ORATION.

MR. MAYOR, GENTLEMEN OF THE COUNCILS, CITIZENS: — The republic draws toward the close of its first century of life. It has escaped the ordinary diseases of adolescence, and we, its children, fondly hope that its life shall be told in uncounted centuries, and that only He who outlives the record of all things shall write its epitaph. It has survived the evil augury of those jealous of it, and of the principles it has essayed to teach; it has passed crises its friends looked forward to with solicitude, or faced with apprehension, while it has been spared that fatal monotony of which the old sea-king chants,-"He who has never been wounded lives a weary life." On its front are honored scars; on its brow wounds yet bleeding. It has a career; it has made a name; it is become a power. It has gone out into the records of time, and the fame thereof can never die. No century of other national existence to be matched against its century of life. Where, in remoter ages or in more immediate time, do we find a people in its maturity achieving what this republic has in its youth?

Favored of God in the time and the conditions of its birth; in its isolation from foreign entanglements; in its various climate and resource; in river and mountain and harbor and mine; in unity of empire, in form and administration of government; in its religion and its culture; in the industry and integrity of a people not weighted by old-time disability; favored of God in every trial that has disciplined it, the republic has had every element of greatness given it,—has been under bonds to success. This is its great holiday and festival, the anniversary of that immortal morning when the bell in the old tower at Philadelphia, proclaiming "liberty throughout the land," chanted to the ages the new anthem of the free. Of all red-letter days in the human calendar, none so pregnant in meaning and in hope. To us it is the "Glorious Fourth,"glorious by the glory wherewith the fathers baptized it, glorious with the new glory that its sons have won for it upon the battlefield. In one proud memory we weave the names of Philadelphia, Vicksburg and Gettysburg. All through the land, from the boy in the nursery to the man of furrowed brow and deadening senses, the day has been welcomed with turbulent exuberance, as the excited patriot foretold. Under our enthusiasm the very laws are silent. Small boys and bigger boys

defy the imperative edict of the city, and the most irreproachable of policemen sees without seeing, hears and forbears. It is the jubilee and carnival of extravagance and noise,― strange inspirations of the genius of liberty. We will keep the nation's birthday in soberer sort, recalling the blessings of the past, recounting the obligations of the present, looking not at success and privilege only, but at danger and duty, beseeching the great All-Father so to move in and control the hearts of all IIis children that when He sets the epitaph above its tomb, it shall be in the Master's brief, expressive phrase, "Well done."

Unlike other nations, ours has no pre-historic existence. Out of a vast, vague past no grim ancestry looks at us. We do not draw our blood of the demi-gods of classic antiquity, or the wild heroes of the Norse Valhalla. Into no dreamy myth-land do we wander searching the corner on which to rest our pedigree. No heraldry blazoned with emblems of forgotten significance, no legends hoar with gathered years, lend their fictitious dignity. It pleases us sometimes to tie ourselves back to an Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and, when we are a little mad with England, we grow specially rhetorical about a common origin and a common property in her language, literature and fame. But it is not so at all. We are a new

people, the parvenus the new-comers · of the world. That from which our fathers deliberately separated themselves, that which they fled from and flung away, that from which ocean and sympathy and career divide us, why should we be ambitious to claim? Why not consent to be the new people that we are, and that in other moments and in other things it is our pride to be considered? Why, in a sort of rhetorical maudlin, claim Shakespeare and Westminster Abbey and Runymede and Naseby fight? They are not ours. We have history and an ancestry of our own, great enough to satisfy any ambition. Our birth is prosaic, and our history neither dim nor uncertain. It has no twilight for fancy to dwell upon, or to draw weird pictures out of. It is hard to work its stern features into poetry, rhetoric, or painting. Our ancestors were men, not warriors, not sea-kings, not demi-gods, but men moulded in the matrix of a rare manliness; men who grew by the hard things God blessed them with; who couldn't be bent by circumstance, by disaster, by tyranny; before whom all these bended and disappeared. The bald facts stand patent to the world. Our fathers were men an old world did not want, men of troublesome conscience and earnest spirit, who had lost faith in kings and in kings' followers, who believed in a light to shine from God's truth into the heart and into the world

which men had never seen. It is not forcing fact to speak of the republic as sprung from the loins of the Pilgrims. There were other men of other motive to settle themselves along the Atlantic shore; but playing no part in the busy drama are James-town, and the first harbor of Lord Baltimore's colony, and Hendrik Hudson's discovery, and the Huguenots' retreat. Some local influence of each survives in custom, institution, character; but the world goes on forgetting them. Alone has Pilgrim character and Pilgrim principle outrun the narrow limit of province and of blood. The men of Scrooby village, the passengers of the Mayflower, the exiles of Plymouth rock, or the more courtly men of the later Massachusetts Colony, have given their character to the republic. The pact of the Mayflower preceded, contained, necessitated the Declaration of Independence as the blossom precedes, necessitates, contains the fruit. It is the Pilgrim spirit that breathes in that immortal paper; that guided that first bold signature, which the brave man hoped was large enough for kings to see; that to-day dominates the land. In the same breath that they have denied, derided, despised the men and principles of New England, have I heard men make the half-reluctant, half-admiring confession, that there is no hope to the country except in their supremacy. Not yet quite