produce him elsewhere, and that any of the 
 great Parliamentary debaters, aside from him, have been 
 matched or surpassed in the hearing of those who have 
 hung with rapt sympathetic attention on the lips of 
 Clay or of Rufus Choate, or have felt themselves listen 
 ing to the mightiest mind which ever touched theirs 
 when they stood beneath the imperial voice in which 
 Webster spoke. 
 
 In applied science there has been much done in the 
 country, for which the world admits itself our grateful 
 debtor. I need not multiply illustrations of this from 
 locomotives, printing presses, sewing-machines, revol 
 vers, steam reapers, bank locks. One instance suffices, 
 most signal of all. When Morse, from Washington, 
 32 years ago, sent over the wires his word to Baltimore, 
 "What hath God wrought," he had given to all the na 
 tions of mankind an instrument the most sensitive, ex 
 pansive, quickening, which the world yet possesses. He 
 bad bound the earth in electric network. 
 
 England touches India to-day, and France Algeria, 
 while we are in contact with all the continents upon these 
 scarcely perceptible nerves. The great strategist like 
 Von Moltke, with these in his hands, from the silence of 
 his office directs campaigns, dictates marches, wins vic- 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 tories ; the statesman in the Cabinet Inspires aid regu 
 lates the distant diplomacies; while the traveler in any 
 poit or mart is by the same marvel of mechanism in in 
 stant communication with all centers of commerce. It 
 Is certainlv not too much to say that no other invention 
 of the world in this century has so richly deserved the 
 medals, crosses, and diamond decorations, the applause 
 of senates, the gifts of kings, which have been showered 
 upon its author, as did this invention, which finally 
 taught and utilized the lightnings whose nature a signer 
 of the great Declaration had made apparent. 
 
 XV. 
 INDIVIDUAL ADVANCEMENT. 
 
 But after all it is not so much in special inventions, or 
 in eminent attainments made by individuals, that we are 
 to find the answer to the question, " What did that day, 
 a hundred years since, accomplish for us ?" Still less is 
 it found in the progress we have made in outward wealth 
 and material success. This might have been made, ap 
 proximately at least, if the British supremacy had here 
 continued. The prairies would have been as productive 
 as now, the mines of copper and silver and gold as rich 
 and extensive, the coal-beds as vast, and the cotton-fields 
 as fertile, if we had been born the subjects of the Georgea 
 or of Victoria. Steam would have kept its propulsive 
 force, and sea and land have been theaters of its triumph. 
 The river would have been as smooth a highway for the 
 commerce which seeks it ; and the leap of every moun 
 tain stream would have given as swift and constant a 
 push to the wheels that set spindles and saws in motion. 
 Electricity itself would have lost no property, and 
 might have become as completely as now the fire- winged 
 messenger of the thought of mankind. 
 
 But what we have now, and should not have had ex 
 cept for that paper which the Congress adopted, is the 
 general and increasing popular advancement in knowl 
 edge, vigor, as I believe in moral culture, of which our 
 country has been the arena, and in which lies its hope for 
 the future. The independence of the nation has acted 
 with sympathetic force on the personal life which the 
 nation includes. It has made men more resolute, aspir 
 ing, confident, and more susceptible to whatever exalts. 
 The doctrine that all by creation are equal not in re 
 spect of physical force or of mental endowment, of means 
 for culture or inherited privilege, but in respect of im 
 mortal faculty, of duty to each other, of right to protec 
 tion, and to personal development this has given manli 
 ness to the poor, enterprise to the weak, a kindling hope 
 to the most obscure. It has made the individuals of 
 whom the nation is composed more alive to the forces 
 which educate and exalt. 
 
 There has been incessant motive, too, for the wide and 
 constant employment of these forces. It has been felt 
 that, as the people is sovereign here, that people must b? 
 tuned in mind and spirit for its august and sovereign 
 
Else of Constitutional Liberty Storrs. 
 
 25 
 
 function. The establishment of common schools for a 
 needful primary secular training has been an instinct of 
 society, only recognized and repeated in provisions of 
 sta utes. The establishment of higher schools, classical 
 and general, of colleges, scientific and professional semi 
 naries, has been as well the impulse of the nation, and 
 the furtherance of them a care of Government. The im 
 mense expansion of the press in this country has been 
 based fundamentally upon the same impulse ; and has 
 wrought with beneficent general force in the same direc 
 tion. Religious instruction has gone as widely as this 
 distribution of secular knowledge. 
 
 It used to be thought that a Church dissevered from 
 the State must be feeble. Wantine: wealth of endow 
 ments and dignity of titles its clergy entitled to no 
 place among the Peers, its revenues assured by no legal 
 enactments it must remain obscure and poor, while the 
 absence of any external limitations, of parliamentary 
 rubrics and a legal creed, must leave it liable to endless 
 division, and tend to its speedy disintegration iuto sects 
 and schisms. It seemed as hopeless to look for strength, 
 wealth, beneficence, for extensive educational and mis 
 sionary work, to such churches as these, as to look for 
 aggressive military organization to a company of farmers, 
 or for the volume and thunder of Niagara to a thousand 
 sinking and separate rills. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 GKOWTH OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 But the work which was given to be done in this coun 
 try was so great and momentous, and has been so constant 
 that matching itself against that work the Church, under 
 whatever name, has realized a strength, and developed 
 an activity, wholly fresh in the world in modern times. 
 It has not been antagonized by that instinct of liberty 
 which always awakens against its work, where religion 
 is required by law. It has seized the opportunity. Its 
 ministers and members have had their own standards, 
 leaders, laws, and sometimes have quarreled, fiercely 
 enough, as to which were the better. But in the work 
 which was set them to do, to give to the sovereign Ameri 
 can people the knowledge of God in the Gospel of His 
 Son, their only strife has been one of emulation to go 
 the furthest, to give the most, and to bless most largely 
 the land and its future. The spiritual incentive has of 
 course been supreme ; but patriotism has added its im 
 pulse to the work. It has been felt that Christianity is 
 the basis of republican empire, its bond of cohesion, its 
 life-giving law ; that the ancient manuscript copies of 
 the Gospels sent by Gregory to Augustine at Canterbury, 
 and still preserved on sixth century parchments at Ox 
 ford and Cambridge more than Magna Charta itself 
 these are the roots of English liberty ; that Magna Charta 
 and the Petition of Right with our completing Declara 
 tion, were possible only because these had been be- 
 
 ity prevalent in the land, all Christian churches have 
 eagerly striven. Their preachers have been heard where 
 the pioneer s fire scarce was kindled. Their schools have 
 been gathered in the temporary camp, not less than in 
 the hamlet or town. They have sent their books with 
 lavish distribution, they have scattered their Bibles like 
 leaves of Autumn, where settlements were hardly more 
 than prophesied. In all languages of the land they have 
 told the old story of the Law and the Cross, a present re 
 demption and a coming tribunal. The highest truths, 
 most solemn and inspiring, have been the truths most 
 constantly in hand. It has been felt that, in the best 
 sense, a muscular Christianity was indispensable where 
 men lifted up axes upon the thick trees. The delicate 
 speculations of the closet and the schools were too dainty 
 for the work ; and the old confessions of councils and re 
 formers, whose undecaying and sovereign energy no use 
 exhausts, have been those always most familiar where 
 the trapper on his stream or the miner in his gulch has 
 found priest or minister on his track. 
 
 Of course not all the work has been fruitful. Not all 
 God s acorns come to oaks, but here and there one. Not 
 all the seeds of flowers germinate, but enough to make 
 some radiant gardens. A*hd out of all this work and gift 
 has come a mental and moral training to the nation at 
 large such as it certain y would not have had except for 
 this effort, the effort for which would not have been m tde 
 on a scale so immense except for the incessant aim to fit 
 the nation for its great experiment of self-regulation. 
 The Declaration of Independence has been the great 
 charter of public education; has given impulse and 
 scope to this prodigious missionary work. 
 
 The result of the whole is evident enough. I am not 
 here as the eulogist of our people beyond what facts jus 
 tify. I admit, with regret, that American manners 
 sometimes are coarse, and American culture very imper 
 fect ; that the noblest examples of a consummate train 
 ing imply a leisure which we have not had, and are per 
 haps most easily produced where social advantages are 
 more permanent than here, and the law of heredity has a 
 wider recognition. We all know too well how much of 
 even vice and shame there has been in our national life ; 
 how corruption has entered high places in the Govern 
 ment, and the blister of its touch has been upon laws, a* 
 well as on the acts of prominent officials. And we know 
 the reckless greed and ambition, the fierce party spirit, 
 the personal wrangles and jealous animosities, with 
 which our Congress has been often dishonored; at which 
 the nation sadder still has sometimes laughed in idiotic 
 unreason. 
 
 XVII. 
 LARGE VITALITY AMID CORRUPTIONS. 
 
 But knowing all this, and with the impression of it full 
 on our thoughts, we may exult in the real, steady, an4 
 
 fore them. And so in the work of keeping Christian- prophesying growth of a better spirit toward dominance 
 
26 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 187G. 
 
 in the land. I scout the thought that we, as a people, are 
 worse than our fathers ! John Adams, at the head of the 
 War Department, in 1776, wrote bitter laments of the 
 corruption which existed in even that infant age of the 
 Republic, and of the spirit of venality, rapacious and in 
 satiable, which was then the most alarming enemy of 
 America. He declared himself ashamed of the age he 
 lived in ! In Jefferson s day all Federalists expected the 
 universal dominion of French infidelity. In Jackson s 
 day all Whigs thought the country gone to ruin already, 
 as if Mr. Biddle had had the entire public hope locked up 
 in the vaults of his terminated bank. In Folk s day the 
 excitements of the Mexican War gave life and germina 
 tion to all seeds of rascality. There has never been a 
 time not here alone, in any country when the fierce 
 light of incessant inquiry blazing on men in public life 
 would not have brought out such forces of evil as we 
 have seen, or when the condemnation which followed 
 the discovery would have been sharper. And it is among 
 my deepest convictions that, with all which has hap 
 pened to debase and debauch it, the nation at large was 
 never before more mentally vigorous or morally sound 
 than it is to-day. 
 
 Gentlemen, the demonstration* is around us. This city, 
 if any place on the continent, should have been the one 
 where a reckless wickedness should have had sure pre 
 valence, and reforming virtue the least chance of suc- 
 ee&s. Starting in 1790 with a white population of less 
 than 30,000 growing steadily for 40 years, till that 
 population has multiplied six-foldtaking into itself 
 from that time on such multitudes of emigrants from all 
 parts of the earth that the dictionaries of the languages 
 spoken in its streets would make a library all forms of 
 luxury coming with wealth, and all means and facilities 
 for every vice the primary elections being always the 
 seed-bed out of which springs its choice of rulers, with 
 the influence which it sends to the public councils its 
 citizens so absorbed in their pursuits that oftentimes, 
 for years together, large numbers of them have left its 
 affairs in hands the most of all unsuited to so supreme 
 and delicate a trust it might well have been expected 
 that while its docks were echoing with a commerce which 
 encompassed the globe, while its streets were thronged 
 with the eminent and the gay from all parts of the land, 
 while its homes had in them uncounted thousands of 
 toble men and cultured women, while its stately 
 (squares swept out year by year across new space, while 
 it founded great institutions of beneficence and shot new 
 spires upward toward heaven, and turned the rocky 
 waste to a pleasure-ground famous in the earth, its Gov 
 ernment would decay, and its recklessness of moral ideas, 
 if not as well of political principles, would be-some ap 
 parent. 
 
 Men have prophesied this, from the outset till now. 
 The fear of it began with the first great advance of the 
 wealth, population, and fame of the city ; and there, have 
 
 not been wanting facts in its history which served to re 
 new if not to justify the fear. 
 
 But when the war of 1861 broke on the land, and shad 
 owed every home within it, this city which had voted 
 by immense majorities against the existing Administra 
 tion, and which was liaked by a million ties with the 
 great communities that were rushing to assail it flung 
 out its banners from window and spire, from City Hall 
 and newspaper office, and poured its wealth and life into- 
 the service of sustaining the Government, with a swift 
 ness and strength and a vehement energy that were 
 never surpassed. When, afterward, greedy and treach 
 erous men, capable and shrewd, deceiving the unwary, 
 hiring the skillful, and molding the very law to their 
 uses, had concentrated in their hands the government of 
 the city, and had bound it in seemingly invincible chains 
 while they plundered its treasury it rose upon them, 
 when advised of the facts, as Samson rose upon the Phil 
 istines ; and the two new cords that were upon his hands 
 no more suddenly became as flax that was burned than 
 did those manacles imposed upon the city by the craft 
 of the Ring. 
 
 Its leaders of opinion to-day are the men like him who 
 presides m our assembly whom virtue exalts and char 
 acter crowns. It rejoices in a Chief Magistrate as up 
 right and intrepid in a virtuous course as any of thosev 
 whom he succeeds. It is part of a State whose present 
 position, in laws, and officers, and the spirit of its people 
 does no discredit to the noblest of its memories. And 
 from these hights between the rivers, looking over the 
 land, looking out on the earth to which its daily embas 
 sies go, it sees nowhere beneath the sun a city more am 
 ple in its moral securities, a city more dear to those 
 possess It, a city more splendid in promise and in hope. 
 
 What is true of the city is tnie, in effect, of all the land. 
 Two things, at least, have been established by our na* 
 tional history, the impression of which the world will 
 not lose. The one is, that institutions like ours, when 
 sustained by a prevalent moral life throughout the na 
 tion, are naturally permanent. The other is, that they 
 tend to peaceful relations with other States. They do 
 this in fulfillment of an organic tendency, and not 
 through any accident of location. The same tendency 
 will inhere in them, whosoever established. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 DISINTEGRATION IN EUROPE. 
 In this age of the world, and in all the States which: 
 Christianity quickens, the allowance of free movement 
 to the popular miud is essential to the stability of public 
 institutions. There iray be restraint enough to guide 
 and keep each movement from premature exhibition. 
 But there cannot be force enough used to resist it, and 
 to reverse its gathering current. If there is, the Gov 
 ernment is swiftly overthrown, as in France so often, or 
 is left on one side, as Austria has been by the advancing 
 
Rise of Constitutional Liberty Storrs. 
 
 27 
 
 German people; like the Castle of Heidelberg, at once 
 palace and fortress, high-placed and superb, but only the 
 stateliest ruin in Europe, when the rail train thunde-s 
 through the tunnel beneath it, and the Neckar sings 
 along its near channel as if tower and tournament never 
 had been. Revolution, transformation, organic change, 
 have thus all the time for this hundred years been pro 
 ceeding in Europe ; sometimes silent, but oftener amid 
 thunders of stricken fields; sometimes pacific, but 
 oftener with garments rolled in blood. 
 
 In England the progress has been peaceful, the popular 
 demands being ratified by law whenever the need became 
 apparent. It has been vast as well as peaceful in the ex 
 tension of suffrage, in the ever-increasing power of the 
 Commons, in popular education. Chatham himself would 
 hardly know his own England if he should return to it. 
 The throne continues, illustrated by the virtues of her 
 who fills it, and the ancient forms still obtain in Parlia 
 ment. But it could not have occurred to him or to Burke 
 that a century after the ministry of Grenville the em 
 barkation of tbe Pilgrims would be one of the prominent 
 historical pictures on the panels of the lobby of the 
 House of Lords, or that the name of Oliver Cromwell, and 
 of Bradshaw, President of the High Court of Justice, 
 would be cut in the stone in Westminster Abbey, over the 
 places in which they were buried, and whence their de 
 caying bodies were dragged to the ditch and the gibbet. 
 England is now, as has been well said, " an aristocratic 
 Republic, with a permanent executive." Its only perils 
 lie in the fact of that aristocracy, which, however, is 
 flexible enough to endure, of that permanence in the Ex 
 ecutive which would hardly outlive one vicious prince. 
 
 What changes have taken place in France I need not 
 remind you, nor how uncertain is still its future. You 
 know how the swift, untiring wheels of advance or re 
 action have rolled this way and that in Italy and in 
 Spain; how Germany has had to be reconstructed; how 
 Hungary has had to fight and suffer for that just place 
 in the Austrian councils which only imperial defeat sur 
 rendered. You know how precarious the equilibrium 
 now is in many States between popular right? and 
 princely prerogative ; what armies are maintained to 
 fortify governments ; what fear of sudden and violent 
 change, like an avalanche tumbling at the touch of a foot, 
 perplexes nations. Th<* records of change make the his 
 tory of Europe. The expectation of change is almost as 
 wide as the continent itself. 
 
 Meantime, how permanent has been the Republic, 
 which seemed at the outset to foreign spectators a mere 
 tudden insurrection, a mere organized riot ! Its organic 
 law, adopted after exciting debate, but arousing no bat 
 tle, and enforced by no army, has been interpreted and 
 peacefully administered, with one great exception, from 
 the beginning. It has once been assailed with passion 
 and skill, with splendid daring and unbounded self-sacri- 
 gce, by thoee who sought a sectional advantage through 
 
 its destruction. No monarchy of the world could have 
 stood that assault. It seemed as if the last fatal Apoca 
 lypse had come, to drench the land with plague and flood, 
 and wrap it in a fiery gloom. The Republic 
 
 pouring, like tke tide into a breach, 
 
 With ample aud brim fullness of it3 force, 
 
 subdued the Rebellion, restored the dominion of the old 
 Constitution, amended its provisions in the contrary 
 direction from that which had been so fiercely sought, 
 gave it guarantees of endurance while the continent; 
 lasts, and made its ensigns more eminent than ever m 
 the regions from which they had been expelled. Ther 
 very portions of the people which then sought its over 
 throw are now again its applauding adherents the great 
 and constant reconciling force, the tranquillizing ire- 
 narch, being the freedom which it leaves in their hands.. 
 
 XIX. 
 CONSERVATIVE FORCES. 
 
 It has kept its place, this Republic of ours, in spite of 
 the rapid expansion of the nation over territory so wide 
 that the scanty strip of the original State is only as a 
 fringe on its immense mantle. It has kept its place, 
 while vehement debates, involving the profoundest eth 
 ical principles, have stirred to its depths the whole pub 
 lic mind. It has kept its place, while the tribes of man 
 kind have been pouring upon it, seeking the shelter and 
 freedom which it gave. It saw an illustrious President; 
 murdered by the bullet of an assassin. It saw his place 
 occupied as quietly by another as if nothing unforeseen 
 or alarming had occurred. It saw prodigious armies as 
 sembled for its defense. It saw those armies at the end 
 of the war marching in swift and long procession up the 
 streets of the capital, and then dispersing into their for 
 mer peaceful citizenship, as if they had had no arms inr 
 their hands. The General before whose skill and will 
 those armies bad been shot upon the forces which op 
 posed them, aud whose word had been their military law, 
 remained for three years an appointed officer of the Gov 
 ernment he had saved. Elected then to be the head of 
 that Government, and again reelected by the bal 
 lots of his countrymen, in a few mouths more he will 
 have retired, to be thenceforth a citizen like the rest, eli 
 gible to office, and entitled to vote, but with no thought 
 of any prerogative descending to him or to his children 
 from his great service and military fame. The Republic, 
 whose triumphing armies he led, will remember his 
 name and be grateful for his work; but neither to him 
 nor to any one else will it ever give sovereignty over 
 itself. 
 
 From the lakes to the Gulf its will is the law, its do 
 minion complete. Its centripetal and centrifugal force* 
 are balanced, almost as in the astronomy of the heavens. 
 Decentralizing authority, it puts his own part of it into 
 the hand of every citizen. Giving free scope to private 
 enterprise, allowing not only but accepting and encour- 
 
28 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 187G. 
 
 aging eacli movement of the public reason winch is its 
 only terrestrial rule, there is no threat, in all its sky, of 
 division or downfall. It cannot be successfully assailed 
 from without, with a blow at its life, while other na 
 tions continue sane. 
 
 It has been sometimes compared to a pyramid, broad- 
 based and secure, not liable to overthrow, as is obelisk 
 or column, by storm or age. The comparison is just, but 
 it is not sufficient. It should rather be compared to one 
 of the permanent features of nature, and not to any arti 
 ficial construction to the river, which flows like our own 
 Hudson, along the courses that nature opens, forever in 
 motion, but forever the same ; to the lake, which Les on 
 common days level and bright in placid stillness, while it 
 gathers its fullness from many lands and lifts its waves 
 in stormy strength when winds assail it ; to the mountain, 
 which is not artistically shaped, and which only rarely, 
 in some supreme sunburst, flushes with color, but whose 
 roots the very earthquake cannot shake, and on whose 
 brow the storms fall hurtless, while under its shelter the 
 cottage nestles, and up its sides the gardens climb. 
 
 So stands the Republic: 
 
 Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, 
 As bi oad and general as the casing air. 
 
 What has been the fact ? Lay out of sight tbat late evil 
 war which could not be averted when once it had been 
 threatened, except by the sacrifice of the Government 
 itself and a wholly unparalleled public suicide, and how 
 much of war with foreign powers has the century seen ? 
 There has been a frequent crackle of musketry along the 
 frontiers, as Indian tribes which refused to be civilized 
 have slowly and fiercely retreated toward the West. 
 There was one war declared against Tripoli, in 1801, 
 when the Republic took by the throat the African pirates 
 to whom Europe paid tribute, and when the gallantry of 
 Preble and Decatur gave early distinction to our Navy. 
 There was a war declared against England, in 1812, 
 when our seamen had been taken from under our flag, 
 from the decks, iudeed, of our national ships, and our 
 commerce had been practically swept from the seas. 
 There was a war affirmed already to exist in Mexico in 
 1846, entered into by surprise, never formally declared, 
 against which the moral sentiment of the nation rose 
 widely in revolt, but which in its result added largely to 
 our territory, oi>ened to us Calif ornian treasures, and 
 wrote the names of Buena Vista and Monterey on our 
 short annals. 
 
 XXI. 
 FEACE WITH THE WORLD. 
 
 That has been our military history ; and if a people, as 
 powerful and as proud, has anywhere been more peace 
 able also in the last 100 years, the strictest research fails 
 4o find it. Smarting with the injury done us by England 
 during the crisis of our National peril, in spite of the re- 
 
 who should have been your orator to-day; while hostile 
 taunts had incensed our people ; while burning ships Lad 
 exasperated commerce, and while what looked like artful 
 evasions had made statesmen indignant with a half 
 million men who hardly yet laid down their arms, with a 
 navy never before so vast or so fitted for service when a 
 war with England would have had the force of passion 
 behind it, and would, at any rate, have shown to the 
 world that the nation respects its starry flag and means 
 to have it secure on the seas we referred all differences 
 to arbitration, appointed commissioners, tried the cause 
 at Geneva with advocates, not with armies, and got a 
 prompt and ample verdict. If Canada now lay next to 
 Yorkville, it would not be safer from armed incursion 
 than it is when divided by only a Custom-house from all 
 the strength of this Republic. 
 
 The fact is apparent, and the reason not less so. A 
 monarchy, just as it is despotic, finds incitement to war 
 for preoccupation of the popular mind; to gratify 
 nobles, officers, the army; for historic renown. An in 
 telligent republic hates war, and shuns it. It counts 
 standing armies a curse only second to an annual pesti 
 lence. It wants no glory, but from growth. It delights 
 itself in arts of peace, seeks social enjoyment and in 
 crease of possessions, and feels instinctively that, like 
 Israel of old, "its strength is to sit still." It 
 cannot bear to miss the husbandman from the 
 fields, the citizen from the town, the house 
 father from the home, the worshiper from the 
 church. To change or shape other people s institutions 
 is no part of its business. To force them to accept its 
 forms of government would simply contradict and nullify 
 its charter. Except, then, when it is startled into pas 
 sion, by the cry of a suffering under oppression which 
 irtirs its pulses into tumult, or when it is assailed in its 
 own rights, citizens, property, it will not go to war, nor 
 even then if diplomacy can find a remedy for the wrong. 
 " Millions for defense," said Cotesworth Pluckney to -the 
 French Directory, when Talleyrand in their name had 
 threatened him with war, "but not a cent for tribute." 
 He might have added, " and not a dollar for aggressive 
 strife," 
 
 It will never be safe to insult such a nation, or to op 
 press its citizens, for the reddest blood is in its veins, and 
 some Capt. Ingraham may always appear to lay hia little 
 sloop-of-war alongside the offending frigate, with shotted 
 guns and a peremptory summons. There is a way to 
 make powder inexplosive ; but, treat it chemically how 
 you will, the dynamite will not stand many blows of the 
 hammer. The detonating tendency is too permanent in 
 it. But if left to itself, such a people will be peaceful, as 
 ours has been. It will foster peace among the nations. 
 It will tend to dissolve great permanent armaments, as 
 the light conquers ice, and Summer sunshine breaks the 
 glacier which a hundred trip-hammers could only scar. 
 
 anonstnauces presented through that distinguished citizen | The longer it continues, the more widely and effectively 
 
Else of Constitutional Liberty Sto^rs. 
 
 its influence spreads, the more will its benign example 
 hasten the day, so long foretold, so surely coming, when 
 
 The war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flairs are furled 
 In the Parliament of man. the Federation of the world. 
 
 XXII. 
 DUTIES TOWARD THE FUTURE. 
 
 It will not be forgotten, in the land or in the earth, 
 until the stars have fallen from their poise, or until our 
 vivid morning star of republican liberty, not losing its 
 luster, has seen its special brightness fade in the ampler 
 effulgence of a freedom universal I 
 
 But while we rejoice in that which is past, and gladly 
 recognize the vast organic mystery of life which was in 
 the Declaration, the plans of Providence which slowly 
 and silently, but with ceaseless progression, had led the 
 way to it, the immense and enduring results of good 
 which from it have flown, let us not forget the duty 
 which always equals privilege, aud that of peoples, as 
 well as of persons, to whomsoever much is given shall 
 only therefore the more be required. Let us consecrate 
 ourselves, each one of us, here, to the further duties 
 which wait to be fulfilled, to the work which shall con 
 summate the great work of the fathers ! 
 
 Mr. President, fellow-citizens, to an extent too great 
 for your patience, but with a rapid incompleteness that 
 is only too evident as we match it with the theme, I have 
 outlined before you a few of the reasons why we have the 
 right to commemorate the day whose hundredth an 
 niversary has brought us together, and why the paper 
 then adopted has interest and importance not only for us, 
 but for all the advancing sons of men. Thank God that 
 he who framed the Declaration, and he who was its fore 
 most champion, both lived to see the nation they had 
 shaped growing to greatness, and to die together, in that 
 marvelous coincidence, on its semi-centennial ! The 
 h fty years which have passed since then have only still 
 further honored their work. Mr. Adams was mistaken in 
 the day which he named as the one to be most fondly 
 remembered. It was not that on which independence of 
 the Empire of Great Britain was formally resolved. It 
 was that on which the reasons were given which justified 
 the act, and the principles were announced which made 
 it of general significance to mankind. But he would 
 have been absolutely right in sayiug of the fourth day 
 what he did say of the second : it " will be the jaost re- 
 niarkable epoch in the history of America : to be celebra 
 ted by succeeding generations as the great anniversary 
 festival, commemorated as the day of deliverance, by 
 solemn acts of devotion to Almighty God, from one end 
 of the continent to the other." 
 
 From barren soils come richest grapes, and on severe 
 and rocky slopes the trees are often of toughest fiber. The 
 wines of Riidesheiin and Johannisberg cannot be grown 
 In the fatness of the gardens, and the cedars of Lebanon 
 disdain the levels of marsh and meadow. So a heroism 
 
 is sometimes native to penury which luxury enervates, 
 and the great resolution which sprang up in the blast 
 and blossomed under inclement skies, may lose its 
 shapely and steadfast strength when the air is all of 
 Summer softness. In exuberant resources is to be the 
 coming American peril in a swiftly-increasing luxury of 
 life. The old humility, hardihood, patience, are too likely 
 to be lost when material success again opens, as it will, 
 all avenues to wealth, and when its brilliant prizes solicit, 
 as again they will, the national spirit. 
 
