and our responsibilities; if we could realize that the want of good men may be a heavier woe to a land than any want of what the world calls great men, our Centennial year would not only be signalized by splendid ceremonials and magnificent commemorations, and gorgeous expositions, but it would go far toward fulfilling something of the grandeur of that "Acceptable Year" which was announced by higher than human lips, and would be the auspicious promise and pledge of a glorious second century of independence and freedom for our country!

FAITH IN THE HIGHER AND BETTER.

For, if that second century of self-government is to go on safely to its close, or is to go on safely and prosperously at all, there must be some renewal of that old spirit of subordination and obedience to divine as well as human laws, which has been our security in the past. There must be faith in something higher and better than ourselves. There must be a reverent acknowledgment of an unseen, but all-seeing, all-controlling Ruler of the Universe. His Word, His Day, His House, His Worship, must be sacred to our children, as they have been to their fathers; and His blessing must never fail to be invoked upon our land and upon our liberties. The patriot voice which cried from the balcony of yonder old State House, when the Declaration had been originally proclaimed, "Stability and perpetuity to American Independence," did not fail to add, "God save our American States." I would I would prolong that ancestral prayer. And the last phrase to pass my lips at this hour, and to take its chance of remembrance or oblivion in years to come, as the conclusion of this Centennial oration, and the sum of all I can say to the present or the future, shall be: There is, there can be, no independence of God; in Him, as a nation, no less than in Him, as individuals, "we live, and move, and have our being!" God save our American States!

THE

II. EXTRACTS FROM MICHIGAN ORATIONS.

HE fact that our Michigan orations do not generally follow any leading idea same by which they can be entitled, and that some of them cover the same ground with others, necessitates a deviation from the typographical style of the last chapter. None of the orations are given entire, and, for convenience, the names of authors will hold the leading position as titles, the special topics being sub-headed. Introductory matter is generally omitted, and selections made only of salient points. We will except from these remarks the oration by Mr. T. B. Church, at Grand Rapids, which is given the first place in this chapter, and nearly at full length, the proper title of which should be, "The Contest of Principle."

MR. THOMAS B. CHURCH, AT GRAND RAPIDS.*

Fellow-Citizens:-The Declaration of Independence, to the reading of which you have just listened, and the one hundredth anniversary of which we have assembled to commemorate, was at once the cause and catastrophe of that great drama, the North American Revolution, whose "swelling scenes" were the dismemberment of the British Empire, and the establishment of confederative republican institutions on this Western Continent.

COMMEMORATING THE ERA OF THE REVOLUTION.

Has an event which is the corner-stone of our national history lost its interest in the minds of men? Are the necessities that led to it, the processes reaching this grand result, now generally and familiarly known and understood? Have our magnificent progress, our unprecedented successes in arts and arms, in statesmanship and war, partially obliterated this primal and seminal transaction from the American memory? Do we all often enough recur to the era of the Revolution, investigate its history, and imbue our hearts and intellects with its patriotism and its wisdom?

How many of our young men, claiming to be intelligent; how many of our lawyers, claiming to be learned, can tell what were the "writs of assistance," in opposition to which James Otis made Faneuil Hall and the town meetings

* Oration properly entitled "The Contest of Principle."

vocal with his fiery declamation; who were the "mandamus" counselors against whose authority the provincial Congresses protested; and why the tax on tea led to the death of Warren at Bunker Hill, as the charge of ship money had before to the death of Hampden on the plain of Chalgrove?

Let us, on this Centennial festival day of the nation, consider these things. Let us here and now evoke the spirit of that time and those men. Let us contemplate the elements of their unequaled civic character. Standing almost in the "visible presence" of those statesmen and warriors of the ancient republic, may we realize the perils of the past, the responsibilities of the present, and the hopes of the future!

THREE STAGES OF THE REVOLUTION.

There are three stages or periods in the history of the North American Revolution. The first commences with the orders and laws of the British parliament, designed to enforce the navigation act of 1660, and terminates in the Declaration of Independence. This first stage embraces the struggle for the preservation of the ancient liberties of those colonies, issuing in a civil war, the causes of which, in part, and the objects of which are exhibited in the Declaration. The second stage consists of the War of Independence, which began fifteen months before the Declaration, and was closed by the treaty of peace negotiated at Paris, November 30, 1783. The third stage was the establishment of the Federal Constitution, what is commonly denominated our "general government." The convocation of the first Continental Congress, in Philadelphia, in September, 1774, and the assembly of the first Congress under the present Federal Constitution, in New York, on the 4th of March, 1789, comprise the beginning and the end of the last, and perhaps the most important, stage of the great North American Revolution.

A CONTEST OF PRINCIPLE.

