E O K A T I O N kkOvkkkd bkkouk tub mm mi § 'MmM JULY 4, 1882, HIS EXCEJ.LKNCY JOHN DAYiS LONG g S t J3 IK PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL. M O O C O L X X X I I . Qas3 EJAia. BookJili ua. L O E A T I O N DELIVERED BEFORE THE ^'«, m\ of t^OI **f JULY 4, 1882, HIS EXCELLENCY JOHN DAYIS LONG § s t n : printp:d by order of the city council. M D C O C L X X X I I . Sf^ PRESS Of^ OT« \(5^ - *ROCKWELL5,(6«! (iCHURCHI ''boston.' P::ch^n re TT ' - ■v, J"L l!i 1909 CITY OF BOSTOX In Board of Aldermen, July 17, 1882. Resolved, That the thanks of the City Council are due, and they are hereby tendered, to His Excellency John D. Long, for the patriotic and instructive Oration delivered by him, before the ISIunicipal Government and the citizens of Boston, on the Fourth of July instant; and that he be requested to furnish a copy thereof for publication. Passed in Common Council. Came up for concurrence. Read and concurred. Approved by the Mayor July 18, 1882. . - A true copy. Attest : JOHN T. PRIEST, Asst. City Cleric. ORATION. It has seemed to you and your associates, Mr. Mayor, not unfitting, that, once in a century, a rep- resentative of the whole Commonwealth of Massa- chusetts should speak for this, her capital city, on Independence day. A hundred years ago, as now, their interests, their hopes, their patriotism, were one. If Boston seemed then to stand out as the proscenium from which the curtain of the drama rose, the scene was a rapidly shifting one, and the actors came not alone, like Sam Adams and War- ren and Hancock and Knox, from Boston. Like Lincoln from Hingham, Hawley from ^N'orthamp- ton, Prescott from Pepperell, Heath from Koxbury, Gridley from Canton, John Adams from Quincy, Cobb from Taunton, Thomas from Kingston, Ward from Shrewsbury, and many others, they came from Massachusetts at large, and so identified the whole province and this its chiefest town, as they have been identified from that day to this, in the cause of liberty and progress. b ORATION. Mindful, therefore, of the close relations which have thus, at all times, bound Massachusetts and Boston tog-ether, I thank you for your courtesy in inviting me to speak for you to-day, and I am here in obedience to your call. I have, as needs nuist be Avith a date celebrated now for more than a hundred anniversaries, and with its topics re- hearsed till every possible variation has been exhausted, no new w^ord to utter, no illumination to throw upon the picture. But the day is our national birthday, and even its familiar stoiy can- not be told too often, if it shall wake each year the patriotic pulse of a people so free that they are almost unconscious of the value of their birth- right of freedom, or shall educate their children to admire and emulate the high spirit, the devotion to liberty, and the love of country, which inspired the fathers and founders of the rejDublic. Let us, then, go back to -1776, and recall the scene and event which we now commemorate, never for- getting that they were only links in the chain which, under Providence, had been forming for centuries, and forming, let us also, in justice, remembeV, under English law, and under the inspiration of English hearts. The separation of the colonies from Great Britain was the result of no single cause; nor was it occasioned solely by reason of a chivalrous devotion JULY 4, 1882. 7 to great i^rinciples of constitutional right or resistance to oppression. The vast territoiy of India, stretching over half a continent and sunk in the effeminacy and ignorance of centuries of stagnation, might for years, and may to-day, submit to the rapacious sway of the British isles, — to the terror of a suj^erior race enriching themselves at its expense. But it was not written in the book of human destiny that the Christian civilization of the l^ew World, the intel- lectual culture of N^ew England, the growing material importance of ISTew York and Pennsylvania, the high spirit of Virginia and the Carolinas, — nay, that any of our colonies, proud of their lineage, devoted to an independent faith, founding among themselves insti- tutions of learning, expanding apace with the very grandeur and extent of the new continent, and year by year conscious more and more of their rapid growth and coming domain and achievement, — should hang as a dependence on an island in the Atlantic, more than that the apple, ripe and round, should cling to the stem and shrivel there in premature decay. In such a condition were the very essentials to cultivate the spirit of progress, of independent citizenship, and of the right of intelligent men, chafing under the stupid narrowness of the dolt who happened at that time to encumber the British throne, to frame their own laws and govern themselves. 8 O RATION. The divine right of kings was not a doctrine that could thrive in such soil ; and no sooner did the colonies begin, as a result of simple growth, to feel their power and to touch shoulder with one another in the sympathy of their geographical and political affinities, than independence became inevitable, and only sought occasion and apology for its own asser- tion. To this end had the instruction of the mother country herself led. From her own pulpits, in the songs of her own poets, in the words of her own orators, in the progress of her own statesmanship, had for centuries been flowing influences that were lifting the individual uian, levelling the acci- dental potentate, and proclaiming the unimportance of those who govern, and the overwhelming conse- quence and needs of tlie governed, even to the humblest citizen. It was a matter of indifl'erence whether Burke and Chatham in England, and Adams and Otis and the town-meetings of Massa- chusetts Ba}' in America, lifted tiieir voices in a British parliament or in Faneuil Hall or Pembroke town-house. The words they spoke, the sentiments they uttered, were eternal truth, and had no local habitation or name. Under these circumstances, allegiance to Great Britain was nothing but a habit and a sentiment. The moment li came face to face JULY 4, 1882. 