» > >> - ■■>->.s> J > :: > ■ :> ?? ^.s» v:> ^'/^ - LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRESENTETj uy UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ■> > : > > ^ >> » "^ >^ zx> 5 „y^ >^' ■ ■ > > 'ip'iJi^ IJ '^^ -^ Z> J> ^■-■^•^ : 3 ^ :>> .:>'_'-^». ^m $:^ ^^^ > 3^ "*"'— 3S*>- ■^ -^ ^1 » D^ ?^ ::>■■■■ i^ > > ~^' ^ ■':•> > tC> "- y i>^ > • :'= l_^ • ->:S^ :>■ Ji <^ ^ ^3 T. s> 5:? 7>' ^ ^^ >^.-:> ::3£> 5» ^'^ .^ -7-=i -«:> » :» -^ ■ "^'- "^ '-=- >5 -:s»- :>-:'5i AN ORATION BEFORE THE CITY AUTIIOKITIES OF BOSTON, FOURTH OF JULY, 1870. By WILLIAM EVERETT. BOSTON: ALFEED MUDGE & SQN, CITY PRINTERS, 34 SCHOOL STREET. 1870. AN ORATION BEFORE THE CITY AUTHOEITIES OF BOSTON, FOURTH OF JULY, 1870. By WILLIAM EVERETT^ I % 3 ^ - BOSTON: ALFRED MUDGE & SON, CITY PRINTERS, 34 SCHOOL STREET. 1870. K «?> CITY OF BOSTON. In Board op Aldermen, July 18, 1870. Ordered, That the thanks of this Board be presented to William Everett, Esquire, for his eloquent and appropriate Address before the City Government and Citizens of Boston, on the occasion of the ninety-fourth Anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence ; and that he be requested to furnish a copy of the Address for publication by the City. Passed. S. F. McCLEARY, City Clerk. Approved, 18th July, 1870. NATHANIEL B. SHURTLEFF, Mayor. ORATION. Mr. Mayor AND Fellow-Citizens of Boston: It is, I assure you, with no slight diffidence that I approach the honorable task Avhich the Committee of Arrangements imposes on me. The mere recital of the names of the distinguished men who have preceded me in the list of annual orators is enough to make any man feel the distinction as well as the labor of this duty. This list is not short; for a hundred successive years has the vote of the town or city government chosen an orator to speak before them on a great public anniversary. In the year 1771, it was voted that an oration be delivered on the Fifth of March, in commemoration of the so-called Massacre — the first collision of British troops and American citizens — in the pre- vious year; and James Lovell, the master of the Boston Latin School, was chosen to deliver it. A wise choice; for no man can be better prepared to trace with accuracy the distresses and duties of 6 .TTTLY 4, 1R70. nations, or express them with elegance; and precision, than he whose daily duty it is to train the youth of his native town in the language, the literature and the history of the wondrous peoples of antiquity. Thirteen orations were deUvered on this anni- versary. When in 1783 the treaty between England and the United States had set the first seal on the independence of the latter, it was voted, on motion, I believe, of James Otis, that the annual Boston ora- tion should be on the Fourth of July. Dr. John "Warren, an honored name and title, never, it should seem, to die out among us, accordingly performed this duty in 1783. It is noAV, therefore, the hundredth year of the celebration, and I am the hundred and first orator to address his fellow-citizens of Boston. My distinguished predecessor, whom we all value for his practical wisdom as much as his attic wit, has told us " Little of all we value here Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year, Without both feeling and looking queer; " an axiom which some antiquaries in England attempt to carry still further, by asserting that no man is properly authenticated as having lived to be a hun- dred years old ; and certainly there is a strong feeling in our community that anything which has existed ORATION. 7 for a hundred years has got to show cause why this lease for three lives should be renewed. The old- world prepossession in favor of antiquity has very little hold now upon us; we care for little that has not modern improvements attached to it ; — and after tinkering away on the Fourth of July celebrations to get them as close to modern ideas as possible, the public has begun to hear a murmu.^ creep through it, that the old house had better be pulled down alto- gether; — or to drop metaphor and take up slang, that the " Fourth of July is played out." I would not quote these words before this audience to defend them ; — but they are said, and no one will pretend that the day is observed with the same enthusiasm that it was twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. This might be laid to the charge of the hot wea- ther. In changing the season of our annual celebra- tion from March to July, we certainly have not gained much in comfort — and doubtless many persons find a great open-air celebration oppressive in the heats of summer. But if the Fourth of July is really ceasing to excite an annual enthusiasm, it is not because the thermometer stands at S5^y or because we hear the waves beating cool on the rocks at I^ahant. The Parisians crowd as eagerly as ever to the fete of Bonaparte on the 15th of August. Is it true, that 8 J U L Y 4 , 1 8 7 . the Yulg'ar ]^liraso T qnotecT to jou involves a fact? that the celebration of the Fonrth of Jnl}^ is merely a piece of stage pageantry, a play of which the actors and andience are alike thoroughly wear}^? When George the Foni'th was crowned, the pageant of the Coronation gave snch general delight, that it was put as a spectacle on the stage of Drnry Lane theatre. Here it was cojjied with snch accurate magnificence that Elliston, who performed the King, was always so intoxicated — with his part — as to bless his as- sembled people with tearful solemnity, and it would have been hard for the most cautious observer of palace and theatre in 1821 to say which was the real, and Avhich was the stage King. But nations are waking uj) to the belief that such sjoectacles are fit for the stage alone ; that when we go out from the doors of the theatre to real life, we must stop all plays, and purge everything in the nature of .a pag- eant from actual government. Can it then be, that we, who wonder why England is so patient with her monarch and her peers, have been in reality prolong- ing to a decrepit old age a mimic enthusiasm for certain old-world events, whose real significance was exhausted a. generation ago? I propose to give this hour to a consideration of the question; and if our answer is " yes " — then let this be the last speech that ORATION. 