 Be it ours to endeavor that that temper of the fathers 
 which was nobler than their work shall live in the chil 
 dren, and exalt to its tone their coming career ; that 
 political intelligence, patriotic devotion, a reverent spirit 
 toward Him who is above, an exulting expectation of 
 the future of the world, and a sense of our relation to 
 it, shall be as of old, essential forces in our public life, 
 that education aud religion shall keep step all the time 
 with the nation s advance, and be forever instantly at 
 home wherever its Hag shakes out its folds. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 PRIVILEGES THAT INSPIRE AMERICANS. 
 
 Be it ours to endeavor that that temper of the fathers 
 which was nobler than their work shall live in the chil 
 dren, and exalt to its tone their coming career; that 
 political intelligence, patriotic devotion, a reverent spirit 
 toward Him who is above, an exulting expectation of the 
 future of the world, and a sense of our relation to it, 
 shall be, as of old, essential forces in our public life, 
 that education and religion shall keep step all the time 
 with the nation s advance, and be forever instantly at 
 home wherever its flag shakes out its folds. 
 
 In a spirit worthy of the memories of the past let us set 
 ourselves to accomplish the tasks which in the sphere of 
 national politics still await completion. We burn the 
 sunshine of other years when we ignite the wood or coal 
 upon our hearths. We enter a privilege which ages 
 have secured in our daily enjoyment of political 
 freedom. While the kindling glow irradiates our homes, 
 let it shed its luster on our spirit and quicken it for its 
 further work. Let us fight against the tendency of edu 
 cated men to reserve themselves from politics, remember 
 ing that no other form of activity is so grand or effective 
 as that which affects, first the character, and then the 
 revelation of character in the government, of a great and 
 free people. Let us make religious dissensions here, as a 
 force in politics, as absurd as witchcraft. Let party 
 names be nothing to us, in comparison with that costly 
 and proud inheritance of liberty and of law which par 
 ties exist to conserve and enlarge, which any party will 
 have here to maintain if it would not be buried 
 at the next cross-roads, with a stake through its breast. 
 Let us seek the unity of all sections of the Republic 
 through the prevalence in all of mutual respect, through 
 the assurance in all of local freedom, through the 
 
30 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 mastery in all of that supreme spirit which flashed from 
 the lips of Patrick Henry when he said, in the first 
 Continental Congress, "I am not a Virginian, but an 
 .American." Let us take care that labor maintains its 
 ancient place of privilege and honor, and that industry 
 lias no fetters imposed of legal restraint or of 
 social discredit to hinder its work or to lessen 
 its wage. Let us turn and overturn in public dis 
 cussion, in political change, till we secure a civil service, 
 honorable, intelligent, and worthy of the land, in which 
 capable integrity, not partisan zeal, shall be the con 
 dition of each public trust ; and let us resolve that what 
 ever it may cost, of labor and of patience, of sharper 
 economy and of general sacrifice, it shall come to pass 
 that wherever American labor toils, wherever American 
 enterprise plans, wherever American commei ce reaches, 
 thither again shall go as of old the country s coin the 
 Amefican eagle, with the encircling stars and golden 
 plumes! 
 
 In a word, fellow-citizens, let each of us live in the 
 blessing and the duty of our great citizenship, as those 
 who are conscious of unreckoned indebtedness to a he 
 roic and prescient past, the grand and solemn lineage of 
 whose freedom runs back beyond Bunker Hill or the 
 Mayflower, runs back beyond muniments and memories 
 
 of men, and has the majesty of far centuries upon it! 
 .Let us live as those for whom God hid a continent from 
 the world till He could open all its scope to the freedom 
 and faith of gathered peoples, from many lauds, to be a 
 nation to His honor and praise! Let us live as those to 
 whom He commits the magnificent trust of blessing peo 
 ples many and far, by the truths which he has made our 
 life, and by the history which He helps us to accomplish. 
 Let us not be unmindful of this ultimate and inspiring 
 lesson of the hour. By all the memories of the past, by 
 all the impulses of the present, by the noblest instincts 
 of our own souls, by the touch of His sovereign spirit 
 upon us, God make us faithful to the work and to Him ! 
 that so not only this city may abide in long and bright 
 tranquillity of peace, when our eyes have shut forever on 
 street and spire, and populous square : that so the land, in 
 all its future, may reflect an influence from this anniver 
 sary ; and that, when another century has passed, the 
 sun which then ascends the heavens may look on a world 
 advanced and illumined beyond our thought, and here 
 may behold the same great nation, born of struggle, bap 
 tized into liberty, and in its second terrific trial purchased 
 by blood, then expanded and multiplied till all the land 
 blooms at its touch, and still one in its life, because still 
 pacific, Christian, free ! 
 
 THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY. 
 
 THE HON. CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS AT TAUNTON, MASS. 
 
 I. 
 
 T salute yon, my fellow countrymen, with a 
 cheer of welcome on this joyous day, when forty millions 
 of human voices rise up with one accord to heaven, in 
 grateful benisons for the mercy showered on three suc 
 cessive generations of the race, by the Great Disposer of 
 events, during the hundred years that have passed away. 
 Yet far be it from us to glory in this anniversary festival 
 with any spirit of ostentation, as if assuming to be the 
 very elect of God s creatures. Let us rather join m hum 
 ble but earnest supplication for the continuance of that 
 support from aloft by reason of which a small and weak 
 and scattered band have been permitted so to grow in 
 strength as to command a recognized position among the 
 leading powers of the earth. 
 
 Less than three centuries since, the European explorer 
 first set his foot on these northern shores, with a view to 
 occupation. He found a primitive race aspiring scarcely 
 higher than to the common enjoyments of animal exist 
 ence, and slow to respond to any nobler call. How long 
 they had continued in the same condition there was little 
 evidence to determine. But enough has been since gath 
 ered tojusiify the belief that advance never can be one 
 
 of their attributes. Without forecast, and insensible to 
 ambition, after long experience and earnest effort to ele 
 vate them, the experiment of civilization must be admit 
 ted to have failed. The North American Indian never 
 could have improved the state he was in when he was 
 first found here. He must be regarded merely as the 
 symbol of continuous negation, of the everlasting rota 
 tion of the present, not profiting by the experience of 
 the past, and feebly sensible of the possibilities of the 
 future. 
 
 The Europeans at last came in upon him, and the scene 
 began at once to change. The magnificence of nature 
 presented to his view, to which the native had been blind, 
 at once stimulated his passion to develop its advantages 
 for civilization, and ere long the wilderness began to 
 blossom like a rose. The hum of industry was heard to 
 echo in every valley, and it ascended every mountain. 
 A new people had appeared, animated by a spirit which 
 enlisted labor without stint and directed it to the channels 
 of improvement. With their eyes steadily fixed upon the 
 future, and their sturdy sinews braced to the immediate 
 task, there is no cause for wonder that the sparse but 
 earnest adventurers who first set foot on the soil of the 
 
The Progress of Liberty Adams. 
 
 31 
 
 new continent should have, in the steady progress of 
 time, made good the aspiration with which they began, 
 of founding a future happy home for ever increasinar mil 
 lions of their race. Between these two forces, the 
 American Indian, who dwells only in the present, and 
 the European adventurer, who fixes his gaze so steadily 
 on the future, the issue of a struggle could end only in 
 one way. While the one goes on dwindling even to the 
 prospect of ultimate extinction, the other spreads peace 
 and happiness among numbers increasing over the con 
 tinent with a rapidity seldom exceeded in the rec jrds of 
 civilization. 
 
 But here it seems as if I catch a sound of rebuke from 
 far off in another quarter of the globe. " Come now," 
 says the denizen of ancient Africa, " this assurance on 
 the part of a new people like you is altogether intolera 
 ble. You of a race starting only, as if yesterday, with 
 your infant civilization, what nonsense to pride yourself 
 on your petty labors, when you have not an idea of the 
 magnitude of the works and the magnificence of the re 
 sults obtained from them in our fertile regions by a popu 
 lation civilized loug and long and long before you and 
 your boasting new continent were ever even dreamed of 
 in the progress of mankind. Just come over here to the 
 land of Egypt, flowing with milk and honey. Cast a 
 glance at our temples and pyramids, at our lakes and 
 rivers, and even our tombs, erected so long since that 
 nobody can tell when. Observe the masterly skill dis 
 played in securing durability, calling for a corresponding 
 contribution of skilled labor from myriads of workmen 
 to complete them. Consider further that even that holy 
 V ook, which you yourselves esteem as embodying the 
 highest conceptions of the Deity, and lessons of morals 
 continually taught among you to this day, had its origin 
 substantially from here. Remember that ail this hap 
 pened before the development of the boasted Greek aud 
 Roman cultivation, and be modest with your pretensions 
 for your laud of yesterday, of any peculiar merit for 
 your aspirations to advance your condition." 
 
 II. 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT. 
 
 To all of which interjection of my African prompter I 
 make but a short reply. By his own showing he appeals 
 only to what was ages ao, and not to what now is. 
 What are the imperishable monuments constructed so 
 long ago but memorials of an obsolete antiquity, to be 
 gazed at by the wandering traveler as examples never to 
 be copied. If once devoted to special forms of Divine 
 worship, the faith that animated the structures has not 
 simply lost its vitality but has been, buried in oblivion 
 forever. What are the catacombs but futile efforts to 
 perpetuate mere matter after the living principle has 
 vanished away? Why not apply them to advance the 
 condition of the survivors ? How about the sacred book 
 to which you refer? Does it not record an account of an 
 
 emigration of au industrious and conscientious people 
 compelled to retreat by reason of the recklessness of an 
 ignorant ruler 1 And bow has it been ever since 1 Al 
 though conceded to be by nature one of the most favored 
 regions of the earth, the general tendency has been *ir 
 from indicating a corresponding: degree of prosperity. 
 Even the splendid memorials of long past ages testify by 
 the solitudes around them only to the vanity of indulging 
 idle aspirations. The conclusion then to be drawn from 
 this spectacle is not of life but of 3eath, not of hope but of 
 despair. 
 
 So, I have presented to you in this picture the three 
 types of humanity as exemplified in the social systems of 
 the world. 
 
 Whilst the African represents the past, and the Indian 
 clings only to the present, it is left to the European and 
 his congener in America persistently to follow in the fu 
 ture the object of the advancement of mankind. 
 
 1. The retrograde. 2. The stationary. 3. The advance. 
 W r hich is it to be with us 1 
 
 We can only judge of the future by what it has been in 
 the past. Is there or is there not a peculiar element, not 
 found in either of the other races, which has shown so 
 much vigor in the American during the past century as 
 to give him a fair right to count upon steady advance in 
 time to come? 
 
 I confidently answer for him that there is. It 3s his de 
 votion to the principle of liberty. 
 
 Do you ask me where to find it in words? Turn we 
 thenatonceto the immortal scroll ever firmly associ 
 ated with the solemnities of this our great anniversary. 
 There lies imbedded in a brief sentence more of living 
 and pervading force than could have ever been applied 
 to secure permanence to all the vast monuments of Egypt 
 or of the world. 
 
 We all know it well, but still I will repeat it : 
 
 "We know these truths to be self-evident: 1. That 
 all men are created equal. 2. That they are endowed by 
 their Creator with inalienable rights. 3. That among 
 them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 
 
 I have considered these significant words as vested 
 with a virtue so subtle as certain ultimately to penetrate 
 the abodes of mankind all over the world. But I sepa 
 rate them altogether from the solemn array of charges 
 against King George, which immediately follow in the 
 Declaration. These may have been just or they may not. 
 In the long interval of time which has passed, ample op 
 portunity has been given to examine the allegations with, 
 more calmness than when they were freshly made. May 
 I venture to express a modest doubt whether the Sover 
 eign was in reality such a cruel tyrant as he is painted, 
 and whether the ministers were so malignantly deaf to 
 the appeals of colonial consanguinity as readers of this 
 day may be led, from the language used, to infer. The 
 passage of a hundred years ought to inspire calmness in 
 revising all judicial decisions in history. Let us, above 
 
32 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 187G. 
 
 all, be sure that we are right. May I be permitted to ex 
 press an humble belief that the grave errors of both Sov 
 ereign, ministers and people were not so much rooted m 
 a spirit of willful and passionate tyratyjy, as of supercil 
 ious indifference ; the same errors I might add which 
 have marked the policy of that country in later times, 
 down to a comparatively recent date. A very little show 
 of sympathy, a ready ear to listen to alleged grievances, 
 perhaps graceful concessions made in season, a disposi 
 tion to look at coloiMsts rather as brethren than as ser 
 vants to squeeze something out of; in short, fellowship 
 and not haughtiness might have kept our affections as 
 Englishmen perhaps down to this day. The true griev 
 ance was the treatment of the colonies as a burden in 
 stead of a blessing ; an object out of which to get as much 
 and to which to give as little as possible. Least of all 
 was there any conception of cultivating common affec 
 tions and a common interest. The consequence of the 
 mistake thus made was not only the gradual yet steady 
 alienation of the people, but to teach them habits of in 
 dependence. Then came at last the appeal to brute force 
 and all was over. Such seems to be the true cause of 
 the breach, and not so much willful tyranny. And it is 
 quite as justifiable a reason for the separation, as any or 
 all of the more vehemont accusations so elaborately ac 
 cumulated in the great Declaration of 177G. 
 
 III. 
 PERSONAL FREEDOM. 
 
 Passing from this digression, let me resume the consid 
 eration of the effect of the adoption of the great seminal 
 principle which I have already pointed out as the pillar 
 of fire illuminating the whole of our later path as an in 
 dependent people. That this light has been no mere 
 flashy, flickering, or uncertain guide, but steadily direct 
 ing us toward the attainment of new and great results, 
 beneficial not more immediately to ourselves than inci 
 dentally to the progress of the other nations of the world, 
 it will be the object of this address to explain. Let us 
 review the century. 
 
 And first of all appears as a powerful influence of the 
 new doctrine of freedom, though indirectly applied, the 
 cooperation -with us in our struggle of the Sovereign 
 Louis the Sixteenth, and the sympathy of the people of 
 France. This topic would of itself suffice for an address, 
 but I have so much more to say relative to ourselves as 
 a directing power that I must content myself with 
 simply recalling to your minds what France was in 1778, 
 when governed by an absolute monarch cooperating 
 with us in establishing our principle, but solely for the 
 motive of depressing Great Britain, and what she is in 
 this our centennial year, an independent Republic ; after 
 long and severe tribulation, at last deliberately ranging 
 itself as a disciple of our school and frankly recognizing 
 the force of our great law of liberty. 
 
 Our war for f re dom had been some time over, and the 
 
 arduous task of restoring order by the cooperation of the 
 whole sense of the people in organizing an effective form 
 of government, the first experiment of the kind in his 
 tory, had been crowned by the spontaneous selection by 
 that people of the true hero who, having proved himself 
 an eminent leader and trusty guide through the perils of 
 a seven years war, was called to labor with even greater 
 glory to be the successful organizer and director of lib 
 erty toward the arts of peace. 
 
 Looking from this point of time in the year 1789, when 
 this original experiment, the latest and the most delib 
 erate ever attempted, was on the verge of trial, it now 
 becomes my duty to pass in review the chief objects 
 which have been secur-d by it during the century. Has. 
 it succeeded or has it failed ? Above all, what has it 
 done directly and indirectly in expanding the influence 
 of its great doctrine of liberty, not merely at home, but 
 over the wide surface of sea and land nay, the great 
 globe itself. 
 
 Washington was President, but he had not had time to 
 collect together his Cabinet and distribute his work when 
 events occurred which demanded immediate attention. 
 Without waiting for the advent of Jefferson, whom he 
 had chosen as his aid in the Department of Foreign Af 
 fairs, he drew with his own hand certain papers of in 
 structions, which he committed to the charge of Mr. 
 Gouverneur Morris, then about to sail for Great Britain, 
 with directions to confer with the Ministry on the subject 
 in hand. Mr. Morris went out and communicated with 
 the British Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds. The 
 object was to negotiate a treaty of commerce, a very 
 necessary measure at the time, but it was not long before 
 another and much more embarrassing matter inter 
 vened. It had been reported to Mr, Morris that several 
 persons, claiming to be American citizens, when walking 
 in the streets of London, suspecting no guile, had been, 
 after the fashion of that day, pounced upon by a ]*jess 
 gang, and put on board of British vessels to serve as sea 
 men, whether they would or no. Here was the beginning 
 of a question of personal freedom, started out of the 
 earth at once, which no American agent could venture to 
 disregard. Although without special instructions, Mr. 
 Morris did not hesitate a moment to submit the griev 
 ance to the consideratian of the Minister. That dia:- 
 nitary contented himself with an evasive answer, and the 
 plea of thedifhculty of distinguishing between citizens 
 speaking the same language, and this became the stand 
 ing pretext for the seizure of Americans for many 
 years. The act itself, looked at in our present light, 
 seems to have been brutal enough, even when applied to 
 subjects. How much more intolerable when invading 
 the liberty of men bearing no allegiance to the Crown I I 
 doubt whether many of you will believe me when I tell 
 you how many Americans underwent this kind of 
 slavery. It appears from the official papers that in 1798, 
 651 persons were recorded as in this condition. Eight 
 
The Progress of Liberty Adainc. 
 
 33 
 
 years later the return is increased to 2,273, and tlie year 
 after it amounted to 4,229. The most flagrant act of all 
 was the seizure of several men on board of tlie Chesa 
 peake, an American vessel of war, by a formal order of 
 an Admiral of a British frigate on the coast. The 
 ultimate consequence of the equivocating course of 
 Great Britain was that this grievance entered with other 
 causes into the necessity of making a declaration of war. 
 
 If ever there \vas a question of liberty under the defini 
 tion of 1776 it seems to have been this, and the success 
 ive Presidents who were in office during the period, 
 though themselves natives and citizens of a region least 
 liable to be subjected to danger of such a fate, were not 
 the least energetic and determined on that account in 
 upholding the right. On the other hand, it is not without 
 its lesson of the dangers of infatuation among purely 
 party politicians to find that the spirit of liberty burned 
 with much the most qualified lieat in the regions most 
 inhabited by those frequenting the seas, and therefore 
 most liable to enslavement. The singular spectacle then 
 followed of the perseverance of those eminent statesmen 
 in upholding, even at the cost of war, of the rights of 
 that portion of their brethren furthest removed from 
 their own homesteads, which were free from danger; 
 while, on the other hand, a considerable number of the 
 population of the coasts absolutely exhausted all the 
 vials of their wrath upon the same distinguished states 
 men for laboring even at the cost of war to secure the 
 safety on land and water of those who actually were 
 their nearest neighbors and friends. 
 
 The result, you all know, was the War of 1812, waged 
 in part under the cry of free trade and sailors rights. A 
 severe trial, but abundantly rewarded by the benefit 
 gained for liberty. From the date of the peace with 
 Great Britain down to the present hour no cause of com 
 plaint has occurred for the impressment of an American 
 citizen. No difficulty in distinguishing citizenship has 
 been experienced even though no change has been made 
 in the use of the language common to both nations. In 
 short, no more men have been taken, whether on land or 
 on the ocean, by force, on any pretense whatever. 
 
 Singularly enough, however, 50 years later a question 
 of parallel import suddenly sprang up which for the mo 
 ment threatened to present the same nations in a posi 
 tion precisely reversed. A naval commander of a United 
 States war vessel assumed the right to board a British 
 passenger steamer crossing the sea on her way home, 
 and to seize aad carry off two American citizens, just as 
 British officers had done in former times. This proceed 
 ing was immediately resented, and the consequence was 
 a new step in favor of liberty on the ocean, for the 
 security of the civilized world. The great waters are 
 now open to all nations, and the flag of any nation covers 
 all who sail under it in times of peace. And Great Britain 
 herself, too often in times long gone by meriting the 
 odious title of tyrant of the ocean, by resorting to other 
 
 and better means than the horrors of t\ e press-gang, has 
 not only raised the character of her own marine, but has 
 pledged herself to follow in the very same path of hu 
 manity and civilization first marked out by ourselves. 
 
 IV. 
 LIBERTY ON THE SEAS. 
 
 Such is the first example o? the direct effect upon liberty 
 of the law proclaimed a hundred years ago. I proceed 
 to consider the second : 
 
 In this year of our Lord 1 876, on looking back upon the 
 events of the century, it seems almost impossible to be 
 lieve that human liberty should have been then held in 
 so much contempt on the high seas, and that by nations 
 as contemptible in character as weak in absolute force. 
 
 As early as the year 1785 two American vessels follow 
 ing their course peaceably over the ocean were boarded 
 by ships fitted out by the Algerines, then occupying an 
 independent position on the Mediterranean coast. The 
 vessels were plundered, and the crew, numbering 21 
 American freemen, taken to Algiers and sold for slaves. 
 
 Instead of protestation and remonstrance and fitting 
 out vessels of war to retort upon this insolent pirate, 
 what did we first do ? What, but to pray the assistance 
 and intervention of such a feeble power as Sweden to 
 help us out of our distress, and money was to be offered, 
 not merely to ransom the slaves, but to bribe the bar 
 barian not to do so again. Of course, he went to work 
 more vigorously than before, and his demands became 
 more imperious and exacting. The patience of the great 
 Powers of Europe, whom he treated with little more 
 deference, only furnishes one more example of the case 
 with which mere audacity may for a time secure advan 
 tages which will never be gained by fair dealing and 
 good will. To an American of to-day it is inexpressibly 
 mortifying to review the legislation of the country on 
 this matter at that time. It appears that so early as the 
 year 1791 President Washington, in the third year of his 
 service, in his speech to Congress, first called the atten 
 tion of that body to the subject. On the 15th of De 
 cember the Senate referred the matter to a committee 
 which in due course of time reported a resolution to this 
 effect : 
 
 Resolved, That the Senate advise and consent that the 
 President take such measures as he may think neces 
 sary for the redemption of the citizens of the United 
 States now in captivity at Algiers, provided (mind you) 
 prov : ded the expense shall not exceed $40,000. 
 
 Congress did not think of looking at the Declaration of 
 Independence, but they passed the resolution. And 
 what was the natural consequence? The consular officer 
 established by the United States in Algiers on learning 
 the result approved it, but added this significant sen 
 tence : 
 
 I take the liberty to observe that there is no doing any 
 business of importance in this country without palming 
 tae ministry. 
 
34 
 
 The logic of all this was, that the best way to keep our 
 people free was to make it worth the while of the minis 
 try to make them slaves. 
 
 The natural consequence was that the cost of these 
 operations ultimately exceeded $1,000,000, and the ex 
 ample had set the kindred Barbary powers in an agony 
 for a share of the plunder. In February, 1802, the gross 
 amount of expenditure to pacify these pirates and man- 
 stealers had risen to $2,500,000, a sum large enough, if 
 properly expended on a naval force, to have cleared them 
 out at a stroke. 
 
 No wonder, then, that President Jefferson should pres 
 ently begin to recur to his draft of the Declaration of In 
 dependence. Though never very friendly to the navy, 
 lie saw that freedom was at stake, so that in his annual 
 message of 1803 he suggested fitting out a small force 
 for the Mediterranean, in order to restrain the Tripohne 
 cruisers, and added that the uncertain tenure of peace 
 with several other of the Barbarj- powers might eventu 
 ally require even a reenforcement. 
 
 So said Jefferson to Congress but his words were not 
 responded to with promptness, so the evil went on in 
 creasing. The insolence of all the petty Barbary States 
 only fattened by What it fed on, until the freedom of 
 American seamen in the Mediterranean was measured 
 only by the sums that could be paid for their ransom. 
 There is no more ignominious part of our history than 
 this. 
 
 Driven at last to a conviction of the impolicy of this 
 course, President Madison, having succeeded to the chair, 
 on the 23d of February sent a message to Congress 
 recommending a declaration of war. The two Houses 
 had become at last convinced that money voted to that 
 end would go farther for freedom than any offers of ran 
 som, and, therefore, responded promptly to the call. A 
 naval expedition was sent out, and on the 5th of Decem 
 ber, nine months after his first adoption of the new pol 
 icy, he had a noble opportunity of reporting to the same 
 body a triumphant justification of his measure. The gal 
 lant Decatur had restored the law of freedom in this 
 quarter forever. 
 
 Mr. Madison tells the siory in these words : 
 
 I have the satisfaction to communicate to you the suc 
 cessful termination of the war. The squadron in advance 
 on that service under C jmmodore Decatur lost not a mo 
 ment after its arrival in the Mediterranean, in seeking 
 the naval force of the enemy then cruising in that sea, 
 and succeeded in capturing two of his ships. The high 
 character of the American commander was brilliantly 
 euetained on the occasion, who brought his own ship 
 into close action with that ol his adversary. Having 
 prepared the way by the demonstration of American 
 skill and prowess, he hastened to the port of Algiers, 
 where peace was promptly yielded to his victorious force. 
 In the terms stipulated, the right and honor of the United 
 States were particularly consulted by a perpetual relin- 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 the Dey of all pretense of tribute from 
 
 quishment by 
 them. 
 
 The Dey subsequently betrayed his inclination to break 
 the treaty, and ventured to demand a renewal of the an 
 nual tribute which had been so weakly yielded ; but the 
 hour had passed for listening to feeble counsels. The 
 final answer was a declaration that the United States 
 preferred war to tribute, and freedom to slavery. They 
 therefore insisted that the observation of the treaty, 
 which abolished forever the right to tribute or to the en 
 slaving of American citizens. 
 
 There never has been since a auestion about the right 
 to navigate the Mediterranean, free from all danger of 
 the loss of personal freedom. It is due to the Govern 
 ment of Great Britain to add that following up this ex 
 ample, Lord Exmouth with his fleet put a final stop to all 
 further pretenses of these barbarians to annoy the navi 
 gation of that sea. France has since occupied the king 
 dom of Algiers, and the abolition of slavery there was 
 one of its early decrees. Thus has happened the liber 
 ation of that superb region of the world, the nursery of 
 more of its civilization than any other, from all further 
 danger of relapsing into barbarism. And America may 
 fairly claim the credit of having initiated in modern 
 times the policy of freedom over the surface of its clas 
 sical sea. 
 
 V. 
 
 PIRACY SUPPRESSED. 
 
 I have now done with the second example of the prog 
 ress of freedom as enunciated in the celebrated scroll set 
 forth a hundred years ago. America had contributed 
 greatly to this result, but a moment was rapidly ap 
 proaching when her agency was to be invoked in a region 
 much nearer home. The younger generations now com 
 ing into active life will doubtless be astonished to learn 
 that not much more than half a century ago there still 
 survived a class of men harbored in the West Indies, suc 
 cessors of the bold buccaneers who, in the seventeenth 
 century, became the terror to the navigation of those 
 seas. They will wonder still more when I tell them that 
 both ships and men were not only harbored in some ports 
 of the United States, but were actually fitted out with a 
 view to the plunder that might be levied upon the legiti 
 mate trade pursued by their countrymen and people of 
 all other nations, in and around the islands of the Carib 
 bean Sea. That I am not exaggerating in this statement, 
 I will prove by merely reading to you a short extract 
 from a report made by a committee of the House of Rep 
 resentatives of the United States in the year 1821 to 
 prove it. 
 
 " The extent," it says, " to which the system of plun 
 der upon the ocean is carried in the West India seas ana 
 Gulf of Mexico is truly alarming, and calls imperiously 
 for the prompt and efficient interposition of the General 
 Government. Some fresh instance of the atrocity with 
 which the pirates infesting those seas carry on their 
 
The I roffresa of Liberty Adams. 
 
 depredations, accompanied, too, by the indiscriminate 
 massacre of the defenseless and unoffending, is brought 
 by almost every mail so that the intercourse between 
 the northern and southern sections of the Union is al 
 most cut off." 
 
 My friends, this picture, painted from an official source, 
 dates back only fifty-five years ago ! Could we believe it 
 as possible that liberty and life guaranteed by our solemn 
 declaration of 1776 should have been found so insecure 
 in our immediate neighborhood, at a time, too, when we 
 were boasting in thousands of orations, on this our anni 
 versary, of the great progress we had made in securing 
 both against violence ? And the worst of it all was that 
 some even of our own countrymen should have been sus 
 pected of being privy to such raids. I shall touch this 
 matter no further than to say that not long afterward 
 adequate preparations were made to remove this pesti 
 lent annoyance, and to reestablish perfect freedom in 
 crossing these waters. This work was so effectivelj r per 
 formed in 1824, that from that time to this personal lib 
 erty has been as secure there as in any other best pro 
 tected part of the globe. 
 