9 in conflict with a right, it went to pieces like a bubble; the moment it involved the sacrifice of a principle, the cost of injustice to the smallest penny, it was gone forever. I take it, there was nothing in British oppression that bore with special hardship on America. It is not likely that any malicious intent existed on the part of king or ministry to wrong and tyrannize over us; and both were no doubt honest in their conviction that we ' were a stift-necked generation, turning in ingratitude on the parentage that had borne and nursed us. The burdens at which we actually rebelled were slight in comparison with those which we had previously borne for years, especially during the wars with France. In comparison with those which, in our recent civil war, we inflicted on ourselves, they were next to nothing. It would be hard to point to the man or community that, prior to the outbreak of bad blood, suff'ered greatly, in person or property, from British tyranny. Even the Declaration of Independence, which we commem- orate to-day, if you carefully peruse it, lacks something of that record of specific grievances and acts of oppression, which we should expect in a statement made in justification of rebellion and treason. It would not be difficult to recite wrongs which other peoples have borne and still bear, 10 ORATION. tenfold greater than tho^e from which we wrested independence. We wdio, in recent years, to suppress rebelUon, wilHngly endured excessive governmental interference with personal rights, and who saw multitudes of new offices created, and sw^arms of officials and standing armies in our midst, can hardly refrain from smiling at the complaints so grandil- oquently put in 1776. ^or must it be overlooked that most of these complaints w^ere directed against the very measures which w^ere resorted to to over- come what Great Britain regarded as treason, and which never would have been resorted to at all had our fathers been submissive. I do not mean that there were no grievances. Grievances there were, such as taxation without representation, though the actual taxes imposed were slight, and in any accustomed form the burden of them would have raised no murmur; such also* as the general control and management of provincial affiiirs by an agency remote and indifferent. But these w ere grievances, not so much invented and asserted by the mother country as inherent in the very organization of her colonial system. It was the instinctive revul- sion which an intelligent and not inferior people felt for the natural unffiness and injustice of the British colonial system as applied to a vigorous and self-conscious community, which made any JULY4,1882. 11 restraint intolerable, and independence a necessity. To my mind it is infinitely more creditable to our fathers that freedom was in this way the result, not of resentment, but of a high mtellectual self-respect, and of the conviction that in the maturity of their growth the time had come for them to take their own destiny into their own hands. Once maugurated the struggle leaped forthwith to the bitterness and desperation of the death-hug. If the provocation was lacking before, it was lacking no longer. Fatally ignorant of the pride, the English thoroughness and tenacity of her own children, Great Britain adopted measures of coercion to which they could not and would not submit. And when there came the Port Bill and the Enforcing Act and the Stamp Act, which were intended to humiliate 15oston and deprive the people of their familiar privileges and place them at the mercy of a ministerial board sitting around a table in London city, the fatal step was taken; the error could never be retrieved; estrangement was only widening with each forcible effort to heal it, and the birth of the new republic was assured. The rebellion of 1861 failed, not because of a lack of brave men and devoted effort, but because it was unfit and out of joint with the moral and physical order of the times. Unlike the American Revolution, it was a movement not with 12 OKATION. but against the lead of civilization; and outside of its original limits never struck the spark of sym- pathy. In 1776, however, the common heart of the whole line of colonies responded to the peril of that one which was first to suffer. In the fall of 1774 met at Philadelphia the original Continental Con- gress, more with a view to adjustment than to inde- pendence. Its professions of loyalty were sincere, and its appeals were not to arms but to the sense of justice in the mother countiy. But the tide was stronger than those who rode it. The time for the friendly arbitrament of counsel and delay was gone ; and when the immortal Second Congress met in Philadelphia, in May, 1775, Patrick Henry had alread}' thundered in the Virginia Convention that there was no peace, that the war had actually begun, and as for him give him liberty or give him death. Lexington green had been crimsoned with the blood of the embattled farmers, and Concord Bridge was already the beginning of our victories, and hence- forth the romance of our annals. 'No Congress could make history so fast as it was already making at Bunker Hill, in Gloucester Harbor, along the shores of Quincy and Marshfield, at the entrench- ments around Boston, and in the spontaneous out- burst of a common enthusiasm, which brought to the cam]:) under Washington, from Carolina, from Vir- JULY 4, 1882. 13 ginia, from Pennsylvania, from Maryland, marching over the mountains, and eager for the fray, the sons of sister colonies, the riflemen of Daniel Morgan, the Puritan and cavalier, the woodsmen and farmers, the children of the Huguenots and the Presbyterians. Carrying out the instruction of his constituents, Richard Henry Lee^ of Virginia, the author of the resolution for independence, introduced it into Con- gress on the 7th of June, 1776. It met with the enthusiastic support of John Adams, who seconded it with a fervor and power that gained him the appel- lation of the Colossus. It was favored by the subtle and philosophic Franklin, who not only compre- hended the grandeur of the occasion, but smarted to repay, in the achieved independence of his countiy, and in the loss to Great Britain of her brightest jewels, the insults rankling in his breast, which, during his attempt 3X'ars before to plead the cause of America before the Privy Council in England, had been heaped upon him, amid the sneers of a British ministry, by the stinging tongue of Attorney- General Wedderburne. It was supported, too, by the inflexible will of Sam Adams, and no man had from the earliest more clearly foreseen the result. On the other side was ranged the cautious Dickinson, of Philadelphia, who, till that time the most influential member of Congress, now doubted 14 ORATION. whether the hour for separation had come, and, doubting, was lost. JSTew Yoi-k, hesitating to risk its commei'cial existence, had instructed its dele- gates, themselves ripe enoogli for the work, to