9 ends the fifth ' act of the hundred years' pageantrj-, and the fireworks to-night close the transformation scene of the empty spectacle. One hundred years ! Let us try to realize, fellow- citizens, the immense distance there is between the thoughts that might fairly occu23y an orator in 1771, and those that now rise instinctively to his mind. The orations for the first thirteen years were deliv- ei-ed in commemoration of the Boston Massacre of 1770. That singular event was much in the minds of all men in both Europe and America. It was the first armed collision between the colonies and the mother country; has been considered by many to contain the germ of the Declaration of Independ- ence; and was well calculated to make such careful observers as Horace Walpole tremble for its effect on national feelings, l^o more striking event for an orator a hundred years ago than the danger of sepa- ration between East and West. A hundred years pass, — and is there a more striking event for an orator than the marvellous union of east and west by the Ocean Telegraph and the Pacific Kailroads? Suppose another collision between English and Americans in the streets of Bos- ton to-day. They could get word across the ocean, and we across the continent, each in an instant of 10 JULY 4, IS 70. time; but our succors would be at liand from San Francisco long before theirs could arrive from Lon- don. I look upon this absolute trampling down the barriers of material nature as an event worthy to close the American century which appeared to begin with the breaking of the ties of blood and nationality. But I can bring before you the lapse of a century perhaps more vividly in another way. There is no better way of noting this lapse than by the lives of men. Towards the end of the year 1770 died George Grenville, the first Bi'itish minister who ever conceived the idea of taxing the American col- onies. It was but about eight years since he had first been the responsible author of any measures of state. But as the inventor of the stamp act, he had succeeded in making himself utterly odious to the colonies, and when, not very long before the first of these orations, the news of his death would be fully understood all over America, many a man would say, " But for him, we might have been as good friends as ever with England." And now, fellow-citizens, our newspapers have hardly got done with commemoration of the death of that son of England whose name is best known to Americans of all the hordes that acknowledge her sway. It may be that in truth we hold to the opinion ORATION. 11 of Carlyle, who wrote many years ago that "the British islands were inhabited by something like 20,- 000,000 of men, women and children, mostly fools." But as long as Charles Dickens lived, we could not, for his sake, hate England altogether. The expres- sions of sorrow for his death, which, beginning from the j)al'ice, were echoed throughout the length and breadth of England, were as much exceeded here as our land is larger than hers. The few fanatical hands that soug-ht to flins" a nettle instead of a rose on his bier were indignantly and contemptu- ously beaten down. ]!*^ay more, those jests and criticisms on America, which in other Englishmen are an ofience, we positively refuse to take in ill-part from him, and so as the hundred years close, Ave felt that all the hated names of generations, — Gren- villes and Gages and Burgoynes — Tarletons and Brokes and Pakenhams — the cold friend and the noisy foe, the Lords of the Council, and the liairds of the Dockyard, have not done so much by their nnited efforts to keep the countries apart, as Dickens and Longfellow to keep them together. l^or am I claiming too much for our revolution and the pro- gress it has caused in the world, when I say this, that but for the resistance inaugurated here, in favor of a new order of things, as against the old tradi- 12 JULY 4, 18 70. tions of Eiiglaiul, — a new ordei- hardly better com- prehended by our iriends like Burke and Chatham, than by our enemies like Grenville and IS^orth — but for the revolution, I say, of America in 1770, it would not have been physically possible, not morally conceivable that in England, in 1870, the tears of Queen, Lords and Commons should have been min gled over the grave of such a writer as Charles Dickens. For this century — the century between the Boston Massacre and the Pacific Railroad — between George Grenville and Charles Dickens — is l)ut the history of the development of that idea which first seemed to flash into men's minds with the snap of the British firelocks on the Fifth of Marcli, and first took authori- tative form on the Fourth of July — the nationality of America. In. these hundred years, this great con- ception has not been gathering growth uniformly, but by successive stages or crises. And I wish to call your attention to these culminating points in the nation's progress, and if possible, to deduce from theii- history three important truths. 1st. That the Declaration of Independence con- tains the hint, at least, of all the successive develop- ments of our nationality. 2d. That at every stage something has been left ORATION. Id incomplete, which a wise nation will be continually taking np and perfecting. 