 Such is my third example of the practical advance of 
 human freedom under the trumpet call made 100 years 
 ago. 
 
 I come now to a fourth and more stupendous measure 
 following that call. The world-wide famous author of it 
 had not been slow to grasp the conception that the aboli 
 tion of all trade in slaves must absolutely follow as a 
 corollary from his general principle. The strongest proof 
 of it is found in the original draft of his paper, wherein 
 he directly charged it as one of the greatest grievances 
 inflicted upon liberty by George, that he had counte 
 nanced the trade. The passage is one of the finest in the 
 paper, and deserves to be repeated to-day. It is in these 
 words : 
 
 " He, the King, has waged cruel war against human 
 nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and 
 liberty in the persons of a distant people who never of 
 fended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery 
 : -\ another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death on 
 their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the 
 opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Chris 
 tian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a 
 market where n en should be bought and sold, he has 
 prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative 
 attempt to prohibit or to restrain the execrable com 
 merce." 
 
 There is no passage so fine as this in the Declaration. 
 Unfortunately it hit too hard upon some interest close 
 at home which proved strong enough to have it dropped 
 from the final draft. But though lost there, its essence 
 almost coeval with the first publication of Granville 
 Sharp in England on the same subject, undoubtedly per 
 vaded the agitation which never ceased in either country 
 until final legislation secured a victory. The labors of 
 
 Sharp and Wilberforce, of Clarkson and Buxton, as welf 
 as many others, have placed them upon an eminence of 
 honor throughout the world. But their struggle, whicii 
 began in 1787, was not terminated for a period of twenty 
 years. On the other hand, it appears from the statute 
 book in 1794, it was enacted by the Congress of thf> 
 United States in these words : " That no vessel shall be 
 fitted for the purpose of carrying on any traffic in slaves 
 to any foreign country, or lor procuring from any for 
 eign country the inhabitants thereof to be disposed of as 
 slaves." This act was followed in due course by others/ 
 which, harmonizing with the action of foreign nations, is 
 believed to have put an effective and permanent stop to 
 one of the vilest abominations, as conducted on the 
 ocean, that was ever permitted in the records of time. 
 
 But all this laborious effort had been directed only 
 against the cruelties practiced iu the transportation of 
 negro slaves over the seas. It did not touch the question 
 of his existing condition or of his right to be free. 
 
 VI. 
 LIBERTY TO ALL. 
 
 This brings me to the fifth and greatest of all fruits of 
 the charter of Independence, the proclamation of lib 
 erty to the captive through a great part of the civilized 
 world. 
 
 The seed that had been sown broadcast over the world 
 fell much of it as described in the Scripture, some of it 
 sprouting too early as in France, and yielding none but 
 bitter fruit, but more, after living in the ground many 
 years, producing results most propitious to the advance 
 ment of mankind. It would be tedious for me to go into 
 details describing the progress of the revolution that has 
 changed the face of civilization. The principle enunci 
 ated iu our precious scroll has done its work in Great 
 Britain and in France, and most of all in the immense 
 expanse of the territories of the Autocrat of all the 
 Russias, who of his own mere motion proclaimed that 
 noble decree which liberated from serfdom at one stroke 
 23,000,000 of the human race. This noble act will re 
 main forever one of the grandest steps toward the ele 
 vation of mankind ever taken by the will of a sovereign 
 of any race in any age. 
 
 But though freely conceding the spontaneous volition 
 of the Czar in this instance, I do not hesitate to affirm 
 that but for the subtle essence infused into the political 
 sentiment of the age by the great Declaration of 1776, 
 he would never have been inspired with the lofty magna 
 nimity essential to the completion of his work. 
 
 I come next and last to the remembrance of the fearful 
 conflict for the maintenance of the grand principle to 
 which we had. pledged ourselves at the very outset of our 
 national career, and out of which we have, by the bless 
 ing of the Almighty, come safe and sound. The history 
 is so fresh in our minds that there is no need of recalling 
 its details, neither would I do so if there were, on a day 
 
30 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 consecrated like this to the harmony of the nation. 
 Never was the first aspect of any contention surrounded 
 by darker clouds, yet viewing as we" must its actual 
 issue, at no time has there ever been more reason to re 
 joice in the present and look forward to a still more bril 
 liant future. Now that the agony is over, who is there 
 that will not admit that he does not rejoice at the re 
 moval of the ponderous burden which weighed down our 
 spirits in earlier days ? The great law proclaimed at the 
 beginning of our course has been at last fully carried 
 out. No more apologies for inconsistency to caviling 
 and evil-minded objectors. No more unwelcome com 
 parisons with the superior liberality of absolute rnon- 
 archs in distant regions of the eartb. Thank God, now 
 there is not a man who treads the soil of this broad land, 
 void of offense, who in the eye of the law does not stand 
 on the same level with every other man. If the memorable 
 words of Thomas Jefferson, that true Apostle of Liberty, 
 had done only this it would alone serve to carry him 
 aloft, high up among the benefactors of mankind. Not 
 America alone, but Europe and Asia, and above all 
 Africa, nay the great globe itself, move in an orbit never 
 80 resplendent as now. 
 
 Let me now sum up in brief the results arrived at by 
 the enunciation of the great law of liberty in 177G : 
 
 1. It opened the way to the present condition of 
 France. 
 
 2. It brought about perfect security for liberty on the 
 high and narrow seas. 
 
 3. It led the way in abolishing the slave trade, which 
 in its turn, prompted the abolition of slavery itself by 
 Great Britain, France, Russia, and last of all, by our own 
 country too. 
 
 Standing now on this vantage ground, gained from the 
 severe struggle of the past, the inquiry naturally pre 
 sents itself, What have we left for us to do 1 To which I 
 will frankly answer, much. It is no part of my disposi 
 tion, even on the brightest of our festival days, to deal in 
 indiscriminate laudation, or even to cast a flimsy vail 
 over the less favorable aspects of our national position. 
 1 will not deny that many of the events that have hap 
 pened since our escape from the last great peril, indicate 
 more forcibly than I care to admit, some decline from 
 that high standard of moral and political purity for 
 which we have ever before been distinguished. The 
 adoration of Mammon, .described by the poet as the 
 " least erected spirit that fell from Heaven, for e en in 
 Heaven his looks and thoughts were always downward 
 bent," has done something to impair the glory earned by 
 all our preceding sacrifices. For myself, while sincerely 
 mourning the mere possibility of stain touching our gar 
 ments, I feel not the less certainty that the heart of the 
 people remains as sound as ever. 
 
 VII. 
 WASHINGTON. 
 
 One of the strongest muniments to save us from all 
 harm it gives me pride to remind you of, especially on 
 this daj r I mean the memory of the example of Wash 
 ington. 
 
 Whatever misfortune may betide us, of one thing we 
 may be sure, that the study of that model by the rising 
 youth of our land can never fail to create a sanative 
 force potent enough to counteract every poisonous ele 
 ment in the political atmosphere. 
 
 Permit me for a few moments to dwell upon this topic, 
 for I regard it as closely intertwined with much of the 
 success we have hitherto enjoyed as an independent peo 
 ple. Far be it from me to raise a visionary idol. I have 
 lived too long to trust in mere panegyric. Fulsome eu 
 logy of any man raises with me only a smile. Indiscrim 
 inate laudation is equivalent to falsehood. Washington, 
 as I understand him, was gifted with nothing ordinarily 
 defined as genius, and he had not had great advantages 
 of education. His intellectual powers were clear, but 
 not much above the average men of his time. What 
 knowledge he possessed had been gained from associa 
 tion with others in his long public career, rather than by 
 secluded study. As as actor he scarcely distinguished 
 himself by more than one brilliant stroke; as a writer 
 the greater part of his correspondence discloses nothing 
 more than average natural good sense ; and on the field 
 of battle his powers pale before the splendid strategy of 
 Napoleon Bonaparte. 
 
 Yet, notwithstanding all these deductions, the thread 
 of his life from youth to age displays a maturity of 
 judgment, a consistency of principle, a steadiness of ac 
 tion, a discriminating wisdom, and a purity of purpose 
 hardly found united to the same extent in any other in 
 stance I can recall in history. Of his entire disinterest 
 edness in all his pecuniary relations with the public it ia 
 needless for me to apeak. More than all and above all, 
 he was always master of himself. If there be one quality 
 more than another in his character which may exercise 
 a useful control over the men of the present hour, it is 
 the total disregard of self, when in the most elevated 
 positions for influence and example. 
 
 In order more fully to illustrate my position, let me for 
 one moment contrast his course with that of the great 
 military chief I have already named. The star of Napo 
 leon was just rising to its zenith as that of Washington 
 passed away. In point of military genius Napoleon 
 probably equaled if he did not exceed any person known 
 in history. In regard to the direction of the interests of 
 a nation he may have occupied a very high place. He 
 inspired an energy and a vigor in the veins of the French 
 people which they sadly needed after the demoralizing 
 sway of centuries of Bonrbon kings. With even a smaller 
 ";" < >" 
 
The Advance of a Century Beecher. 
 
 too might have left a people to honor his memory down 
 to the la best times. But it was not to be. Do you ask 
 the reason 1 It is this. His motives of action always 
 centered in self. His example gives a warning but not a 
 guide. For when selfishness animates a ruler there is no 
 cause of surprise if he sacrifice, without scruple, an entire 
 generation of men as a holocaust to the great principle 
 of evil, merely to maintain or extend his sway. Had 
 Napoleon copied the example of Washington he would 
 have been the idol of all later generations in France. For 
 Washington to have copied the example of Napoleon 
 would have been simply impossible. 
 
 Let us, then, discarding all inferior strife, hold up to 
 our children the example of Washington as the symbol, 
 not merely of wisdom, but of purity and truth. 
 
 Let us labor continually to keep the advance in civil 
 ization as it becomes us to do after the struggles of the 
 
 past, so that the rights to life, to liberty, and the pursuit 
 of happiness, which we have honorably secured, may be 
 firmly entailed upon the ever-enlarging generations of 
 mankind. 
 
 And what is it, I pray you tell me, that has brought uo 
 to the celebration of this most memorable day 1 Is it not 
 the steady cry of excelsior up to the most elevated 
 regions of political purity, secured to us by the memory 
 of those who have passed before us and consecrated the 
 very ground occupied by their ashes 1 Gloriously indeed 
 may it be said of it in the words of the poet : 
 
 What s hallowed ground 1 "Tis what gives birth 
 To sacred thoughts in souls of worth- 
 Peace! Independence! Truth! go forth 
 
 Earth s compass round, 
 And your high priesthood shall make earth 
 
 All hallow d ground. 
 
 THE ADVANCE OF A CENTURY. 
 
 THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER AT PEEKSKILL, N. Y. 
 
 1. 
 
 Of all the places on this continent where, 
 from political considerations, vast assemblies should 
 gather to-day, there is no place that can equal Philadel 
 phia, where that orator and statesman and civilian, 
 Evarts, is holding in rapt attention the great crowds. 
 But if it be not a question of political interest, but of 
 military, I know of no other point throughout the land 
 where the people may more fitly assemble for retrospect 
 and for pride than in this goodly place of Peekskill 
 [Applause.] For we stand in the very center of the 
 military operations that were conducted in the northern 
 part of our then country. The great ferry the King s 
 Ferry by which chief communication was had between 
 all New-England and New-Jersey and Pennsylvania, in 
 which bounds there was the greatest part of the popula 
 tion of the country, lies right opposite to us. This is the 
 center of that sphere, of that vast drama. (At this 
 point the cannon on the adjacent hill was fired. Mr. 
 Beecher stopped for an instant, but he immediately said, 
 " 1 have spoken very often, but I have never been 
 punctuated with the cannon before.") [Great laughter 
 and applause.] But as I was saying, around this region 
 was that great drama played the treachery of Arnold 
 and the sad recompense upon Andre. In these streets 
 our armies have trod ; in this town Washington dated, 
 indeed, the commission which -was last received by 
 Arnold at the hands of his countrymen. Off upon this 
 
 bay hovered the British fleet. (The cannon again gave a 
 deafening report, causing Mr. Beecher to say, " I have 
 no objection to being canonized, but don t like to be 
 cannonaded.") [Great laughter.]- 
 
 A hundred years have passed since this region was the 
 theater of such stirring scenes arid vicissitudes. A hun 
 dred years i. % long period in the life of a man a short 
 period in the life of a nation. A hundred years I It is 
 1 ,800 since the Advent ; a thousand years scarcely take us 
 back beyond the beginning of European nations in their 
 modern form. A hundred years is scarcely the " teen " 
 to which nations come. And it seldom happens that any 
 nation has for its thousand such a hundred years as that 
 whicnhas been vouchsafed to us. From a population 
 of scant 3,000,000, including the slave population, we 
 have swelled to more than 40,000,000. Behind a small 
 strip of settled territory lining the Atlantic coast almost no 
 one except the pioneers s foot had trod the mountain 
 path, had pressed the soil of the country beyond. Now 
 the Atlantic and the Pacific are joined by the iron road, 
 and that has come to pass in reality which in the Scrip 
 ture is spoken of in poetry " deep answers unto deep," 
 and the ocean breaks upon one shore to be answered by 
 the other; and all the way across are thickly-settled 
 communities, towns, and cities innumerable. And yet 
 this is but small as compared with the augmentation of 
 material interests. The wealth that scarcely now is com 
 putable, the industries that thrive, the inventions, the 
 
38 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 discoveries, the organizations of labor and of capital, the 
 vast spread of the industries over the valleys and hills 
 who can estimate that of the early day which was but as 
 a seed compared with that of our day which moves like 
 Lebanon ? And yet what are the sheen and ships and 
 rails, and what are granaries and roads and canals, 
 what a?e herds upon a thousand hills, what are all these 
 in comparison with man ! All labor and the products of 
 labor are valuable only as they promote the virtue and 
 the comfort of man are valuable only as they promote 
 the manhood which is in man. Though we had a quad 
 rupled wealth, yet if the people were decayed or en 
 feebled, what would our property be worth 1 Not worth 
 the assembling here to look back upon, or to look for 
 ward to. The value of our material growth is to be esti 
 mated by its eftect upon the people. 
 
 What has been the history of a hundred years In re 
 gard to the people of America 1 Are they as virtuous as 
 they were a hundred years ago? Are they as manly as 
 they were a hundred years ago? Are they as intelligent, 
 are they as religious as they were a hundred years ago ? 
 Not only that are these individuals that are perhaps, as 
 we shall examine, more or less religious, moral, intelli 
 gent, happy have they learned anything in the highest 
 of all arts, the art of man to live with man, the art of 
 organizing society, of conducting government, the pro 
 motion of the common weal through broad spaces and 
 through vast multitudes? What is the history of the 
 people? What are we to-day? What our fathers were 
 we know. Their life was splendid; their history was 
 registered. W T e read what they were, and form an esti 
 mate of them with gratitude to God; but what are we, 
 their sous? Have we shrunk? Are we unworthy of 
 their names, and places, and functions, which have been 
 transmitted from their hands to ours? What are the 
 laws, what are the institutions, what is the Government, 
 what are the policies of this great nation, redeemed from 
 foreign thrall to home independence? Are they commit 
 ted to puny hands, or is manhood broadened and 
 strengthened and ennobled? Look then at our popula 
 tion, what it is, spread abroad through all the laud. It 
 might be said that America represents every nation on 
 the globe better than the nation represents itself. We 
 Lave the best things they have got in Ireland, for we 
 have stripped her almost bare. We have the canny 
 Scotchman in great numbers among us, though not 
 enough for our good. We have the Englishman among us, 
 and are suspected ourselves of having English blood 
 in our veins. We have also those from Norway, Sweden, 
 Denmark, Russia even, Germany, Austria and Hungary, 
 Ita y, Spain, France, Switzerland. We can cull from all 
 these nations out of our population many members of 
 whom they are not ashamed and for whom 
 we are grateful. We have our fields tilled by foreign 
 hands, our roads built by them. This is a matter of 
 political economy, but the question which I propose to 
 
 you is, What are they as component elements of a ne-vr 
 American stock ? Do you believe in stock ; do you b- 
 lieve in blood ? I do. Do you believe in crossing judi 
 ciously ? Do you believe that the best blood of all na 
 tions will ultimate by and by in a better race than the 
 primitive and the uncomplex race, mixing new strength 
 and alliances? We have fortified our blood, enriched 
 our blood ; we have called the world to be our father and 
 the father of our children and posterity, and there never 
 was a time in. the history of this nation when the race- 
 stock had in it so much that was worth the study of the 
 physiologist and philanthropist as to-day. We are en<- 
 riched beyond the power of gratitude. 1 for one regard 
 all the inconveniences of foreign mixtures, of difference 
 of language, the difference of customs, the difference at 
 religion, the difference in domestic arrangement I re 
 gard all these inconveniences as a trifle ; but the aug 
 mentation of power, of breadth of manhood, the prom 
 ise of the future, is past all computation, and there never 
 was, there never began to be in the early day such prom 
 ise for physical vigor and enriched life as there is to-day 
 upon this continent. 
 
 II. 
 CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE AND HAPPINESS. 
 
 And now consider that not only is this race-stock for 
 these reasons made a better one than that which existed 
 a hundred years ago, but consider that the conditions of 
 existence among the whole population are better than 
 they were a hundred years ago. We not only wear better 
 heads, but we have better bellies [great laughter], 
 with better food in them. We have also better clothes 
 now. In other words, the art of living healthily has ad 
 vanced immensely, and though cities have enlarged, and 
 though the causes of dangers to sanitary conditions are 
 multiplied, science has kept pace, and there never was a 
 time, I will not say in our own history, but in the history 
 of any nation on the globe, when the condi 
 tions of life were so wholesome, the conditions 
 of happiness so universally diffused, as they are 
 to-day in this great land. We grumble we Inherit that 
 from our ancestors ; we often mope and vex ourselves 
 with melancholy prognostications concerning this or 
 that danger. Some men are born to see the devil of mel 
 ancholy ; they would see him sitting in the very door of 
 heaven, methiuks. Not I ; for though there be mischiefs 
 and troubles, yet when we look at the great conditions of 
 human life in society, and they have been augmented fa 
 vorably, they never were so favorable as they are to-day. 
 More than that; if you will look at the diversity of the 
 industries by which men ply their hands, if we look at 
 the accumulating power of the average citizen, you will 
 find that it is in the power of a man to earn more in a 
 single ten years of his life to-day than for our ancestors 
 in the whole of their life. The heavens are nearer to us 
 than to them, for we have learned the secrets of the 
 
The Advance of a Century Becclicr. 
 
 39 
 
 storm and the sweep of the lightning. The earth itself 
 is but just outside our door. We can now call to Asia 
 and the distant parts of the earth easier than they could 
 to Boston or Philadelphia a hundred years ago : and all 
 the fleets of the world bring hither the tribute of the 
 ylobe. ana that not for the rich man and the sumptuous 
 In e", but for the common folks of the land to which we 
 all belong. The houses in which we live are better ; bet 
 ter warmed in Winter and our Summers are very well 
 warmed too. The implements by which the common 
 man works are multiplied ; the processes which he can 
 control, and which are organized in society that he gets 
 the reflex benefit of them, are incalculable. And all that 
 the soil has, and all that the sea has, and all that the 
 mountain locks up, and all that is invisible in the atmos 
 phere, are so many servitors working in this great 
 democratic land for the multitude, for the great mass of 
 The common people. We are in that regard advanced far 
 beyond the days of our fathers ; for then they had not 
 escaped from the hereditary notions, or aristocratic 
 thoughts, the aristocratic classes, or the aristocratic ten 
 dencies even in government. But the progress of 
 democracy which is not merely political, but which is 
 religious, in literature, art, even in mechanics the wave 
 of democratic influence has been for a hundred years 
 washing in further and further toward the feet of the 
 common people. And to-day there is not on the face of 
 the globe another forty millions that have such ampli 
 tude of sphere, such strength of purpose, such instru 
 ments to their hand, such capital for them, such oppor 
 tunity, such happiness. And that leads me to speak 
 going aside from the common people individually or as 
 in classes of their institutions, and let me begin where 
 you began, in the household. 
 
 III. 
 CHANGES IN THE HOUSEHOLD. 
 
 What is the family and household to-day as compared 
 with the family and household a hundred years ago 9 Time 
 is a great magnifying medium. We look back a hundred 
 years and think that influences of the household and of 
 society must have been better, purer, than they are to-day. 
 No, no. If there be one thing that has grown in solidity 
 and grandeur, in richness and purity and refinement, it 
 has been the American household. Oh, there were here 
 and there notable mansions, here and there notable 
 households of intelligence and virtue in the olden day. 
 But we are concerned with the averages ; and the average 
 American household is wiser, there is more material for 
 thought, for comfort, for home love, to-day, in the ordi 
 nary workman s house, than there was a hundred years 
 ago in one of a hundred rich men s mansions and build 
 ings. For no man among us is so poor unless he drinks 
 whisky too much no man that is well born among us 
 and to be well born it is necessary first to have been born 
 at all. and secondly, to have been born out of virtuous 
 
 parents, who set him a good example no man has been 
 well born in this laud who needs to stand at the bottom 
 of the ladder 20 years. The laborer ought to be ashamed 
 of himself or to find fault with Providence that stinted 
 him when he was endowed who in 20 years does not 
 own the ground on which his house stands, and 
 that, too, an unmortgaged house; who has not iu 
 that house provided carpets tor the rooms, who has 
 not his China plates, who has not his chromos, who has 
 not some picture or portrait hanging upon the walls, 
 who has not some books nestling on the shelf, who has 
 not there a household that he can call his home, the 
 sweetest place upon the earth. This is not the picture 
 of some future time, but the picture of to-day, a picture 
 of the homes of the workingmen of America. The 
 average workingman lives better now in the household 
 and in the family than he did a hundred years ago. But 
 we have come to it steadily, without record or observa 
 tion. Yet it is none the less true that the average 
 condition of the household for domestic comfort has 
 gone up more than one per cent for every year of the 
 last 100 years. 
 
 But that is not all. The members of the household 
 have also developed, and chiefly she into whose hand 
 God put the rudder of time. For if Eve plucked the 
 apple that Adam might help her to eat it, she has been 
 beforehand with him ever since and steered him. The 
 household that has a bad woman may have an augel for 
 a husband, but he is helpless. The household that has a 
 brute for a husband is safe if the woman be God s own 
 woman. Franklin said that a man is what his wife will 
 let him be. It is more than a proverb that the children 
 are what the mother makes them. She is the legislator 
 of the household ; she is the judge that sits upon the 
 throne of love. All severity comes from love in a moth 
 er s hand ; she is the educator; she also is the atonement 
 when sins and transgressions have brought children to 
 shame. The altar of penitence is at the mother s knee,, 
 and not the heart of God knows better how to forgive 
 than does she. If womanhood has gone down, woe be to 
 us ; the richer we are, the stronger we are, the worse we 
 are. And if woman has gone up in intelligence, in influ 
 ence, in virtue, and in religion, then the country is safe, 
 though its fleets were sunk and its cities were burned, 
 though its crops were mildewed and blasted. For easy is 
 recovery where the head forces are sound ; but where 
 there is corruption at the central point of power all out 
 ward helps are in vain. I declare that in the last one 
 hundred years woman, who before had brooded and 
 blossomed in aristocratic circles, has now come to blos 
 som through democratic circles, and is in America to-day 
 undisputed and uncontradicted what before she has been 
 allowed to oe only when she had a coronet upon her brow, 
 or some scepter of power in her hand. Not only is she 
 unvailed, not only is she permitted to show her face 
 where men do most congregate, not only is she a power 
 
40 
 
 Independence Day Orations. July 4. 187G. 
 
 in the silence oi the house, but in the church a teacher. 
 Paul from a thousand years ago may in vain now say, 
 " Let not your women teach in the church." Thy cannot 
 come there without being teachers and silent letters. 
 They are the books and epistles known and read of all 
 men. They have come to that degree of knowledge, they 
 have come to that breadth of intellect and power, they 
 have learned how to dispose of that primary and highest 
 gift, moral intuition, which God gave to them in 
 excess, chetiting mnn, they have come to such 
 influence and grandeur that never before m any 
 land, certainly never m our own, has womanhood 
 attained such authority and eminence as at the present 
 day. That power which is now latent and applied indi 
 rectly, is soon to fill the channels that shall be direct aud 
 initial. You may die too soon, as many have before 
 they saw the beatific vision, but you that live long 
 enough will see woman vote, and when you see woman 
 vote, you will see less fraud, less selfishness, less brutal 
 ity, and more public spirit and rectitude and harmony in 
 the administration of public affairs. I do not propose 
 to discuss the question at any length with you, but I can 
 not without thanksgiving, I caunot fail to recognize that 
 steady advance which is sure to make woman a voter in 
 this generation. 
 
 IV. 
 
 EXTENSION OF THE SUFFRAGE. 
 In the beginning of our history no man could vote that 
 was not a member of the church ; and, by the way, the 
 deacons, to relieve the church members from the trouble 
 of calling at the ballot-boxes, took their hats and went 
 around and collected the votes from house to house ; but 
 deacons in those days were trustworthy. After a little a 
 man was allowed to vote if a white man and owned prop 
 erty to a certain amount, though he did not belong to the 
 church, and that was the augmentation of suffrage in 
 that respect. After a time it became necessary to knock 
 down even that exception. Franklin labored with 
 might and main to this end, and employed that signifi 
 cant argument: If a man may not vote unless he is a 
 property-holder to the amount of $100, and he owns an 
 ass which is worth $100, and to-day the ass 
 is well and he votes, but to-morrow the ass 
 dies, and so he cannot vote which votes, the 
 ass or the man 1 The property qualification disappeared 
 before this argument, and the power of voting became 
 free. Then came the question of foreigners voting, and 
 they were not to be allowed to vote except upon proba 
 tion. Like many of your fences, one rail after another 
 fell down, until the fence was so low that anything could 
 jump it when it wanted to. and in New-York they 
 jump it now quite easily. But the day is coming, and 
 that very soon, in which this pretense of limitation will 
 be thrown down, and every man that means in good faith 
 to settle here shall have it proclaimed to him, " If you 
 
 wish to settle here you shall have the protection of thf) 
 aws if you undertake to be responsible for those laws." 
 [ would allow a man to vote the very moment he touches 
 the soil. 
 
 The next step was the admission of the colored race to 
 vote. This was the boldest thing ever done. It was said 
 it was a war measure ; it was necessarily connected with 
 it In such a manner as to come under that general desig 
 nation. During the war a million of black men were 
 taken from the plantation they could cot read 
 the Constitution or the spelling-book, they could 
 hardly tell one hand from the other and they 
 were allowed to vote, in the sublime faith 
 that liberty which makes a man competent to 
 vote would render him fit to discharge the duty of the 
 voter. And when these colored men, these unwashed 
 black men were allowed to vote, although much disturb 
 ance occurred as disturbance always occurs upon great 
 changes I am bound to say that the black man has 
 proved himself worthy of the trust confided to him. Be 
 fore emancipation the black man was the 
 most docile laborer that ever the world saw. 
 During the war, and when he knew that 
 liberty was the gage, when he knew that the battle waa 
 whether he should or should not be true, although the 
 country for hundreds of miles was stripped bare of able- 
 bodied white men, and when property was at the mercy 
 of the slave, arson or rapine or conspiracy was saved to 
 the country, and no uprising took place. They stood 
 still, conscious of their power, and said : " We will see 
 what God will do for us." Such a history has no parallel 
 And since they began to vote, after their eman 
 cipation, I beg to say, in closing on this subject, that they 
 have voted just as wisely and patriotically as did their 
 late masters before emancipation. 
 