hold back. South Carolina voted against the resolution. Pennsylvania and Delaware were divided. But these defections were idle. The real resolution of independence had long since been uttered. It had been the staple of every town-meeting in America, the subject of every fireside conversation, the thought of every farmer and mechanic; and when the fifty men who assembled in that Congress, by more than a two-thirds vote, adopted in Committee of the Whole, on the first day of July, 1776, the resolution of independence, they but gave expres- sion to the sentiment of America, as also John Adams expressed it in that unpremeditated burst of eloquence, of which no report exists except in the traditions of its magnificent boldness and vigor, and in the imaginary reproduction of Webster. On the second day of Jnly even the fears of the minority were overcome, and the resolution was adopted, without a dissenting vote, that the United Colonies were, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. Two days later, on the fourth, the day we celebrate, the declaration of principles on which the resolution of inde]jendence was JULY4,1882. 15 founded, drawn by Thomas Jefferson, then thirty- three years of age, and revised by Frankhn and Adams, was presented and adopted, and, with the broad sign manual of John Hancock at its foot, became the great charter of the war, the ])ulletin to England and the world of the justice and dignity of our cause. Kecall the quaint and homely city of Philadel- phia; the gloom that hung over it from the terrible responsibility of the step there taken; the modest hall, still standing and baptized as the cradle of liberty. On its tower swung the bell, which yet survives, with its legend, "PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE WORLD TO ALL THE mHABITAKTS THEREOF." That day it rang out a proclamation of liberty that will indeed echo round the world, and in the ears of all the inhabitants thereof, long after the bell itself shall have crumbled into dust. Hancock is in the President's chair; before him sit the half hundred delegates, who at that time repre- sent America. Among the names it is remarkable how many there are that have since been famous in our annals, — Harrison, Lee, Adams, Clinton, Chase, Stockton, Paine, Hopkins, Wilson, ISTelson, Lewis, Walcott, Thompson, Rutledge, and more. The committee appointed to draft the declaration are 16 ORATION. Jefferson, youngest and tallest; John Adams; Sherman, shoemaker; Franklin, printer; and Robert R. Livingston. If the patriot Sam Adams, at the sunrise of Lexington, could say, " Oh ! what a glorious morning for America!" how well might he have renewed, in the more brilliant noontime of July 4, 1776, the same 2:)rophetic words! There is nothing in the prophecies of old more striking and impressive than the words of John Adams, who declared the event would be celebrated by succeeding generations as a great anniversary festi- val and commemorated, as a day of deliverance, from one end of the continent to the other; that through all the gloom he could see the light; that the end was worth all the means; and that posterity would triumph in the transaction. I am not of those who overrate the past. I know that the men of 1776 had the common weaknesses and shortcomings of humanity. I read the Declaration of Independence with no feeling of awe; and yet if I were called upon to select from the history of the world any crisis grander, loftier, purer, more heroic, I should know not where to turn. It seems simple enough to-day. There is no school-boy who will not tell you he knows it by heart; and so much a part of the national fibre is it, that the school-boy JULY 4, 1882. 17 cannot conceive of his or any American's not declaring and doing the same thing. Bnt it was something else tliat dav. The men who sig'ned the declaration knew not bnt they were signing warrants for their own ignominious execution on the gibbet. It was the desperation of the pun- ster's wit that led one of them to say that unless they hung together, they would all hang separately. The bloody victims of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1715 were still a warning to rebels; and the gory holocaust of Culloden was fresh in the memory. But it Avas not only the personal risk; it was I'isking the homes, the connnerce, the lives, the property, the honor, the future destiny of three million innocent people, — men, women, and children. It was defying, on behalf of a straggling chain of colonies clinging to the sea- board, the most imperial power of the world. It was, more than all, like Columbus sailing into awful uncertainty of untried space; casting off from an established and familiar form of govern- ment and politics; drifting away to unknown methods, and upon the dangerous and yawning chaos of democratic institutions; flying from ills they had to those they knew not of; and, per- haps, laying the way for a miserable and ])loody catastrophe in anarchy and riot. There are times 18 ORATION. when ordinary men are borne ])y the tide of an occasion to crests of grandenr in conduct and action. Such a time, such an occasion, was that which to-day we celebrate. While the signers of the Declaration were picked men, none the less true is it that their extraordinary fame is due not more to their merits than to the crisis at which they were at the helm, and to the great popular instinct which they obeyed and expressed. And so we ask, why do we commemorate with such veneration and display this special epoch and event in our history; why do we repeat the words our fathers spoke or wrote; why cherish their names, when our civilization is better than theirs, and when we have reached in science, art, educa- tion, religion, in politics, in every phase of human development, even in morals, a higher level? It is because we recognize that in their beginnings the eternal elements of truth and right and justice were conspicuous, and to those eternal verities wq pay our tribute, and not to their sur- roundings, except so far as we poetically let the form stand for the spirit, the man for the idea, the event for the purpose. And it is also because we can do no better work than to perjjetuate virtue in the citizen by keeping always fresh in the popular mind, whether we do it by the art of the JULY 4, 18 82. 