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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 ! 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