E 286 
 .B74 
 1873 
 Copy 1 
 
 AN 
 
 ORATION 
 
 UEFORE THK 
 
 Oil Y , AUTHORITIES OE BOSTON, 
 
 FOURTH OF JULY, 1873. 
 
 Bv JOHX F. AV. WARE. 
 
 BOSTON; 
 
 RCCKWELL. & CHURCHILL, CITY PRIKTERS, 
 
 12 2 Washington S t k k e t . 
 
 18 7 3. 
 
Class L_£16 
 
 Book ."B 7^ 
 I ^73 
 
^'•- 
 
 AN 
 
 ORATION 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 CITY AUTHORITIES OF BOSTON, 
 
 FOURTH OF JULY, 18 7 3 
 
 By JOHN F. W. WARE. 
 
 II 
 
 BOSTON : 
 
 ROCK'WELL & CHURCHILL, CITY PRINTERS, 
 12 2 Washington S t k e e t . 
 
 1873. 
 
l?73 
 
 7 iao» 
 
CITY OF BOSTOJS". 
 
 In Board of Aldermen, July 7, 1873. 
 
 Ordered, That the thanks of the City Council be tendered 
 to the Rev. John F. W. Ware for the very patriotic aiKl 
 eloquent Oration delivered by him before the Municipal 
 Authorities of this city on the Fourth of July instant ; and 
 that he be requested to furnish a copy thereof for publication. 
 
 Passed ; sent down for concurrence. 
 
 L. E. CUTTER, Chairman. 
 
 In Common Council, July 10, 1873. 
 Concurred : 
 
 E. O. SHEPARD, 
 
 President. 
 
 Approved July 12, 1873. 
 
 HENRY L. PIERCE, Maijor. 
 
ORATION. 
 
 Mr. Mayor, Gentlemen of the Councils, Citizens: — 
 
 The republic draws toward the close of its first 
 century of life. It has escaped the ordinary diseases 
 of adolescence, and we, its children, fondly hope that 
 its life shall be told in uncounted centuries, and that 
 only He who outlives the record of all things shall 
 write its epitaph. It has survived the evil augury 
 of those jealous of it, and of the principles it has 
 essayed to teach; it has passed crises its friends 
 looked forward to with solicitude, or faced with appre- 
 hension, while it has been spared that fatal monotony 
 of which the old sea-king chants, — " He who has 
 never been wounded lives a weary life." On its front 
 are honored scars; on its brow wounds yet bleeding. 
 It has a career; it has made a name; it is become a 
 power. It has gone out into the records of time, and 
 the fame thereof can never die. ]^o century of 
 other national existence to be matched against its 
 centurj'^ of life. Where, in remoter ages or in more 
 immediate time, do we hud a people in its maturity 
 achieving what this republic has in its youth? 
 
6 ORATION. 
 
 * 
 
 Favored of God in the time and the conditions of its 
 birth; in its isolation from foreign entanglements; 
 in its various climate and resource; in river and 
 mountain and harbor and mine; in unity of empire,* 
 in form and administration of government; in its 
 religion and its culture; in the industry and integrity 
 of a people not weighted by old-time disability; 
 favored of God in every trial that has disciplined 
 it, the republic has had every element of greatness 
 given it, — has been under bonds to success. This 
 is its great holiday and festival, the anniversary of 
 that immortal morning when the bell in the old tower 
 at Philadelphia, proclaiming " liberty throughout the 
 land," chanted to the ages the new anthem of the free. 
 Of all red-letter days in the human calendar, none so 
 pregnant in meaning and in hope. To us it is the 
 " Glorious Fourth," — glorious by the glory where- 
 with the fathers baptized it, glorious with the new 
 glory that its sons have won for it upon the battle- 
 field. In one proud memory we weave the names 
 of Philadelphia, Yicksbnrg and Gettysburg. All 
 through the land, from the boy in the nursery to the 
 man of furrowed brow and deadening senses, the day 
 has been welcomed with turbulent exuberance, as the 
 excited patriot foretold. Under our enthusiasm the 
 very laws are silent. Small boys and bigger boys 
 
JULY 4, 1873. 7 
 
 defy the imj^erative edict of the city, and the most 
 irreproachable of policemen sees without seeing, 
 hears and forbears. It is the jubilee and carnival of 
 extravagance and noise, — strange inspirations of the 
 genius of liberty. "We will keep the nation's birth- 
 day in soberer sort, recalling the blessings of the 
 past, recounting the obligations of the present, look- 
 ing nAt at success and privilege only, but at danger 
 and duty, beseeching the great All-Father so to move 
 in and control the hearts of all His children that 
 when He sets the epitaph above its tomb, it shall be 
 in the Master's brief, expressive phrase, " Well 
 done." 
 
