chapters of human history are alike important. The annals of our race have been filled up with incidents which concern not, or at least ought not to concern, the great company of mankind. History, as it has often been written, is the genealogy of princes, the field-book of conquerors; and the fortunes of our fellow-men have been treated only so far as they have been affected by the influence of the great masters and destroyers of our race. Such history is, I will not say a worthless study, for it is necessary for us to know the dark side as well as the bright side of our condition. But it is a melancholy study which fills the bosom of the philanthropist and the friend of liberty with sorrow.

But the history of Liberty-the history of men struggling to be free-the history of men who have acquired and are exercising their freedom-the history of those great movements in the world, by which liberty has been established and perpetuated, forms a subject which we cannot contemplate too closely. This is the real history of man, of the human family, of rational immortal beings.

This theme is one: the free of all climes and nations are themselves a people. Their annals are the history of freedom. Those who fell victims to their principles in the civil convulsions of the short-lived republics of Greece, or who sunk beneath the power of her invading foes; those who shed their blood for liberty amid the ruins of the Roman Republic; the victims of Austrian tyranny in Switzerland and of Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands; the solitary champions or the united bands of high-minded and patriotic men who have, in any region or age, struggled and suffered in this great cause, belong to that people of the free whose fortunes and progress are the most noble theme man can contemplate.

The theme belongs to us. We inhabit a country which has been signalized in the great history of freedom. We live under forms of government more favorable to its diffusion than any the world has elsewhere known.

A succession of incidents, of rare curiosity, and almost mysterious connection, has marked out America as a great theatre of political reform. Many circumstances stand recorded in our annals, connected with the assertion of human rights, which, were we not familiar with them, would fill even our own minds with amazement.

The theme belongs to the day. We celebrate the return of the day on which our separate national existence was declared the day when the momentous experiment was commenced, by which the world, and posterity, and we ourselves were to be taught how far a nation of men can be trusted with self-government—how far life, liberty, and property are safe, and the progress of social improvement is secure, under the influence of laws made by those who are to obey them-the day when, for the first time in the world, a numerous people was ushered into the family of nations, organized on the principle of the political equality of all the citizens.

Let us then, fellow-citizens, devote the time which has been set apart for this portion of the duties of the day, to a hasty review of the history of Liberty, especially to a contemplation of some of those astonishing incidents which preceded, accompanied, or have followed the settlement of America, and the establishment of our Constitutions, and which plainly indicate a general tendency and co-operation of things toward the erection, in this country, of the great monitorial school of political freedom.

We hear much at school of the liberty of Greece and

Rome-a great and complicated subject, which this is not the occasion to attempt to disentangle. True it is that we find, in the annals of both these nations, bright examples of public virtue-the record of faithful friends of their country-of strenuous foes of oppression at home or abroad -and admirable precedents of popular strength. But we nowhere find in them the account of a populous and extensive region, blessed with institutions securing the enjoy ment and transmission of regulated liberty. In freedom, as in most other things, the ancient nations, while they made surprisingly close approaches to the truth, yet, for want of some one great and essential principle or instrument, they came utterly short of it in practice. They had profound and elegant scholars; but, for want of the art of printing, they could not send information out among the people, where alone it is of great use in reference to human happiness. Some of them ventured boldly out to sea, and pos sessed an aptitude for foreign commerce; yet, for want of the mariner's compass, they could not navigate distant seas, but crept for ages along the shores of the Mediterranean. In respect to freedom, they established popular governments in single cities; but, for want of the representative principle, they could not extend these institutions over a large and populous country. But as a large and populous country, generally speaking, can alone possess strength enough for self-defence, this want was fatal. The freest of their cities accordingly fell a prey, sooner or later, either to a foreign invader or to domestic traitors.

In this way, liberty made no firm progress in the ancient States. It was a speculation of the philosopher, and an experiment of the patriot, but not an established state of society. The patriots of Greece and Rome had indeed suc

ceeded in enlightening the public mind on one of the cardinal points of freedom-the necessity of an elected executive. The name and the office of a king were long esteemed not only something to be rejected, but something rude and uncivilized, belonging to savage nations, ignorant of the rights of man, as understood in cultivated States. The word "tyrant," which originally meant no more than monarch, soon became with the Greeks synonymous with oppressor and despot, as it has continued to be ever since. When the first Cæsar made his encroachments on the liberties of Rome, the patriots even of that age boasted that they had

So deeply rooted was this horror of the very name of king in the bosom of the Romans, that under their worst tyrants, and in the darkest days, the forms of the Republic were preserved. There was no name under Nero and Calig ula for the office of monarch. The individual who filled the office was called Cæsar and Augustus, after the first and second of the line. The word "emperor" (imperator) implied no more than general. The offices of consul and tribune were kept up; although, if the choice did not fall, as it frequently did, on the emperor, it was conferred on his favorite general, and sometimes on his favorite horse. The Senate continued to meet, and affected to deliberate; and, in short, the Empire began and continued a pure military despotism, ingrafted, by a sort of permanent usurpation, on the forms and names of the ancient Republic. spirit, indeed, of liberty had long since ceased to animate § 3-Orations-Vol. VIII.

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these ancient forms, and when the barbarous tribes of Central Asia and Northern Europe burst into the Roman Empire, they swept away the poor remnant of these forms, and established upon their ruins the system of feudal monarchy from which all modern kingdoms are descended. Efforts were made in the Middle Ages by the petty republics of Italy to regain the political rights which a long proscription had wrested from them. But the remedy of bloody civil wars between neighboring cities was plainly more disas trous than the disease of subjection. The struggles of freedom in these little States resulted much as they had done in Greece, exhibiting brilliant examples of individual character, and short intervals of public prosperity, but no permanent progress in the organization of liberal governments.

At length a new era seemed to begin. The art of printing was invented. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks drove the learned Greeks of that city into Italy, and letters revived. A general agitation of public sentiment in various parts of Europe ended in the religious Reformation. A spirit of adventure had been awakened in the maritime nations, projects of remote discovery were started, and the signs of the times seemed to augur a great political regeneration. But, as if to blast this hope in its bud; as if to counterbalance at once the operation of these springs of improvement; as if to secure the permanence of the arbi. trary institutions which existed in every part of the Continent, at the moment when it was most threatened, the last blow at the same time was given to the remaining power of the great barons, the sole check on the despotism of the monarch which the feudal system provided was removed, and a new institution was firmly established in Europe,