 And now there is but one step more there is but one 
 step more. We permit the lame, the halt, and the blind 
 to go the ballot-box ; we permit the foreigner and the 
 black man, the slave and the freedman, to partake of the 
 suffrage ; there is but one thing left out, and that is the 
 mother that taught us, and the wife that is thought 
 worthy to walk side by side with us. It is woman that 
 is put lower than the slave, lower than the ignorant for 
 eigner. She is put among the paupers whom the law 
 won t allow to vote, among the insane whom 
 the law won t allow to vote. But the days are numbered 
 in which this can take place, and she too will vote. As 
 in a hundred years suffrage has extended its bounds 
 until it now includes the whole population, in another 
 hundred years everything will vote, unless it be the 
 power of the loom, and locomotive, and watch, and I 
 sometimes think, looking at these machines and their 
 performances, that they too ought to vote. 
 
The Advance of a 
 
 V. 
 
 AUGMENTATION IN INTELLIGENCE. 
 
 More than that, what has been the progress of the 
 country during this time in intelligence and the 
 means of intelligence 1 A hundred years ago, I had al 
 most said, schoolhouses couW. be counted, certainly 
 upon the hairs of your head, if not upon the fingers of 
 your hand, in New-England and throughout the country. 
 As I remember them, they were miserable, unpainted 
 buildings, that roasted you in Winter and stunk in Sum 
 mer, with slabs for seats, with old Webster for the spell 
 ing-book, with Daboll for the arithmetic, with three 
 months of school m the Winter, and with one, two, or 
 three in Summer. Compare them with the high schools, 
 the graded schools, and the primary schools that are now 
 the pride of every populous neighborhood. Has there 
 been no augmentation in the instruments of intelligence ? 
 
 Then there were perhaps 20 newspapers in the United 
 States. Alas! how they have increased since then! 
 These are said to be the leaves of the tree for the healing 
 of the nations ; and often in this regard that comes to 
 pass which comes to pass in sickness that men who 
 take the leaves are made sicker than they were before. 
 But every man reads the newspapers to-day. The dray 
 man, at his nooning, divides the time between his little 
 tin kettle and his newspaper. A man, though he goes 
 home tired, yet must know what the news is. The vast 
 majority of laboring men not to speak of professional 
 men, and men whose business requires that they shall 
 read know before the setting of the sun, on any given 
 day, what is being done in Asia, what is being done in 
 Turkey, what is being done in California, what is 
 being done the world around for this is a pocket world 
 now, which every man can carry round for himself, in 
 his newspaper. t 
 
 Consider how cheap books are. Consider how wide is 
 the diffusion of knowledge through essays, through 
 treatises of various kinds, through lectures, through all 
 manner of instruments of enlightenment. Consider how 
 our political organizations are turning themselves into 
 great educating conventions, in which the best men dis 
 course on their theories of government. I hold that no 
 German university ever had in its halls such legists or 
 judicial men as were turned out by the wholesale in this 
 country during the late war, and for years preceding 
 tiiat war, for the discussion of questions relating 
 to the rights of- the individual, the nature of 
 the State, the duty of the citizen, and the func 
 tions and prerogatives of the Legislature and the Gov 
 ernment. Never were a peopie so educated as this peo 
 ple were during the twenty-five years which preceded 
 the present. For, let me tell you, in 1776 there were 29 
 public libraries in the United States ; or, there were 
 about one and two-thirds volumes for each 100 of the 
 people in the country. In 1876 there are 3,632 public 
 
 Century Bceclicr. 41 
 
 libraries in the United States, not including the 
 libraries of the common schools, of the Church, 
 or the Sunday-school, numbering in the ag 
 gregate 12,276,000 volumes, or about 30 volumes to 
 one hundred persons. Between 1775 and 1800 a period of 
 twenty-five years there were 20 public libraries formed. 
 During another period of twenty-five years between 
 1800 and 1825 there were 179 public libraries formed. 
 During the next period of twenty -five years between 
 1825 and 1850 there were 551 public libraries formed. 
 During the twenty-five years intervening between 1850 
 and 1875, there were 2,240 public libraries formed. And 
 in all the history of America there has not been a period 
 when the brain of the population has teemed with such 
 fertility as it did during the 25 years last past, in which 
 the great and agitating discussions of slavery took place. 
 During the war when there was such a subsoiling of this 
 country, there was displayed such energy and activity 
 of its people as they had never before displayed. Never 
 before were there 25 years in which there were such 
 tremendous agents employed for instruction ; never be 
 fore were there such instruments of enlightenment 
 brought to bear upon us. 
 
 And that which is indicated in the increase of books is 
 carried out in the increase of newspapers and maga 
 zines not only, but in the increase of machinery and 
 agriculture and art and the mechanical business of life. 
 The impulse toward power and fruitfulness was never 
 s^eminent as it was during those 25 years in which the 
 rights of men were the fundamental questions that were 
 discussed, and in which we proved the sincerity of the 
 North and the weakness of the South. 
 
 VI. 
 
 EELIGIOUS INFLUENCE. 
 
 Thus far we have spoken of the condition of the com 
 mon people and their various institutions. Let me say 
 in passing one word on that subject which from my very 
 profession it might be thought that I would mention 
 first, and which on that very account I only glance 
 at lest I should seem to give undue promi 
 nence to that profession. The state of religious 
 feeling in this country is more advanced to-day by many 
 and ma y degrees than it has been in any period anterior 
 to this. When the Ohio River, the mountain snow melt 
 ing swells up to the measure of its banks, begins to 
 overflow and overflow, the big Miami bottoms are one 
 sheeted field of water, and where I once lived in 
 Lawrenceburg, Indiana I could take a boat and go 25 
 miles straight across the country, so vast was the 
 volume. Now, suppose a man had taken a skiff and gone 
 out over the fields and plumbed the depth and found only 
 five feet of water, and had said, " Ah ! only five feet of 
 water, and the Ohio had forty feet." Well, the Ohio has 
 not shrunk one inch. There are forty feet there and there 
 arc tive i oet everywhere else. Religion used to be iu tha 
 
42 
 
 Independence Day C rations, July 4, 187G. 
 
 clmrcli pretty much and men used to have to measure 
 the church in order to know how deep it was, but 
 there has been rain on the mountains and the moral feel 
 ing that exists in the community and in the world 
 has overflowed the bounds of the church, and you can t 
 measure. the religious life or the religious impulse of this 
 people unless you measure their philanthropy, their 
 household virtue, and the general good will that prevails 
 between classes and communities. The church is not 
 less than it has been, it is more than it ever was, but 
 outside of it also there is a vast volume of that 
 which can be registered under no head so well as under 
 that of religious influence, which never existed in old 
 days gone by to the extent to which it exists now. I am 
 one who, although I am a servant of the Church, a min 
 ister within her bounds, whenever I look out of her win 
 dows and see hundreds of good men outside, am not 
 sorry. I thank God when I see a better man in a denom 
 ination that is not my own than I see in my own denom 
 ination. I thank God when I see virtue and true piety 
 existing outside of the church, as well as when I see it 
 existing inside of the church. I recognize the hand of 
 God as being as bountiful, and I recognize His admin 
 istration as being as broad, as are the rains or as is the 
 sunshine. God does not send to Pj^kskill just as much 
 sunshine as you want for your corn and rye and wheat. 
 It shines on stones and sticks and worms and bugs. It 
 pours its light and heat down upon the mountains and 
 rocks and everywhere. God rains not by the pint yr 
 by the quart, but by the continent. Whether things 
 need it or not, He needs to pour out His bounty, t|hat He 
 may relieve Himself of His infinite fullness. 
 
 And so it is in the community. Never before was there 
 fco much conscience or so many subjects as there is 
 to-day. I know there is not enough conscience to go 
 around always. I know there are men whose consciences 
 are infirm on certain sides. I know that in the various 
 professions there are many places where there are gaps, 
 or where the walls are too low. But the cultivation of 
 conscience is an art. Conscience is a thing that is 
 learned. No man has much more conscience than he is 
 trained to. So the minister has his conscience ; it is ac 
 cording to the training that he has had ; and it is thought 
 to be fair for him to hunt a brother minister for heresy, 
 though it would not be fair for him to hunt him for any 
 thing else. A lawyer has his conscience. It is sometimes 
 very high, and sometimes it is very low. As an average, 
 it is very good. The doctor has his conscience, and his 
 patients have theirs. Everybody has his conscience, and 
 everybody s conscience acts according to certain lines to 
 which he has been drilled and trained. Right and wrong 
 are to the great mass of men as letters and words. We 
 learn how to spell, and if a man spells wrong, and was 
 taught in that way, nevertheless it is his way of spelling. 
 And so it is with men s consciences. Now, I aver that 
 more legislative conscience is genius. Not one man in a 
 
 million has a sense of what is right and wrong except as 
 the result of education and experience. No man in com 
 plex circumstances has a conception ot justice and recti 
 tude by a legislative conscience. The great mass of men 
 teachers and the taught are obliged to depend upon 
 the revelations of experience to enable them to deter 
 mine what is right and wrong. They have to set their 
 consciences by the rule of the experiences which they 
 have gone through. 
 
 Now I aver not that the conscience of this people is a 
 perfect conscience and not that it does not need a great 
 deal of education, but that, such as it is, it is better and 
 higher and more universal than it was at any other pe 
 riod of the hundred years that have just gone by. I 
 would rather trust the moral sentiment of the commu 
 nity now on any question of domestic policy, or on any 
 question of legislative policy, than at any period anterior 
 in the history of America. I would, within the bounds 
 of their knowledge, rather trust the moral judgment and 
 common sense of the millions of the conwnon people than 
 the special knowledge of any hundred of the best 
 trained geniuses that there are in the land. 
 This is not true in respect to those departments of 
 knowledge which the common people have never reached. 
 There is no common sense in astronomy, because there 
 is no common knowledge in astronomy. The same is 
 also true of engineering ; but in that whole vast realm of 
 questions which do coaae down to men s board and 
 bosoms, the moral sentiment of the great mass of the 
 common people is more reliable than the judgment of 
 the few. In all those questions there is a common con 
 science and a common moral sense ; and I say that the 
 average moral sense and conscience of the community 
 never were so high as they are to-day and to-day at such; 
 a hight in the common people as to be safer in them than 
 , in any class in the community. This is a great gain in 
 the last bu/idred years. 
 
 VII, 
 THE COUNTRY S ELEMENTS Or GROWTH. 
 
 Let me once more call vour attention to some of the 
 elements of growth that have taken place in this nation. 
 I was one of those whose courage never failed except in 
 spots. Before the war I did have some dsrk days, ia 
 which I felt as though this nation was going to be raised 
 up merely to be the manure of some after nation, being 
 plowed under. It seemed to me as though all the avenues 
 of power were in the hands of despotism, as though 
 a great part of humanity was trodden under foot ; as 
 though every element that could secure to despotism a 
 continuance of its power had been seized and sealed ; and 
 I did not see any way out God forgive me for those 
 very steps which made the power and despotism of 
 Slavery dangerous were in the end its remedy ant! its de 
 struction. And this great North had so long, partly from 
 necessity, and partly from a misguided and romantic 
 ,tiiotism, encouraged and promoted that which waa 
 
Tlie Advance of a Century Beecher. 
 
 the caries of free institution. , the bane of liberty, and the 
 danger which threatened the continent in all after times. 
 
 But when at last the nation was aroused, it smote not 
 once, nor twice, but, according to the old prophet, seven 
 times ; and then deliverance was prompt. The power 
 of a nation is to be judged by its resistance to disease. 
 All nations are liable to attack, but the real power of a 
 nation is shown in its ability to throw off disease in its 
 resiliency. The power of recovery is better than all 
 soundness of national constitution. It is better than 
 anything else can be. America has arisen from a fifth- 
 rate power ; but she looks calmly and modestly over the 
 ocean, and is a first-rate power among the nations to 
 day. She was a democracy ; the people made their own 
 laws ; they levied and collected their own taxes ; and it 
 was said, " Of course they will not allow themselves to be 
 taxed more than they want to be." They were not a 
 military people ; Europe told us so. Great Britain told 
 us so. They told me so to my face ; and I said, on many 
 a platform, with an audience like this, " You do not un- 
 dertsand what democratic liberty means. Wait till this 
 game is played ont, and see what the issue Is." And 
 what is the issue of the game ? To a certain extent, the 
 political economy of the South gave her aid in the be 
 ginning; and the political economy of the North gave 
 her inexhaustible resources. The genius of the Northern 
 people is slow to get on fire, and is hard to put out ; so 
 that we had to learn the trade of war. We had learned 
 every trade of peace already, but when once we had 
 learned the trade of war, the power of the North was 
 manifest, to the honor and glory of OUT religion, of our 
 political faiths, and of the whole training of our past 
 history. 
 
 But there was something more dangerous than war. 
 An insidious serpent is more dangerous than a roaring 
 lion if the lion does not jump before he roars. Repudi 
 ation threatened more damnation to the morals of this 
 nation than ever war did with all its mischiefs ; and I 
 want to record, to the honor of our foreign population, 
 of whom it is often said, " When you come to a great 
 stress, when questions are to be settled on principles of 
 rectitude and truth, they will be found wanting "I 
 want to record to the honor of the population that we 
 have borrowed from Europe, the fact that when the 
 question came, "Shall this nation pay every dollar 
 which it promised, and by which it put the boys in blue 
 in the field," it was, through the West and the North- 
 West, the foreign vote together with the vote of our own 
 people, that carried the day for honesty and for public 
 integrity. Now, for a Democratic nation that owns 
 everything the government, the law, the policy, the 
 magistrate, the ruler; that can change, that caa make 
 and unmake, that has in its hands almost the power of the 
 Highest to exult one and to put down another for such 
 a nation to stand before the world and show that this 
 great people, smarming through our valleys and over 
 
 our mountains and far away to either shore, and without 
 tiie continuity necessary to the creation of a common 
 public sentiment, were willing to bear the brunt of a five 
 years war and to be severely taxed, down to this day, 
 and yet refuse to lighten its burdens in a way that would 
 be wrong and dishonorable that will weigh more in 
 Europe than any test that any nation is able to put forth, 
 for its honor, its integrity, its strength, and its promise 
 of future life. 
 
 Look back, then, through the hundred years of our 
 national history. They are to me like the ascending of 
 stairs, some of which are broader, some narrower, some 
 with higher rising, and some with less than the others, 
 but on the whole there has been a steady ascent in in 
 telligence, in conscience, in purity, in industry, in hap 
 piness, in the art of living well individually, and in 
 the higher art of living well collectively, and we stand 
 to-day higher than at any other time. Our burdens are 
 flea-bites. We have some trouble about money. I never 
 saw a time when the most of the population did not. We * 
 have our trouble, because there is loo much in some 
 places and too little in others, The trouble with us is 
 like the trouble in Winter, when the snow has fallen and 
 drifted, and leaves one-half of the road bare, while it ia 
 piled up in the other half, so that you cannot get along 
 for the much nor for the little. But a distribution will 
 speedily bring all things right and I think we are not 
 far from the time when th,at will take place. So soon as 
 we can touch the ground of universal confidenee, so soon 
 as we stand on a basis of silver and gold then, and not 
 an hour before then, will this nation begin to move on in 
 the old prosperity of business. 
 
 I determined not to say anything that could be con 
 strued as an illusion to party politics, and what I have 
 said cannot be so construed, for both sides around here 
 say that they are for resumption. The only difference is> 
 that one party say that they are for resumption, and 
 the other say that they are for resumption as soon a 
 we can have it. Well, I do not see how anybody can say 
 anything more. You cannot resume before you can. 
 
 Fellow citizens, in looking back upon the past, it is 
 not right that we should leave the sphere and field of 
 our remarks without one glance at the future. In 
 another hundred years not one of us will be here. Some 
 other speaker, doubtless, will stand in my place. Other 
 hearers will throng though not with more courtesy, nor 
 with more kindly patience than you have to listen to 
 his speech. Then on every eminence from New-York to 
 Albany there will be mansions and cottages, and garden 
 will touch garden along the whole Eden of the Hudson 
 River Valley. But it does not matter so much to us,, 
 who come and go, or what takes place in the future, ex 
 cept so far as our influence is concerned. When a hun 
 dred years hence the untelling sun, that saw Arnold, and 
 Andre, and Washington, but will not tell us one word 
 of history, shall shine on these enchanted hills and on* 
 
44 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4. 1876. 
 
 tliis unchanging river then it is for us to have set in 
 motion, or to have given renewed impulse to those great 
 causes, intellectual, moral, social, and political, Avhich 
 have rolled our prosperity to such a hight. 
 
 To every young man here that is beginning life, let me 
 gay, Listen not to those insidious teachers who tell you 
 that patriotism is a sham, and that all public men are 
 corrupt or corrupters. Men in public or private life are 
 corrupt here and there, but let me say to you, no corrup 
 tion in government would be half so bad as to have the 
 seeds of unbelief in public administration sown in the 
 minds of the young. If you teach the young that 
 their Chief Magistrates, their Cabinets, and their 
 representatives are of course corrupt, what will 
 
 that be but to teach them to be themselves corrupt ? I 
 
 > 
 stand hear to bear witness and say that publicity may 
 
 consist with virtue and does. There are men that serve 
 the public for the public, though they themselves thrive 
 4>y it also. I would sow in your minds a romance of 
 
 patriotism and love of country that shall be necessary to 
 the love which you have lor your own households, and I 
 would say to every mother that teaches her child to 
 pray, next to the petition, " Our Father which art in 
 heaven," let it learn this petition : Our Fatherland, and 
 so let our children grow up to love God, to love man, and to 
 love their country, and to be glad to serve their country as 
 well as their God and their fellow-men, though it may be 
 necessary that theys hould lay down their lives to serve it. 
 T honor the unknown ones that used to walk in Peeks- 
 kill and who fell in battle. I honor, too, every armlesa 
 man, every limping soldier, that through patriotism went 
 to the battle-field and came back lame and crippled, and 
 bears manfully and heroically his deprivation. What 
 though he find no occupation 1 What though he be for 
 gotten 1 He has in him the imperishable sweetness of 
 this thought : I did it for my country s sake." For 
 God s sake and for your country s sake, live, and you 
 shall live forever. 
 
 A CENTURY OF SELF-GOVERNMENT. 
 
 THE HON. ROBERT C. WINTHROP AT BOSTON, MASS. 
 
 I. 
 
 Again and again, Mr. Mayor and Fellow-Cit 
 izens, in years gone by, considerations or circumstances 
 of some sort, public or private I know not what have 
 prevented my acceptance of most kind and flattering in 
 vitations to deliver the oration in this my native city on 
 the Fourth of July. On one of those occasions, long, 
 long ago, I am Bald to have playfully replied to the 
 Mayor of that period, that, if I lived to witness this Cen 
 tennial anniversary, I would not refuse any service 
 which might be required of me. That pledge has been 
 recalled by others, if not remembered by myself, and by 
 the grace of God I am here to-day to fulfill it. I have 
 come at last, in obedience to your call, to add my name 
 to the distinguished roll of those who have discharged 
 this service in unbroken succession since the year 1783, 
 when the date of a glorious act of patriots was substi 
 tuted for that of a dastardly deed of hirelings the 4th 
 of July for the 5th of March as a day of annual cele 
 bration by the people of Boston. 
 
 In rising to redeem the promise thus inconsiderately 
 given, I may be pardoned for not forgetting, at the out 
 set, who presided over the Executive Council of Massa 
 chusetts when the Declaration, which has just been 
 read, was first formally and solemnly proclaimed to the 
 people, from the balcony of yonder Old State House, on 
 
 the 18th of July, 1776 ; and whose privilege it was 
 amid the shoutings of the assembled multitude, the ring 
 ing of the bells, the salutes of the surrounding forts, and 
 the firing of 13 volleys from 13 successive divisions of 
 the Continental regiments, drawn up " in correspondence 
 with the number of the American States United," to in 
 voke " Stability and Perpetuity to American Independ 
 ence ! God save our American States ! " 
 
 That invocation was not in vain. That wish, that 
 prayer, has been graciously granted. We are here this 
 day to thank God for it. We do thank God for it with all 
 our hearts, and ascribe to Him all the glory. And it 
 would be unnatural if I did not feel a more than common 
 sat wf action, that the privilege of giving expression to 
 your emotions of joy and gratitude at this hour should 
 have been assigned to the oldest living descendant of him 
 by whom that invocation was uttered and that prayer 
 breathed up to heaven. 
 
 And if, indeed, in addition to this as you, Mr. Mayor, 
 so kindly urged in originally inviting me the name I 
 bear may serve in any sort as a link between the earliest 
 settlement of New-England, two centuries and a half 
 ago, and the grand culmination of that settlement in this 
 Centennial epoch in American independence, all the less 
 may I be at liberty to express anything of the compunc- 
 ion or regret, which I cannot but sincerely feel, that so 
 
A Century of Self-Government. Wlnthrop. 
 
 45 
 
 responsible and difficult a task liad not been imposed 
 upon some more sufficient or certainly upon some younger 
 man. 
 
 Yet what can I say 1 What can any one say, here or 
 elsewhere, to-day, which shall either satisfy the expecta 
 tions of others, or meet his own sense of the demands of 
 such an occasion 1 For myself, certainly, the longer I 
 have contemplated it the more deeply I have reflected 
 on it so much the more hopeless I have become of find 
 ing myself able to give any adequate expression to its 
 full significance, its real sublimity and grandeur. A 
 hundred-fold more than when John Adams wrote to his 
 wife it would be so forever, it is an occasion for " shows, 
 games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, 
 from one end of the continent to the other." Ovations, 
 rather than orations, are the order of such a day as this. 
 Emotions like those which ought to fill, and which do 
 fill, all our hearts, call for the swelling tones of a multi 
 tude, the cheers of a mighty crowd, and refuse to be 
 utteied by any single human voice. The strongest 
 phrases seem feeble and powerless ; the best results of 
 historical research have the dryuess of chaff and husks, 
 and the richest flowers of rhetoric the drowsiness of 
 " poppy or mandragora," in presence of the simplest 
 statement of the grand consummation we are here to cel 
 ebratea century of self-government completed! A 
 hundred years of free republican institutions realized 
 and rounded out ! An era of popular liberty, continued 
 and prolonged from generation to generation, until to 
 day it assumes its full proportions, and asserts its right 
 ful place, among the ages ! It is a theme from which an 
 Everett, a Choate, or even a Webster might have shrunk. 
 But those voices, alas ! were hushed long ago. It is a 
 theme on which any one, living or dead, might have been 
 glad to follow the precedent of those few incomparable 
 sentences at Gettysburg, on the 19th of November, 1863, 
 and forbear from all attempt at extended discourse. It 
 is not for me, however, to copy that unique original nor 
 yet to shelter myself under an example, which I should 
 in vain aspire to equal. 
 
 And indeed, fellow-citizens, some formal words must 
 be spoken here to-day trite, familiar, commonplace 
 words though they may be some words of comrnein- 
 oral on; some words of congratulation ; some words of 
 glory to God, and of acknowledgment to man ; some 
 grateful lockings back ; some hopeful, trustful lookings 
 forward these, I am sensible, cannot be spared from our 
 great assembly on this Centennial Day. You would not 
 pardon me for omitting them. But where shall I begin ? 
 To what sp-cific subject shall I turn for refuge from the 
 thousand thoughts which come crowding to one s mind 
 and rushing to one s lips, all jealous of postponement, all 
 clamoring for ulterauce before our Festival shall close, 
 and bef;>r6 this Centennial sun shall set? The single, 
 simple act which has made the Fourth of July memora 
 ble fere \ ^r Ute more scene oi the Declaration would 
 
 of itself and alone supply an ample subject for far more 
 than the little hour which I may dare to occupy ; and, 
 though it has been described a hundred times before, in 
 histories and addresses, and in countless magazines and 
 journals, it imperatively demands something mo re than 
 a cursory allusion here to-day, and challenges our atten 
 tion as it never did before, and hardly ever can challenge 
 it again. 
 
 II. 
 JEFFERSON. 
 
 Go back with me, then, for a few moments at least, to 
 that great year of our Lord, and that great day of Amer 
 ican Liberty. Transport yourselves with me, in imagina 
 tion, to Philadelphia. It will require but little effort for 
 any of us to do so, for all our hearts are there already. 
 Yes, we are all there from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
 from the Lakes to the Gulf, we are all there, at this 
 high noon of our Nation s birthday, and that beautiful 
 City of Brotherly Love, rejoicing in all her brilliant dis 
 plays, and partaking of the full enjoyment of all her 
 pageantry and pride. Certainly, the birthplace and the 
 burial-place of Franklin are in cordial sympathy at this 
 hour; and a common sentiment of congratulation and 
 joy, leaping and vibrating from heart to heart, outstrips 
 even the magic swiftness of magnetic wires. There are 
 no chords of such elastic reach and such elastic power as 
 the heartstrings of a mighty nation, touched and tuned, 
 as all our heartstrings are to-day, to the sense of a com 
 mon glory throbbing and thrilling with a common ex 
 ultation. 
 
 Go with me, then, I say, to Philadelphia; not to Phila 
 delphia, indeed, as she is at this moment, with all her 
 bravery on, with all her beautiful garments around her,, 
 with all the graceful and generous contributions which 
 so many other cities and other States and other Nations 
 have sent for adornment not forgetting those most 
 graceful, most welcome, most touching contributions, in 
 view of the precise character of the occasion, from Old 
 England herself ;- -but go with me to Philadelphia as she 
 was just a hundred years ago. Enter with me her noble 
 Independence Hall, so happily restored and consecrated 
 afresh as the Runnymede of our Nation ; and, as we enter 
 it, let us not forget to be grateful that no demands of 
 public convenience or expediency have called for the 
 demolition of that old State House of Pennsylvania. Ob 
 serve and watch the movements, listen attentively to the 
 words, look steadfastly at the countenances, of the men 
 who compose the little Congress assembled there. Braver, 
 wiser, no bier men have never been gathered and grouped 
 under a single roof, before or since, in any age, or any 
 soil beneath the sun. What are they doing ? What are 
 they daring? Who are they, thus to do, and thus to 
 dare ? 
 
 Single out with me, as you easily will at the first 
 glance, by a presence and a stature not easily overlooked 
 or mistaken, the young, ardent, accomplished Jefferson* 
 
46 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 He is only just 33 years of age. Charming in conversa 
 tion, ready and full in counsel, he is " slow of tongue," 
 like the great Lawgiver of the Israelites, for any public 
 discussion or formal discourse. But he has brought with 
 him the reputation of wielding what John Adams well 
 called "a masterly pen." And grandly has he j ustified 
 that reputation. Grandly has he employed that pen 
 already in drafting a paper which is at this moment 
 lying on the table, and awaiting its final signature and 
 sanction. 
 
 Three weeks before, indeed on the previous 7th of 
 June his own noble colleague, Richard Henry Lee, had 
 moved the resolution, whose adoption on the 2d of July 
 liad virtually settled the whole question. Nothing, cer 
 tainly, more explicit or emphatic could have been 
 wanted for that Congress than that resolution, setting 
 forth, as it did, in language of striking simplicity and 
 brevity and dignity, " That these United Colonies are, 
 and, of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States ; 
 that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British 
 Crown, and that all connection between them and the 
 State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dis 
 solved." 
 
 The resolution was, indeed, not only comprehensive 
 and conclusive enough for the Congress which adopted 
 it, but, I need not say, it is comprehensive and conclu 
 sive enough for us ; and I heartily wish that, in the cen 
 tury to come, its reading might be substituted for that of 
 the longer Declaration, which has put the patience of our 
 audiences to so severe a test for so many years past, if 
 not to day. 
 
 But the form in which that resolution was to be an 
 nounced and proclaimed to the people of the colonies, 
 and the reasons by which it was to be justified before the 
 world, were at that time of intense interest and of mo 
 mentous importance. No graver responsibility was ever 
 devolved upon a young man of 33, if, indeed, upon any 
 man of any age, than that of preparing such a paper. As 
 often as I have examined the original draft of that 
 paper, still extant in the archives of the State Depart 
 ment at Washington, and have observed how very few 
 changes were made, or even suggested, by the illustrious 
 men associated with its author on the committee for its 
 preparation, it has seemed to me to be as marvelous a 
 composition, of its kind.and for its purpose, as the annals 
 of mankind cavi show. The earliest honors of this day 
 certainly may well be paid, here and throughout the 
 country, to the young Virginian of " the masterly pen." 
 