 Unlike other nations, ours has no pre-historic 
 existence. Out of a vast, vague past no grim ances- 
 try looks at us. We do not draw our blood of the 
 demi-gods of classic antiquity, or the wild heroes of 
 the Norse Yalhalla. Into no dreamy myth-land do 
 we wander searching the corner on Avhich to rest our 
 pedigree. 'No heraldry blazoned with emblems of 
 forgotten significance, no legends hoar with gathered 
 years, lend their fictitious dignity. It pleases us 
 sometimes to tie ourselves back to an Anglo-Saxon 
 ancestry, and, when we are a little mad with England, 
 we grow specially rhetorical about a common origin 
 and a common property in her language, literature 
 and fame. But it is not so at all. We are a new 
 
8 ORATION. 
 
 people, the parvenus — the new-comers — of the 
 world. That from which our fathers deliberately 
 separated themselves, that which they fled fi-om and 
 flung away, that from which ocean and sympathy and 
 career divide us, why should we be ambitious to claim? 
 Why not consent to be the new people that we are, 
 and that in other moments and in other things it is 
 our pride to be considered? Why, in a sort of rhe- 
 torical maudlin, claim Shakespeare and Westminster 
 Abbe}^ and Runymede and o^aseby fight? They 
 are not ours. We have historj^ and an ancestrj^ of 
 our own, great enough to satisfy any ambition. Our 
 birth is j^rosaic, and our history neither dim nor uncer- 
 tain. It has no twilight for fancy to dwell uj:>on, or 
 to draw weird pictures out of. It is hard to work its 
 stern features into j3oetry, rhetoric, or j^ainting. Our 
 ancestors were men, not warriors, not sea-kings, not 
 demi-gods, but men moulded in the matrix of a rare 
 manliness; men who grew by the -hard things God 
 blessed them with; who couldn't be bent by cir- 
 cumstance, by disaster, by t^'ranny; before whom all 
 these bended and disappeared. The bald facts stand 
 patent to the world. Our fathers were men an old 
 world did not want, men of troublesome conscience 
 and earnest spirit, who had lost faith in kings and 
 in kings' followers, who believed in a light to shine 
 from God's truth into the heart and into the world 
 
J U L Y 4, 1 8 7 3 . y 
 
 which men had never seen. It is not forcing fact to 
 speak of the repubhc as sprung* from the loins of the 
 Pilgrims. There were other men of other motive to 
 settle themselves along the, Atl a n tic sh ore^-but play- 
 ing no part in the busy drama are James-town, and 
 the first harbor of Lord Baltimore's colonj^, and 
 Hendrik Hudson's discovery, and the Huguenots' 
 retreat. Some local influence of each survives in 
 custom, institution, character; but the world goes on 
 forgetting them. Alone has Pilgrim character and 
 Pilgi'im principle outrun the narrow limit of province 
 and of blood. The men of Scrooby village, the pas-, 
 sengers of the Ma^^flower, the exiles of Plymouth 
 rock, or the more courtly men of the later Massachu- 
 setts Colony, have given their character to the 
 republic. The pact of the Mayflower preceded, 
 contained, necessitated the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence as the blossom precedes, necessitates, contains 
 the fruit. It is the Pilgrim spirit that breathes in 
 that immortal paper; that guided that first bold 
 signature, which the brave man hoped was large 
 enough for kings to see; that to-day dominates the 
 land. In the same breath that they have deiiied, 
 derided, despised the men and principles of 'New 
 Ihigland, have I heard men make the half-reluctant, 
 half-admiring confession, that there is no hope to the 
 country except in their supremacy. Not yet quite 
 