19 painter, by oration, or by bonfire, the great heroic deeds and times of our history. In this light it is ahnost impossible to overrate the influence on national destiny of a legend or a name. Look back to your own childhood and tell me when you first grew mature enough to distinguish patriotism from the story of Gen. Warren and Bunker Hill. Who shall say trliat the tradition of Marathon and Thermopylae did not give us Concord and York- town, as it also gave independence to modern Greece, and glorified the career and death of Byron, and made our own Howe crusader and philan- thropist? Who shall determine how far the maintenance of the integrity of our Union will depend on the memory of Webster, and find help in the picture in Faneuil Hall of his great debate with Hayne, as well as in his unanswerable logic? And who shall say to how great an extent the love of country for the next century shall rise from the fidelity with which we keep alive in the public heart the iiiieinorahilia of our Kevolution and of our recent war? Wise, indeed, as well as loyal and beautiful, is it that to-day all America joins in this observance; that at this hour a thousand orators are speaking words of high emprise; that poets kindle the fire of patriotism, and that the heroes of 1776 stand up from the past, grander 20 ORATION. and diviner for the illnsion of distance, and point the way to the highest ideals of national attain- ment. The valnable thing in the past is not the man or the event, which are Ijotli always ordinary, and which, nnder the enchantment of distance and the pride of descent, we love to surround with exaggerated glory; it is rather in the sentiment for which the man and the event stand. The ideal is alone substantial and alone survives. Let us avoid undue praise of the fathers, because the bare truth is tribute enough, and because it is so easy to exaggerate the past. Such undue ex- altation of the good of other times has its demor- alizing side. There is no service or manliness in belittling our own times and men. We can appreciate the past as well if we appreciate our- selves at our own true value. It is the fashion of the hour — and not a new fashion, especially when partisanship is l)itter and searching — to scat- ter the poison of asjDersion on all surrounding character, service, and system. And yet, to my mind, there is occasion for thorough satisfaction with the result of tlie first century of the re- public. It began as an experiment, doubtful and uncertain; it began with nothing more than a feeble union of sentiment, engendered l^y the en- thusiasm of connnon militarv service and a common JULY 4, 1882. 21 exposure; it began amid a diversity of interests and of races, of religious and ethnic characteris- tics; it began not only without money, but with a crushing burden of debt, which it seemed to have no resources or means of paying; it l)eg«n with no hold on the cooperation of foreign powers, ex- cept the chivalrous sympathy that ended almost with the stirring events of the war that aroused it; it began in a state of public demoralization, caused by seven years of campaigning, and with a currency debased and worthless, and furnishing still a terrible warning against the rot which such inflation and depreciation cause in the character, tone, and truth of a people; it Ijegan with a dis- contented and distur1)ed soldiery, unpaid, destitute, and neglected, and smarting under the ingratitude of their countr}^ Its early years were marked by riots and rebellions. It is claimed that nothing but the firm and enduring weight of the character of Washington held it together. Its constitution was framed and adopted only with reluctance and doubt. The morals of the people were not of a high order. The morals of public men were low. Aaron Burr was of a charactei* so notoriously in- famous, that to-day it is incredible how he could have been chosen Vice-President, and brought within two or three votes of the Presidencv itself. 22 ORATION. Hamilton was not free from reproach. Religion, when not asleep, was coarse and illiterate. Con- gress was the scene of debates bitter and per- sonal to a shameful degree. The Cabinet w^as divided against itself. The mutual hate of Jef- ferson and Hamilton it would ])e hard to parallel. Vituperation, abuse, and slander poisoned many an honest name; and though now, the mist of prejudice having lifted, we look back and see only what was solid and valuable growth, yet in that day it was said, as we hear it said nowa- days, that corruption was undermining the foun- dations, and that democracy was a demonstrated failure. Head the journal of John Quincy Adams, and note what half a century ago w^as his estimate of the selfishness, meanness, vulgarity, and hopelessness of the public service; how speedily he looked for the disruption of a brittle republic, and with what contempt he refers to Wel)ster and Clay, and the names we have been taught to rever- ence. A¥e nmst not be ])linded by the miasma of present abuse, that is always afloat. We must take deeper views and a wider range. Look not at any year, but on the whole century, and see what has been the advance, what the i>rogress in arts, in science, in human life and culture, in JULY 4, 188 2. 23 all that broadens the intellect and enlarges the soul, in all that humanizes and educates a peo- ple! The feeble colonies are an empire so mag- nificent in territory and population that the imagination cannot take it in. The imperfect league of 1776 is the majestic consolidated nation of thirty-eight States, each one an empire, and the whole the most magnificent and forward cluster of civil polity the world ever saw, — a very well-spring of human enlightenment and outgrowth in every upward direction. The national government, which was almost over- thrown, even under the guard of Washington, by a whiskey riot in a ravine of the Alle- ghanies, has withstood the shock of a civil war, that rocked a continent to its foundations, tri- umphing not so much by force of arms as by the popular sense of right, and rising from the convulsion stronger than ever by reason of the eradication of the one false and diseased element which impaired it, and which was, from the first, an element of weakness as it was of wrong. Think of what has been done in the matter of education, of public schools, of iniiversities of learning for both sexes and all races. In science we have unlocked the secrets of the earth and the air and the sea, and made them not merely 24: O E A T I O X . matters of wonder, but hand-maidens of homely use. Religion has been reiined and elevated, and the human mind, searching for divine truth, has risen above superstition and cant, and, with knowledge for its guide, has reconciled faith