 And here, by the favor of a highly valued friend and 
 fellow-citizen, to whom it was given by Jefferson himself 
 a few months only before his death, I am privileged to 
 hold in my hands and to lift up to the eager gaze of you 
 sll, a most compact and convenient little mahogany case, 
 which bears this autograph inscription on its face, dated 
 " Monticcllo, November 18, 1825 :" 
 
 "T ~"~w J-ff" fl - tliis Writfn-? D?slt to Joseph 
 
 Coolidge, Junr., as a memorial of his affection. It was 
 made from a drawing of his own, by Ben Randall, Cab 
 inet-maker of Philadelphia, with whom he first lodged 
 on his arrival in that City in May, 1776, and is the 
 identical one on which he wrote the Declaration of 
 Independence." 
 
 " Politics, as well as Religion," the inscription pro 
 ceeds to say, " has its superstitions. These, gaining 
 strength with time, may, one day, give imaginary value 
 to this relic, for its association with the birth of the Great 
 Charter of our Independence." 
 
 Superstitions ! Imaginary value ! Not for an instant 
 can we admit such ideas. The modesty of the writer has 
 betrayed even " the masterly pen." There is no imagin 
 ary value to this relic, and no superstition is required 
 to render it as precious and as priceless a piece of 
 wood, as the secular cabinets of the \v orld have ever 
 possessed, or ever claimed to possess. No cabinet 
 maker on earth will have a more enduring name than 
 this inscription has secured to " Ben Randall of Phila 
 delphia." No pen will have a wider or more lasting 
 fame than his who wrote the inscription. The very table 
 at Runny mede, which some of us have seen, on which 
 the Magna Charta of England is said to have been signed 
 or sealed five centuries and a half before even were it 
 authenticated by the genuine autographs of every one of 
 those brave old Barons, with Stephen Langton at their 
 head who extorted its grand pledges and promises from 
 King John so soon to be violated could hardly exceed, 
 could hardly equal, in interest and value, this little 
 mahogany desk. May it long find its appropriate and 
 appreciating ownership in the successive generations of 
 a family in which the blood of Virginia and Massachu 
 setts are so auspiciously commingled! 
 
 But the young Jefferson is not alone from Virginia, on 
 the day we are celebrating, in the Hall which we have 
 entered as imaginary spectators of the scene. His veu- 
 erated friend and old legal preceptor George Wythe is, 
 indeed, temporarily absent from his side; and even 
 Richard Henry Lee, the original mover of the measure, 
 and upon whom it might have devolved to draw up the 
 Declaration, has been called home by dangerous illness 
 in his family, and is not there to help him. But " the gay, 
 good-humored " Francis Lightfoot Lee, a younger 
 brother, is there. Benjamin Harrison, the father of our 
 late President Harrison, is there, and has just reported 
 the Declaration from the Committee of the Whole, of 
 which he was Chairman. The " mil I and philanthropic " 
 Carter Braxton is there, in the place of the lamented Pey 
 ton Randolph, the first President of the Continental Con 
 gress, who had died, to the sorrow of the whole country, 
 six or seven months before. And the noble-hearted 
 Thomas Nelson is there the largest subscriber to the 
 generous relief from Virginia to Boston during the sore 
 distress occasioned by the shutting up of our port, and 
 who was the mover of tliose Instructions in the Con veil- 
 
A Century of Self -Government Winthrop. 
 
 47 
 
 tion of Virginia, passed on the 15th of May, under which 
 Richard Henry Lee offered the original Resolution of In 
 dependence, on the 7th of June. 
 
 I am particular, fellow-citizens, in giving to the Old 
 Dominion the foremost place in this rapid survey of the 
 Fourth of July, 1776, and in naming every one of her 
 delegates who participated in that day s doings; for it is 
 hardly too much to say that the destinies of our coun 
 try, at that period, hung and hinged upon her action, 
 and upon the actions of her great and glorious sons. 
 Without Virginia, as we must all acknowledge without 
 her Patrick Henry among the people, her Lees and Jef 
 ferson in the forum, and her Washington in the field I 
 will not say that the cause of American Liberty and 
 American Independence must have been ultimately de 
 featedno, no ; there was no ultimate defeat for that 
 cause in the decrees of the Most High ! but it must have 
 been delayed, postponed, perplexed, and to many eyes 
 ;and many hearts rendered seemingly hopeless. It was 
 Union iv*iich assured our independence, and there could 
 have been no Union without the influence and coopera 
 tion of that^reat leading Southern Colony. To-day, 
 then, as we look back over the wide gulf of a century, 
 we are ready and glad to forget everything of alienation, 
 everything of contention and estrangement which has 
 intervened, and to hail her once more, as our Fathers in 
 Faneull Hall hailed her in 1775, as " our noble, patriotic 
 sister Colony, Virginia." 
 
 I may not attempt, on this occasion, to speak with 
 equal particularity of all the other delegates whom we 
 see assembled in that immoratal Congress. Their names 
 are all inscribed where they can never be obliterated, 
 never be forgotten. Yet some others of them so chal 
 lenge our attention and rivet our gaze, as we look in 
 upon that old, time-honored Hall, that I cannot pass to 
 other topics without a brief allusion to them. 
 
 III. 
 SHERMAN AND HANCOCK. , 
 
 Who can overlook or mistake the sturdy front of Roger 
 Sherman, whom we are proud to recall as a native of 
 Massachusetts, though now a delegate from Connecti 
 cut, that " Old Puritan," as John Adams well said, " as 
 honest as an angel, and as firm in the cause of American 
 Independence as Mount Atlas," represented most 
 worthily to-day by the distinguished orator of the Cen 
 tennial at Philadelphia, as well as by more than one dis 
 tinguished grandson in our own State 1 
 
 Who can overlook or mistake the stalwart figure of 
 Samuel Chase of Maryland, "of ardent passions, of 
 strong mind,,of domineering temper, of a turbulent and 
 boisterous life," who had helped to burn in effigy the 
 Maryland Stamp Distributor 11 years before, and who, 
 we are t?oldby one who krew what he was saying, " must 
 ever be conspicuous in the catalogue of that Congress?" 
 
 His milder and more amiable colleague, Charles Carroll, 
 
 was engaged at that m merit in pressing the cause of in 
 dependence on the hesitating Convention of Maryland at 
 Annapolis; and though, as we shall see, he signed the 
 Declaration on the 2d of August, and outlived all his 
 compeers on that roll of glory, he is missing from the 
 illustrious band as we look in upon them this morning. I 
 cannot but remember that it was my privilege to see and 
 know that venerable person in my early manhood. En 
 tering his drawing-room, nearly tive-and-forty years ago, 
 I found him reposing on a sofa and covered with a shawl, 
 and was not even aware of his presence, so shrunk and 
 shriveled by the lapse of years was his originally feeble 
 frame. Quotlibras in duce summo ! But the little heap 
 on the sofa was soon seen stirring, and, rousing himself 
 from his midday nap, he rose and greeted me with a 
 courtesy and a grace which I can never forget. In the 
 95th year of his age, as he was, and within a few months 
 of his death, it is not surprising that there should be little 
 for me to recall of that interview, save his eager inquiries 
 about James Madison, whom I had just visited at Mont- 
 pelier, and his affectionate allusion to John Adams, who 
 had gone before him ; and save, too, the exceeding satis 
 faction for myself of having seen and pressed the hand 
 of the last surviving signer of the Declaration. 
 
 But Csesar Rodney, who had gone home on the same 
 patriotic errand which had called Carroll to Maryland, 
 had happily returned in season, and had come in, two 
 days before, " in his boots fnd spurs," to give the casting 
 vote for Delaware in favor of Independence. 
 
 And there is Arthur Middleton of South Carolina, the 
 bosom friend of our own Hancock, and who is associated 
 with him under the same roof in those elegant hospitali 
 ties which helped to make men know and understand ana 
 trust each other. And with him you may see and almost 
 hear the eloquent Edward Rutledge, who not long before 
 had united with John Adams and Richard Henry Lee in 
 urging on the several colonies the great measure of 
 establishing permanent governments at once for them 
 selvesa decisive step which we may not forget that 
 South Carolina preceded all other colonies in taking. She 
 took it, however, with a reservation, and her delegates 
 were not quite ready to vote for Independence when it 
 was first proposed. 
 
 But Richard Stockton of New-Jersey must not be un 
 marked or unmentioned in our rapid survey, more espe 
 cially as it is a matter of record that his original doubts 
 about the measure, which he is HOW bravely supporting, 
 had been dissipated and dispelled "by the irresistible 
 and conclusive arguments of John Adams." 
 
 And who requires to be reminded that our " Great Bos- 
 tonian," Benjamin Franklin, is at his post to-day, repre 
 senting his adopted colony with less support than he 
 could wish for Pennsylvania, as well as New- York, was 
 sadly divided, and at times almost paralyzed by her divi 
 sions but with patriotism and firmness and prudence 
 and sagacity and philosophy and wit und common sense 
 
48 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1870. 
 
 and courage enough to constitute a whole delegation and 
 to represent a whole colony by himself ! He is the last 
 man of that whole glorious group of fifty or it may have 
 been one or two more or one or two less than fifty who 
 requires to be pointed out in order to be the observed of 
 all observers. 
 
 But I must not stop here. It is fit, above all other 
 things, that, while we do justice to the great actors in 
 this scene from other colonies, we should not overlook 
 the delegates from our own colony. It is fit, above all 
 things, that we should recall something more than the 
 names of the men who represented Massachusetts in that 
 great Assembly, and who boldly affixed their signatures 
 in her behalf to that immortal instrument. 
 
 Was there ever a more signal distinction vouchsafed to 
 mortal man than that which was won and worn by John 
 Hancock a hundred years ago to-day 1 Not altogether a 
 ereat man; not without some grave defects of character 
 we remember nothing at this hour save his Presidency of 
 the Congress of the Declaration and his bold and noble 
 signature to our Magna Charta. Behold him in the 
 chair which is still standing in its old place the very 
 same chair in which Washington was to sit eleven years 
 later as President of the Convention which framed the 
 Constitution of the United States ; the very same chair, 
 emblazoned on the back of which Franklin was to descry 
 " a rising, and not a setting sun," when that Constitution 
 had been finally adopted behold him, the young Boston 
 merchant, not yet quite forty years of age, not only with 
 a princely fortune at stake, but with a price at that 
 moment upon his own head, sitting there to-day in all the 
 calm composure and dignity which so peculiarly charac 
 terized him, and which nothing seemed able to relax or 
 ruffle. He had chanced to come on to the Congress dur 
 ing the previous year just as Peyton Randolph had been 
 compelled to relinquish his post and go home to die; and, 
 having been unexpectedly elected as his successor, he 
 hesitated about taking the seat. But grand old Benjamin 
 Harrison of Virginia, we are told, was standing beside 
 him, and with the ready good humor that loved a joke 
 even in the Senate House, he seized the modest candidate 
 in his athletic arms and placed him in the Presidential 
 chair; then, turning to some of the members around, he 
 exclaimed : " We will show Mother Britain how little we 
 care for her by making a Massachusetts man our Presi 
 dent whom she has excluded from pardon by a public 
 proclamation." 
 
 Behold him ! He has risen for a moment. He has put 
 the question. The Declaration is adopted. It is already 
 late in the evening, and all formal promulgation of the 
 day s doings must be postponed. After a grace of three 
 days, the air will be vibrating with the joyous tones of 
 the old bell in the cupola over his head, proclaiming lib 
 erty to all mankind, and with the responding acclama 
 tions of assembled multitudes. Meantime, for him, how 
 ever, a simple but solemn duty remains to bo discharged. 
 
 The paper is before him. You may see the very table on 
 which it was laid, and the very inkstand which awaits 
 his use. No hesitation now. He dips his pen, and with 
 an untrembling hand proceeds to execute a signature, 
 which would seem to have been studied in the schools, 
 and practiced in the counting-room, and shaped and mod 
 eled day by day in the correspondence of mercantile and 
 political manhood, until it should be meet for the authen 
 tication of some immortal act ; and which, as Webster 
 grandly said, has made his name as imperishable " as if 
 it were written between Orion and the Pleiades." 
 
 Under that signature, with only the attestation of a 
 secretary, the Declaration goes forth to the American 
 people, to be printed in their journals, to be proclaimed 
 in their streets, to be published from their pulpits, to be 
 read at the head of their armies, to be incorporated for 
 ever into their history. The British forces, driven away 
 from Boston, are now landing on Staten Island, and the 
 reverses of Long Island are just awaiting us. They were 
 met by the promulgation of this act of offense and defi 
 ance to all loj T al authority. But there was no individual 
 responsibility for that act, save in the signsfllhre of John 
 Hancock, President, and Charles Thomson, Secretary. 
 Not until the 2d of August was our young Boston mer 
 chant relieved from the perilous, the appalling grandeur 
 of standing sole sponsor for the revolt of thirteen colo 
 nies and three millions of people. Sixteen or seventeen 
 years before, as a very young man, he had made a visit to 
 London, and was present at the burial of George II. and 
 at the coronation of George III. He is now not only the 
 witness but the instrument, and in some sort the imper 
 sonation, of a far more substantial change of dynasty on 
 his own soil the burial of royalty under any and every 
 litle, and the coronation of a sovereign whose scepter 
 has already endured for a century, and whose sway has 
 already embraced three times thirteen States and more 
 than thirteen times three millions of people ! 
 
 Ah, if his quaint, picturesque, charming old mansion- 
 ho\ise, so long the gem of Beacon-st., could have stood 
 till this day, our Centennial decorations and illumina 
 tions might haply have so marked, and sanctified, and 
 glorified it, that the rage of reconstruction would have 
 passed over it still longer, and spared it for the reverent 
 gaze of other generations. But his own name and fame 
 are secure ; and, whatever may have been the foibles or 
 faults of his later years, to-day we will remember that 
 momentous and matchless signature, and him who made 
 it, with nothing but respect, admiration, and gratitude. 
 
 IV. 
 
 SAMUEL AND JOHN ADAMS. 
 But Hancock, as I need not remind you, was not the 
 only prescribed patriot who represented Massachusetts 
 at Philadelphia on the day we are commemorating. His 
 associate in Gen. Gage s memorable exception from 
 rardon is close at his aide. He who, as-a Harvard College 
 
A Century of Self-Government l\lntlirop. 
 
 student, in 1743, had maintained tlie affirmative of the 
 thesis, " Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme 
 Magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be 
 preserved," and who, during those whole three-and 
 thirty years since had been training up himself and 
 training up his fellow-countrymen in the nurture and 
 admonition of the Lord and of Liberty; he who had 
 replied to Gage s recommendation to him to make his 
 peace with the King, " I trust I have long since made my 
 peace with the King of Kings, and no personal considera 
 tions shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of 
 my country;" he who had drawn up the Boston Instruc 
 tions to her Representatives in the General Court, 
 adopted at Faneuil Hall, on the 24th of May, 1764 
 the earliest protest against the Stamp act, and 
 one of the grandest papers of our whole Revo 
 lutionary period ; he who had instituted and organized 
 those Committees of Correspondence, without which we 
 could have had no united counsels, no concerted action, 
 no union, no success ; he who, after the massacre of 
 March 5, 1770, had demanded so heroically the removal 
 from Boston of the British regiments, ever afterward 
 known as " Sam Adams s regiments," telling the Gov 
 ernor to his face, with an emphasis and an eloquence 
 which were hardly ever exceeded since Demosthenes 
 stood on the Bema, or Paul on Mars Hill, " If the Lieu 
 tenant-Governor or Col. Dalryrnple, or both together, 
 have authority to remove one regiment they have au 
 thority to remove two ; and nothing short of the total 
 evacuation of the town by all the regular troops will sat 
 isfy the public mind or preserve the peace of the prov 
 ince ;" he, " the Palinurus of the American Revolution," 
 as Jefferson once called him, but, thank Heaven ! a Paii- 
 nurus who was never put asleep at the helm, never 
 thrown into the sea, but who is still watching the com 
 pass and the stars, and steering the ship as she enters at 
 last the haven he has so long yearned for the veteran 
 Samuel Adams, the disinterested, inflexible, Incorrupti 
 ble statesman is second to no one in that whole Con 
 gress, hardly second to any one in the whole 13 colonies, 
 in his claim to the honors and grateful acknowledgments 
 of this hour. We have just gladly hailed his statue on 
 its way to the Capitol. 
 
 Nor must the name of Robert Treat Paine be forgotten 
 among the five delegates of Massachusetts in that Hall 
 of Independence, a hundred years ago to-day an able 
 lawyer, a learned judge, a just man ; connected by mar 
 riage, if I mistake not, Mr. Mayor, with your own gal 
 lant grandfather, Gen. Cobb, and who himself inherited 
 the blood and illustrated the virtues of the hero and 
 statesman whose name he bore Robert Treat, a most 
 distinguished officer in King Philip s War, and afterward 
 a worthy Governor of Connecticut. 
 
 And with him, too. is Elbridge Gerry, the very 
 youngest member of the whole Continental Congress, 
 just thirty-two years of age who had been one of the 
 
 chosen friends of the proto-martyr, Gen. Jo$eph War 
 ren, who was with Warren at Watertowu the very last 
 night before he fell at Bunker Hill, and iuto whose ear 
 that heroic volunteer had whispered those memorable 
 words of presentment, " Dulce et decorum est pro pa- 
 tria mori ; " who lived himself to serve his Common 
 wealth and the Nation ardently and efficiently at home 
 and abroad, ever in accordance with his own patriotic 
 injunction, " It is the duty of every citizen, though he 
 may have but one day to live, to devote that day to the 
 service of his country," and died on his way to his post 
 as Vice-Presidentof the United States. 
 
 One more name is still to be pronounced. One more 
 star of that little Massachusetts cluster is still to be ob 
 served and noted. And it is one which, on the precise 
 occasion we commemorate one which, during those 
 great days of June and July, 1776, on which the question 
 of independence was immediately discussed and decided, 
 had hardly "a fellow in the firmament," and which was 
 certainly " the bright, particular star" of our own con 
 stellation. You will all have anticipated me in naming 
 John Adams. Beyond all doubt his is the Massachusetts 
 name most prominently associated with the immediate 
 day we celebrate. 
 
 Others may have been earlier or more active than he 
 in preparing the way. Others may have labored longer 
 and more zealously to instruct the popular mind and in 
 flame the popular heart for the great step which was 
 now to be taken. Others may have been more ardent, as 
 they unquestionably were more prominent, in the various 
 stages of the struggle against Writs of Assistance, and 
 Stamp Acts, and Tea Taxes. But from the date of that 
 marvelous letter of his to Nathan Webb, in 1755, when 
 lie was less than 20 years old, he seems to have fore 
 cast the destinies of this continent as few other men of 
 any age at that day had done ; while from the moment 
 at which the Continental Congress took the question of 
 Independence fairly in hand, as a question to be decided 
 and acted on, until they had brought it to its final issue 
 in the Declaration, his was the voice, above and before 
 all other voices, which commanded the ears, convinced 
 the minds, and inspired the hearts of his colleagues, and 
 triumphantly secured the result. 
 
 I need not speak of him in other relations or in after 
 years. His long life of varied and noble service to his 
 country, in almost every sphere of public duty, domestic 
 and foreign, belongs to history ; and history has long ago 
 taken it in charge. But the testimony which was borne 
 to his grand efforts and utterances, by the author of the 
 Declaration himself, can never be gainsaid, never be 
 weakened, never be forgotten. That testimony, old as it 
 is, familiar as it is, belongs to this day. John Adams will 
 be remembered and honored forever, in every true 
 American heart, as the acknowledged Champion of Inde 
 pendence in the Continental Congress" coming out witli 
 
50 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 a power which moved us from our seats " " our Colossus 
 on the floor." 
 
 And when we recall the circumstances of his death 
 the year, the day, the hour and the last words upon his 
 dying lips, " Independence forever "who can help feel 
 ing that there was some mysterious tie holding back his 
 heroic spirit from the skies, until it should be set free 
 amid the exulting shouts of his country s first National 
 Jubilee ! 
 
 But not his heroic spirit alone ! 
 
 In this rapid survey of the men assembled at Philadel 
 phia a hundred years ago to-day, I began with Thomas 
 Jefferson of Virginia, and I end with John Adams of 
 Massachusetts, and no one can hesitate to admit that, 
 under God, they were the very Alpha and Omega of that 
 day s doings the pen and the tongue the masterly 
 author, and the no less masterly advocate of the Decla 
 ration. 
 
 V. 
 THE STATESMEN. 
 
 And now, my friends, what legend of ancient Rome or 
 Greece or Egypt, what myth of prehistoric mythology, 
 what story of Herodotus, or fable of .<Esop, or metamor 
 phosis of Ovid, would have seemed more fabulous and 
 mythical did it rest on any remote or doubtful tradition, 
 or had not so many of us lived to be startled and tJirilled 
 and awed by it than the fact, that these two men, under 
 so many different circumstances and surroundings, of 
 age and constitution and climate, widely distant from 
 each other, living alike in quiet neighborhoods, remote 
 from the smoke and stir of cities, and long before rail 
 roads and telegraphs had made any advances toward 
 the annihilation or abridgment of space, should have 
 been released to their rest and summoned to the skies, 
 not only on the same day, but that day the Fourth of 
 July, and that Fourth of July the Fiftieth Anniversary 
 of that great Declaration which they had contended for 
 and carried through so triumphantly side by side ! 
 
 What an added emphasis Jefferson would have given 
 to the Inscription on this little desk" Politics, as well 
 as Religion, has its superstitions," could he have fore 
 seen the close even of his own life, much more the simul 
 taneous close of these two lives, on the Day of days ! Oh, 
 let me not admit the idea of superstition ! Let me rather 
 reverently say, as Webster said at the time, in that mag 
 nificent eulogy which left so little for any one else to say 
 as to the lives or deaths of Adams and Jefferson : " As 
 their lives themselves were the gifts of Providence, who 
 is not willing to recognize in their happy termination, as 
 well ae in their long continuanc, proofs that our country 
 and its benefactors are objects of His care 1" 
 
 And now another fifty years have pased away, and 
 
 we are holding our high Centennial Festival ; and still 
 
 the most striking, most impressive, most memorable co- 
 
 * incidence in all American history, or oven in the authen 
 
 tic records of mankind, is without a visible monument 
 anywhere ! 
 
 In the interesting little City of Weimar, renowned as 
 the resort and residence of more than one of the greatest 
 philosophers and poets of Germany, many a traveler 
 must have seen and admired the charming statues of 
 Goethe and Schiller, standing side by side and hand in 
 hand, on a single pedestal, and offering, as it were, the 
 laurel wreath of literary priority or preeminence to each 
 other. Few nobler works of art, in conception or execu 
 tion, can be found on the continent of Europe. And 
 what could be a worthier or a juster commemoration of 
 the marvelous coincidence of wlach I have just spoken 
 and of the men who are the subjects of it, and of the 
 declaration with which, alike in their lives and in their 
 deaths, that they are so peculiarly and so signally asso 
 ciated, than just such a monument, with the statues of 
 Adams and Jefferson, side by side and hand in hand, upon 
 the same base, pressing upon each other, in mutual ac 
 knowledgment and deference, the victor palm of triumph 
 for whieh they must ever be held in common and equal 
 honor 1 It would be a new tie between Massachusetts 
 and Virginia. It would be a new bond of that Union 
 which is the safety and glory of both. It would be a new 
 pledge of that restored good will between the North and 
 South, which is the herald and harbinger of a second 
 century of -National Independence. It would be a fit 
 recognition of the great hand of God in our history ! 
 
 At all events, it is one of the crying omissions and 
 neglects which reproach us all this day, that " glorious 
 old John Adams " is without any proportionate public 
 monument in the State of which he was one of the grand 
 est citizens and sons, and in whose behalf he rendered 
 such inestimable services to his country. It is almost 
 ludicrous to look around and see who has been commem 
 orated, apd he neglected! He might be seen standing 
 alone, as he knew so well how to stand alone in life. He 
 might bo seen grouped with his illustrious son, only 
 second to himself in his claims on the omitted posthu 
 mous honors of his native State. Or, if the claim of noble 
 women to such commemorations were ever to be recog^ 
 nized on our soil, he might be lovingly grouped with that 
 incomparable wife, from whom he was often separated 
 by public duties and personal dangers, and whose familiar 
 correspondence with him, and his with her, furnishes a. 
 picture of fidelity and affection, and of patriotic zeal and 
 courage and self-sacrifice, almost without a parallel in 
 our Revolutionary Annals. 
 
 But before all other statues, let us have those of Adams 
 and Jefferson on a single block, as they stood together a 
 hundred years ago to-day as they were translated to 
 gether just fifty years ago to-day foremost for Independ 
 ence in their lives, and in their deaths not divided ! 
 Next, certainly, to the completion of the National Monu. 
 ment to Washington, at the Capital, this double statue 
 of this " double star " of the Declaration calls for the cou- 
 
A Century of Self-Government Winthrop. 
 
 51 
 
 tributions of a patriotic people. It would have some- 
 tiling of special appropriateness as the first gift to that 
 Boston Park, which is to date from the Centennial Period. 
 
 I have felt, Mr. Mayor and fellow-citizens, as I am sure 
 you all must feel, that the men who were gathered at 
 Philadelphia a hundred years ago to-dfty, familiar as 
 their names and their story may be to ourselves and to all 
 the world, had an imperative claim to the first and high 
 est honors of this Centennial anniversary. But, having 
 paid these passing tributes to their memory, I hasten to 
 turn to considerations less purely personal. 
 
 The Declaration has been adopted, and has been sent 
 forth in a hundred journals and on a thousand broadsides 
 to every camp and council chamber, to every town and 
 village and hamlet and fireside throughout the colonies. 
 What was it 1 What did it declare 1 What was its right 
 ful interpretation and intention" ? Under what circum 
 stances was it adopted ! What did it accomplish for our 
 selves and for mankind 1 
 
 A recent and powerful writer on " The Growth of the 
 English Constitution," whom I had the pleasure of meet 
 ing at the Commencement of Old Cambridge University 
 two years ago, says most strikingly and most justly : 
 " There are certain great political documents, each of 
 which forms a landmark in our political history. There 
 is the Great Charter, the Petition of Rights, the Bill of 
 Rights." " But not one of them," he adds, " gave itself 
 out as the enactment of anything new. All claimed to 
 set forth, with new strength it might be, and with new 
 clearness, those rights of Englishmen which were already 
 old." The same remark has more recently been incor 
 porated into " A Short History of the English People." 
 " In itself," says the writer of that admirable little vol 
 ume, " the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to 
 establish any new constitutional principles. The Charter 
 of Henry I. formed the basis of the whole, and the ad 
 ditions to it are, for the most part, formal recognitions of 
 the judicial and administrative changes introduced by 
 Henry II." 
 
 So substantially so almovSt precisely it may be said of 
 the great American charter, which was drawn up by 
 Thomas Jefferson on the precious little desk which lies 
 before rue. It made no pretensions to novelty. The men 
 of 1776 were not in any sense, certainly not in any sedi 
 tious sense, greedy of novelties " avidi nova rum rerum." 
 They had claimed nothing new. They desired nothiwg 
 new. Their old original rights as Englishmen were all 
 they sought to enjoy, and those they resolved to vindicate. 
 It was the invasion and denial of those old rights of Eng 
 lishmen which they resisted and revolted from. 
 
 As our excellent fellow-citizen, Mr. Dana, so well said 
 publicly at Lexington last year, and as we should all 
 have been glad to have him in the way of quietly repeat 
 ing in London this year," We were not the revolution 
 ists. The King and Parliament were tJte revolutionists. 
 
 They were the radical innovators. We were the conser 
 vators of existing institutions." 
 
 No one has forgotten, or can ever forget, how early 
 and how emphatically all this was admitted by some 
 of the grandest statesmen and orators of England her- 
 sel". It was the attempt to subvert our rights as English 
 men which roused Chatham to some of his most majestic 
 efforts. It was the attempt to subvert our rights as 
 Englishmen which kindled Burke to not a few of his 
 most brilliant utterances. It was the attempt to subvert 
 our rights as Englishmen which inspired BarrS and 
 Conway and Cauideii with appeals and arguments and 
 phrases which will keep their memories fresh whem all 
 else associated with them is forgotten. The names of 
 all three of them, as you \TBll know, have long been the 
 cherished designations of American towns. 
 