 2 
 
10 ORATION. 
 
 true of them what Plutarch says of the good King 
 Noma: "It is the fortune of all good men that their 
 yirtue rises in gloiy after their deaths, and that the 
 env}' which evil men conceive against them never out- 
 lives them long- " but it grows upon the people as 
 they outgrow local prejudice, and will gi-ow as we 
 shall sink petty and sectional jealousies, and come at 
 last to have a country, that but for the men who 
 landed at Plymouth, the America of the fii'st century 
 could not have existed. Christianity dates back to a 
 stable in Judea; the republic to the hard gray rock 
 by the sea. Upon it American liberty w^as born. Its 
 sponsors were the grim men who had dared de.^j^ots, 
 disease and storm. It bases and supports the nation, 
 and the pi'inciples of it are the stay and staff of 
 the republic. The calm, judicious De Tocqueville 
 says: "Here is a stone which the feet of a few 
 poor fugitives pressed for an instant, and this stone 
 becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation; 
 a fragment is prized as a relic. But what has 
 become of the door-steps of a thousand palaces?" 
 In no metaphor is it that the republic is founded on a 
 rock. Ihe American republic to-day is the century 
 growth of the seed dropped upon it. 
 
 I will not make the part in the national anniver- 
 sarj' to which you have invited me, a thing of mciui- 
 ingless, exaggerated boast. I pay most cordial 
 
J U L Y 4, 1 8 7 3 . 11 
 
 honor to, I claim and am proud to own as country- 
 men, the historic men'who took their part, or lived or 
 died for the Commonwealth; while I believe the 
 real founders and fothers of the republic to have 
 been those from whom we moi-e immediately take 
 descent, and that their policy, principles, character, 
 have stami^ed themselves upon, will perpetuate the 
 nation. And more than polic}^ or principle, it is 
 the character they were of, the actual men they 
 wei'c, the lives they lived out before all men, the 
 genuine, sturdy manhood that they made, that is 
 their special boon to us, that calls for special grat- 
 itude, for study and for imitation. Other men 
 have had honorable ancestors, other men have 
 had costlj^ legacies, but never have people entered 
 into such heritage as we. In privilege, we 
 stand at the head, before all peoples, and the 
 privilege is in the manhood we may look up to. 
 Over all, that was the characteristic of the national 
 fathers. They carried through by it what completest 
 system and policy would have failed in. More than 
 the country they gave, more than the laws they 
 made, more than the principles they established, 
 was the integrity they were of; that their best 
 gift to us. One of the prominent writers of Eng- 
 lish essay says that " Christianity starts from the 
 unbounded admiration of a person," and that " all 
 
12 ORATION. 
 
 true moral pi'ogress is made through admiration." 
 It is our fortune to have the admirable persons 
 of our ancestors before us, though we have not lifted 
 admiration to the point that inspires imitation. That 
 we are a mighty people is reiterated to us from 
 every Senate chamber and every stump, at every 
 civic and political gathering. But the republic, no 
 more than anything else, is stronger than its weakest 
 part. And our Aveakest part is not our international 
 policy, our system of government, our internal 
 differences; not questions of revenue, currency, 
 labor. It is the moral tone underlying thrift and 
 energy, society and cliurch and law. Side by 
 side with every matei'ial prosperity there has been 
 growing a laxity of individual honor^ a worshiji of 
 expedienc}^, a love of the hazards of money and of 
 power, a moral enervation and obtuseness which 
 come to the surface in all dealings, personal and 
 national, and ai-e got to be recognized as the char- 
 acteristics of the American man. We have not gone 
 on with the steadfastness of our ancestry, building, 
 in an honorable life with all we do; but, leaving out 
 the honorable things, have grasped for those which 
 satisfy a low and j^ersonal ambition. There w\as a 
 chance, under the inspirations of the past, under 
 the culture of our institutions, to have built a broad, 
 and recognized, and honored American character; 
 
JULY 4, 1873. 13 
 
 and there is chance yet, if, forsaking the way in 
 which we have gone too far, we will take the back- 
 ward step, and bnild anew, from our fathers' founda- 
 [jtions, the fabric of American manhood. 
 