with an enlightened reason. In all matters of comfort, of use, of elegance, of convenient living, of house, and table, and furniture, and light, and warmth, and health, and travel, what thorough and beneficent advance equally for all, shaming the petty meanness with which, unjust alike to the old times and the new, we inveigh against the new times and overrate the old! At home it is with a feeling of satis- faction and pride that we turn to our own Common- wealth in every department of her public life; in her spotless judiciary, wdiich has never fallen below its best standard, and whose ermine bears no stain; or her legislature, which has always expressed the popular will, and embodied in its enactments the reach of the popular sentiment. Shall I pre- fer the old times, when I see government made to-day the use, the culture, the salvation of the people; saving those who are in peril from want and fire and famine; looking after the little chil- dren; caring for the insane, the idiotic, the crim- inal, the drunkard, the unfortunate, the orphans, and the aged; guarding the interests of the JULY 4, 1882. 25 laborer; l^ringiiig to the help of the agriculturist the best results of science, and building colleges for the promotion of the noble calling of the culture of the soil; guarding the savings of the small earners; investigating the causes of disease, and securing its prevention; giving to all the people comforts that were once not even the luxurious dreams of princes; pouring out education like streams of living water; maintaining great and generous charities, and extending the shield of its foresight and encouragement over all alike? Grant that since the rebellion of 1861, as years ago after the revolution of 1776, a period of war was followed by an extraordinary period of de- moralization, resulting from the excessive and ab- normal disturbance of the ordinary channels of labor and industry, and especially from that in- flation of our currency which gave rise to in- credible increase of expenditure and debt, and from which recovery came only with a shock. Grant that corruption sometimes exists in high places and in low; grant that politics are too often turned into barter. Whatever the evil, it can- not stand against the discernment which is so swift to uncover and shame it, and which will permit it no concealment. And there is good token in the very sensitiveness of the public mind, which 26 ORATION. was never keener or quicker to discover and punish fraud and faithlessness than now. It must not be forgotten that the repubhc not only was an experiment in its inception, but is so still. We are apt to judge by the severe rules of criticism which we apply to completed work. We forget that only a few short years ago it was said that a popular government cannot suc- ceed; that the popular mind is not sufficiently educated to be relied on; that a pure democracy has in it no stability or permanence, but must go down with the first tumult of popular frenzy; that patriotism will decay without the veneration that attaches to monarchy; and that in a gov- ernment of the people, ignorance, fraud, brutality, and crime will rise by might of fist and lung to the supremacy. The wonder is, not that the re- public is not perfect to-day in its machinery, its character, its results, but that, with its monstrous expansion from within and innnigration from abroad, it has fared so well, and that its achieve- ments are better than its founders dared predict or hope. Tell me what government, ancient or modern, has been more stable, or freer from con- vulsion. Who are our politicians, if not our presidents of colleges, our brightest poets, our most vigorous divines, our conspicuous merchants, our JULY 4. 188 2. 27 foremost lawyers, our leading men ever^^where ? Our politics, at which we rail so much, are what we are. Do you say that there are peculiar evidences of neglect when no pulpit is without its fervid appeal for loftier patriotism; when no class grad- uates from college that half its orations are not on the duty of the citizen to the state; when our cen- tennials fairly weary us with the demand, made by all who speak by voice or pen, for national purity and virtue ; and when no political party dares the popular verdict that does not proclaim and exhibit its pur- pose of reform in every branch of the public service ? Let the test of our hope or despair be not so much the severe standard of the very highest reach of the demands of to-day, but rather the modest trust with which a hundred years ago our fathers risked a democracy. Is it nothing* that their perilous confidence in human nature, and in the ability and inclination of the masses to govern them- selves aright, has been justified and not abused? Is it nothing that, ruled by a mol), our leaders selected from and by a mob, our laws the popular sentiment of a mob, yet such is the preponderance of the good elements over the bad, of the upward tendency over the downward, of order over disorder, of progress over stagnation, that the experiment has resulted in a century of 28 ORATION. success ; that, however imperfect the scheme in some of its outward manifestations, it is correct in ])rin- ciple; and that it has demonstrated the practica- bihty and wisdom of a government of the people, by the people, for the people? If there were none in the ranks except the men who have proved un- worthy, we might despair; but not when we re- member that in every section of the country we still number great hosts of honest and able men fit for every political need or duty. If a period of national demoralization were followed by continued indiffer- ence and acquiescence, we might despair, but not when we see it followed by the indignant uprising of the better elements, the wholesome criticism of the press, the outcry of the poet and the philosopher, the sturdy and resolute reaction of that fundamental intelligence and honesty of the people, which are the fruit of our system of free education, and which can always l)e relied on in the last resort to do the work of reform Avhen the crisis comes. Foi' one I feel no anxiety. I regard it as a sign of the perma- nence of our institutions, that to-day when so many mourn over the sadder revelations of the time, a wiser philosophy looks through the fer- ment that is sloughing the scum from the sur- face and purifying the body politic from top to JULY 4, 18 8 2. 