 They all perceived and understood that we were con 
 tending for English rights, and against the violation of 
 the great principles of English liberty. Nay, not a few 
 of them perceived and understood that they ^ ere fight 
 ing their battles as well as our own, and that nhe liber 
 ties of Englishmen upon their own soil were virtually in 
 volved in our cause and in our contest. 
 
 There is a most notable letter of Josiah Quiocy, jr/s, 
 written from London at the end of 1774 a few months 
 only before that young patriot returned to die so sadly 
 within sight of his native shores in which he tolls his 
 wife, to whom he was not likely to write for any mere 
 sensational effect, that " some of the first characters for 
 understanding, integrity, and spirit," whom he had met 
 in London, had used language of this sort : " This na 
 tion is lost. Corruption and the influence of the crown 
 have led us into bondage, and a standing army has riv 
 eted our chains. To America only can we look for sal 
 vation. Tis America only can save England. Unite and 
 persevere. You must prevail you must triumph." 
 Quincy was careful not to betray names, in a letter which 
 might be intercepted before it reached its destination. 
 But we know the men with whom he had been brought 
 into association by Franklin and other friends men like 
 Shelburne, and Hartley, and Pownall, and Priestley, and 
 Brand Hollis, and Sir George SaviUe, to say nothing of 
 Burke and Chatham. The language was not lost upon 
 vis. We did unite and persevere. We did prevail and 
 triumph. And it is hardly too much to say that we did 
 " save England." We saved her from herself ; saved her 
 from being the successful instrument of overthrowing 
 the rights of Englishmen ; saved her " from the poisoned 
 chalice which would have been commended to her own 
 lips;" saved her from "the bloody instructions which 
 would have returned to plague the inventor." Not only 
 was it true, a? Lord Macaulay said in one of his brilliant 
 essays, that " England was never so rich, so great, so 
 formidable to foreign princes, so absolutely mistress of 
 the seas, as. since the alienation of her American colo 
 nies," but it is not less true that England came out of 
 that contest with new and larger views of liberty ; with 
 a broader and deeper sense of what was due to human 
 rights, and with an experience of incalculable value to 
 her in the management of the vast colonial system wMoh 
 remained, or was in store for her. 
 
 A vast and gigantic colonial system, beyond doubt, it 
 has proved to be. She was just entering, a hundred 
 years ago, on that wonderful career of conquest in tho 
 East which was to compensate her if it were a compen 
 sationfor her impending losses in the West. Her gal 
 lant Coruwullis was soon to receive the jeweled sword of 
 Tippoo Suib at Bangalore, in exchange for that vvkieh ho 
 
Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876. 
 
 was now destined to surrender to Washington at York- 
 town. It is certainly not among the least striking coin 
 cidences of our Centennial year that at the very moment 
 when we are celebrating the event which stripped Great 
 Britain of thirteen colonies and three millions of subjects 
 now grown into thirty-nine States and more than forty 
 millions of people she is welcoming the return of her 
 amiable and genial Prince from a royal progress through 
 the widespread regions of " Ormus and of Ind," bringing 
 back, to lay at the foot ot the British throne, the homage 
 of nine principal provinces and a hundred and forty- 
 eight feudatory states, and of not less than two hundred 
 and forty millions of people, from Ceylon to the Hima 
 layas, and affording ample justification for the Queen s 
 new title of Empress of India. Among all the parallel 
 isms of modern history there are few more striking and 
 impressive than this. 
 
 The American colonies never quarreled or caviled 
 about the titles of their sovereign. If, as has been said, 
 they went to war about a preamble," it was not about 
 the preamble of the royal n. une. It was the imperial 
 power, the more than imperial pretensions and usurpa 
 tions which drove them to rebellion. The Declaration 
 was, in its own terms, a personal and most stringent 
 arraignment ot the King. It could have been nothing 
 else. George III. was to us the sole responsible instru 
 ment of oppression. Parliament had, indeed, sustained 
 him ; but the Colonies had never admitted the authority 
 of a Parliament in which they had no representation. 
 There is no passage in Mr. Jefferson s paper more care 
 fully or more felicitously worded than that in which he 
 says of the sovereign, that " he has combined with others 
 to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions 
 and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to 
 their acts of pretended legislation." A slip of " the 
 masterly pen" on this point might have cost us our con 
 sistency ; but that pen was on its guard, and this is the 
 only allusion to Lords or Commons. We could recognize 
 no one but the monarch. We could contend with noth 
 ing less than royalty. We could separate ourselves only 
 from the crown. English precedents had abundantly 
 taught us that kings were not beyond the reach of ar 
 raignment and indictment ; and arraignment and in 
 dictment were then our only means of justifying our 
 cause to ourselves and to the world. Yes ; harsh, severe, 
 stinging, scolding, I had almost said, as that long 
 series of allegations and accusations may sound, and 
 certainly does sound, as we read it or listen to it, in cold 
 blood, a century after the issues are all happily settled, 
 it was a temperate and dignified utterance under the 
 circumstances of the case, and breathed quite enough 
 of moderation to be relished or accepted by those who 
 were bearing the brunt of so terrible a struggle for life 
 and liberty and all that was dear to them, as that which 
 those issues involved. Nor in all that bitter indictment 
 is there a single count which does not refer to, and rest 
 upon, some violation of the rights of Englishmen, or 
 some violation of the rights of humanity. We stand by 
 the Declaration to-day, and always, and disavow nothing 
 of its reasoning or its rhetoric. 
 
 And, after all, Jefferson was not a whit more severe on 
 the King than Chatham had been on the King s minis 
 ters six months before, when he told them to their facos : 
 " The whole of your political conduct has been one con 
 tinued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, igno 
 rance, futility, negligence, blundering, and the most noto 
 rious servility, incapacity, and corruption." Nor was 
 William Pitt, the younger, much more measured in his 
 language, at a later period of our struggle, when he de 
 clared : " These ministers will destroy the empire they 
 
 were called upon to save before the indignation of a 
 great and suffering people can fall upon their heads in 
 the punishment which they deserve. I affirm the war to 
 have been a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, un 
 natural, unjust, and diabolical war." 
 
 I need not say, fellow-citizens, that we are here to in 
 dulge in no reproaches upon Old England to-day, as we 
 look back from the lofty hight of a century of independ 
 ence on the course of events which severed u.s from her 
 dominions. We are by no means in the mood to reopen 
 the adjudications of Ghent or of Geneva ; nor can we 
 allow the ties of old traditions to be seriously jarred, ou 
 such an occasion as this, by any recent failures or extra 
 ditions, however vexatious or provoking;. But certainly, 
 resentments on either side, for anything said or done 
 during our revolutionary period, after such a lapse of 
 time, would dishonor the hearts which cherished them 
 and the tongues which uttered them. Who wonders that 
 George the Third would not let such colonies as our go 
 without a struggle? They were the brightest jewels of 
 his crown. Who wonders that he shrank from the respon 
 sibility of such a dismemberment of his empire, and that 
 his brain reeled at the very thought of it? It would 
 have been a poor compliment to us had he not considered 
 us -worth holding at any and every cost. We should 
 hardly have forgiven him had he not desired to retain us. 
 Nor can we altogether wonder that, with the views of 
 kingly prerogative which belonged to that period, and 
 in which lie was educated, he should have preferred the 
 policy of coercion to that of conciliation, and should 
 have insisted on sending over troops to subdue us. 
 
 Our old mother country has had indeed, a peculiar 
 destiny, and in many respects a glorious one. Not alone 
 with her drum-beat, as Webster so grandly said, has she 
 encircled the earth. Not alone with her martial airs has 
 she kept company with the hours. She has carried civil 
 ization and Christianity wherever she has carried her flag. 
 She has carried her noble tongue, with all its incompara 
 ble treasures of literature and science and religion, 
 around the globe; and, with our aid for she will confess 
 that we are doing our full part in this line of extension 
 it is fast becoming the most pervading speech of civilized 
 man. We thank God at this hour, and at every hour, 
 that " Chatham s language is ouv mother tongue," and 
 that we have an inherited and indisputable share in the 
 glory of so many of the great names by which that 
 language has been illustrated and adorned. 
 
 But she has done more than all this. She has planted 
 the great institutions and principles of civil freedom in 
 every latitude where she could find a foothold. From 
 her our Revolutionary fathers learned to understand 
 and.l/alue them, and from her they inherited the spirit to 
 defend them. Not in vain had her brave barons extorted 
 Magna Charta from King John. Not in vain had her 
 Simon de Montfort summoned the knights and burgesses, 
 and laid the foundations of a Parliament and a House of 
 Commons. Not in vain had her noble Sir John Eliot 
 died, as a martyr of free speech, in the Tower. Not in vain 
 had her heroic Hampden resisted ship-money and died 
 on the battle-field. Not in vain for us, certainly, the great 
 examples and the great warnings of Cromwell and the 
 Commonwealth, or those sadder ones of Sidney and 
 Russell, or that later and more glorious one still of 
 William of Orange. 
 
 The grand lessons of her own history, forgotten, over 
 looked, or resolutely disregarded, it may be, on her own 
 side of the Atlantic, in the days we are commemorating, 
 were the very inspiration of her colonies on this side ; 
 and under that inspiration they contended and con 
 quered. And though she may sometimes be almost 
 
A Century of Self- Govern m en t Win throp. 
 
 53 
 
 tempted to take sadly upon her lips tbe words of the old 
 prophet, "I have nourished and brought up children 
 a ud they have rebelled against me,* she has long ago 
 learned that such a rebellion as ours was really m ner 
 o \vninterest and for her own ultimate welfare begun, 
 continued, and ended, as it was, in vindication of the 
 liberties of Englishmen. 
 
 I cannot forget how justly and eloquently my friend, 
 Dr. Ellis, a few months ago, in this same hall, gave ex 
 pression to the respect which is so widely entertained on 
 tins side of the Atlantic for tbe sovereign lady who has 
 now graced the British throne for nearly forty years. 
 No passage of his admirable oration elicited a warmer 
 response from the multitudes who listened to him. How 
 much of the growth and grandeur of Great Britain is 
 associated with the names of illustrious women! Even 
 those of us who have, no fancy for female suffrage might 
 be well-nigh tempted to take refuge from the incoui- 
 jietenciea and intrigues and corruptions of men under 
 the presidency ol the purer and gentler sex. What 
 would English history be without the names of Elizabeth 
 and Anne? What would it be without the name of Vic 
 toria -of whom it has been written " that by a long 
 course of loyal acquiescence in the declared "wishes of 
 "her people, she has brought about what is nothing less 
 than a great revolution all the more beneficent because 
 it has been gradual and silent 1 ?" Ever honored be her 
 name and that of her lamented consort. 
 
 Ever-l>eloved and loving may her rule be; 
 And when old Time shall l^ad her to her end. 
 Goodness and she fill up one monument. 
 
 The Declaration is adopted and promulgated ; but we 
 may not forget how long and how serious a reluctance 
 there had been to take the irrevocable step. As late as 
 September, 1774, Washington had publicly declared his 
 belief that independence " was wished by no thinking 
 man." As late as the 6th of March, 1775, in his memo 
 rable oration in the Old South, with all the associations 
 of " the Boston massacre " fresh in his heart, Warren had 
 declared that " independence was not our aim." As late 
 as July, 1775, the letter of the Continental Congress to 
 the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London had said : 
 <( North America, my lord, wishes most ardently for a 
 lasting connection with Great Britain, 011 terms of just 
 and equal liberty," and a simultaneous humble petition 
 to the King, signed by every member of the Congress, re 
 iterated the same assurance. And as late as the 25th of 
 August, 1 7 75, Jefferson himself, in a letter to the John 
 Randolph of that day, speaking of those who " still wish 
 for reunion with their parent country," says most em 
 phatically, " I am one of those ; and would rather be in 
 dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on 
 any nation on earth, or than on no nation." Not all the 
 blood of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, crying 
 from the ground long before these words were written, 
 had extinguished the wish for reconciliation and reunion 
 even in the heart of the very author of the Declaration. 
 
 Tell me not, tell me not, that there was anything of 
 equivocation, anything of hypocrisy in these and a hun 
 dred other similar expressions which might be cited. The 
 truest human hearts are full of such inconsistency and 
 hypocrisy as that. The dearest Mends, the tenderest 
 relatives are never more overflowing and outpouring, nor 
 ever more sincere, in feelings and expressions of devo 
 tion and love, than when called to contemplate some 
 terrible impending necessity of final separation and 
 divorce. The ties between us and Old England could not 
 be sundered without sadness, and sadness on both sides 
 of the ocean. Franklin, albeit his eyes were " unused to 
 1he melting mood," is recorded to have wept as he left 
 
 England, in view of the inevitable result of which he 
 was coining home to be a witness and an instrument : 
 and I have heard from the poet Rogers s own lips, what 
 many of yon may have read in his Table-Talk, how 
 deeply he was impressed, as a boy, by his father s putting 
 on a mourning suit when he heard of the first shedding 
 of American blood. 
 
 Nor could it, in the nature of things, have been only 
 their warm and undoubted attachment to England which 
 made so many of the men of 1776 reluctant to the last to 
 cross the Rubicon. They saw clearly before them, they 
 could not help seeing, the full proportions, the tremend 
 ous odds, of the contest into which the colonies must be 
 plunged by such a step. Think you, that no apprehen 
 sions and anxieties weighed heavily on the minds and 
 hearts of those far-seeing men ? Think you, that as their 
 names were called on the day we commemorate, begin 
 ning with Josiah Bartlett of New-Hampshire, or, as one 
 by one they approached the secretary s desk on the fol 
 lowing 2d of August, to write their names on that now 
 hallowed parchment, they did not realize the full re 
 sponsibility, and the full risk to their country and to 
 themselves, which such a vote and such a signature in 
 volved ? They sat, indeed, with closed doors ; and it is 
 only from traditions or eaves-droppings, or from the 
 casual expressions of diaries or letters, that we catch 
 glimpses of what was done, or gleanings of what was 
 said. But how full of import are some of those glimpses 
 and gleanings. 
 
 " Will you sign 1" said Hancock to Charles Carroll, 
 who, as we have seen, had not been present on the 4th 
 of July. " Most willingly," was the reply. " There 
 goes two millions with a dash of the pen," says one of 
 those standing by ; while anothei remarks, " Oh, Carroll, 
 you will get off, there are so many Charles Carrolls." 
 And then we may see him stepping back to the desk, and 
 putting that addition" of Carrol Itou" to his name, 
 which will designate him forever, and be a prouder title 
 of nobility than those mthe peerage of Great Britain, 
 which were afterward adorned by his accomplished and 
 fascinating granddaughters. 
 
 " We must stand by each other we must hang to 
 gether," is presently heard from some one of the sign 
 ers; with the instant reply, "Yes, we must hang to 
 gether, or we shall assuredly hang separately." And, on 
 this suggestion, the portly and humorous Benjamin 
 Harrison, whom we have seen forcing Hancock into the 
 chair, may be heard bantering our spare and slender 
 Elbridge Gerry levity provoking levity and telling him 
 with grim merriment that, when that hanging scene 
 arrives, he shall have the advantage : " It will be all over 
 with me in a moment, but you will be kicking in the air 
 half an hour after I am gone !" These are among the 
 the " asides" of the drama, but, T need not say, they 
 more than make up in significance for all they may seem 
 to lack in dignity. 
 
 The excellent William Ellery of Rhode Island, whose 
 name waa afterward borne by his grandson, our revered 
 Channiug, often spoke, we are told, of the scene of the 
 signing, and spoke of it as an event which many regarded 
 with awe, perhaps with uncertainty, but none with fear. 
 " I was determined," he used to say, " to see how all 
 looked as they signed what might be their death warrant. 
 I placed myself beside the secretary, Charles Thompson, 
 and eyed each closely as he affixed his name to the docu 
 ment. Undaunted resolution was displayed in every 
 countenance." 
 
 " You inquire," wrote John Adams to William Plumer 
 " whether every member of Congress did, on the 4th oj 
 July, 1776, in fact, cordially approve of the Declaration 
 
54 
 
 Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1870. 
 
 of Independence. They who were then members all 
 signed it, and, as I could not see their hearts, it would be 
 hard for me to say that they did not approve it ; but, as 
 far as I could penetrate the intricate internal foldings of 
 their souls, I then believed, and have not since altered 
 my opinion, that there were several who signed with re 
 gret, and several others with many doubts and much 
 lukewarmness. The measure had been on the carpet for 
 months, and obstinately opposed it from day to day. 
 Majorities were constantly against it. For many days 
 the majority depended upon Mr. Hewes of North Caro 
 lina. While a member one day was speaking and read 
 ing documents from all the colonies to prove that the 
 public opinion, the general sense of all, was in favor of 
 the measure, when he came to North Carolina, and pro 
 duced letters and public proceedings which demonstrated 
 that the majority of that colony were in favor of it, Mr. 
 Hewes, who had hitherto constantly voted against it, 
 started suddenly upright, and, lifting up both his hands 
 to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, It is 
 done, and I will abide by it. I would give more for a 
 perfect painting of the terror and horror upon the faces of 
 the old majority, at that critical moment, than for the 
 best piece of Raphael." 
 
 There is quite enough, in these traditions and hearsay^ 
 in these glimpses and gleanings, to show us that the sup 
 porters and signers of the Declaration were not blind to 
 the responsibilities and hazards in which they were in 
 volving themselves and the country. There is quite 
 enough, certainly, in these and other indications, to give 
 color and credit to what I so well remember hearing the 
 late Mr. Justice Story say, half a century ago, that, as 
 the result of all his conversations with the great men of 
 the revolutionary period and especially with his illus 
 trious aud venerated chief on the bench of the Supreme 
 Court of the United States, John Marshall he was con 
 vinced that a majority of the Continental Congress was 
 opposed to the Declaration, and that it was carried 
 through by the patient, persistent, and overwhelming 
 efforts and arguments of the minority. 
 
 Two of those arguments, as Mr. Jefferson has left them 
 on record, were enough for that occasion, or certainly are 
 enough for this. 
 
 One of the two was, " That the people wait for us to 
 lead the way; that they are in favor of the measure, 
 though the instructions given by some of their repre 
 sentatives are not." And most true indeed it was, my 
 friends, at that day, as it often has been since that day 
 that the people were ahead of their so-called leaders. 
 The minds of the masses were made up. They had no 
 doubts or misgivings. They demanded that indepen d 
 euce should be recognized and proclaimed. John Adams 
 knew how to keep up with them. Sam Adams had kept 
 his finger on their pulse from the beginning, and had 
 " marked time " for every one of their advancing steps. 
 Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jef 
 ferson, and some other ardent and noble spirits, were 
 liy no means behind them. But not a few of the leaders 
 were, in lact, only followers. " The people waited for 
 them to lead the way." Independence was the resolve 
 and the act of the American people, and the American 
 people gladly received and enthusiastically ratified, and 
 heroically sustained the Declaration, until independence 
 was no longer a question either at homo or abroad. Yes, 
 our great charter, as we fondly call it, though with some 
 thing, it must be confessed, of poetic or patriotic license, 
 was no temporizing concession, wrung by menaces from 
 reluctant monarchs, but was the spontaneous and im 
 perative dictate of a nation resolved to be free ! 
 The other of those two arguments was even more con 
 
 clusive and more clinching. It was, " that the question 
 was not whether by a declaration of independence we 
 should make ourselves what we are not, but whether we 
 should declare a fact which already exists." 
 
 " A fact which already exists !" Mr. Mayor and fel 
 low-citizens, there is no more interesting historical 
 truth to us of Boston than this. Our hearts are all at 
 Philadelphia to-day, as I have already said, rejoicing in 
 all that is there said and done in honor of the men who 
 made this day immortal, and hailing it, with our fellow- 
 countrymen, from ocean to ocean, and from the lakes to 
 the Gulf, as our national birthday. And nobly has Phil 
 adelphia met the requisitions, and more than flulfilled 
 the expectations, of the occasion ; furnishing a f 6te and a 
 pageant of which the whole nation is proud. Yet we are 
 not called on to forget we could not be pardoned, in 
 deed, for not remembering that, while the Declaration 
 was boldly and grandly made in that hallowed Pennsyl 
 vania hall, independence had already been won and 
 won here in Massachusetts. It was said by some one of 
 the old patriots John Adams, I believe that "the Rev 
 olution was effected before the war commenced;" and 
 Jefferson is now our authority for the assertion that " in 
 dependence existed before it was declared. They both 
 knew well what they were talking about. Congresses in 
 Carpenters Hall, and Congresses in the old Pennsylvania 
 State House, did grand things, and were composed of 
 grand men, and we render to their memories all the 
 homage and all the glory which they so richly earned. 
 But here in Boston, the capital of Massachusetts, and the 
 principal town of British North America at that day, the 
 question had already been brought to an issue, and al 
 ready been irrevocably decided. Here the manifest des 
 tiny of the Colonies had been recognized and accepted. 
 It was upon us, as all the world knows, that the blows of 
 British oppression fell first and fell heaviest fell like a 
 storm of hail stones and coals of fire ; and where they 
 fell, and as soon as they fell, they were resisted, and suc 
 cessfully resisted. 
 
 Why, away back in 1761, when George the Third had 
 been but a year on his throne, and when the printer s ink 
 on the pages of our Harvard "Pietas et Gratulatio" 
 was hardly dry ; when the seven years war was still un 
 finished, in which New-England had done her full share 
 of the fighting, and reaped her full share of the glory, 
 and when the British flag, by the help of her men and 
 money, was just floating in triumph over the whole 
 American continent a mad resolution had been adopted 
 to reconstruct O word of ill omen ! the whole colonial 
 system, and to bring America into closer conformity and 
 subjection to the laws of the mother country. A revenue 
 is to be collected here. A standing army is to be estab 
 lished here. The navigation act and acts of trade are to 
 be enforced and executed here. And all without any 
 representation on our part. The first practical step in 
 this direction is taken. A custom-house officer, named 
 Cockle, applies to the Superior Court at Salem for a writ 
 of assistance 1 . That cockle-shell exploded like dynamite J 
 The Court postpones the case, and orders its argument in 
 Boston. And then and there, in 1761, in our old town 
 house, afterward known as the Old State House alas, 
 alas, that it is thought necessary to talk about removing 
 or even reconstructing it ! James Otis, as John Adams 
 himself tells us, "breathed in to this nation the breath of 
 life." Then and there," he adds, and he spoke of what he 
 witnessed and heard, " then and there the child Independ 
 ence was born. In fifteen years, i. e., in 1776, he grew up 
 to manhood, and declared himself free." 
 
 The next year finds the same great scholar and orator 
 exposing himself to the cry of " treason " in denouncing 
 
A Century of Self- Government Wintkrop. 
 
 the idea of taxation without representation, and forth 
 with vindicating himself in a masterly pamphlet which 
 excited the admiration and sympathy of the whole peo 
 ple. 
 
 Another year brings the first installment of the scheme 
 for r .ising a revenue in the colonies, in the shape of 
 declaratory resolves, and Otis meets it plum ply and 
 b jldly, in Faneuil Hall at that moment freshly rebuilt 
 and reopened with the counter declaration that " every 
 British subject in America is, of common right, by act of 
 Parliament, and by the laws of God and nature, entitled 
 to all the essential privileges of Britons." 
 
 And now George Grenville has devised and proposed 
 the Stamp Act. And, before it is even known that the 
 bill had passed, Samuel Adams is heard reading, in that 
 sameFaueuii Hall, at the May meeting of 1764, those 
 memorable instructions from Boston to her representa 
 tives : " There is no room for delay. If taxes are laid 
 upon us in any shape without our having a legal repre 
 sentation where they are laid, are we not reduced from 
 the character of free subjects, to the miserable state of 
 tributary slaves ? * * * We claim British rights, not 
 by charter only ; we are born to them. Use your en 
 deavors that the weight of the other North American 
 colonies may be added to that of tbis province, that by 
 uuited application all may happily obtain redress." Re 
 dress and Union and union as the means, and the only 
 means, of redress had thus early become ttie doctrine 
 of our Boston leaders ; and James Otis follows out that 
 doc nine, without a moment s delay, in another brilliant 
 plea for tbe rights of the colonies. 
 
 The next year finds the pen of John Adams in motion, 
 in a powerful communication to the public journals, set 
 ting forth distinctly that " there seems to be a direct and 
 formal design on foot in Great Britain to enslave all 
 America" and adding most ominously those emphat!c 
 words: "Be it remembered, liberty must be defended 
 at all hazards !" 
 
 And, I need not say, it was remembered, and liberty 
 was defended, at all hazards, here upon our own soil. 
 
 Ten long years, however, are still to elapse before the 
 wager of battle is to be fully joined. The stirring events 
 which crowded those years, and which have been so viv 
 idly depicted by Sparks and Bancroft and Frothingham 
 to name no others are too familiar for repetition or ref 
 erence. Virginia, through the clarion voice of Patrick 
 Henry, nobly sustained by her house of burgesses, leads 
 off iu the grand remonstrance. Massachusetts, through 
 the trumpet tones of James Otis, rouses the whole con 
 tinent by a demand for a General Congress. South Ca 
 rolina, through the influence of Chrieiopher Gadsden, 
 responds first to the demand. " Deep calleth unto deep." 
 In October, 1765, delegates, regularly or irregularly 
 chosen, from nine colonies, are in consultation at New- 
 York ; and from South Carolina comes the watchword \:. f 
 assurred success : There ought to be no New-England 1 
 man, no New-Yorker, known on tbe continent ; but all I 
 of us Americans." 
 
 Meantime, the people are everywhere inflamed and j 
 maddened by the attempt to enforce the Stamp act. 
 Everywhere that attempt is resisted. Everywhere it is 
 resolved that it shall never be executed. It is at length 
 repealed, and a momentary lull succeeds. But the re 
 peal is accompanied by more declaratory resolutions of 
 the power of Parliament to tax the colonies " in all cases 
 whatsoever ; " and then follows that train of abuses and 
 usurpations which Jefferson s immortal paper charges 
 upon the King, and which the King himself unquestion 
 ably ordered. " It was to no purpose," said Lord North 
 in 1774, " making objections, for the King would have 
 
 it so." " The King," said he, " meant to try the ques 
 tion with America," And it is well added by the narra 
 tor of the anecdote, " Boston seems to have been the 
 place fixed upon to try the question." 
 
 Yes, at Boston the bolts of royal indignation are to be 
 ainiitl and winged. She has been foremost in destroying 
 the stamps, in defying the soldiers, in drowning the tea. 
 Letters, too, have reached the Government, like those 
 which Rehum the Chancellor and Shimshai the Scribe 
 wrote to King Artaxerxes about Jerusalem, calling this 
 " a rebellious city, and hurtful unto kings and provinces, 
 and that they have moved sedition within the same of 
 old time, and would not pay toll, tribute and custom ;" 
 and warning His Majesty that, unless subdued and 
 crushed, " he would have no portion on this side the 
 river." In vain did our eloquent young Quincy pour 
 forth his burning words of remonstrance. The port of 
 Boston is closed, and her people are to be starved into 
 compliance. Well did Boston say to herself, in town- 
 meeting, that " she had been stationed by Providence in 
 the front rank of the conflict." Grandly has our eloquent 
 historian, Bancroft, said of her. in a sentence which 
 sums up the whole matter, " like the last embattling of 
 a Roman legion"" The King set himself, and his minis 
 try, and his Parliament, and all Great Britain to subdue 
 to his will one stubborn little town on the sterile coast of 
 the Massachusetts Bay. The odds against it were fear 
 ful ; but it showed a life inextinguishable, and had been 
 chosen to guard over the liberties of mankind !" 
 