 An English writer of our day has said that 
 " patriotism is only another name for the worship of 
 rehcs." The definition seems to me paltry and 
 unworthy. If it be only that — of the dead past — 
 let it be buried. We can better at any time afibrd 
 to go without a past, than forego the future. But 
 we cannot dismiss the idea of patriotism that w^ay. 
 It is more; it is deeper; it is holier. 'No "relic 
 worship " nerved our fathers for that struggle which 
 De Tocqueville declares " was the I'esult of a mature 
 and reflecting preference for freedom, and not the 
 vague or ill-defined craving for independence." It 
 was "more light yet" for man that they saw, as 
 with finger of fire, beckoning them from out the low 
 black clouds that hung upon the western horizon. 
 No " relic worship " sent our sons, our brothers, 
 ourselves, into the civil strife. IS^ot that which was 
 behind in the honored past, but that which lay in 
 the quick womb of hope; not that which had been 
 bequeathed, but that which we should ourselves 
 bequeath. The patriot's is not the backward-looking 
 eye alone, nor do his duties cease with the hour and 
 peril of battle. As the heart in man, so the republic 
 
14 ORATION. 
 
 is alwaj's in pei-il, and danger threatens most when 
 men feel most secure. Only eternal vigUance is 
 safety. 
 
 These are the dull and enervating days of peace, 
 and to the excitements of war have succeeded those 
 of commercial pi'osperity. We have resumed the 
 ways and arts of peace, and we have resnmed its 
 neglects. We are settled doAvn as if the war had 
 settled all outstanding questions, and there was 
 nothing for us to do but to pui'sue the way marked 
 by our ambitions. We speak of danger as past, as 
 if danger were only that which the bayonet could 
 face, and the shell dissipate; as if rebellions against 
 morality were not as disastrous as rebellions against 
 law; as if the w^orst wounds are not the Avounds we 
 give ourselves, and suicide the meanest of all deaths. 
 The perils of the republic are not all passed. I 
 am not one of those w^ho think that permanence and 
 prosperity were secured through that strife, because 
 permanence and prosperity arc made of other stuff. 
 It did not cure, it did not probe, it did not reach the 
 worst diseases of the body politic. Though we have 
 closed up that struggle, and voted to call ourselves 
 once more a free, and iniited,and happy people; though 
 the old stars and stripes to-day float evei'ywhere, and 
 the other changeling is forgotten; though politicians 
 have " shaken hands across a bloody chasm," and 
 
JULY 4, 187 3. 15 
 
 Confederate living have placed flowers above the 
 graves of Federal dead, the republic has not passed 
 the point of peril. Peace came to ns too soon. The 
 greatest of war's lessons had not been learned. We 
 came from the contest braggart, self-mastered not at 
 all; our own part in it exaggerated, God's part over- 
 looked. Back to the old ways w^e went, fonvard to 
 new careers, with a maddened speed goading our- 
 selves Avhere already there was no need of spur. 
 Everything was inflated, ourselves most of all, 
 everything in excess, no balance, no repose, no 
 foresight; everything under pressure, and one sees 
 no human way out of it except by convulsions which 
 shall shake, not government perhaps, not finance, not 
 commerce, manufactures, trades alone, but, worse 
 and more, that of which already we may count the 
 foreshadow^s, man's faith in man, in himself, in the 
 very fact of a higher moral law. Consulting the 
 outside of prosperity, we cannot deny the mighty 
 stride of the republic day by day, and while men 
 sleep. Looking only at industry and resource and 
 thrift and material success, it all seems well, too 
 bright to fade. But clouds are in the horizon, and 
 their mutter reaches the ear that is wise to hear. 
 There are conditions about us that cannot continue. 
 Of no time since the formation of the republic may 
 it be more truly said, that all its best, its j^'^st, its 
 
