WHO WAS THE MINUTE-MAN. 43 bassadors entertained by our inveterate enemy; and ministers do not and dare not interpose with dignity or effect. The desperate state of our army abroad is in part known. No man more highly esteems and honors the British troops than I do; I know their virtues and their valor; I know they can achieve any but impossibilities, and I know that the conquest of British America is an impossibility. You cannot, my lords, you cannot conquer America. What is your present situation there? We do not know the worst, but we know that in three campaigns we have done nothing and suffered much. You may swell every expense, accumulate every assistance, and extend your traffic to the shambles of every German despot, your attempts will be forever vain and impotent, doubly so, indeed, from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your adversaries to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty. If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms, never, never, never! WHO WAS THE MINUTE-MAN. GEO. WM. CURTIS. Two hundred years ago, Mary Shepherd, a girl of fifteen, was watching the savages on the hills of Concord, while her brothers thrashed in the barn. Suddenly the Indians appeared, slew the brothers, and carried her away. In the night while the savages slept, she untied a stolen horse, slipped a saddle from under the head of one of her captors, mounted, fled, swam the Nashua River, and rode through the forest, home. Mary Shepherd was the true ancestor of the minute-man of the Revolution. The minuteman of the Revolution! who was he? He was the husband, the father, who left the plough in the furrow, the hammer on the bench, and kissing wife and children, marched to die or to be free. The minuteman of the Revolution! He was the old, the middle aged, the young. He was Capt. Miles, of Acton, who reproved his men for jesting on the march. He was Deacon Josiah Haines, of Sudbury, eighty years old, who marched with his company to South Bridge, at Concord, then joined in that hot pursuit to Lexington, and fell as gloriously as Warren at Bunker Hill. He was James Hayward, of Acton, twentytwo years old, foremost in that deadly race from Charlestown to Concord, who raised his piece at the same moment with a British soldier, each exclaiming, "You are a dead man." The Briton dropped, shot through the heart. Young Hayward fell, mortally wounded. Father," said he, "I started with forty balls, I have three left. I never did such a day's work before. Tell mother not to mourn too much, and tell her whom I love more than my mother, that I am not sorry I turned out." This was the minute-man of the Revolution ! The rural citizen, trained in the common school, the town meeting, who carried a bayonet that thought and whose gun, loaded with a principle, brought down, not a man, but a system. With brain and heart and conscience all alive, he opposed every hostile order of the British council. The cold Grenville, the brilliant Townsend, the reckless Hillsborough derided, declaimed, denounced, laid unjust taxes, and sent troops to 66 THE MINUTE-MEN OF '75. 45 collect them, and the plain Boston Puritan laid his finger on the vital point of the tremendous controversy, and held to it inexorably. Intrenched in his own honesty, the king's gold could not buy him. Enthroned in the love of his fellow-citizens, the king's writ could not take him. And when, on the morning at Lexington, the king's troops marched to seize him, his sublime faith saw, beyond the clouds of the moment, the rising sun of America, and careless of himself, mindful only of his country, he exultingly exclaimed, "Oh, what a glorious morning!" He felt that a blow would soon be struck that would break the heart of British tyranny. His judgment, his conscience, told him the hour had come. Unconsciously, his heart beat time to the music of the Slave's Epitaph: "God wills us free, THE MINUTE-MEN OF '75. GEO. WM. CURTIS. CITIZENS of a great, free, and prosperous country, we come hither to honor the men, our fathers, who on this spot struck the first blow in the contest which made our country independent. Here, beneath the hills they trod, by the peaceful river on whose shores they dwelt, amidst the fields that they sowed and reaped, we come to tell their story, to try ourselves by their lofty standard, to know if we are their worthy children; and, standing reverently where they stood and fought and died, to swear before God and each other, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. This ancient town has never failed fitly to commemorate this great day of its history. Fifty years ago, while some soldiers of the Concord fight were yet living, twenty-five years ago, while still a few venerable survivors lingered, you renewed the pious vow. But the last living link with the Revolution has long been broken; and we who stand here to-day have a sympathy with the men at the old North Bridge, which those who preceded us here at earlier celebrations could not know. With them war was a name and a tradition. When they assembled to celebrate this day, they saw a little group of tottering forms, whose pride was, that before living memory, they had been minute-men of American Independence. But with us, how changed! War is no longer a tradition, half romantic and obscure. It has ravaged how many of our homes, it has wrung how many of the hearts before me? North and South, we know the pang. We do not count around us a few feeble veterans of the contest, but we are girt with a cloud of witnesses. Behold them here to-day, sharing in these pious and peaceful rites, the honored citizens whose glory it is that they were minute-men of American liberty and union. These men of to-day interpret to us, with resistless eloquence, the men and the times we commemorate. Now, if never before, we understand the Revolution. Now, we know the secrets of those old hearts and homes. No royal governor sits in yon stately capitol; no hostile fleet for many a year has vexed the waters of our coast; nor is any army but our own ever likely to tread our soil. Not such are our enemies THE AMERICAN AGE. 47 to-day. They do not come proudly stepping to the drum-beat, with bayonets flashing in the morning sun. But wherever party spirit shall strain the ancient guaranties of freedom, or bigotry and ignorance shall lay their fatal hands upon education, or the arrogance of caste shall strike at equal rights, or corruption shall poison the very springs of national life, there, minute-men of liberty, are your Lexington Green and Concord Bridge! And, as you love your country and your kind, and would have your children rise up and call you blessed, spare not the enemy! Over the hills, out of the earth, down from the clouds, pour in resistless might! Fire from every rock and tree, from door and window, from hearthstone and chamber; hang upon his flank and rear from morn to sunset, and so through a land blazing with holy indignation, hurl the hordes of ignorance and corruption and injustice back, back in utter defeat and ruin. THE AMERICAN AGE. ROBERT C. WINTHROP. OTHER ages have had their designations, local or personal or mythical, historic or prehistoric; ages of stone or iron, of silver or gold; ages of kings or queens, of reformers or conquerors. That marvellous compound of everything wise or foolish, noble or base, witty or ridiculous, sublime or profane, -Voltaire, maintained that, in his day, no man of reflection or taste could count more than four authentic ages in the history of the world. First, that of Philip and Alexander, with Pericles and Demosthenes, Aristotle and Plato, Apelles, Phidias, and Praxiteles. Second, that of Cæsar and Augustus, |