 Generously and n(L>ly did the other colonies come to 
 our aid, and the cause of Boston was everywhere ac 
 knowledged to be " the cause of all." But we may not 
 forget how peculiarly it was " the cause of Boston," and 
 that here, on our own Massachusetts soil, the practical 
 question of independence was first tried and virtually 
 settled. Tbe brave Col. Pickering at Salem Bridge, the 
 heroic minute men at Lexington and Concord Bridge, 
 the gallant Col. Prescott at Bunker Hill, did their part in 
 hastening that settlement and bringing it to a crisis ; and 
 when the continental army was at length brought to our 
 rescue, and the glorious Washington, after holding the 
 British forces at bay for nine mouths, had fairly driven 
 them from the town though more than three montha 
 were still to intervene before the Declaration was to be 
 made it could truly and justly be said that it was only 
 " the declaration of a fact which already exists." 
 
 Indeed, Massachusetts had practically administered 
 " a government independent of the King" from the 19th 
 of July, 1775 ; while on the very first day of May, 1776, 
 her General Court had passed a solemn act to erase forth 
 with the name of the King, and the year of his reign, 
 from all civil commissions, writs, and precepts, and to 
 substitute therefor " the year of the Christian era and 
 the name of the government and people of the Massa 
 chusetts Bay in New-England." Other colonies may 
 have empowered or instructed their delegates in Con 
 gress earlier than this colony to act on the subject. But 
 this was action Itself positive, decisive, conclusive ac 
 tion. The Declaration was made in Philadelphia; but 
 the independence which was declared can date back no 
 where, for its first existence as a fact, earlier than to 
 Massachusetts. Upon her the lot fell " to try the ques 
 tion ;" and. with the aid of Washington and the Conti 
 nental army, it was tried, and tried triumphantly, upon 
 her soil. Certainly, it Faneuil Hall was the cradle of 
 liberty, the Old State House was the cradle of independ 
 ence, and our Old South the nursery of liberty and inde 
 pendence both ; and if these sacred edifices, all or any of 
 them, are indeed destined to disappear, let us see to it 
 that some corner of then? sites at least be consecrated to 
 
Independence Day Orations, July 4, 187G. 
 
 monuments which shall toll their story, in legible letter 
 ing, to our children and our children s children forever ! 
 
 Thank* be to God, that, in his good providence, the 
 trial of this great question fell primarily upon a colony 
 and a people peculiarly litted to meet it ; whose whole 
 condition and training had prepared them for it, and 
 whose whole history had pointed to it. 
 
 Why, quaint old John Evelyn, in his delicious diary, 
 tells us, under date of May, 1671, that the great anxiety 
 of the Council for plantations, of which he had just been 
 made a member, was " to know the condition of New- 
 England," which appeared " to be very independent as 
 to their regard to Old England or His Majesty," and 
 almost upon the very brink of renouncing any depend 
 ence upon the Crown." 
 
 " I have always laughed," said John Adams, in a letter 
 to Beniamin Rush in 1807, " at the affectation of repre 
 senting American Independence as a novel idea, as a 
 modern discovery, as a late invention. The idea of it as a 
 possible thing, as a probable event, as a necessary and 
 unavoidable measure, ia ease Great Britain should as 
 sume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been 
 familiar to Americans from the first settlement of the 
 country, and was well understood by Gov. Winthrop in 
 1675, as by Gov. Samuel Adams, when he told you that 
 independence had been the first wish of his heart for 
 seven years." " The principles and feelings which pro 
 duced the Revolution," said he again, in his second letter 
 to Tudor in 1818, " ought to be traced back for two hun 
 dred years, and sought in the history of the country 
 from the first plantations in America." The first emi 
 grants, he maintains, were the true authors of our inde 
 pendence, and the men of the revolutionary period, him 
 self among them, were only " tLe awakeuers and re 
 vivers of the original fundamental principles of col 
 onization." 
 
 And the accomplished historian of New-England, Dr. 
 Palfrey, follows up the idea, and says more precisely : 
 " He who well weighs the facts which have been pre 
 sented in connection with the principal emigration to 
 Massachusetts, and other related facts which will 
 offer themselves to notice as we proceed, may find him 
 self conducted to the conclusion that when Winthrop and 
 his associates (in 1629) prepared to convey across the 
 water a charter from the King which, they hoped, would 
 in their beginnings afford them some protection both 
 from himself, and, throughhim, from the Powers of Con 
 tinental Europe, they had conceived a project no less im 
 portant than that of laying on this side of the Atlantic 
 the foundations of a nation of Puritan Englishmen- 
 foundations to be built upon as future circumstances 
 should decide or allow." 
 
 Indeed, the transfer of their charter and of their 
 " whole government " to New-England, on their own re 
 sponsibility, was an act closely approaching to a declara 
 tion of independence, and clearly foreshadowing it. And 
 when, only a few years afterward, \re find the magis 
 trates and deputies resisting a demand for the surrender ! 
 of the charter, studiously and systematically " avoiding 
 and protracting" all questions on the sutject, and 
 "hastening their fortifications" meantime; and when 
 we hear even the ministers of the colony openly declar 
 ing that, "Lf a General Governor were sent over here, 
 we ought not to accept him, but to defend our lawful 
 possessions, if we were able" we recognize a spirit and a 
 purpose which cannot be mistaken. That spirit and that 
 purpose were manifested and illustrated in a manner 
 even more marked and unequivocal as the late venera 
 ble Josiah Quiucy reminded the people of Boston, just 
 half a century ago to-d{% when under the lead of 0110 
 
 who had come over in the ship with the charter, and had 
 lived to be the Nestor of New-EnglandSimon Brad- 
 street " a glorious revolution was effected here in Mas 
 sachusetts 30 days before it was known that King Wil 
 liam had just effected a similar glorious revolution on 
 the other side of the Atlantic." New-England, it seems, 
 with characteristic and commendable dispatch, had 
 fairly got rid of Sir Edmond Andros a month before she 
 knew that Old-England had got rid of his master ! 
 
 But I do not forget that we must look further back 
 than even the earliest settlement of the American colo 
 nies for the primal fiat of independence. I do not forget 
 that when Edmund Burke, in 1775, in alluding to the 
 possibility of an American representation in Parliament, 
 exclaimed so emphatically and eloquently, " Opposiiit 
 nalural cannot remove the external barriers of the 
 creation," he had really exhausted the whole argument. 
 No effective representation was possible. If it had been 
 possible, England herself would have been aghast at it. 
 The very idea of James Otis and Patrick Henry and the 
 Adamses arguing the great questions of human rights 
 and popular liberty on the floor of the House of Com 
 mons, and in the hearing of the common people of Great 
 Britain, would have thrown the King and Lord North 
 into convulsions of terror, and we should soon have 
 heard them crying out, " These men that have turned the 
 world upside down are come hither also." One of their 
 own Board of Trade (Soame Jenyus) well said, with as 
 much truth as humor or sarcasm, " I have lately seen so 
 many specimens of the great powers of speech of which 
 these American gentlemen are possessed, that I should 
 be afraid the sudden importation of so much eloquence 
 at once would endanger the safety of England. It will 
 be much cheaper for us to pay their army than their ora 
 tors." But no effective representation was possible ; 
 and without it taxation was tyranny, in spite of the great 
 dictionary dogmatist and his insolent pamphlet. 
 
 Why, even in these days of ocean steamers, reducing 
 the passage across the Atlantic from forty or fifty or sixty 
 days to ten, representation in Westminster Hall is not 
 proposed for the colonies which England still holds on 
 our continent ; and ir would be little better than a farce 
 if it were proposed and attempted. The Dominion of 
 Canada, as we all know, remajua as she is, seeking nei 
 ther independence aor annexation, only because her 
 people prefer to be, :-.iul a.c proud of being, a part of the 
 British Empire; and :> .-< .m.-,,--. ih:u I", nip ire has abandoned 
 all military occupation or forcible restraint upon them, 
 and has adopted a system involving no collision or con 
 tention. Canada is now doubly a -nonuaieiit of the great 
 ness and wisdom of the immortal ( uatham. His military 
 policy oouquered it for England, and his civil policy, 
 " ruling from his urn," and supplemented by that of his 
 gvoal son, hoiuo it !>/r England, at this day, permitting it 
 Substantially to ride itself, through the agency of a Par- 
 M:U<K ; <>f its own, with, at this moment, as it ha.pi ens. 
 
 . . ., u 
 
 iin able, intelligent, and accomplished Governor-General, 
 whose name and blood were not without close affinities 
 kto those of that marvelous statesman and orator while 
 he lived. 
 
 It did not require the warning of our example to bring 
 about such results. It is written in the eternal constitu 
 tion of things that no large colonies, educated to a sense 
 of their rights and capable of defending them no En 
 glish or Anglo-Saxc.fr colony, certainly can be gov 
 erned by a power thrc. thousand miles across an ocean, 
 unless they are governed to their own satisfaction, and 
 held as colonies with their own consent and free will. 
 An imperial military sway may be as elastic and far- 
 reaching as the mngnotic wires, it matters not whether 
 
A Century of Self -Government Winthrop. 
 
 57 
 
 tbnec thousand or fifteen thousand miles over an unciv 
 ilized region or an unenlightened race. But who is wild 
 enough to conceive, as Burke said a hundred years ago, 
 " that the natives of Hindostun and those of Virginia 
 could be ordered in the same manner; or that the 
 Cutehery Court and tbe Grand Jury at Salem could be 
 regulated on a similar plan?" "I am convinced." said 
 Fox, in 1701, in the fresh light of the experience America 
 had afforded him, " that the only method of retaining 
 distant colonies with advantage is to enable them to 
 govern themselves." 
 
 Yes, from the hour when Columbus and his compeers 
 discovered our continent its ultimate political de"stiny 
 was fixed. At the very gateway of the Pantheon of 
 American liberty and American independence might 
 well be seen a triple monument, like that to the old in 
 ventors of printing at Frankfort, including Columbus and 
 Americus Vespucius and Cabot. They were the pioneers 
 in the march to independence. They were the precursors 
 in the only progress of freedom which was to have no 
 backward steps. Liberty had struggled long and bravely 
 in other ages and in other lands, fe had made glorious 
 manifestations of its power and promise in Athens and in 
 Rome ; in the medireval republics of Italy ; on the plains 
 of Germany; along the dykes of Holland; among the 
 icy fastnesses of Switzerland; and, more securely and 
 hopefully still, in the sea-girt isle of Old England. But 
 it was the glory of those heroic old navigators to reveal 
 a standing-place for it at last, where its lever could find 
 a secure fulcrum, and rest safely until it had moved the 
 world! The fullness of time had now come. Under an 
 impulse of religious conviction, the poor persecuted Pil 
 grims launched out upon the stormy deep in a single, 
 leaking, almost foundering bark; and in the very cabin 
 of the Mayflower the first written compact of self- 
 government in the history of mankind is prepared and 
 signed. Ten years afterward the Massachusetts Company 
 come over with their charter, and administer it on 
 the avowed principle that the whole government, civil 
 and religious, is transferred. All the rest which is to 
 follow until the 4th of July, 177C, is only matter of time 
 and opportunity. Certainly, uiy friends, as we look back 
 to-day through the long vista of the p-.ist. we perceive 
 that it was no mere declaration of men which "primarily 
 brought about the independence we celebrate. We can 
 not but reverently rc-C giii/e- the hand of that Almighty 
 Maker of the World who " f >un<le<i it upon f.ne seas and 
 established it upon the floods," We cannot but feel the 
 full force and felicity ot : those opening -words in which 
 the Declaration speaks of our assuming aipouer the pow 
 ers of toe earth " that separate and equal station to 
 which the laws of > ;I!LIKV and of Nature s God entitled 
 us." 
 
 I spoke, Mr. M;>-. >: at the IIF oivtt on, of \ 
 
 Century of Self- - . c vnr-u - i? Completed." And ^o, 
 some sort, it is. Tt.e, "Deeiaration at Philadelphia was, in? 
 itscli, both an a^< "iion ;)>c\ m net of self-government: 
 and it Lad been j-, n wis immediately followed, 
 
 by provisions for It - ^ K -go voninvnt in all the sepa 
 rate colonies- South C.u ..i.i:a haviiu: led the way, condi 
 tionally at least, as early is tl j e 2(?th of March. But we 
 infiy not forget that six or seven years of hard fighting 
 are still to intervene before, qjrr indei endence is to be 
 acknowledged by Great Britain , jiu l six or seven years 
 more before the full cousir.i.manoi: will have been 
 reached by the adoption of the Federal Constitution and 
 the organization of our National system under the august 
 and transcendent Presidency of Washington. 
 
 With that august and transcendent Presidency, dating 
 as it is pleasant to remember precisely a hundred 
 
 years from the analogous accession of William of Orange 
 to the throne of England, our history as an organized 
 nation fairly begins. When that centennial anniversary 
 shall arrive, thirteen years hence, the time may have 
 come for a full review of our National career and charac 
 ter, and for a complete computation or a iust estimate of 
 what a century of self-government has accomplished for 
 ourselves and for mankind. 
 
 1 dared not attempt such a review to-day. This anni 
 versary has seemed to me to belong peculiarly I had 
 almost said sacredly to the men and the events which 
 rendered the Fourth of July so memorable forever ; and 
 I have willingly left myself but little time for anything 
 else. God grant that when the 30th of April, 1889 
 shall dawn upon those of us who may live to see it, the 
 thick clouds which now darken our political sky may 
 have passed away; that wholesome and healing counsels 
 may have prevailed throughout our land; that integrity 
 and purity may be once more conspicuous in our high 
 places; that an honest currency may have been re 
 established, and prosperity restored to all branches of 
 our domestic industry and our foreign commerce, and 
 that some of those social problems which are perplexing 
 and tormenting so many of our Southern States may 
 have been safely and satisfactorily solved! 
 
 For indeed, fellow-citizens, we cannot shut our eyes to 
 the fact that this great year of our Lord and of American 
 liberty has been ushered in by not a few discouraging 
 and depressing circumstances. Appalling catastrophes, 
 appalling crimes, have marked its course. Financial, 
 political, moral delinquencies and wrongs have swept 
 over our laud like an Arctic or an Antartic wave, or both 
 conjoined, until we have been almost ready to cry out in 
 anguish to Heaven, " Thou hast multiplied the nation 
 but not increased the joy !" It will be an added stigma, 
 in all time to come, on the corruption of the hour, and on 
 all concerned in it, that it has cast so deep a shade over 
 our Centennial festival. 
 
 All this, however, we are persuaded, is temporary and 
 exceptional the result, not of our institutions, but of 
 disturbing causes, and as distinctly traceable to those 
 causes as the scoria of a volcano or the debris of a 
 deluge. Had there been no long and demoralizing civil 
 war to account for such developments, we might indeed 
 be alarmed for our future. As it is, our confidence in 
 the Republic is unshaken. We are ready even to accept 
 all that has occurred to overshadow our jubilee, as a sea 
 sonable warning against vainglorious boastings; as a 
 timely admonition that our institutions are not proof 
 against licentiousness and profligacy, but that " eternal 
 vigilance is still the price of liberty." 
 
 Already the reaction has commenced. Already the 
 people are everywhere roused to the importance of 
 something higher than mere partisan activity and zeal, 
 and to a sense that something beside " big wars" may be 
 required to "make ambition virtue." Every where the 
 idea is scouted that there are any immunities or impuni- 
 CTfes for bribery and corruption : and the scorn of the 
 v hole people is deservedly cast on any one detected in 
 t )luckiag our eagle s wings to feather his own nest. 
 Everywhere there is a demand for integrity, for princi 
 ple, for character, as the only safe Qualifications for pub 
 lic employments as well as for private trusts. Oh, let 
 that demand be enforced and insisted on as I hope and 
 believe it will be and we shall have nothing to fear for 
 our freedom, and but little to regret in the temporary de 
 pression and inertification which have recalled us to a 
 deeper sense of our dangers and our duties. 
 
 Meantime we may be moro than content that no short 
 comings or failures of our own day can diminish tan 
 
58 
 
 Independence Day Orations. July 4. 1S7G. 
 
 glories of the past or dim the brilliancy of successes 
 achieved by our fathers. We can look back upon our 
 history so far and find iu it enough to make us grateful, 
 enough to make us hopeful, enough to make us proud of 
 our institutions and of our country, enough to make us 
 resolve never to despair of the Republic, enough to assure 
 us that, could our fathers look down on all which has 
 been accomplished, they would feel that their toils and 
 sacrifices had not been in vain ; enough to convince other 
 nations and the world at large that, in uniting so gener 
 ously with us to decorate our grand Exposition and cele 
 brate our Centennial birthdav, they are swelling the tri 
 umphs of a people and power which have left no doubt 
 ful impress upon the hundred years of their independent 
 national existence. 
 
 Those hundred years have been crowded, as we all 
 know, with wonderful changes in all quarters of the globe. 
 I would not disparage or depreciate the interest and im 
 portance of the great events and great reforms which 
 have been witnessed during their progress, and especi 
 ally near their end, in almost every country of the Old 
 World. Nor would I presume to claim too confidently 
 for the closing century that when the records of mankind 
 are made up in some far distant future it will be remem 
 bered and designated, peculiarly and preeminently, as 
 the American age. Yet it may well be doubted whether 
 the dispassionate historian of after years will find that 
 the influences ot any other nation have been of further 
 reach and wider range or of more efficiency for the wel 
 fare of the world than those of our great Republic since 
 it had a name and a place on the earth. 
 
 Other ages have had their designations, local or per 
 sonal or mythical historic or prehistoric ages of stone 
 or iron, of silver or gold ; ages of kings or queens, of re 
 formers or conquerors. Tbat marvelous compound of 
 almost everything wise or foolish, noble or base, witty or 
 ridiculous, sublime or profane, Voltaire, maintained that, 
 in his day, no man of reflection or of taste could count 
 more than four authentic ages in the history of the 
 world : 1. That of Philip and Alexander, with Pericles 
 and Demosthenes, Aristotle and Plato, Apelles, Phidias, 
 and Praxiteles ; 2. That of Caesar and Augustus, with 
 Lucretius and Cicero and Livy, Virgil and Horace, Varro 
 and Vitruvius ; 3. That of the Medici, with Michael An- 
 gelo and Raphael, Galileo and Dante ; 4. That which he 
 was at the moment engaged in depicting the age of 
 Louis XIV., which, in his judgment, surpassed all the 
 others ! 
 
 Our American age could bear no comparison with aares 
 like these measured only by the brilliancy of historians 
 and philosophers, of poets or painters. We need not, in 
 deed, be ashamed of what has been done for literature 
 and science and art, during these hundred years, nor 
 hesitate to point with pride to oar own authors and ar 
 tists, living and dead. But the day has gone by when 
 literature and the fine arts, or even science and the use-- 
 f ul arts, can characterize an age. There are other an/l 
 higher measures of comparison. And the very nation 
 which counts Voltaire among its greatest celebrities the 
 nation which aided us so generously in our Revolution 
 ary struggle, and which is now rejoicing in its own sui 
 cessful establishment of republican institutions the 
 land of the great and good Lafayette, has taken the lead 
 in pointing out the true grounds on which our American 
 age may challenge and claim a special recognition. An 
 association of Frenchmen, under the lead of some of 
 their most distinguished statesmen and scholars, has 
 proposed to erect, and is engaged in erecting, as their 
 contribution to our Centennial, a gigantic statue at the 
 very throat of the harbor of our supreme commercial 
 
 emporium, which shall symbolize the legend inscribed oa 
 its pedestal, " Liberty enlightening the World!" 
 
 That glorious legend presents the standard by which 
 our age is to be judged, and by which we may well be 
 willing and proud to have it judged. All else in our own 
 career, certainly, is secondary. The growth and 
 grandeur of our territorial dimensions, the multiplica 
 tion of our States, the number and size and wealth of our 
 cities, the marvelous increase of our population, the 
 measureless extent of our railways and internal naviga 
 tion, our overflowing granaries, our inexhaustible mines, 
 our countless inventions and multitudinous industries- 
 all these may be remitted to the census and left for the 
 students of statistics. The claim which our country pre 
 sents, for giving no second or subordinate ^character to 
 the age which has just closed, rests only on what has 
 been accomplished, at home and abroad, for elevating 
 the condition of mankind, for advancing political and hu 
 man freedom, for promoting the greatest good of the 
 greatest number, and for "enlightening the world" by 
 the example of a rational, regulated, enduring constitu 
 tional liberty, And 1 * who will dispute or question that 
 claim ? In what region of the earth ever so remote from 
 us, in what corner of creation ever so far out of the 
 range of our communication, does not some burden light 
 ened, some bond loosened, some yoke lifted, some labor 
 better remunerated, some new hope for despairing 
 hearts, some new light or new liberty for the benighted 
 or the depressed, bear witness this day, and trace itself, 
 directly or indirectly, back to the impulse given to the 
 world by the successful establishment and operation of 
 free institutions on this American continent? 
 
 How many colonies have been more wisely and hu 
 manely and liberally administered under the warning of 
 our Revolution! How many churches have abated some 
 thing of their old intolerance and bigotry, under the en 
 croachment of our religious freedom ! Who believes or 
 imagines that free schools, a free press, the elective 
 franchise, the rights of representation, the principles of 
 constitutional government, would have made the notable 
 progress that they have made, had our example been 
 wanting! Who believes or imagines that even the rot 
 ten boroughs of old England would have disappeared sa 
 rapidly had there been no American representative re 
 public ! And has there been a more effective influence 
 on human welfare and human freedom since the world 
 began than that which has resulted from the existence 
 of a great land of liberty in this Western Hemisphere, of 
 unbounded resources, with acres enough for a myriad of 
 homes, and with a welcome lor all who may fly to it from 
 oppression from every region beneath the sun 1 
 
 Let not our example be perverted or dishonored, by 
 others or by ourselves. It was no wild breaking away 
 from all authority, which we celebrate to-day. It was no 
 mad revolt against everything like government. No in 
 cendiary torch can be rightly kindled at our flame. 
 Doubtless there had been excesses and violences in many 
 quarters of our land irrepressible outbreaks under un 
 bearable provocations" irregular things, done in the 
 confusion of mighty troubles." Doubtless our Boston 
 mobs did not always move " to the Dorian mood of flutes 
 and soft recorders." But in all our deliberative assem 
 blies, in all our town meetings, in all our Provincial and 
 Continental Congresses, there was a respect for the 
 great principles of law and order ; and the definition of 
 true civil liberty, which had been so remarkably laid 
 down by one of the founders of our Common wealth, more 
 than a century before, was, consciously or uncon 
 sciously, recognized" a Liberty for that only which is 
 good, just, and honest." The Declaration wo commemo- 
 
A Century of Self -Government. Winthrop. 
 
 59 
 
 rate expressly admitted and asserted that " governments 
 long established should not be changed for light and 
 transient causes." It dictated no special forms of gov 
 ernment for other people, and hardly for ourselves. It 
 had no denunciations, or even disparagements, for mon 
 archies or for empires, but eagerly contemplated, as we 
 do at this hour, alliances and friendly relations with 
 both. We have welcomed to our Jubilee, with peculiar 
 interest and gratification, the representatives of the na 
 tions of Europe all then monarchical to whom we were 
 so deeply indebted for sympathy and for assistance in 
 our struggle for independence. We have welcomed, too, 
 the personal presence of an Emperor, from another quar 
 ter of our own hemisphere, of whose eager and en 
 lightened interest in education and literature and 
 science we had learned so much from our lamented Agas- 
 siz, and have now witnessed so much for ourselves. 
 
 Our fathers were no propagandists of republican in 
 stitutions in the abstract. Their own adoption of a 
 republican form was, at the moment, almost as much 
 a matter of chance as of choice, of necessity as of prefer 
 ence. The Thirteen Colonies had, happily, been too long 
 accustomed to manage their own affairs, and were too 
 wisely jealous of each other, also, to admit for an instant 
 any idea of centralization ; and without centralization a 
 monarchy, or any other form of arbitrary government, 
 was out of the question. Union was then, as it is now, 
 the only safety for liberty ; but it could be only a Con 
 stitutional Union, a limited and restricted Union, 
 founded on compromises and mutual concessions ; a 
 Union recognizing a large measure of State rights 
 resting not only on the division of powers among legis 
 lative and executive departments, but resting also on 
 the distribution of powers between the States and the 
 nation, both deriving their original authority from the 
 people, and exercising that authority for the people. 
 This was the system contemplated by the Declaration of 
 1776. This was the system approximated to by the Con 
 federation of 1778-81. This was the system finally con 
 summated by the Constitution of 1789. And under this 
 system our great example of self-government has been 
 held up before the nations, fulfilling, so far as it has ful 
 filled it, that lofty mission which is recognized to-d?.y as 
 " Liberty enlightening the World !" 
 
 Let me not speak of that example in any va in- 
 glorious spirit. Let me not seem to arrogate for 
 my country anything of superior wisdom or virtue. 
 Who will pretend that we have always made the most 
 of our independence or the best of our liberty? Who 
 will maintain that we have always exhibited the bright 
 est side of our institutions or always intrusted their ad 
 ministration to the wisest or worthiest men ? Who will 
 deny that we have sometimes taugut the world what to 
 avoid, as well as what to imitate : and that the cause of 
 freedom and reform has sometimes been discouraged and 
 put back by our short-comings, or by our excesses t Our 
 light has been at best but a revolving light, warning by 
 its darker intervals or by its somber shades, as well as 
 cheering by its flashes of brilliancy, or by the clear lus 
 ter of its steadier shining. Yet, in spite of all its imper 
 fections and irregularities, to no other earthly light have 
 so many eyes been turned ; from no other earthly illumi 
 nation have so many hearts drawn hope and courage. 
 It has breasted the tides of sectional and party strife. 
 It has stood the shock of foreign and of civil war. It 
 \\ ill still hold on, erect andunextiuguished, defying " the 
 returning wave" of demoralization and corruption. Mil 
 lions of young hearts, in all quarters of our land, are 
 awaking at this moment to the responsibility which rests 
 peculiarly upon them, for rendering its radiance purer 
 
 and brighter and more constant ; and are resolvtag thatr 
 it shall not be their fault if it do not stand for a century 
 to come, as it has stood for a century past, a beacon of 
 liberty to mankind! With those young hearts it is safe. 
 Meantime, we may all rejoice and take courage, as we 
 remember of how great a drawback and obstruction our 
 example has been disembarassed and relieved within a 
 few years past. Certainly, we cannot forget, this day, in 
 looking back over the century which is gone, how long 
 that example was overshadowed, in the eyes of all men, 
 by the existence of African Slavery in so considerable a 
 portion of our country. Never, never, however it may 
 be safely said was there a more tremendous, a more 
 dreadful, problem submitted to a nation for solution, than 
 that which this institution involved for the United Statse 
 of America. Nor were we alone responsible for its exist 
 ence. I do not speak of it in the way of apology for our 
 selves. Still less would I refer to it in the way of crimi 
 nation or reproach toward others, abroad or at home. 
 But the well-known paragraph on this subject, in the 
 original draft of the Declaration, is quite too notable a 
 reminiscence of the little desk before me, to be forgotten 
 on such an occasion as this. That omitted clause, which, 
 as Mr. Jefferson tells us, " was struck out in complais 
 ance to South Carolina and Georgia," not without "ten 
 derness, too, as he adds, to some " Northern brethren 
 who, though they had very few slaves themselves, had 
 been pretty considerable carriers of them to others," 
 contained the direct allegation that the King had " pros 
 tituted his negative for suppressing every legislative 
 attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable 
 commerce." That memorable clause, omitted for pru 
 dential reasons only, has passed into history, and its 
 truth can never be disputed. It recalls to us, and recalls 
 to the world, the historical fact which we certainly 
 have a special right to remember this day that not only 
 had African slavery found its portentous and pernicious 
 way into our colonies in their very earliest settlement,, 
 but that it had been fixed and fastened upon some of 
 them by royal vetoes, prohibiting the passage of laws to 
 restrain its further introduction. It had thus not only 
 entwined and entangled itself about the very roots of 
 our choicest harvests until slavery and cotton 
 at last seemed as inseparable as the tares and 
 wheat of the sacred parable but it had engrafted 
 itself upon the very fabric of our Government. We all 
 know, the world knows, that our Independence could 
 not have been achieved, our Union could not have been 
 maintained, our Constitution could not have been 
 established, without the adoption of those compromises 
 which recognized its continued existence, and left it to 
 the responsibility of the States of which it was the 
 grievous inheritance. And from that day forward, the 
 method of dealing with it, of disposing of it, and of ex 
 tinguishing it, .became more and more a problem full of 
 corrible perplexity, and seemingly incapable of human 
 soJiition. 
 