3d. That this process of development is not at an end; the truths of the Declaration not being, as yet, worked out. And, fellow-citizens, if I can succeed, even par- tially, in showing this, then the Fourth of July is not "played out" — then the annual orator has still something to talk about, something to praise, some- thing to note, something to counsel, — then Ave are not enacting a pageant, but doing a great work, • whereon we may well, like our fathers, " mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." This nationality of ours, then, seems to me like a tidal wave, passing in majesty over the century, and cresting in successive billows, as one or another thought, mightier than the rest, assumes a definite shape, and rises and breaks in grandeur and beauty. The first of these crests, if you will let me so call them — the first great thought which exhibits itself as a great fact, is the assertion of our independence as a nation. The full establishment of this great fact occupies the whole space from 1770 to 1783, the first thirteen years of our Boston orations. ]^ot till the original antagonist, whose first armed collision \4z ' JULY 4, 18 70. with US was seen in these streets a hundred years aii'o, threw down lier sword, and acknowledged her defeat, was it right that our celebration day should be changed to the Fourth of July. The spirit that arose in 1770 was struggling for six years with all the associations, the traditions, the affections of the past, with all the doubts and fears for the future. At last, the internal agony could be borne no longer — the Declaration of Independence was wrung by main force from the heart of tlie people. Six more years, however, were needed to establish the fjict, — and ovevy hour of those six years — every victory, every defeat, every alliance welded, every intrigue foiled, even Lee's braggadocio and Arnold's treachery did its part to establish it beyond all question, in the minds not only of Englishmen, but of every other nation, that we are a people like them. They greatly err, it seems to me, who would make the Declaration of Independence the sole determining element in this great series of events. As the formal expression of the people's will, it was most essential, as the cr}" forced from their heart it is most touching, — but I feel that its true significance has been misinterpreted, when the declaration is made synonymous with the establishment of independence. From 1783 we are a nation like others. Whatever ORATION. 15 they may do, a's the Declaration says, we may do — we are one in the great commonwealth of peoples — we are sharers and contributors in the great world stock of art, literature and science ; we are bound by all the precepts, and may claim all the benefits of that glorious system of rights and duties, the work of the first intellects of the world, that is known as the law of nations. How concisely is this last truth expressed in that last clause of the Declaration, when it asserts that we shall hold Englishmen, as all other nations, " to be enemies in Avar, in peace, friends." A fit rebuke to that miserable policy — too often fos- tered and defended among us — which would make us not independent among nations, but isolated from them, which teaches that Americans should look on every other country with suspicion and contempt, — and which, refusing to cultivate a single friendshij) in peace, may find itself at last without one ally in war. The second crest in our national wave was the consolidation of the country by the adoption of the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence was formed by the delegates of the United States, — as the United States, they asserted their right to an equal place among the nations of the earth, — as the United States they entered into an alliance with France and Spain, and ultimately wrung the IG JULY 4, 18 70. acknowledgment of their nationality from England. The Articles of Confederation and Pe]i)etnal Union — mark that word pei'petual — asserted no ncAv i)iin- ciple, — they merely attempted to give form to that which already existed, and the Constitution of the United States, ordained and established in order to form a more perfect Union, is, as that very phrase declares, not the act which made a people one, but the act of a people already one. That we are as we are, may be the work of the Constitution ; but that we are what we ai-e, is the Avork of the Declaration. The restrictions, the barriers, the guards of the Articles of Confederation would be like the fallen trunks that impede and perplex the navigation of the Mississippi. The grave enactments of the Constitution are as the stately levees, which, while they prevent the destruc- tive exuberance of the glorious current, only direct and further the sweep of its imperial progress to the sea. Once more, that solemn and pregnant assertion of the Fourth of July that the United States have the right to do anything which free and inde- pendent states ought to do, contains full au- thority for every word in that marvellous instrument of 1787, Avhich carries throughout the length and breadth of the land a supreme authority and absolute sway, gi-eater in its direct expression ORATION. 17 of national will than was ever vouchsafed, in their highest pitch of power, to the edicts of Alexander, the decrees of the Roman Senate, or the acts of the august Parliament of Britain. So strangely, so providentially has the simple, logical, legitimate inter- pretation of the Constitution surpassed and defeated the hopes and fears of all who saw its birth. For not Patrick Henry, who thought it did too much, nor Hamilton, Avho thought it did too little, nor Madison, who believed it had just hit the happy medium, had any conception of its legitimate development — and I would say to all " strict constructionists," the untimely brood of a dead and gone generation, who can see nothing in the Constitution but what they read in Elliott's Debates, that they can no more stop the evolution from it of a centralized, consolidated, imperial government, above, beneath, beyond all state sovereigiit}^, than the Indians along the Kepublican Fork can stop the engines of the Pacific railroad by putting red clay pipe-heads on the track. The next great step in the progress of our nation- ality is the extension of