29 bottom. To be conscious of the malad}^ in a republic of free schools and a free press, is to cure it. It is easy to raise spectres of danger, and forecast perils that threaten to destroy the republic. But it will meet and beat them. It is flying in the face of nature and of experience to fear that man, with in- creasing expansion of his opportunities and powers, has, like a child, no horizon of promise beyond his present vision. Why should we at the approach of the next century, with its magnificent impulse on- ward, shudder with the same ignorant and ungodly distrust with which the old time trembled at the coming of our own? We have brought no dangers that we have not averted, no perils that have over- whelmed us. Why whisper under the breath that in the near years to come men are to withdraw more and more from the grinding of unremitted and unlight- ened physical toil? Do not you and I enjoy what- ever exemption from it there comes to us ; and shall not the humblest enjoy as much? Will it be an evil when science, with its inventions and its use of the illimitable agencies of nature, the development of which is now but in its infancy, performs still more the drudgery of toil and lets the souls of all go freer? Labor and industry, in the nature of things, will never cease; but the progress of 30 ORATION. the ages will direct them to higher levels of em- ployment, never dispensing with their need, but rather adding to their dignity and to the happi- ness they return. Why, too, this terror lest those, who have not had the sweetness and re- finements and elevation of leisure, shall have them more and more as well as those to whom it cer- tainly has brought, not harm, but culture? Has the result hitherto been so disastrous as to make us fear either the bettered conditions of the masses, or their ambition for Ijetter conditions still V Faith in the common people is not a fine phrase or a dream; it is the teaching of experi- ence and test. They, too, may be confided in to measure and accept the necessities and inequali- ties that attach to human living*, and they are not going to destroy any social economy which blesses them all, because it does not bless them all alike. Are not fidelity, patience, loyal service, and good citizenship, true of the kitchen, the loom, and the bench? Is there no professor's chair, no clergyman's desk, no merchant prince's counting-room, dishonored? Does, indeed, the line of simple worth or social or political stability run on the border of any class or station? The peo])le may be trusted with their own interests. If it shall appear that any one form of govern- JULY 4, 1882. 31 ment or society fails, tliere will always be intel- ligence and wit enough to foshion a better. Forces will come at command. The instinct of self- preservation counts for something, as well as the elements of goodness and progress which are inherent in human nature. And when all these unite, while there will indeed be change and revo- lution, there wdll never be wreck and chaos. There will be fools, and fanatics, and assassins, and demagogues, and nihilists, and all sorts of insane or vicious dissolvers of security ; there will be convulsions and horrors : every fair summer the lightning flashes and strikes. But all these are the tempests of the year against the unfailing simshine and rain which make the blooming and fragrant gai'den of the earth. There must, indeed, be eternal vigilance and increasing zeal and endeavor for the right. But can there be nobler or finer service than to contribute these? Or, if you, sleek and well-to-do and jealous of your fortunate share of good things, fear lest frenzy and drunkenness and vice invade your domain, will you not stop sneering at the reformers, who, in whatever line or of whatever sex or social scale, are trying to breast the torrent, and give them your countenance, your help, and your right arm ? Shall our forecast of imminent or coming perils 82 ORATION. unnerve us and awake only a whine of despair; or shall it rather put us to our mettle, and to the development of the better influences which always have averted and always will avert disaster ? Grant the great accumulations of individual and corporate wealth, with its larger luxuries; grant this, and, if there be danger in it, — as' there is, — be on your guard. But is it all evil? Have the multi- tude been correspondingly straitened and deprived? Are the homes, the food, the clothing, the literary and aesthetic tastes, and the amusements of the toilers, more limited, or do they share in the general betterment? Is the pul^lic library closed to them? Is there no newspaper, — a library in itself, — in their hands each day? Have they less or dimmer light to read by than before; or scantier means of conveyance from the city to the fields and beach; or more meagre communication with the great orbit of the living world, its interests, its activities, its I'esources? May we not yet find even in this bug- bear f)f excessive wealth, with its perilous luxury emasculating those who enjoy it and tempting those who ape it, the seeds of the evil's own cure? If it be not so, it is the first instance of a corru])tion which has not wrought its own better life. Xeed we, indeed even now, look far off for a day when the vulgar ghittony of wealth Avill be the disdain JULY 4, 188 2. 33 of good manners and high character, not worth its own heavy weight, and no longer the aim of a better and finer time? Is happiness, or was it ever, correspondent with wealth or Inxmy? Are not most men superior to either, or to the fever for them? I do not think it too much to say, that in the time to come, " Give me neither povert}^ nor riches " will be not only the wise man's prayer, but the " smart " man's maxim and the aristocrat's choice. What refreshment, even to-day, to turn to examples of wealth, — of which so many are illustrious in your own city, — which finds its most gracious use and its most indulgent luxury in cooling streams of charity and beneficence flowing broadcast amid the parched lowlands of want and ignorance and wrong! Under our system the easy mobility of wealth is its own no small safeguard and regulator, l^ot only do for- tunes come and go; not only from all rounds of the social ladder do the millionnaires spring; but, even while retained in the same hand, wealth does not lie inactive and embayed, but is coursing every- where, a trust rather than an exclusive possession to its owner, employing, supporting, enriching a thousand other men. To assail it is to attack not him, but them. It i's engaged in their service more than in his. It has no existence except in this 34 ORATION. very