The war of independence, we say, was preceded by a contest of principle; a struggle for the preservation of the ancient liberties of the colonies, induced, developed and matured into "overt acts" of resistance by the attempt of the British government to monopolize the commerce of the colonies, and to burden them with taxation by acts of parliament; and this stage of the North American Revolution we will more particularly consider.

In the year 1660, during the session of the famous "long parliament," the act of navigation was passed, which, embodying and enlarging the provisions of its predecessor and precedent-the act of 1651-was designed to secure to Great Britain the whole trade of the plantations. It provided, among other

things, that none but English ships should transport American produce over the ocean, and that the principal articles of that produce should be sold in the markets of the mother country only. In 1663 it was further enacted that such commodities as the colonies wished to purchase should be purchased within the same markets, and severe rules were prescribed to enforce these laws during the protectorate of Cromwell and the subsequent reigns. Thus, to tie up the commerce of the colonies for the exclusive advantage of England, was the intent and operation of twenty-nine acts of Parliament, from 1660 to 1764, forming what Mr. Burke expressively denominated "an infinite variety of paper chains to bind together your complicated system of colonial legislation." But this legislation was based on commercial policy alone-policy shaped for a commercial monopoly-and its restrictive features were designed, doubtless, to make the colonies contribute in their proportion to the strength and unity of the empire. The vast interests ultimately to be affected, and the vast pecuniary revenues thus to be indirectly secured to England, were probably never contemplated by the early legislators on the subject. America was then (again to quote the graphic language of Mr. Burke) "a little speck scarce visible in the mass of national interests; a small seminal principle, rather than a formed body;" and its astonishing growth and development, for a half century, seemed to an incredulous house, when the orator portrayed its progress, rather as the coloring of his own fervid imagination than a narrative of authentic facts.

"Nothing in the history of mankind," says he, "is like their progress. When I cast my eyes on their flourishing commerce, and their cultivated and commodious life, they seem to me rather ancient nations, grown to perfection through a long series of fortunate events, and a train of successful industry, accumulating wealth in many centuries, than the colonies of yesterday, not so much sent out as thrown out, a few years ago, on the bleak and barren shore of a desolate wilderness, thousands of miles from all civilized intercourse."

"Whatever England has been growing to," again he says, "by a progressive increase of improvements brought in by civilizing settlements and civilizing conquests, and by varieties of people, in seventeen hundred years, you see so much added to America in a single life." In fact, Chatham was the first English minister who observed the wealth and resources of these possessions of the crown, and who foresaw their importance. He deemed Spain, Holland, and France, successively the objects of his inimical policy, chiefly to be feared as maritime rivals of England; and to cripple the naval armaments of the two former powers, and to drive the latter from North America and the West Indies, were the bold, grand plans of action he urged upon a timorous cabinet.

He correctly viewed the fisheries as a nursery of seamen, and therefore, with characteristic energy, prosecuted the war which secured to Great Britain Canada and the control of the adjacent islands, and jurisdiction over the New Foundland banks.

TAXATION NOT CONTEMPLATED BY EARLY LEGISLATION.

But during the whole period from 1660 to 1764, taxation formed no part of the government scheme or the object of parliamentary enactment. Directly to draw a revenue from the colonies was not intended nor declared. Though a commercial monopoly of increasing severity and, according to the present lights of political economy, of injurious effect, was imposed upon the colonies, they exhibited neither resentment nor resistance. Ungracious and unjust as were the navigation act of 1660 and all its correlative and corroborative laws, they were borne as the inevitable condition of metropolitan protection, and were compensated, as some colonial statesmen then argued, by a corresponding investment of English capital in America. Usage, rather than formal and advised assent to these commercial regulations, had made them to the colonists a law of their being, "which had grown with their growth and strengthened with their strength," and to whose compressive energy their expanding faculties and limbs had by daily practice become accommodated.

SUPREMACY OF PARLIAMENT ADMITTED.

It may safely be concluded that the supremacy of Parliament, so far as the legislative power had ever been exercised, was admitted in all the colonies, whether provincial, proprietary or chartered. England herself always maintained that Parliament had power to bind the colonies in all cases whatever. But Parliament, whatever might be the theoretical views of the government, had never transcended her old and systematic course of commercial restriction. No necessity had arisen, no motive had been presented to the colonies (in which, however, an enlarged experience was creating gradually a juster appreciation of constitutional privilege and popular rights), to question or attack the foundation or extent of parliamentary supremacy.

PROTESTS BY MASSACHUSETTS.

Massachusetts alone had looked adversely upon the interference of Parlia ment, even in the regulation of commerce, as far back as 1640, prior to the famous navigation acts of 1651 and 1660; and those acts were frequently evaded by the restless and ingenious spirit of the merchants of that colony. The addresses of her general court to the crown in 1757, 1761, and 1768, admit