the authority of the Consti- tution and the principles of the Declaration beyond the territory originally included in the colonies of Europe. The progress has been so gradual, the States have grown up so systematically from East 18 JULY 4, 1870. to West, that we are apt to overlook what an entirely (HHcrent process is the growth of onr territoiy beyond the Rocky Mountains, from anything which has happened to the east of them. It was a great step to cross the Appalachian range and found Kentucky and Tennessee; it was a great step to leap the Ohio, and plant the new, free life of Illinois and Wisconsin. It was a still more daring feat, it was in the opinion of our ancestors unconsti- tutional, to acquire Louisiana and Floi'ida by pur- chase. But all these States were within the range of the original English colonists, or within that of the original French colonists, whose power I'ell seven years before the century we are considering, — or, in the extreme case, had received European civiliza- tion as soon as ourselves, or even sooner. But in extending the genius of our government to the regions on the Pacific coast, we are entering upon a land unknown even to the nations of Europe in 1776. In the maps published by geographers of authority in the middle of the last century, the whole northern part of America is laid down with a wild- ness of speculation which reminds one of Chinese or Arabic science. In this same year 1770, from which I date my subject, I find recorded the death of Capt. Christopher Middleton, who received the Royal So- ORATION. 19 . ciety's Medal for his explorations in the Arctic Seas. But Captain Middleton had been sent in 1742 to explore a northwest passage from Hudson's Bay to the South Sea, and it was evidently expected that it would be but the journey of a few days from ocean to ocean in latitude 60"^. It was not till Washing- ton's first administration was drawing to its close, that Capt. Robert Gray of Boston discovered the Columbia River, nor till twelve years after that it was reached overland. In two generations we have California and Oregon entering the Union as states, ^ow here, fel- low-citizens, we have a new idea, — a new element in the national life. All the previous additions to the old thirteen, however different in their history, their soil, or the genius of their first settlers, yet looked more or less to the towns on the Atlantic seaboard for the full development of their resources, ^o matter what authority they might claim in virtue of the unheard- of stream of agricultural and mineral wealth which they were destined to pour upon the old world, — as long as the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence run eastward, they must still look to the Atlantic ports as the channels through which that abundance should flow, and everything that the old world could • give them in exchange must come across that same Atlantic ocean, which throughout its expanse is the true Mediterranean or connector of the lands. 20 JULY 4, 18 70. And it is not only as a medium of commerce, not only to carry out its native Avealth and bring back its acquired luxuries, tbat tbe sea and the coast are needed by a great inland country like ours. Xo, nor yet for that other marvellous influence which only the sea imparts from its rocks and beaches, that strange health-giving force which comes from salt air and salt water alone, above the purest inspiration of the mountain, and the deepest rest of the plains. There is a nobler power yet, which the sea, and nothing but the sea, breathes into the heart of a nation. The mountaineer learns the austerer virtues, which are apt to Avither at the first touch of civilization, and the selfish indepen- dence which bids every other nation stand oft'; — the inhabitant of the plains learns to accumulate wealth, with that sort of fair-weather enterprise which tends only to foster prosperity, and ends in sluggish con- tent. But it is the sea-kings and their descendants alone, who enjoy the freest liberty in a genial inter- course with every land, who tear their golden treasures from the caves and floods of the barren main, who make a sport of danger and a mock of difficulty, whose messengers are winds, and the flames of fire their ministers. We children of tide- water, who draAV in the ocean with every breath, can ORATION. 21 hardly appreciate what a blessing we enjoy above those who live far removed from it. I was told by one of onr own lamented dead, who marched with Sherman to the sea, that some of the Western men on arriving at the shore stooped down and drank the water, of which the taste rather staggered them. I fear physical geography was neglected in their school. But another Western man, worth all Sher- man's army put together, — I mean President Lin- coln, — told me with his own lips in 1863, that he longed to stay a while at the sea-shore, for he had never seen the sea in his life, except hastily from the windows of a railroad car. As he said it, that wild, sweet, unearthly look of melancholy that he too often wore, played across his rugged features, softening them to more than woman's tenderness, and he seemed to say like a man who resembled him in nothing but a love of liberty, and the abuse he got for it, — " I could lie down like a tired child And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear, Till death like sleep should steal an me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony." Oh why was he not spared to us one summer more, that we might show him the sea? How all our coast 22 JULY 4, 1870. would have risen like one man to gi-eet him I How all the Lincolns in Ilingham would have fought to be the first to get him, and the last to part with him! How we should have waked his child-like mirth to tenfold peals of laughter at the sports and stories of the sea-shore ! How the old fishermen and sailors would have crowded round to welcome the rugged Westerner that was so like themselves — how