subservience to the general use. Destroy this function, and it is but a corpse, worth no man's having. Fortunate is the community, and men do not deca}^, where, under our institutions, wealth accumulates. It cannot fill one hand without overflowing into every other. It cannot live to itself alone. Danger and peril enough indeed; need every- where for safeguards and forethought! But the world is a failure and man is a lie if there be not in him the capacity to rise to his own might, and to keep pace with his own growth. Are education, science, is this godlike mind, are the soul and the moral nature, to count for nothing but their own disaster? Is there no future manhood to meet the future crisis? Is there no God? As the dead past buries its dead, so the unborn future will solve its own needs. Ours it is to do the duty of the present hour. And to that high duty with what a trumpet-call are we summoned ! I would at once avoid indiscrim- inate praise or blame of the things of to-day. I would not so assail our national and social and polit- ical character and men and institutions as to destroy our self-respect; nor, on the other hand, would I shut my eyes to the glaring defects that exist, and that are a reproach to any people. There is rust JULY 4, 18 82. 35 upon our escutcheon. Our civil service cries aloud for the reform which has begun to come, and which is already shaping the action of politicians and de- partments that are unconsciously obeying the public sentiment it has created. There is sometimes lack of homely honesty in our touch upon the public money; there is dishonor in high places; there are frauds in finance. But these are evils not permanent in the heart of a progressive j)eople. They are only incidental to incomplete systems. They suggest what would be a nobler and more vital theme for us at this time than even the Declaration of Independence of 1776; and that is a new and present declaration of independence, which, if proclaimed to the world in honesty and sincerity, would make some John Adams of to-day prophesy that it would be henceforward celebrated by succeeding generations from one end of the continent to the other. The century just past was a century of military and political growth; the century opening this hour will be one of moral and scientific growth. The parties of the future can only succeed if they embody some great moral element and purpose. Let us have here and now a new declaration of indejjendence, — independence from ignorance and prejudice and narrowness and false restraint; from the ruthless machineiy of war, so that we may have the benefi- 36 O K A T I N . cent influences of peace; from the clumsiness of any lingering barbarism, so that we may have the full development of a Christian civilization; from the crimes that infest and retard society; from intem- perance and drunkenness and false gods; from low views of public trust. 'No declaration of the fathers would compare for a moment with a declaration of the high moral purposes that beckon us on to a loftier national life. The field is unlimited; the opportunity for growth inexhaustible. Only let us realize the absolute duty of impressing on the leading classes, as we call them, on the educated and religious classes, at least, the necessity of their projecting themselves out of the ranks which need no physician into the ranks which do. I do not mean the nonsense of class distinctions; I mean that whoever is a foremost man in any sphere, in the professions, in trade or elsewhere, whoever leads in politics, in church, in society, in the shoj:), must feel that on his shoulders alone i-ests the public safety. There must be the sense of personal obligation on every man whose natural power or happy op- portunities have given him a lift in anywise above the rest. Virtue, public and private, will become easy and popular when it is the badge and inspi- ration of the leaders ; and good influences from the JULY 4, 1882. 37 top will permeate through the whole body pohtic as rain fiUers through the earth and freshens it with verdure and beauty and fertihty. I would emphasize, more than anything else, the duty of the enlightened classes to throw all their energies into the popular arena. Why should the ingen- uous youth, fresh from college, dream of Pericles swaying, with consunnnate address and eloquence, the petty democracy of Athens, and himself shun the town-house, where, in a golden age, beside which the age of Pericles is brass, is moulded the destiny of his own magnificent republic? Why kindle with the invective of Cicero, or the wit of Aristophanes, and himself be too dainty to lift voice or finger to banish Catiline and Cleon from manipulating the honor, the integrity, the achievement of the fotherland, bequeathed to him in sacred trust by his own heroic ancestors? .Little sympathy is to be felt with the spirit that stands aloof and rails at the clumsy work of a government by the people, who, on their part, invariably wel- come the approach of the man of culture, and will give him place if only he will not convey the idea that he despises it. It is useless to deny that the scholars have failed oftentimes — less of late — to improve their opportunity ; and if ever the republic o-oes to the bad, it will be, not because the illit- 38 ORATIOX. erate and lax have seized and depraved it, but because the instructed and trained have neglected it. To me it seems axiomatic that the educated and virtuous, in a free State, can control it if they will. Here we are at the threshold of these great economic questions of labor, of ca^jital, of currency- They affect the very tables and hearthstones and muscles of us all. AYe have yet to solve the problem of so distributing the excess of the grain of the woi'ld that no man shall be unable to fairly ex- change his product for it; of so distributing the excess of wealth that no man shall be destitute who is willing to work. There will be fewer frauds upon the revenue when connnerce is fur- ther relieved from its restraints. Defalcations will be rare when the proper channels for capital are alone open and the eddies and cataracts of base- less speculation are avoided. There will be no terrorism of strikes when labor is directed aright and its wages are its honest measure. There will be no bubbles to burst, no corners for the gamblers to work up, when the laws that regulate the carrying of the product to the consumer are learned, and the supply becomes a steady stream, flowing into and satisfying the demand. All these are the questions of the economy- of the future. There lies before us a field which should J U L Y 4 . 