16 O K A T 1 O N . 
 
 promise is at hazai'cl. What the press tells us from 
 day to day of plans and deeds, of policies and 
 politics, of contrivance and connivance, of the clash 
 of interests that are local and selfish with rights that 
 are broad and universal, gives iis not the sup of 
 horrors, but the full meal of despairs. There would 
 seem nothing that is not iu process of decay. Either 
 these are the most atrocious libels that follow up and 
 fix upon the men of politics and of traffic, or the}^ 
 are to the core morally unsound; either the land is 
 given over to a reprobate tongue, or the men of it, 
 of all classes and occupations, are fatallj^ corrupt. 
 The war we have had was not, after all, the test 
 and strain of institution and of government. In 
 these peace-days it is that strain and test come; in 
 these that is the nation's trial of what sort it is; in 
 these that the question is to be settled of national 
 advance, national perpetuity, national integrity. 
 What of readjustment the war demanded, what of re- 
 construction it necessitates, quite as much needed here 
 as elsewhere, north as south. While we are think- 
 ing of, legislating for, complaining about the still 
 malcontent, a graver duty lies nearer home. The 
 reconstruction this da}' needs is not that of once 
 rebellious States; is not a question of local or 
 national policy ; is not a thing for force, for law^, for 
 enactment, for Executive. It is I'ccon.structed selves 
 
J IT L Y 4, 1 8 7 3 . 17 
 
 that is demanded, a more conscientious, consis- 
 tent, individual manhood. The repubhc is not 
 saved, nor can it be, so long as everywhere the old, 
 unrestrained spirit of self — petulant, aggressive, 
 noisy, on every occasion obtrusive — asserts itself. 
 He looks very superficially at causes and results, 
 who does not know how all life-troubles, civil as 
 personal, spring from the self in man. As the years 
 drift us away from the point of strife, and prosperity, 
 with its cares and deceits, demands us, I cannot feel 
 that the republic is secure, because I do not find that 
 quality of manhood which must underlie the nation, 
 as it should underlie the man. Ours is the dull time 
 of the patriot's existence, but that does not excuse us 
 from the patriot's duties; it is no time to give over 
 a patriot's cares. The patriot spirit does not wait 
 occasion, does not slowly rouse at the last, uttermost 
 peril; it does not need to be perpetually "fired," but 
 is itself a fire; is not a meteor- flash, but a steady, 
 self-feeding flame ; is not a moment's efi'usion, but a 
 life. The patriot is a sober man, anxious in thought, 
 faithful in service, alive to the least and humblest 
 duty as man or citizen, sturd}^ and steady under dull 
 routine, resolved that through him the republic 
 receive no hai'm. Only as I can put an honest man- 
 hood in, am I in any way a patriot. No feat of 
 arms, no gift of moneys, no imprisonment in Libbys, 
 
18 ORATION. 
 
 no eloquence, no, not death, make men patriot. 
 These are cheap. They are of impulse, of excite- 
 ment, or of necessit}^; they sti'ike and act from the 
 nerve, and not the soul. The calm and steady life, 
 true to nohlest instinct and loftiest example, ready 
 in duty as in dauger, under tame and wear}" toil as 
 under excited pressure, to do as to die, that makes 
 the patriot, as it makes the man. Washington, Put- 
 nam, Greene, are not alone our patriots; the men 
 who died in State street, or on Bunker's Hill; who 
 fell at Gettysburg, or saw the last of the " rebel 
 rag" at Richmond; who lie beneath the turf of ten 
 thousand graves, or who live to flower-crown their 
 memories; but the men in all the land, — north, 
 south, east, west, — the men of toil, the men of 
 scholarship, the men of wealth, who live in devoted 
 fealty to every-day principles of i-ight and honor 
 and truth. To whatever of personal reconstruction 
 is needed, such man will bend himself, not appalled 
 by its difficulty, but stimulated by its necessit}^ In 
 it will he know no pause, till out of himself shall be 
 taken everything low and mean, and he shall be 
 worthy to support his country, to be the defender of 
 its liberty. 
 