we would.have laid before him all the treasures of beach and rock, the wonders of fortress and beacon, how we would have blown away the cares and miseries of four wretched years with one whiif of an incoming tide! How we would have sent him back again to tell his own rich valleys, where nature seems to have outdone all her exploits of fertility, that after all there were no hearts and hands like the coastmen's in ^ew England! ^ow this mighty influence of the sea, which all his- tory tells us has such an efiect on nations, our AYestern brethren had for years to seek fi'om us. They were obliged to descend to the coast of the same water that. bore the ships of King Athelstane, of Rollo, of Columbus, of Philip. But when Oregon and Cal- ifornia came into our family of States, a western coast, a coast all their own, was spread before them, and an ocean highway whose like Athelstane and ORATION. 23 Columbus never knew, l^o longer need they look eastward for the treasures of India or China or Japan. It is Europe and we that must receive these treasures from them. No longer do they need to learn of us the enterprise, the liberty, the gene- rosity of the sea-kings; their own glorious ocean, their own peaceful sea, exempts them forever from such dependence. Truly, fellow-citizens, a mighty step in national progress. The next crest in the wave of our nationality is but too well known to all of us. Then it was that noxious seaweeds floated to the surface, and tinged the flood of an angry crimson dye. I propose now to say but few words on the two great additions made to our national experience in the last ten years, viz : — The maintenance by force of arms of the country's unity, and the emancipation of the negroes by the proclamation of the executive. Speak- ing with the hesitation which becomes a young man in the presence of those to whom the problems of Constitutional law were familiar before his birth, I shall venture to propound a view which would seem capable of determining these two questions with greater simplicity and completeness than more elabo- rate theories. The Declaration of Independence which we have heard read, — is it a mere rhetorical 24 JULY 4, 1870. iiourish? is it a mere manifesto? is it only another way of saying, ^' Let us fight this question of Re- bellion out"? ^N^ot so, every true American answers; it is a state paper of the greatest significance, in which some exceptionable phrases are overcome by the weight of the matter. Yes;'*but what kind of a state paper? Was it merely like the letters which a secretary of state writes to a foreign minister, to explain or defend something in the conduct of him- self or another official? or has it in some way a binding force beyond the temporary occasion? I believe a document of such a character, creating and moving a nation as it did, brought before the world with every possible formality by the unanimous vote of the representative body of the nation, and ac- cepted by all successive generations as the authoi-- itative exposition of the popular will, can be regarded in no other light than as an exposition, in accordance with that will, of the great principles of organic law. And if so, then no organic or statute law that con- travenes it can in principle be legal; and none that clearly furthers it can in principle be illegal, l^o stream can rise higher than its fountain. Xo articles of confederation, or constitution, or treaties, or acts, or ordinances, can claim to express the sense of the nation more directly than the original charter which set the whole in motion. ORATION. 25 Let us apply this principle to secession and eman- cipation. The declaration begins by recognizing the possibility of inevitable separation between States, — and it asserts also the necessity of a decent state- ment of the impelling causes in the face of the world, as also the duty of patient remonstrance before ap- pealing to arms. JS'ow, fellow-citizens, consider the actual history of the secession, consider that instead of anything like patient remonstrance we had san- guinary threats and abuse, and that when the so- called fatal hour came, so far from any statement of reasons out of decent respect to mankind, on the part of the unanimous representatives of the Southern people, half-a-dozen men, without rhyme or reason, said " we 'I'e ofi\ " Can we resist the conclusion, that such an act of separation is not only not recognized but is absolutely disowned by the signers of the Dec- laration, and that consequently the government and people of that nation which the Declaration created are in duty bound to see in it only a wilful rebellion, and as such to treat it, in virtue of that clause in our great charter which claims that the United States may do everything which sovereign and independent States of right ought to do? And so for the emancipation. I have heard good men, and wise men, express every variety of opin- 26 .7 U I. Y 4 , 1 8 7 . ion about it. I have heard some coiuleiiiu it as unconstitutional; others defend it, as a military necessity; and others again praise it, as a noble casting aside of legal shackles, and an assertion of the great principles of man's rights. Yes, but not a new assertion, nor an illegal one. It is asserted in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and asserted not as a Utopian theory, not as a phil- anthropic challenge, but as a solemn decree of the people of the United States, in the veiy birth-hour of their national existence, and through the mouth of their authorized representatives. The emancijjation proclamation therefore Avas simply the carrying out of the dictum of an original charter; none the less organic law, because subsequent restrictive enact- ment had checked its legitimate operation. It was a return to old principles, not an assertion of new ones; it was Law and not Theory. The latest step in our national progress is that which I named as the great event to close the cen- tury, — the establishing of a speedy means of commu- nication between the extremities of the country. The Pacific Kailroad is needed if the country is to be the United States. Think, fellow-citizens, if we had had ORATION. 