 Oh, that it could have been solved at last by some pro- 
 c -SS less deplorable and dreadful than Civil War ! How 
 unspeakably glorious it would have been for us this day, 
 could the Great Emancipation have been concerted, ar 
 ranged, and ultimately effected, without violence or 
 bloodshed, as a simple and sublime act of philanthrophy 
 and justice ! 
 
 But it was not in the divine economy that so huge an 
 original wrong should be righted by any easy process. 
 The decree seems to have gone forth from the very regis 
 tries of heaven : 
 
 " Cuncta prius tentanda, seel immedicabLle vuluua 
 Ense recideudum est." 
 
60 
 
 Independence Dai/ Orations, July 4, 187G. 
 
 The immedicable wound must be cut away by the 
 sword ! Again and again as that terrible war went on, 
 we might almost hear voices crying out, in the words of 
 the old prophet : " O thou sword of the Lord, how long 
 will it foe ere thou be quiet? Put up thyself into thy 
 scabbard ; rest, and be still ! " But the answering voice 
 seemed not less audible : " How can it be quiet, seeing 
 the Lord hath given it a charge 1 " 
 
 But, thanks be to God, who overrules everything for 
 good, that great event, the greatest of our American age 
 great enough, alone and by itself, to give a name and a 
 character to any age has been accomplished ; and. by 
 His blessing, we present our country to the world this 
 day without a slave, white or black, upon its soil ! 
 Thanks be to God not only that our beloved Union has been 
 saved, but that it has been made both easier to save and 
 better worth saving hereafter by the final solution of a 
 problem before which all human wisdom had stood 
 aghast and confounded for so many generations ! Thanks 
 be to God, and to Him be all the praise and the glory, we 
 can read the great words of the Declaration on this Cen 
 tennial anniversary, without reservation or evasion : 
 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are 
 created equal, and that they are endowed by their Cre 
 ator with certain unalienable rights ; that among these 
 are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The le 
 gend on that new colossal Pharos at Long Island may 
 now indeed be, " Liberty enlightening the world." 
 
 VII. 
 DUTIES OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 We come, then, to-day, fellow-citizens, with hearts full 
 of gratitude to God and man, to pass down our country 
 and its institutions not wholly without scars and blem 
 ishes upon their front not without shadows on the past 
 or clouds on the future but freed forever from at least 
 one great stam, and firmly rooted in the love and loyalty 
 of a united people to the generations which are to suc 
 ceed us. 
 
 And what shall we say to those succeeding generations 
 as we commit the sacred trust to their keeping and 
 guardianship 1 If I could hope without presumption 
 that any humble counsels of mine on this hallowed anni 
 versary could be remembered beyond the hour of their 
 utterance, and reach the ears of my countrymen in 
 future days ; if I could borrow " the masterly pen " of 
 Jefferson, and produce words which should partake of 
 the immortality of those which he wrote on this little 
 desk ; if I could command the matchless tongue of John 
 Adams, when he poured out appeals and arguments 
 which moved men from their seats, and settled the des 
 tinies of a nation ; if I could catch but a single spark of 
 those electric fires which Franklin wrested from the 
 skies, and flash down a phrase, a word, a thought, along 
 the magic chords which stretch across the ocean of the 
 future what could I, what would I say ? 
 
 I could not omit, certainly, to reiterate the solemn 
 obligations which rest on every citizen of this Republic 
 to cherish and enforce the great principles of fair 
 Colonial and Revolutionary Fathers the principles of 
 Liberty and Law, one and inseparable the principles of 
 the Constitution and the Union. 
 
 I could not omit to urge on every man to remember 
 that self-government politically can only be successful 
 if it be accompanied by self-government personally ; 
 that there must be government somewhere ; and that, if 
 tfce people are indeed to bo sovereigns, they must exer 
 cise their sovereignty ovor themselves individually, as 
 well as over themselves in the aggregate regulating 
 theiv own lives, re sip ting their own temptation s, subdu 
 
 ing their own passions, and voluntarily Imposing upon 
 themselves some measure of that restraint and disci 
 pline, which, under other systems, is supplied from the 
 armories of arbitrary power the discipline of virtue, in 
 the place of the discipline of slavery, 
 
 I could not omit to caution them against the corrupting 
 influences of intemperance, extravagance, and luxury. 
 I could not omit to warn them against political intrigue, 
 as well as against personal licentiousness ; and to im 
 plore them to regard principle and character, rather than 
 mere party allegiance, in the choice of men to rule over 
 them. 
 
 I could not omit to call upon them to foster and further 
 the cause of universal Education ; to give a liberal sup 
 port to our schools and colleges ; to promote the ad 
 vancement of science and art, in all their multiplied di 
 visions and relations ; and to encourage and sustain all 
 those noble institutions of charity, which, in our own 
 land above all others, have given the crowning grace and 
 glory to modern civilization. 
 
 I could not refrain from pressing upon them a just and 
 generous consideration for the interests and the rights of 
 their fellow men everywhere, and an earnest effort to 
 promote peace and good will among the nations of the 
 earth. 
 
 I could not refrain from reminding them of the shame, 
 the unspeakable shame and ignominy, which would at 
 tach to those who should show themselves unable to up 
 hold the glorious fabric of self-government which had 
 been founded for them at such a cost by their Fathers : 
 " Ytdcte, videte, nc, ut illis pulclicrrimum fiiit tantam 
 vobis imperil gloriam relinqiiere, sic vobis turpissimum 
 sit, illud quod accepistis, tueri et conservare non posse !" 
 
 And surely, most surely, I could not fail to invoke 
 them to imitate and emulate the examples of virtue and 
 purity and patriotism, which the great founders of our 
 Colonies and of our nation had so abundantly left them. 
 
 VIII. 
 WHAT ARE GREAT MEN ? 
 
 But could I stop there 1 Could I hold out to them, as 
 the results of a long life of observation and experience, 
 nothing but the principles and examples of great men ? 
 
 Who and what are great men 1 " Woe to the country," 
 said Metternich to our own Ticknor, forty years ago, 
 " whose condition and institutions no longer produce 
 great men to manage its affairs." The wily Austrian ap 
 plied his remark to England at that day; but his woe if 
 it be a woe would have a wider range in our time, and 
 leave hardly any land unreached. Cortainly we hear it 
 nowadays, at every turn, that never before has there 
 been so striking a disproportion between supply and de 
 mand as at this moment, the world over, in .the com 
 modity of great men. 
 
 But who, and what, are great men 1 " And now stand 
 forth," says an eminent Swiss historian, who had com 
 pleted a survey of the whole history of mankind, at the 
 very moment when, as he says, " a blaze of freedom is 
 just bursting forth beyond the ocean,"" And now stand 
 forth, ye gigantic forms, shades of the first C^Jeftains, 
 and Sons of Gods, who glimmer among the rocky halls 
 rnd mountain fortresses of the ancient world ; and you, 
 Conquerors of the world from Babylon and from Mace 
 donia; ye Dynasties of Caesars, of Huns, Arabs, Moguls, 
 and Tartars ; ye Commanders of the Faithful on the 
 Tigris, and Commanders of the Faithful on the Tiber ; 
 you hoary Counselors of Kings, and Peers of Sovereigns ; 
 Warriors on the car of triumph, covered with scars, and 
 crowned with laurels; ye long rows of Consuls and Dic 
 tators famed for your lofty miml.s, your unshaken con- 
 
The National Ode -Bayard Taylor. 
 
 61 
 
 stati cy, your ungovernable spirit, stand forth, and let us 
 survey for awhile your assembly, like a council of the 
 Gods! What were ye? The first among mortals? Sel 
 dom can you claim that title ! The best of men ? Still 
 fewer of you have deserved such praise ! Were ye the 
 compellers, the instigators of the human race, the prime 
 movers of all their works ? Rather let us say that you 
 were the instruments, that you were the wheels, by 
 whose means the Invisible Being has conducted the in 
 comprehensible fabric of universal government across 
 the ocean of time I" 
 
 Instruments and wheels of the Invisible Governor of 
 the Universe ! This is indeed all which the greatest of 
 men ever have been, or ever can be. No flatteries of 
 courtiers ; no adulations of the multitude; no audacity of 
 self-reliance ; no intoxications of success ; no evolutions 
 or developments of science can make more or other of 
 them. This is " the sea-mark of their utmost sail" the 
 goal of their furthest run the very round and top of 
 their highest soaring. 
 
 Oh, if there could be, to-day, a deeper and more per 
 vading impression of this great truth throughout our 
 land, and a more prevailing conformity of our thoughts 
 and words and acts to the lessons which it involves ; if 
 we could lift ourselves to a loftier sense of our relations 
 to the Invisible ; if, in surveying our past history, we 
 could catch larger and more ex Ited views of our des 
 tinies and our responsibilities ; if we could realize that 
 the want of good men may be a heavier woe to a land 
 than any want of what the world ealls great men, our 
 Centennial Year would not only be signalized by splen 
 
 did ceremonials and magnificent commemorations and 
 gorgeous expositions, but it would go far toward ful 
 filling something of the grandeur of that " Acceptable 
 Year" which was announced by higher than human lips, 
 and would be the auspicious promise and pledge of a glo 
 rious second century of Independence and Freedom for 
 our country ! 
 
 For, if that second century of self-government is to go 
 on safely to its close, or is to go on safely and prosper 
 ously at all, there must be some renewal of that old 
 spirit of subordination and obedience to divine as well 
 as human laws, which has been our security in the past. 
 There must be faith in samething higher and better than 
 ourselves. There must be a reverent acknowledgment of 
 an Unseen, but All-seeing, All-controlling Ruler of the 
 Universe. His Word, His Day, His House, His Worship, 
 must be sacred to our children, as they have been to their 
 fathers; and His blessing must never fail to be invoked 
 upon our land and upon our liberties. The patriot voice, 
 which cried from the balcony of yonder old State House, 
 when the Declaration had been originally proclaimed, 
 " Stability and perpetuity to American Independence," 
 did not fail to add, " God save our American States." I 
 would prolong that ancestral prayer. And the last 
 phrase to pass my lips at this hour, and to take its chance 
 of remembrance or oblivion in years to come, as the con 
 clusion of this Centennial oration, and the sum of all I 
 can say to the present or the future, shall be : There is, 
 there can be no independence of God; in Him, as a 
 nation, no less than in Him, as individuals, " we live, 
 and move, and have our being!" God save our American 
 States ! 
 
 THE NATIONAL ODE. 
 
 BY BAYARD TAYLOR. 
 
 Delivered at Philadelphia, July 4, 1876. 
 
 I. 1. 
 
 Sun of the stately Day, 
 Let Asia into the shadow drift, 
 Let Europe bask in thy ripened ray, 
 And over the severing ocean lift 
 A brow of broader splendor ! 
 Give light to the eager eyes 
 Of the Land that waits to behold thee rise : 
 The gladness of morning lend her, 
 With the triumph of noon attend her, 
 And the peace of the vesper skies! 
 
 For lo! she cometh now 
 
 With hope on the lip and pride on the brow, 
 Stronger, and dearer, and fairer, 
 To smile on the love we bear her, 
 To live, as we dreamed her and sought her, 
 Liberty s latest daughter ! 
 
 In the clefts of the rocks, in the secret places, 
 
 We found her traces ; 
 On the hills, in the crash of woods that fall, 
 
 We heard her call ; 
 When the lines of battle broke, 
 We saw her face in the tiery smoke ; 
 Through toil, and anguish, and desolation, 
 
 We followed, and found her 
 With the grace of a virgin Nation 
 As a sacred zone around her ! 
 Who shall rejoice 
 With a righteous voice, 
 Far-heard through the ages, if not she? 
 For the menace is dumb that defied her, 
 
 The doubt is dead that denied her, 
 And she stands acknowledged, and strong and 
 free! 
 
Independence Day Poems, July 4, 1876. 
 
 II.-l. 
 
 Ah, hark ! the solemn undertone 
 n every wind of human story blown. 
 
 A large, divinely-moulded Fate 
 Questions the right and purpose of a State, 
 
 And in its plan sublime 
 Our eras are the dust of Time. 
 The far-off Yesterday of power 
 
 Creeps back with stealthy feet, 
 Invades the lordship of the hour, 
 Aid at our banquet takes the unbidden seat. 
 From all unchronicled and silent ages 
 Before the Future first begot the Past, 
 
 Till History dared, at last, 
 To write eternal words on granite pages; 
 From Egypt s tawny drift, and Assur s mound, 
 And where, uplifted white and far, 
 Earth highest yearns to meet a star, 
 And Man his manhood by the Ganges found, 
 Imperial heads, of old millennial sway, 
 
 And still by some pale splendor crowned, 
 Chill as a corpse -light in our full-orbed day, 
 
 In ghostly grandeur rise 
 
 And say, through stony lips and vacant eyes : 
 " Thou that assertest freedom, power and fame, 
 Declare to us thy claim !" 
 
 I.-2. 
 
 On the shores of a Continent cast, 
 
 She won the inviolate soil 
 By loss of heirdom of all the Past, 
 And faith in the royal right of Toil ! 
 She planted homes on the savage sod : 
 Into the wilderness lone 
 She walked with fearless feet, 
 In her hand the divining-rod, 
 Till the veins of the mountains bent 
 With fire of metal and force of stone ! 
 She set the speed of the river- head 
 
 To turn the mills of her bread ; 
 She drove her plowshare deep 
 Through the prairie s thousand -centuried sleep ; 
 To the South, and West, and North, 
 She called Pathfinder forth, 
 Her faithful and sole companion, 
 Where the flushed Sierra, snowy-starred, 
 
 Her way to the sunset barred, 
 And the nameless rivers in thunder and foam 
 Channeled the terrible canyon ! 
 Nor paused, till her uttermost home 
 Was built, in the smile of a softer sky 
 And the glory of beauty still to be, 
 Where the haunted waves of Asia die 
 On the strand of the world-wide sea ! 
 
 II.-2. 
 
 The race, in conquering, 
 Some fierce Titanic joy of conquest knows: 
 
 Whether in veins of serf or king, 
 Our ancient blood beats restless in repose. 
 
 Challenge of Nature unsubdued 
 Awaits not Man s defiant answer long; 
 
 For hardship, even as wrong, 
 Provokes the level-eyed, heroic mood. 
 This for herself she did ; but that which lies, 
 
 As over earth the skies, 
 Blending all forms in one benignant glow, 
 
 Crowned conscience, tender care, 
 Justice, that answers every bondman s prayer, 
 Freedom where Faith may lead or Thought 
 may dare, 
 
 The power of minds that know, 
 
 Passion of hearts that feel, 
 
 Purchased by blood and woe, 
 Guarded by fire and steel, 
 
 Hath she secured f What blazon on her shield, 
 In the clear Century s light 
 Shines to the world revealed, 
 
 Declaring nobler triumph, born of Right 1 ? 
 
 I. 3. 
 
 Foreseen in the vision of sages, 
 Foretold when martyrs bled, 
 
 She was born of the longing of ages, 
 By the truth of the noble dead 
 And the faith of the living fed! 
 
 No blood in her lightest veins 
 
 Frets at remembered chains, 
 Nor shame of bondage has bowed her head. 
 
 In her form and features still 
 
 The unblenching Puritan will, 
 
 Cavalier honor, Huguenot grace, 
 
 The Quaker truth and sweetness, 
 And the strength of the danger-girdled race 
 Of Holland, blend in a proud completeness. 
 From the homes of all, where her being began, 
 
 She took what she gave to Man : 
 
 Justice, that knew no station, 
 Belief, as soul decreed, 
 
 Free air for aspiration, 
 Free forne for independent deed ! 
 
 She takes, but to give again, 
 As the sea returns the rivers in rain; 
 And gathers the chosen of her seed 
 From the hunted of every crown and creed. 
 Her Germany dwells by a gentler Rhine; 
 Her Ireland sees the old sunburst shine ; 
 Her France pursues some dream divine; 
 Her Norway keeps his mountain pine ; 
 Her Italy waits by the western brine ; 
 
 And, broad-based under all, 
 Is planted England s oaken-hearted mood, 
 
 As rich in fortitude 
 As e er went world ward from the island- wall ! 
 
 Fused in her candid light, 
 To one strong race all races here unite : 
 Tongues melt in hers, hereditary foemen 
 Forget their sword and slogan, kith and clan; 
 
 Twas glory, once, to be a Roman ; 
 She makes it glory, now, to be a Man! 
 
 II. 3. 
 
 Bow down! 
 Doff thine aeonian crown ! 
 
 One hour forget 
 The glory, and recall the debt : 
 
 Make expiation. 
 
 Of humbler mood, 
 For the pride of thine exultation 
 O er peril conquered and strife subdued! 
 But half the right is wrested 
 
 When victory yields her prize, 
 And half the marrow tested 
 
 When old endurance dies. 
 In the sight of them tliat love thee, 
 Bow to the Greater above thee ! 
 
 He faileth not to smite 
 The idle ownership of Right, 
 Nor spares to sinews fresh from trial, 
 And virtue schooled in long denial, 
 The tests that wait for thee 
 In larger perils of prosperity. 
 
 Here, at the Century s awful shrine, 
 Bow to thy Fathers God and thine ! 
 
 
The National Ode Bayard Tayior. 
 
 63 
 
 I. 4. 
 
 Behold! she bendeth now, 
 Humbling the chaplet of her hundred years : 
 There is a solemn sweetness on her brow, 
 And in her eyes are sacred tears. 
 
 Can she forge.t. 
 
 In present joy. the burden of her debt, 
 When for a captive race 
 She grandly staked and won 
 The total promise or her power begun, 
 
 And bared her bosom s grace 
 To the sharp wound that inly tortures yet ? 
 
 Can she forget 
 The million graves her young devotion set, 
 
 The hands that clasp above 
 From either side, in sad, returning love ? 
 
 Can she forget, 
 
 Here, where the Ruler of to-day, 
 The Citizen of to-morrow, 
 And equal thousands to rejoice and pray 
 
 Beside these holy walls are met, 
 Her birth- cry, mixed of keenest bliss and sorrow I 
 Where, on July s immortal morn 
 Held forth, the People saw her head 
 And shouted to the world : " The King is dead, 
 
 But lo ! the Heir is born !" 
 When fire of Youth, and sober trust of Age, 
 In Farmer, Soldier, Priest and Sage, 
 
 Arose and cast upon her 
 Baptismal garments, never robes so fair 
 Clad prince in Old-world air, 
 Their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred 
 honor 
 
 II. 4. 
 
 Arise! Re crown thy head, 
 Eadiant with blessing of the Dead ! 
 Bear from this hallowed place 
 The prayer that purities thy lips, 
 The light or courage that defies eclipse, 
 The rose of Man s new morning on thy face ! 
 
 Let no iconoclast 
 Invade thy rising Pantheon of the Past, 
 
 To make a blank where Adams stood, 
 To touch the Father s sheathed and sacred blade, 
 Spoil crowns on Jefferson and Franklin laid, 
 Or wash fro in Freedom s feet the stain of Lin 
 coln s blood ! 
 Hearken, as from that haunted hall 
 
 Their voices call : 
 " We lived and died for thee : 
 We greatly dared that tliou might st be ; 
 
 So, from thy children still 
 We claim denials which at last fulfill, 
 And freedom yielded to preserve thee free! 
 
 Beside clear-hearted Right 
 That smiles at Power s uplifted rod, 
 
 Plant Duties that requite, 
 And Order that sustains, upon thy sod, 
 And stand in stainless might 
 Above all self, and only less than God ! " 
 
 III.-l. 
 
 Here may thy solemn challenge end, 
 All-proving Past, and each discordance die 
 
 Of doubtful augury, 
 
 Or in one choral with the Present blend, 
 And that half-heard, sweet harmony 
 Of something nobler that our sons may see ! 
 
 Though poignant memories burn 
 Of days that were, and may again return, 
 When thy fleet foot, Huntress of the Woods, 
 The slippery brinks of danger knew, 
 And dim the eyesight grew 
 
 That was so sure ia thine old solitudes, 
 
 Yet stays some richer sense 
 Won from the mixture of thine elements, 
 
 To guide the vagrant scheme, 
 And winnow truth from each conflicting dream ! 
 
 Yet in thy blood shall live 
 Some force unspent, some essence primitive, 
 To seize the highest use of things ; 
 For Fate, to mold thee to her plan, 
 
 Denied thee food of kings, 
 Withheld the udder and the orchard-fruits, 
 
 Fed thee with savage roots, 
 And forced thy harsher milk- from barren breasta 
 of man ! 
 
 III. 2. 
 
 sacred Woman-Form, 
 Of the first People s need and passion wrought, 
 
 No thin, pale ghost of Thought, 
 But fair as Morning and as heart s-blood warm, 
 Wearing thy priestly tiar on Judah s hills ; 
 Clear-eyed beneath Athene s helm of gold ; 
 
 Or from Rome s central seat 
 Hearing the pulses of the Continents beat 
 
 In thunder where her legions rolled ; 
 Compact of high heroic hearts and wills, 
 
 Whose being circles all 
 The selfless aims of men, and all fulfills ; 
 Thyself not free, so long as one is thrall ; 
 Goddess, that as a Nation lives, 
 
 And as a Nation dies, 
 That for her children as a man defies, 
 And to her children as a mother gives, 
 
 Take our fresh fealty now ! 
 No more a Chieftainess, with wainpum-zoaa 
 
 And feather-cinctured brow, 
 No more a new Britannia, grown 
 To spread an equal banner to the breeze, 
 And lift thy trident o er the double seas ; 
 
 But with unborrowed crest, 
 In thine own native beauty dressed, 
 The front of pure command, the unflinching 
 eye, thine own ! 
 
 III. 3. 
 
 Look up, look forth, and on ! 
 
 There s light in the dawning sky: 
 The clouds are parting, the night is gone : 
 
 Prepare for the work of the day ! 
 
 Fallow thy pastures lie 
 
 And far thy shepherds stray, 
 And the fields of thy vast domain 
 
 Are waiting for purer seed 
 
 Of knowledge, desire, and deed, 
 For keener sunshine and mellower rain f 
 
 But keep thy garments pure: 
 Pluck them back, with the old disdain, 
 
 From touch of the hands that stain! 
 
 So shall thy strength endure. 
 Transmute into good the gold of Gain, 
 CouiDel to beauty thy ruder powers, 
 
 Till the bounty of coining hours 
 
 Shall plant, on thy fields apart, 
 With the oak of Toil, the rose of Art! 
 
 Be watchful, and keep us 90: 
 
 Be strong, and fear no foe : 
 
 Be iust, and the world shall know ! 
 With the same love love us, as we give ; 
 
 And the day shall never come, 
 
 That finds us weak or dumb 
 
 To join and smite and cry 
 In the great task, for thee to die*, 
 And the greater task, for- thee to live! 
 
 
\V 
 
 _ 
 EBTOtE TO THE NATIONS. 
 
 BY uLIVEK WKNDELL HOLMES. 
 
 J 
 
 Sung at Philadelphia, Jti/v 4. 
 I. 
 
 Bright on the banners of lily and rose 
 Lo, the last sun of our century sets ! 
 
 Wreath the black cannon that scowled on oar foes, 
 All bat her friendships the Nation foi_ 
 All but her friends and their welcome forgets! 
 
 These are around her : But where are her foes ! 
 Lo. while the sun of her century sets 
 Peace with her garlands of lily and rose I 
 IT. 
 
 Welcome ! a shout like the war trumpet swell 
 Wakes the wild echoes that slumber around ! 
 
 Welcome ! it quivers from Liberty s bell ; 
 
 Welcome ! the walls of her temple resound ! 
 Hark ! the gray walls of her temple resound ! 
 
 Fade the far voices o er hill-side and dell ; 
 
 Welcome ! still whisper the echoes around ; 
 Welcome ! still trembles on Liberty s bell ! 
 III. 
 
 Thrones of the Continents ! Isles of the Sea ! 
 Yours are the garlands of peace we entwine ; 
 
 Welcome, once more, to the land of the free, 
 Shadowed alike by the palm and the pii,e : 
 Softly they murmur, the palm and the pine ; 
 
 Hushed is our strife, in the land of the free ; " 
 Over your children their branches entwine, 
 Thrones of the Continents ! Isles of the Sea ! 
 
 SONG OF 1876. 
 
 BY BAYABD TAYLOR. 
 
 Written for the New- York Celebration, July 3. 1876. 
 Waken, voice of the Land s Devotion : 
 
 Spirit of freedom, awaken all ! 
 Ring, ye shores, to the Song of Ocean, 
 Rivers, answer, and mountains, call ! 
 The golden day has come : 
 Let every tongue be dumb 
 That sounded its malice or murmured its fears ; 
 She hath won her story ; 
 She wears her glory ; 
 
 We crown her the Land of a Hundred Years ! 
 Out of darkness and toil and danger 
 Into the light of Victory s day- 
 Help to the weak and Home to the stranger, 
 Freedom to all, she hath held her way ! 
 Now Europe s orphans rest 
 Upon her mother breast : 
 The voices of nations are heard in the cheers 
 That shall cast upon her 
 >*ew love and honor, 
 
 And crown her the Queen of a Hundred Years . 
 North and South, we are met as brothers ; 
 East and West, we are wedded as one ! 
 Right of each shall secure our mother s 
 Child of each is her faithful son I 
 We give thee heart and hand, 
 Our gfcrious native land, 
 For battle has tri d thee, and time endears ; 
 We will write thy story, 
 And keep thy glory 
 As pure as of old for a Thousand Years . 
 
 ODE. 
 
 BY WILLIAM CL LLEX BRYANT. 
 
 at Xt ic- York, July 4, 1 ~7 j. 
 Through storin and calm tne years have led 
 
 Our nation on frorn stage to - 
 A century s space until we tread 
 
 The threshold of another a^e. 
 We see there, o er our pathway swept, 
 
 A torrent stream of blood and fire ; 
 And thauk the ruling power who kept 
 
 Our sacred league of States entire. 
 Oh ! checkered train of years, farewell. 
 
 With all thy strifes and hopes and fears; 
 But with us let thy memories dwell. 
 
 To warn and lead the coming years. 
 And thou.the new-lie ginning age, 
 
 Warned by the past and not ia vain, 
 Write on a fairer, whiter page 
 
 The record of thy happier reign. 
 
 CENTENNIAL HYMN. 
 
 BY JOHN G. WtriTTIER. 
 
 (Sung at the Optning of the Czntennixl Exhibition, May 10, 
 
 1876.) 
 
 Our fathers God ! from out whose hand 
 TUP centuries fall like grains of sand, 
 We meet to-day, united, free, 
 And loyal to our land and Thee, 
 To thank Thee for the era done, 
 And trust Thee for the opening one. 
 Here, where of old, by Thy design, 
 The fathers spake that word of Thine, 
 Whose echo is the glad refrain 
 Of rended bolt and falling chain, 
 To grace our festal time, from all 
 The zones of earth our guest* we calL 
 Be with us while the new world greeU 
 The old world thronging all its streets* 
 Un vailing all the triumphs won 
 By art or toll beneath the sun ; 
 And unto common good ordain 
 This rivalship of hand and brain. 
 Thou, who host here in concord furled 
 The war flags of a gathered world, 
 Beneath our Western skies fulfill 
 The Orient s mission of good will, 
 And, freighted with love s Golden Fleeoe, 
 Send back the Argonauts of peace. 
 For art and labor met in trace, 
 For beauty made the bride of use 
 We thank Thee, while, withal, we crave 
 The austere virtues strong to save, 
 The honor proof to place or gold. 
 The manhood never bought nor sold ! 
 O ! make Thou us, through centuries lone; 
 In peace secure, injustice strong ; 
 Around our gift of freedom draw 
 The safeguards of Thy righteous law ; 
 And, caet in some diviner mold, 
 Let the nw cycle shame the old ! 
 
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