 One stern and pressing patriot duty to-day. AYe, 
 the sovereign people, may be morally upright yet, 
 sound at heart, though there is so much that does not 
 
J U L Y 4, 1 8 7 3 . 19 
 
 look like it; but we trust ourselves and all our dear- 
 est intei'ests to the keeping of immoral men, — men 
 who never see deeper or farther than wliat shall serve 
 themselves, men who turn the trust we repose in 
 then to that end. Politics is a noble science, but 
 pai ty intrigue and chicane threaten the very life of 
 the republic. These get into all our responsible 
 places, and rule out principle and brains from custom- 
 houses to school committees. The great interests of 
 the republic must not and cannot remain at the mercy 
 of partisan intrigue or transient gusts of popular 
 opinion. We put men into office who flatter us by 
 calling themselves our servants; and once secure iu 
 their place and the manipulations that will keei3 them 
 thei'e, like the animals spoken of in Scripture, they 
 turn again and rend us. We are as afraid of our 
 servants as the Southern aristocracy was of its 
 slaves. The}" bully us out of our morality. They 
 leave us scarce the name of liberty. They suffer us 
 in no opinion. They override us by trick. The 
 republic is lapsed into an oligarchy. We keep its 
 name, its form, its phrases; but there is no tyranny on 
 God's earth so galling, so degrading, so fraught with 
 mischief as the tyranny that the moral cowardice of 
 the American peo[)le has placed in the hands of the 
 American public man. If we will not break it, it 
 must recoil upon us, or, what is worse, infinitely 
 
20 K A T I O N . 
 
 worse, upon our children. Of no use our individual 
 morality, if we will not take it out of its individual 
 belongings, and apply it to i:)ublic service. It is not 
 a half quality. Better without it. Has it come to 
 this that that leading American paper, The JSfation , 
 can soberly say, " All being corrupt, what is the use 
 of investigating each other?" Has it come to this, 
 that America can undertake nothing Avithout a 
 scandal annexed, a suspicion at least, — a Yienna Ex- 
 hibition, a Freedman's bureau, a Pacific railway, a 
 Presidential campaign, a Washington treaty? Are 
 we to be followed all the time by the incompetency, 
 the dishonesty, the blunders of those who are, by our 
 system, foisted into places, if not of trust, of con- 
 spicuousness? — we can't say honor where no honor 
 is. It is only for us to decide. The shame attaches 
 only so long as Ave will. We may talk about the evil 
 as in the system, or in the times, or in the men. It is 
 in us. AYe make that which we allow. Men in place 
 only dare because we permit. The easy-going good- 
 nature with which we look on at things that degrade 
 us in the eyes of nations, and must belittle us in our 
 children's, — turning to our farms and merchandise 
 as if that only concerned us which touches them, — 
 is not a good natuie at all, and criminal if it were. 
 It is a blunted moral sense; it is a seared moral con- 
 sciousness; it is a fatal moral deterioration in you and 
 
J U L Y 4 , 1 8 7 3 . 21 
 
 in me. Our easy-going is lack of principle, of 
 courage, of patriotism. The great crimes that go 
 unpunished; the prostitution of the great principles 
 of law to the mere juggle of skilful counsel; the 
 spotted judicial ermine; the audacity of what are 
 popularly termed "rings; "the selfishness of over- 
 grown corporations; the grasping, consolidation and 
 defiance of railways; the nullifying of deliberate 
 enactment, — are only ont-croppings, permissions of 
 something more radical, individual, which may go on 
 to permit evils more fatal. These are not merely pass- 
 ing phases of a busy life, carelessly absorbed ; they 
 are indications of a spirit which strikes at the life of 
 the republic. They are not convulsions of values and 
 shocks of credit and movements of intrigue and 
 fence of reckless men; but deeper than that, they 
 indicate badness at heart, badness in the men, and, 
 equally, badness in you and in me for letting them be 
 where they can do such things. It is not that men in 
 these relations and with these opportunities are above 
 all or peculiarly sinners. These but express through 
 their opportunity the lack that lies in us all. The sin 
 is that the individual American man has lost that 
 fine, penetrating sense of honor and fidelity and self- 
 control and truth, that keen moral sentiment that dis- 
 tinguished the fathers, and, at a time when men wor- 
 shipped thrones and kings, made of them the leading 
 
