tion was carried on.

preparation commenced, of the world's grand political regeneration. For about a century and a half, this preparaWithout any of the temptations which drew the Spanish adventurers to Mexico and Peru, the Colonies throve almost beyond example, and in the face of neglect, contempt, and persecution. Their numbers, in the substantial middle classes of life, increased with regular rapidity. They had no materials out of which an aristocracy could be formed, and no great eleemosynary establishments to cause an influx of paupers. There was nothing but the rewards of labor and the hope of freedom.

But at length this hope, never adequately satisfied, began to turn into doubt and despair. The Colonies had become too important to be overlooked; their government was a prerogative too important to be left in their own hands; and the legislation of the mother country decidedly assumed a form which announced to the patriots that the hour at length had come when the chains of the great discoverer were to be avenged, the sufferings of the first settlers to be compensated, and the long-deferred hopes of humanity to be fulfilled.

You need not, friends and fellow citizens, that I should dwell upon the incidents of the last great acts in the colonial drama. This very place was the scene of some of the earliest and the most memorable of them, and their recollection is a part of your inheritance of honor. In the early councils and first struggles of the great revolutionary enterprise, the citizens of this place were among the most prominent. The measures of resistance which were projected by the patriots of Charlestown were opposed by but one individual. An active co-operation existed between the political leaders in Boston and this place. The beacon light

which was kindled in the towers of Christ Church in Boston, on the night of the eighteenth of April, 1775, was answered from the steeple of the church in which we are now assembled. The intrepid messenger who was sent forward to convey to Hancock and Adams the intelligence of the approach of the British troops was furnished with a horse, for his eventful errand, by a respected citizen of this place. At the close of the following momentous day, the British forces -the remnant of its disasters-found refuge, under the shades of night, upon the heights of Charlestown; and there, on the ever-memorable seventeenth of June, that great and costly sacrifice in the cause of freedom was consummated with fire and blood. Your hilltops were strewed with illustrious dead; your homes were wrapped in flames; the fair fruits of a century and a half of civilized culture were reduced to a heap of bloody ashes, and two thousand men, women, and children turned houseless on the world. With the exception of the ravages of the nineteenth of April, the chalice of woe and desolation was in this manner first presented to the lips of the citizens of Charlestown. Thus devoted, as it were, to the cause, it is no wonder that the spirit of the Revolution should have taken possession of their bosoms, and been transmitted to their children. The American, who, in any part of the Union, could forget the scenes and the principles of the Revolution, would thereby prove himself unworthy of the blessings which he enjoys; but the citizen of Charlestown, who could be cold on this momentous theme, must hear a voice of reproach from the walls which were reared on the ashes of the seventeenth of June-a piercing cry from the very sods of yonder hill.

The Revolution was at lengtà accomplished. The political separation of the country of Great Britain was ef

fected, and it now remained to organize the liberty which had been reaped on bloody fields—to establish, in the place of the government whose yoke had been thrown off, a government at home, which should fulfil the great design of the Revolution and satisfy the demands of the friends of liberty at large. What manifold perils awaited the step! The danger was great that too little or too much would be done. Smarting under the oppressions of a distant gov. ernment, whose spirit was alien to their feelings, there was great danger that the Colonies in the act of declaring themselves sovereign and independent States, would push to an extreme the prerogative of their separate independence, and refuse to admit any authority beyond the limits of each particular Commonwealth. On the other hand, achieving their independence under the banners of the Continental Army, ascribing, and justly, a large portion of their success to the personal qualities of the beloved Father of his Country, there was danger, not less imminent, that those who perceived the evils of the opposite extreme would be dis posed to confer too much strength on one general gov ernment, and would, perhaps, even fancy the necessity of investing the hero of the Revolution, in form, with that sovereign power which his personal ascendency gave him in the hearts of his countrymen. Such and so critical was the alternative which the organization of the new government presented, and on the successful issue of which the entire benefit of this great movement in human affairs was to depend.

The first effort to solve the great problem was made in the course of the Revolution, and was without success. The Articles of Confederation verged to the extreme of a union too weak for its great purposes; and the moment the

pressure of this war was withdrawn, the inadequacy of this first project of a government was felt. The United States found themselves overwhelmed with debt, without the means of paying it. Rich in the materials of an extensive commerce, they found their ports crowded with foreign ships, and themselves without the power to raise a revenue. Abounding in all the elements of national wealth, they wanted resources to defray the ordinary expenses of government.

For a moment, and to the hasty observer, this last effort for the establishment of freedom had failed. No fruit had sprung from this lavish expenditure of treasure and blood. We had changed the powerful protection of the mother country into a cold and jealous amity, if not into a slumbering hostility. The oppressive principles against which our fathers had struggled were succeeded by more oppressive realities. The burden of the British Navigation Act, as it operated on the Colonies, was removed, but it was followed by the impossibility of protecting our shipping by a Navigation Act of our own. A state of material prosperity, existing before the Revolution, was succeeded by universal exhaustion; and a high and indignant tone of militant patriotism, by universal despondency.

It remained, then, to give its last great effort to all that had been done since the discovery of America for the establishment of the cause of liberty in the Western Hemisphere, and by another more deliberate effort to organize a government by which not only the present evils under which the country was suffering should be remedied, but the final design of Providence should be fulfilled. Such was the task that devolved on the statesmen who convened at Philadel

phia on the second day of May, 1787, in the Assembly of which General Washington was elected president, and over whose debates your townsman, Mr. Gorham, presided for two or three months as chairman of the Committee of the Whole, during the discussion of the plan of the Federal Constitution.

The very first step to be taken was one of pain and regret. The old Confederation was to be given up. What misgivings and grief must not this preliminary sacrifice have occasioned to the patriotic members of the Convention! They were attached, and with reason, to its simple majesty. It was weak then, but it had been strong enough to carry the Colonies through the storms of the Revolution. Some of the great men who led up the forlorn hope of their country in the hour of her direst perils had died in its defence. Could not a little inefficiency be pardoned to a Union with which France had made an alliance, and England had made peace? Could the proposed new government do more or better things than this had done? Who could give assurance, when the flag of the Old Thirteen was struck, that the hearts of the people could be rallied to another banner?

Such were the misgivings of some of the great men of that day-the Henrys, the Gerrys, and other eminent antifederalists, to whose scruples it is time that justice should be done. They were the sagacious misgivings of wise men, the just forebodings of brave men, who were determined not to defraud posterity of the blessings for which they had all suffered, and for which some of them had fought.

The members of that Convention, in going about the great work before them, deliberately laid aside the means by which all preceding legislators had aimed to accomplish