27 that railroad lii 1861, how it would have relieved niy sainted predecessor, Starr King, in his almost single- handed fight that kept California for the nation, and took him from it. I regard this connection as just as essentially involved in the Declaration as the battle of Saratoga, or the treaty of 1783. If we are to be the United States, I say again, we must be united. If we are to be independent of the rest of the world, we must' hold together ourselves. I do not know what Political Economy may prove next, as to the right of Government to help a railroad; pretty soon I expect to hear that it has no right to build a light- house. But I am certain of this, that if Congress is to have members from the Pacific States, it must give them means to get to the Atlantic, or very soon they will cease to legislate in a pacific spirit. There were those who prophesied that the admission of California in 1850 meant a separate nation on that shore. I firmly believe that the Pacific Kailroad, as it closes this century which opened in 1770 with a threat of separation, is an assurance that the century of '76 will go by many times without see- ing another declaration of independence within the borders of the United States. I have thus attempted, fellow-citizens, to sketch the most important steps in our national progress 28 JULY4,1S70. during the century since the national independence first ajDpeared inevitable. I do not mean to say this list would be everywhere agreed to. But I do say that these great events, the establishment of our nationality; the defining of our organic law; the extension of its authority over lands not included in our original limits, and ultimately over those undis- covered in 1770, and finding their national outlet in another ocean; the defence by arms of our national authority at home ; the emancipation of the African race, and finally, the physical uniting of all parts of the country, must be allowed by all to be at least the most important of the great crises in our history. ]^ow, fellow-citizens, if I have succeeded in making my meaning clear to you, you will see in all these steps the great truths I named at the outset, and first, that they all derive their vitality from tlie original impulse given, the original energy breathed by the Declaration of Independence, which created the United States, endowed them with every attri- bute of national authority, and laid down the organic laws under which that power should be swayed, and hence the declai-ation is not " played out" but is as alive and real to-day as ever. I think I may safely rest this here. But, you will remember, I asserted that these sue- ORATION. 29 cessive devetopments and evolutions of the princi- ples of 1776 had not yet come to an end; that at every step something had been left undone, and that there were yet greater things for the Declaration to ejBPect before it could have its perfect work. I have not the time to elaborate the first of these propositions at length — nor is it necessary ; for it is apparent to every man that there have always been at least two causes at work from the very foundation of the government to prevent the true carrying out of our great destiny. The first is that strange love of restriction, which has constantly fi-om time to time appeared, tending to hamper independence, to ham- per the confederation, to hamper the Constitution, to hamper every session of Congress since Congress was, with a fear, that this, or that, or the other was not within the powers of whatever was then the highest authority. Occasionally, the party that holds this view has actually succeeded in making some of their restrictions authoritative; but always have they been swept away by the advancing genius of the Declaration ; and, I trust, the time is not far distant, when it will be thoroughly recognized by constitu- tional lawyers that the very small number of restric- tions placed upon the powers of the general govern- ment by the Constitution, is, in reality, to prevent 30 JULY 4, 18 70. still more serious restrictions being laid on the pul)lic liberty; and that the genius of the entire instrument, in obedience to that of the Declaration, is not restric- tive, but encouraging, clothing Congress with power, not stripping it, and bidding the nation go on, and do all that a nation of right may do. The second cause why, at each stage of our pro- gress, we have not done our entire work, is from that thought so deeply enrooted in the American heart, that we must " go ahead " — that if the nation makes progress, it is enough; and, in truth, if to advance were all, if to clear away the wilderness were the sum of national duty, we might well be satisfied. I have endeavored to point out the stages of progress of a century. 'No other nation ever went so for ahead in twice the period. But how have we done the work? Have Ave planted the wilderness that we have cleared? Have we always seen to it that it should not relapse into wildness ? Alas, too often not ! You are familiar with the heedless waste of land practised hitherto in many of our Southern States. Virgin soil has been tilled without rotation or manuring, till it could be tilled no more, and then it has been abandoned for other virgin soil, and this exhaustive practice has been repeated ad infini^ turn. I^ow this is only a type of what has been ORATION. 