22 O E A T I Jf . 
 
 power of the globe. More unqualifiedly than 
 Taiiie puts it of the Englaud of to-daj, as com- 
 pared with the England of Cromwell, may it be 
 said of our to-day America as contrasted with 
 that of our fathers — " We no longer look on 
 life as an aug'ust temple, but as a machine 
 for solid profits, or a hall for refined amuse- 
 ments. AVe have our rich, our working-classes, onr 
 bankers who preach the gospel of gold; we have 
 gentlemen, lords, dandies who preach the gospel of 
 manners. . We overwork ourselves to heap up 
 guineas; or else we make ourselves insipid to attain 
 an elegant dignity. Our hell is no longer, as under 
 Cromwell, the dread of being found guilty before a 
 just Judge, but the dread of making a bad sj)ecula- 
 tion, or of transgressing etiquette. We have no 
 moral convictions, and only floating convictions. 
 We have lost the mainspring of action." To have 
 lost moral conviction is indeed to have lost the 
 mainspring of action. Is it not that to which the 
 American public seems to have come? Parry or 
 shield it as we maj^, is it not that to wdiich the Amer- 
 ican individual has lapsed? The American reputa- 
 tion cannot long stand the sti'ain, much less the 
 American character. It is the republic that suffers. 
 
 The historian Fi-oude has said — "It would be well 
 if there were some definition of freedom; which would 
 
J U L Y 4 , 1 8 7 3 . 23 
 
 enable men to see clearly what they mean and do not 
 mean by that vaguest of words;" and elsewhere he 
 says — " The entire fabric of human existence is woven 
 of the double threads of freedom and authority, 
 which are forever wrestling, one against the other." 
 In thiit they knew this, the men of the older republic 
 are distinguished from the men of the later. They 
 had just emerged from a conflict that taught them 
 the self-limitings of freedom; had been face to face 
 with perils from which they learned self-respect as 
 self-i-estraint. The power they grew to have over 
 themselves, the}'' threw into their government; and 
 there presides over the birth of the new nation a 
 spirit of moderation and of health, which gives to its 
 earlier days the characteristics of an individual, rather 
 than of a people. There is balance, confidence, fore- 
 sight, consideration in all things planned, under- 
 taken, and the republic moves to its place among 
 the countries of the globe, as steadily, as buoyantly, 
 as the well-ballasted hull glides from the stocks to its 
 place among navies. Time and the security of suc- 
 cess have largely lost us the ancestral idea of liberty. 
 It will not occur to the true chronicler of our time to 
 speak of the balance of the republic to-day. ]N^ot 
 liberty under law, but liberty above law is our pop- 
 ular idea. And this not the legitimate result of our 
 institutions. Republicanism does not tend to anarchy. 
 
24 ORATION. 
 
 It is no synonym for license. There may be lesser 
 causes, — the reaction from a too stern religion, the 
 enervation of continued success, the rise and struggle 
 between various commercial interests, the relaxing 
 of the rule of home, — but the cause behind all other 
 cause is, that the man has lost the thought of himself 
 as primaril}^ a moral agent, and has given himself to 
 the control of things over which he should have kept 
 the master3\ The republic of to-day reflects its 
 children as that of the ftithers did its founders. To 
 shield, to save the republic, we must reach, rouse, 
 convict the man. You, and I, and all America's 
 sons, have got to comprehend that we hold not the 
 destiny of our oavu souls in our own keeping, or the 
 destiny of untold millions, but the destiny of an 
 idea. The man must go to work upon himself, see 
 in himself the unit of power, the unit of safety. He 
 may not stoop from loftiest principle, because he so 
 endangers the integrity of the republic, the integi-ity 
 of liberty. Throwing aside all policy of party, of 
 sect, or of self; turning his back upon the Avild and 
 lawless pursuit of pleasure, self-indulgence, ambition; 
 shaking himself clear of the encumbering things of 
 mistaken self-interest, under the restrainings of a 
 hitrher law, must he seek that moral manhood, 
 which, as it was the creator of the rei)ublic, so 
 shall it be its onlj' safety. 
 