1 8 8 2 . 39 make the heart of a true man glad as he sees approachmg a centmy of peace, of wise economies, of amelioration for the masses, of op- portunity for lifting all men to a happy and useful activity. So shall those who follow reap a grander harvest than ours. It is God's earth, and He made it for His children. How the arts will educate and train them; how science will enlio-hten them; how great moral strides will take them to loftier planes of conduct and life! There can be no failure of the republic among an intelligent people, with schools for the young, with good examples in the past, with Christian ideals for the future. It has already surmounted its most stupendous risks and assaults. It has ridden them all safely over. The late civil war will only cement the structure. I am told that on the battle-fields of Virginia, so swift is time's erasure, where, now seventeen years ago, the land was rough with the intrenchments of the camp, already new woody growths have covered them over, and the foliage and the turf and the fruitful farms bear no mark of war, but wave with lines of beauty and of harvest. So be it, too, in the nation at large! The contest is over: the wrons" is righted; the curse is off; the land is redeemed; the sweet angels of peace and reconciliation are 40 ORATION. flitting from door to door, sitting at the tents, inspiring kinder thonghts and sympathies, and awakening at this very hour the ancient memories of a common sacrifice and a common glory. The great prolific fields of the South, its rivers and natural resources, saved from the blight of slavery, will he the loom and granary and wealth of ns all. The softening influences of a common interest ^will draw together the people of all sections. Com- merce and trade and learning, and all the affilia- tions that interweave the affections of a people, will surround and sustain the central pillar of a common country and destiny. I am now the hundredth in tliat succession with whom Boston has charged her Fourth of July orations. Our beloved country is more than a hundred years old. A century has come and has gone. It is indeed but as a day; yet what a day! ]S^ot the short and sullen day of the winter solstice, but the long, glorious, and prolific summer day of June. It rose in the twilight glimmerings of the dawn of Lexington, and its rays falling on the mingled dew and gore of that greensward, and a little later across the rebel gun-barrels of Bunker Hill, and then tenderly lingering on the dead upturned face of Warren, l)roke in the full splendor of the first JULY 4, 188 2. 41 Fourth of July and lay warm upon the bell m the tower of Independence Hall, as it rang out upon the air the cry of a free nation newly born. Its morning sun, now radiant and now obscured, shone over the battle-fields of the Revolution, over the ice of the Delaware, and over the ramparts at Yorktown swept by the onslaught of the chivalrous Lafayette. It looked down upon the calm figure of Washington in- augurating the new government under the Con- stitution. It saw the slow but steady consolida- tion of the Union. It saw the marvellous stride with which, in the early years of the present century, the republic grew in wealth and popu- lation, sending its ships into every sea, and its pioneers into the wilds of the Oregon and to the lakes of the JS^orth. It burst through the clouds of the war of 1812, and saw the navy of the young nation triumph in encounters as romantic as those of armed knights in tournament. It heard the arguments of Madison, Hamilton, Marshal, Story, and Webster, determining the scope of the constitution and establishing forever the theory of its powers and restrictions. It beheld the overthrow of the delusion that regarded the United States as a league and not a nation, and that would have sapped it with the poison of 42 . ORATION. nullification and secession. It saw an era of liter- ature begin, distinguished by the stately achieve- ments of the historian, the thought of the philoso- pher, the grace of oratory, the sweet pure verse of the American poets — poets of nature and the heart. It brought the tender ministry of unconsciousness to human pain. It caught the song of machinery, the thunder of the locomotive, the first click of the telegraph. It saw the measureless West unfold its prairies into great activities of life and prod- uct and wealth. It saw the virtue and culture and thrift of ^ew England flow broad across the Mississippi, over the Rocky Mountains and down the Pacific slope, expanding into a civiliza- tion so magnificent that its power and grandeur and influence to-day overshadow indeed the fount from which they sprang. It saw America, first wrenching liberty for itself from the hand of European tyranny, share it free as the air with the oppressed and cramped peoples of Europe, carrying food to them in their starvation, offer- ing them an asylum, welcoming their cooperation in the development and enjoyment of the gener- ous culture and freedom and opportunity of the 'New World, and setting them, from the fii'st even till now, an example of free institutions and local popular government, which every in- JULY4,1882. 43 telligent and self-respecting people must follow. Its afternoon was indeed overcast with shame- ful assault made on an unoffending neighbor to strengthen the hold of slavery upon the mis- guided interests of the country; and there came the fiery tempest of civil war: the heart of the nation mourned the slaughter of its patriots, and the treason and folly of its children of the South, yet welcomed them back to their place in the family circle. And now eventide has come; the storm is over; the long day has drawn to its close in the magnificent irradiation that betokens a glorious morning. We gather at our thresholds and hold sweet neighborly converse. Our children are about us in pleasant homes; our flocks are safe; our fields are ripening with the harvest. We recall the day, and pray that the God of the pil- grim and the patriot will make the morrow of our republic even brighter and better. May it indeed be the land of the free, — the land of education and virtue, in which there shall be none ignorant or depraved, none outside the pale of the influence and sympathy of the best, and therefore no swift or slow declension to corruption and death, no decline or fall for the future historian to write. ^^ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 011 782 928 5