31 done throng-liont the country, and throughout the century, in almost every part of the work. An immensity has been half done, very little thoroughly done. It is time to stop this; — it is time to add to our faith virtue; that is, not merely to go on, and on, and on, but to detail at least one- half the nation's strength to perfect, while the other is advancing; to see that we are content with no make-shifts, no temporary expedients, but that all our national work is of the best. And here it is that I find a most noble and ever-extending field for the energies of our own section, and our own city. It is for ]N'ew England, it is for Boston, the oldest, the best trained, the most experienced part of the country, to carry out to perfection the ideas which others initiate. It is in vain for us to attempt to keep progress with our brethren of San Francisco or Des Moines in the matter of going ahead ; but we may beat them out of the field in the ai't of perfect- ing half-done work. "Well and nobly did we dis- charge our duty as pioneers when that ivas our duty, and when thoroughness of detail, and stability of performance, resulting from higher education and closer competition, were to be found in Europe alone. ^N'ow that the advanced guard has moved westward, it is theirs to pioneer, ours to perfect. ^N'or let 32 JULY 4, 18 70. either them or us despise this duty. In the great work of rearing* the nation's edifice, remember that " 'Tis not timber, lead, and stone The architect requires alone To linish a fine building; The structure were but half complete, If he could possiblj' forget The carving and the gilding." Now this same carving and gilding must include everything that is demanded by elegance, refinement and comfort; by all the tenderer and delicate emo- tions; everything which makes our life worth more than Daniel Boone's or Red Jacket's. I need not name all the points in which Boston might aspire to control the world in this direction; but one, I will. It is the duty of Boston to see that her places of education are something besides schools; that she teaches something more than what are called, in de- rision I suppose, useful branches; for they are of no use except for the one lowest ambition; they may teach one how to make money, but they can teach him neither to be contented in its absence, nor happy in its use. Boston, as the head of the older states, must bring up her chikb'en to a thorough, lofty, deep and refined knowledge in every department of science, literature, history and art, without which all the poAver in the Avorld makes men mere tigers, and all the wealth in the world assimilates them to swine. ORATION. 33 For these reasons, we may say that the work of the Declaration is not exhausted ; that its celebration is not played out. But there is one more great truth I alluded to, namely, that at least one more stage must come in its legitimate development, before its work is over. I have hinted it before : it is for America to understand and assume her true posi- tion as a member of the commonwealth of nations. Almost simultaneous with the completion of the Pa- cific railroad is the doubling of our telegraphic com- munication with Europe, and its extension to India ; and soon we shall see a belt of telegraph entirely around the world. As we are thus brought physi- cally nearer the other nations, I trust we shall be brought morally nearer to them, that we shall give up the selfish, exclusive, repellent feeling which we call independent and American, and know that all nations form one brotherhood. It cannot, I think, be denied, that such a feeling does very largely exist, — a feeling that as we are on another continent, so we are on another world. It is easy to see its origin. As colonies we knew Europe only through England. America-'s greatest friends and lovers, men like Chatham and Burke, who attacked the measures of the Ministry as legally or morally wrong, always seemed to maintain that 34 JULY 4, 1870. through England alone the colonies ought to com- municate with the world. Naturally, then, Amer- icans came to believe that the Declaration separated them, cut them adrift, cast them oil' from England, Europe, the Avorld, and left them to work out the problem of national duty in isolation. Hence arises that strange feeling which makes so many Americans visit the whole of Europe as they* visit the buried cities near ^Naples; as a sort of enormous Pompeii, where a kindly interposition of Providence has entirely destroyed all real life, and left a variety of national and social relics as in a museum, whei e we can see how a set of unreal people live as they lived in the dark ages, bearing no kind of relation to ourselves. Or if they advance a step beyond this, they still have a sort of Pompeian idea of Europe and Asia; for they look on them as con- taining many objects suitable for models of beauty and luxury in art or architecture, but hardly a thing which deserves to be copied in our real practical life ; a life in which they are fairly convinced no European can teach them anything. ISTay, can it be doubted, that there exists among us a still deeper, darker spirit of doubt, distrust, almost of hatred to Europe, which looks on the Atlantic as typical merely of the great gulf forever fixed between us ? If this feeling, ORATION. 35 which I grant is very vague, were brought to an accurate definition, it would be that all but the lowest class in Europe were hopelessly opposed to us in principle; and that without a convulsion, to which the French Revolution offers no parallel, after which all that was left alive should at once model itself on our example, — we never can be in sympathy. JN^ow, fellow-citizens, such feelings may have a cer- tain lofty pride and freedom about them ; but they are wholly ungenerous,' wholly vuichristian, and certainly derive no countenance from the Declaration. That wonderful document does not isolate us from the nations, it sets us among them; — it recognizes a decent respect for the opinions of mankind; it tells us not to regard England and the rest of the world with distrust, suspicion and hatred, but as " enemies in war, in peace, friends." It is time for us to re- member these maxims, — it is time for us to cease looking at the old world from the wrong side. When we burst away a hundred years ago, we looked