JULY 4, 1873. 25 
 
 Your Honor and Gentlemen! \Ye are not maldiig" 
 a grand American manhood side by side with this 
 great American prosperity; it is not the impulse and 
 inspiration of our activities. All oiir dangers lie in 
 that; not in foreign entanglements; not in the failure 
 of one or the establishment of the other home policy; 
 not in strifes of labor with capital; not in inflated 
 currency or internal dissension; not in the poor, the 
 ignorant, the depraved, the immigrant, whom we call 
 the dangerous, classes. Our dangers are not in 
 classes at all, but in individuals, who have no pure, 
 elevated manhood, no well-regulated, established, 
 restrained self. The need we have to-day over all 
 other needs is the need of an American manhood; 
 and the culture requisite to an American manhood is 
 not necessarily of schools, of college, of position, of 
 many opportunities or many books. It may come in 
 all its rugged, best proportion where these are not, 
 as a man sitting with himself shall see into the great 
 demands of life, and understand how wide and 
 unselfish moral obUgation is. The principles that 
 planted themselves by the winter sea were but the 
 wild waste of ocean currents, save for the men who 
 held and lived them, thi-ough whose lives they became 
 immortal. Had there been no Carvers, Bre wasters, 
 "Winslows; no Winthrops, orEndicotts; no Adamses 
 or Quincys; no Washingtons, Henrys, Jeffersons, 
 
 4 
 
2G ORATION. 
 
 there had been no repnbUc; and stock gamblers, 
 political intriguers, a low judiciary, canting piet}^, lax 
 morality cannot maintain it. Tlie republic was born 
 in the men who not merely professed, but Hved its 
 principles, from the fealty of whose lives the Declara- 
 tion of Independence and the snbsequent Consti- 
 tution of the United States derived all tiieir dignity 
 and force, and we go on building an enormous and 
 imposing superstructure upon their foundation which 
 must totter to the earth, save as we shall learn to 
 supply its every joint with that sturdy moral probity 
 they were of. It was as manhood failed Carthage 
 and Sparta and Rome that they faltered and fell ; as 
 manhood failed, that Cromwell became possible to 
 England, and Kapoleon to France. It Avas manhood 
 ftiilure that made the rebellion inevitable. Would 
 we divert future disaster, ourselves and onr children 
 under American culture must grow into xVmerican 
 men. 
 
 There come to me, over the yeai\s, the words, as I 
 think, of 3Ir. Justice Story — "We stand the latest, 
 and, if we fail, the last experiment at self-govern- 
 ment by the people." The republic must not fail; if 
 we be men, it cannot ftiil. I believe in the future 
 gloi-y of my country; in ever-growing honors to 
 adorn the fair repute of the republic; in a career of 
 which no man would dare to cast the horoscope. In 
 
J U L Y 4 , 1 8 7 3 . 27 
 
 the far-off years I hear the soHd tramp of the 
 centuries as their deep colamn moves to the consum- 
 mation of the purposes of God, and at their far 
 front, steady and sublime, I behold the unflinching- 
 eagles of the republic; and at the last grand review 
 hers shall be the place of honor at 'Hhe head of the 
 cokimn, on the right." ISTot by "extending the area 
 of freedom," not through any " manifest destiny," 
 shall her gloiy come, or any of those cheap things of 
 cheap phrase, which have so long pleased the popular 
 ear, and raised the popular applause. Mr. Emerson 
 has lately said of the Egyptians, they " are a perpet- 
 ual study for the grace of their forms and motions. 
 jfSTo people walk so well, none are so upright, none 
 are so well-developed, so strong. It seems as if an 
 artist shonld go to them for perfect models." To us 
 should the traveller and the man of thought go for the 
 perfect model of a well-developed, upright, moral 
 manhood. We have a historj^ It has this central 
 day, a central flict, not in our own career alone, but 
 central in human progress. We do not want fire- 
 works, bells, cannon, periods to round and comprise 
 and compress its celebration. Their noisy accord 
 may do, if we have only to recall a past, to worship 
 relics. We have other and more to do. Cheered, 
 lighted, led by the holy influence and bright examples 
 of the past, armed with that armor which our fathers 
 
28 ORATION. 
 
 found of proof, as their posterity and God's sons, let 
 ns press forward, out of individual character and 
 endeavor, slowly but surely building, for the world's 
 blessing and our country's good, an American man- 
 hood, an American people. 
 
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