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times and to all nations, and maintain peace, friendship, and benevolence with all the world; if an unshaken confidence in the honor, spirit, and resources of the American people, on which I have so often hazarded my all, and never been deceived; if elevated ideas of the high destinies of this country, and of my own duties toward it, founded on a knowledge of the moral principles and intellectual improvements of the people, deeply engraven on my mind in early life, and not obscured but exalted by experience and age; and with humble reverence I feel it my duty to add, if a veneration for the religion of a people, who profess and call themselves Christians, and a fixed resolution to consider a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for the public service, can enable me, in any degree, to comply with your wishes, it shall be my strenuous endeavor that this sagacious injunction of the two houses shall not be without effect.

With this great example before me-with the sense and spirit, the faith and honor, the duty and interest of the same American people, pledged to support the Constitution of the United States, I entertain no doubt of its continuance in all its energy; and my mind is prepared, without hesitation, to lay myself under the most solemn obligations to support it to the utmost of my power.

And may that Being who is supreme over all, the patron of order, the fountain of justice, and the protector, in all ages of the world, of virtuous liberty, continue His blessing upon this nation and its government, and give it all possible success and duration, consistent with the ends of His providence.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

THE JUBILEE OF THE CONSTITUTION

[John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, was born at Braintree, Mass., July 11, 1767. He was the son of John Adams, the second President. He accompanied his father on his diplomatic missions to Europe, and began his education abroad. In 1785 he decided to return to the United States and enter Harvard. His attainments enabled him to enter the junior class and he took his degree in 1787. Four years later he was admitted to the bar. In 1794 Washington appointed him Minister to the Hague, from which place, in 1797, he was transferred to the court of Prussia. In 1801 he returned to America, and two years later was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts. In 1809 he was appointed Minister to Russia by President Madison. His duties being slight, his time was mainly engrossed by social functions and study, together with a keen observation of passing events, this being the time of the Napoleonic invasion. He remained there for two years, when he resigned and returned home, thus closing the long though intermittent period of his residence in foreign countries. As secretary of state, to which office he was appointed in 1817, he became the originator of the "Monroe Doctrine," before the publication of the message that fathered upon Monroe this famous political canon. By the then established tradition that the head of the state department was in the line of succession to the presidency, Adams passed to that office in 1824. He died in 1848. The following oration was delivered before the New York Historical Society, 1839. The second speech was made in the House of Representatives, 1836.]

FE

ELLOW CITIZENS and Brethren, Associates of the New York Historical Society: Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination to conceive that on the night preceding the day of which you now commemorate the fiftieth anniversary-on the night preceding that thirtieth of April 1789, when from the balcony of your City Hall the chancellor of the State of New York administered to George Washington the solemn oath faithfully to

execute the office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States-that in the visions of the night the guardian angel of the Father of our Country had appeared before him, in the venerated form of his mother, and, to cheer and encourage him in the performance of the momentous and solemn duties that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a suit of celestial armor—a helmet, consisting of the principles of piety, of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence; a sword, the same with which he had led the armies of his country through the war of freedom to the summit of the triumphal arch of independence; a corselet and cuishes of long experience and habitual intercourse in peace and war with the world of mankind, his contemporaries of the human race, in all their stages of civilization; and, last of all, the Constitution of the United States, a shield, embossed by heavenly hands with the future history of his country?

Yes, gentlemen, on that shield, the Constitution of the United States, was sculptured (by forms unseen, and in characters then invisible to mortal eye) the predestined and prophetic history of the one confederated people of the North American Union.

They had been the settlers of thirteen separate and distinct English colonies, along the margin of the shore of the North American continent; contiguously situated, but chartered by adventurers of characters variously diversified, including sectarians, religious and political, of all the classes which for the two preceding centuries had agitated and divided the people of the British islands-and with them were intermingled the descendants of Hollanders, Swedes, Germans, and French fugitives from the persecution of the revoker of the edict of Nantes.

In the bosoms of this people, thus heterogeneously composed, there was burning, kindled at different furnaces, but all furnaces of affliction, one clear, steady flame of liberty. Bold and daring enterprise, stubborn endurance of privation, unflinching intrepidity in facing danger, and inflexible

adherence to conscientious principle, had steeled to energetic and unyielding hardihood the characters of the primitive settlers of all these colonies. Since that time two or three generations of men had passed away, but they had increased and multiplied with unexampled rapidity; and the land itself had been the recent theater of a ferocious and bloody seven-years' war between the two most powerful and most civilized nations of Europe, contending for the possession of this continent.

Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Britain. She had conquered the provinces of France. She had expelled her rival totally from the continent, over which, bounding herself by the Mississippi, she was thenceforth to hold divided empire only with Spain. She had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes still tenanting the forests unexplored by the European man. She had established an uncontested monopoly of the commerce of all her colonies. But forgetting all the warnings of preceding ages -forgetting the lessons written in the blood of her own children, through centuries of departed time, she undertook to tax the people of the colonies without their consent.

Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic, inflexible resistance, like an electric shock, startled and roused the people of all the English colonies on this continent.

This was the first signal of the North American Union. The struggle was for chartered rights-for English liberties -for the cause of Algernon Sidney and John Hampdenfor trial by jury-the habeas corpus and magna charta.

But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament was omnipotent-and Parliament, in its omnipotence, instead of trial by jury and the habeas corpus, enacted admiralty courts in England to try Americans for offenses charged against them as committed in America; instead of the privileges of magna charta, nullified the charter itself of Massachusetts Bay, shut up the port of Boston, sent armies and navies to keep the peace and teach the colonies that John Hampden was a rebel and Algernon Sidney a traitor.

English liberties had failed them. From the omnipotence of Parliament the colonists appealed to the rights of man and the omnipotence of the God of Battles. Union!

Union! was the instinctive and simultaneous cry throughout the land. Their congress, assembled at Philadelphia, once-twice-had petitioned the king; had remonstrated to Parliament; had addressed the people of Britain, for the rights of Englishmen-in vain. Fleets and armies, the blood of Lexington, and the fires of Charlestown and Falmouth, had been the answer to petition, remonstrance, and address.

The dissolution of allegiance to the British crown, the severance of the colonies from the British empire, and their actual existence as independent states, were definitely established in fact, by war and peace. The independence of each separate state had never been declared of right. It never existed in fact. Upon the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the dissolution of the ties of allegiance, the assumption of sovereign power, and the institution of civil government, are all acts of transcendent authority, which the people alone are competent to perform; and, accordingly, it is in the name and by the authority of the people, that two of these acts-the dissolution of allegiance, with the severance from the British empire, and the declaration of the united colonies as free and independent states-were performed by that instrument.

But there still remained the last and crowning act, which the people of the Union alone were competent to perform— the institution of civil government for that compound nation, the United States of America.

At this day it cannot but strike us as extraordinary that it does not appear to have occurred to any one member of that assembly, which had laid down in terms so clear, so explicit, so unequivocal, the foundation of all just government in the imprescriptible rights of man, and the transcendent sovereignty of the people, and who in those principles had set forth their only personal vindication from the charges of rebellion against their king, and of treason to their country, that their last crowning act was still to be performed upon the same principles. That is, the institution, by the people of the United States, of a civil government, to guard and protect and defend them all. On the contrary, that same assembly which issued the Declaration of Independence, instead of continuing to act in the name

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