back at Europe with a scowl, and turned our faces steadily westward — we broke down the hard ground, and climbed the hills ; we spread over the rich plains, we toiled through the desert and up the eternal peaks ; and rushing down the golden valleys, at last we stand on the shore of ocean ; and as we still fix our 36 JULY 4, 18 70. gaze westward, we find that tlie world is not an end- less plane, but a bounded sphere, and that the on- ward look from the new West only brings us back to the other side of the old East. Then, if we gaze clearly, without prejudice or prepossession, we find that after all, as both religion and science tell, we too spring from that m3"stic eastern world, whence every race of man has come. Then we shall learn that our fathers did well in setting us among the nations. We shall learn that the old world is no congeries of buried cities, no mere museum of ante- diluvian curiosities, but the real home of live men — men who know how to live: we shall find models there worthy of our imitation, not merely in the lux- uries of life, not merely in its pretty matters and playthings, but in real solid concerns of strength, progress, happiness; and finally we shall know that the great heart of Europe, from king to serf, beats with us and not against us. Fellow-citizens, this problem of the true relations of the United States to the rest of the world is at this ^moment forcing itself upon us. At this very moment we are in danger of refusing a gift which old Asia, the ever joatient mother of the world, is offering to the youngest of her children. When we placed flowers the other day on the graves of our ORATION. 37 brethren in gratitude for their noble sacrifice, we could not help thinking what a terrible gap they left among us, and how all our difficulties at present are derived from the one want of men — men with arms, heads, hands — to fill, however imperfectly, the place of our lost thousands. The plenty that has come with peace is of no use. Our corn stands unreaped, our timber rots in the forest, our iron moul- ders in the mountain, for the want of men, men to do the work. At this moment a people of the old world — the most ancient, the most industrious, the most thrifty, the most ingenious, the best convinced of the value of education- — are crowding from their overstocked land to our doors, not as sturdy beg- gars, but as honest laborers, asking for work. Will you turn them away? Will you persist in refusing their help to make the national burdens lighter? Have you so poorly learnt the Declaration that you are going at this hour to take up the old cries of " race," and " America for the Americans "? Good Heavens! Ten years ago the IN^orth rose against the oppressions of the African — swore there should be no distinction of color, steadily refused to consider the question, "What will you do with the Negro?" and persisted, at the risk of national existence, in establishing that the black man was 38 J U L Y 4 , 1 8 7 . as good as the Caucasian — and now comes the Mongolian, and asks to do the very thing you want done, and some of the very men who have declaimed loudest against distinctions of race and color talk ahout degradation from the contact. If you really mean to reject this timely aid that Asia oifers — if you really so construe the Declaration of Independence — then don't talk al)()ut acts of Con- gress to protect ship-building and encourage com- merce, but use your iron to make a high wall all round the frontier — plant a thick hedge of pine-trees outside — and retire to your lofty isolation. And perhaps, a thousand years hence, some travelling Chinese will break down the barrier, worse than his own great wall, and find the remnants of cities, as unintelligible as those of Central America, and as useless to the world. Ko, fellow-citizens, this would be copying China in the worst side of her character. JS'ot so is our national duty. Eather let us go on as of yore, throwing wide open our gates to all comers, and putting the Declaration into the freest and fullest practice. In. that case it can never be played out, hut every year will add new glories to its celebration. And so, when a hundred years hence a worthier orator, whom 3^on and I shall never O 1{ A T I O N . 39 see, shall address our successors, — when Boston shall gather in her arms, from a circuit of a hundred miles, a population of a million and a half of citizens, — when two hundred thousand chil- dren shall throng her schools — when her libraries and museums, grown to tenfold their present size, shall still be bursting with their stores of art and litera- ture — when her harbor is crowded with five thousand sail, proudly flaunting the stars and stripes — when our ancient university shall count ten students for every one she now instructs, and show an income equal to her present capital — when the legislature shall sit but a single month in the year, except when detained on tunnel business, — when the directors of a network of railroads all over the state shall throng the State-house thrusting their surplus dividends into the hands of the state treasurer for investment — when all our hyperboles shall become less than the earnest of the prosperity of the United States — then, I say, the orator who succeeds me will claim it as the noblest honor of Boston that she stands between the old world and the new, — the advanced outpost of one, the rear-guard of the other, and the loved and cherished friend of both. , V > 'tap* ^ ' -■■:» > >,:> . .s>. ■:> _=> -&. > : .::2>.> = :> >-i> >. :> ->-> 3>v^ - > > r». > > - ^^ j> ' > 2 :>■■■ -> " ■■■^ 3 --> o *~ >■ ~-i ^^ ^ > . > >' _^ _ J — > ^ ' i_i*«- iJ r> ^ >. .^^2!^i*^"' '^^3^ -^ > 5r::>, > > > > :> > > :> ":>' >:,j>. i:>>5j > i> ":> > :z>.^ 3>o.>- > ^ 5:> ~^ i O —if ^ i Ti ^ >.Ji ..V> - >3 .:*:•> ;./-^ 3^? >> :*^a. ■^ IS*. ^ ^ >;a>* ^ ^53SL> -•:'■■ :>j>v *-5> ■z>.>:r ■ - z> :>x- ■ ■:> :>5: "-> :2> ::> :>' ■■■' -■■: ::z>> ::> > = -'Zap»>::s» >-5»-