ADDRESS.

BY GEN. JOHN A. DIX, EX-GOV. OF NEW YORK, PRESIDENT OF THE DAY.

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC, N. Y., JULY 4TH, 1876.

FELLOW-CITIZENS :-One hundred years ago to-day, in our sister city of Philadelphia, a band of courageous and devoted men, at the peril of their lives and everything they held dear, set at defiance one of the most powerful nations of Europe and proclaimed to the world that the American Colonies, which they represented, were free and independent States, assuming for them " among the powers of the earth," to use their own language, "the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them." The three millions in whose behalf the Declaration of Independence was made are now more than forty millions, and wherever patriotic hearts are to be found-whether in the crowded thoroughfares of cities and towns or in the quietude of rural habitations-they are overflowing with gratitude for our prosperity, our good name among the nations, our free institutions, our widespread domain, never again to be pressed by a servile foot, and for our deliverance from the dangers through which we have passed; above all, the late fearful peril of disunion. You will hear from eloquent lips the story of our trials and our triumphs, and of the fulfillment of that memorable prophecy uttered a century and a half ago of the progress of "the star of empire" westward. But first let us listen to the Rev. Dr. Adams, and join him in acknowledging our thankfulness to Almighty God for our preservation during the hundred years that are past, and in fervent supplication for His continued protection and favor through the years that are to come.

RISE OF CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY.

AN ORATION DELIVERED BY THE REV. DR. R. S. STORRS,

AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC, NEW YORK, JULY 4, 1876.

MR. PRESIDENT-FELLOW-CITIZENS: The long-expected day has come, and passing peacefully the impalpable line which separates ages, the Republic completes its hundreth year. The predictions in which affectionate hope gave inspiration to political prudence are fulfilled. The fears of the timid, and the hopes of those to whom our national existence is a menace, are alike dlsappointed. The fable of the physical world becomes the fact of the political; and after alternate sunshine and storm, after heavings of the earth which only deepened its roots, and ineffectual blasts of lightning whose lurid threat died in the air, under a sky now raining on it benignant influence, the century-plant of American Independence and popular government bursts into this magnificent blossom of a joyful celebration illuminating the land!

With what desiring though doubtful expectation those whose action we commemorate looked for the possible coming of this day, we know from the records which they have left. With what anxious solicitude the statesmen and the soldiers of the following generation anticipated the changes which might take place before this Centennial year should be reached, we have heard ourselves, in their great and fervent admonitory words. How dim' and drear the prospect seemed to our own hearts fifteen years since, when, on the fourth of July 1861, the XXXVIIth Congress met at Washington with no representative in either House from any State south of Tennessee and Western Virginia, and when a determined and numerous army, under skillful commanders, approached and menaced the capital and the government-this we surely have not forgotten; nor how, in the terrible years which followed, the blood and fire, and vapor of smoke, seemed oftentimes to swim as a sea, or to rise as a wall, between our eyes and this anniversary.

"It cannot outlast the second generation from those who founded it," was the exulting conviction of the many who loved

the traditions and state of monarchy, and who felt them insecure before the widening fame in the world of our prosperous Republic. "It may not reach its hundredth year," was the deep and sometimes the sharp apprehension of those who felt, as all of us felt, that their own liberty, welfare, hope, with the brightest political promise of the world, were bound up with the unity and the life of our nation. Never was solicitude more intense, never was prayer to Almighty God more fervent and constantnot in the earliest beginnings of our history, when Indian ferocity threatened that history with a swift termination, not in the days of supremest trial amid the Revolution-than in those years when the nation seemed suddenly split asunder, and forces which had been combined for its creation were clenched and rocking back and forth in bloody grapple on the question of its maintenance.

The prayer was heard. The effort and the sacrifice have come to their fruitage; and to-day the nation-still one, as at the start, though now expanded over such immense spaces, absorbing such incessant and diverse elements from other lands, developing within it opinions so conflicting, interests so various, and forms of occupation so novel and manifold-to-day the nation, emerging from the toil and the turbulent strife, with the earlier and the later clouds alike swept out of its resplendent stellar arch, pauses from its work to remember and rejoice; with exhilarated spirit to anticipate its future; with reverent heart to offer to God its great Te Deum.

Not here alone, in this great city, whose lines have gone out into all the earth, and whose superb progress in wealth, in culture, and in civic renown, is itself the most illustrious token of the power and beneficence of that frame of government under which it has been realized; not alone in yonder, I had almost said adjoining, city, whence issued the paper that first announced our national existence, and where now rises the magnificent Exposition, testifying for all progressive States to their respect and kindness toward us, the radiant clasp of diamond and opal on the girdle of the sympathies which interweave their peoples with ours; not alone in Boston, the historic town, first in resistance to British aggression, and foremost in plans for

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the new and popular organization, one of whose citizens wrote his name, as if cutting it with a plough-share, at the head of all on our great charter, another of whose citizens was its intrepid and powerful champion, aiding its passage through the Congress; not there alone, nor yet in other great cities of the land, but in smaller towns, in villages and hamlets, this day will be kept, a secular Sabbath, sacred alike to memory and to hope.

Not only, indeed, where men are assembled, as we are here, will it be honored. The lonely and remote will have their part in this commemoration. Where the boatman follows the winding stream, or the woodman explores the forest shades; where the miner lays down his eager drill beside rocks which guard the precious veins; or where the herdsman, along the sierras, looks forth on the seas which now reflect the rising day, which at our midnight shall be gleaming like gold in the setting sun -there also will the day be regarded, as a day of memorial. The sailor on the sea will note it, and dress his ship in its brightest array of flags and bunting. Americans dwelling in foreign lands will note and keep it.

London itself will to-day be more festive because of the event which a century ago shadowed its streets, incensed its Parliament, and tore from the crown of its obstinate King the chiefest jewel. On the boulevards of Paris, in the streets of Berlin, and along the leveled bastions of Vienna, at Marseilles and at Florence, upon the silent liquid ways of stately Venice, in the passes of the Alps, under the shadow of church and obelisk, palace and ruin, which still prolong the majesty of Rome; yea, further East, on the Bosphorus, and in Syria; in Egypt, which writes on the front of its compartment in the great Exhibition, "The oldest people of the world sends its morning-greeting to the youngest nation;" along the heights behind Bombay, in the foreign hongs of Canton, in the "Islands of the Morning," which found the dawn of their new age in the startling sight of an American squadron entering their bays-everywhere will be those who have thought of this day, and who join with us to greet its coming.

No other such anniversary, probably has attracted hitherto

such general notice. You have seen Rome, perhaps, on one of those shinging April days when the traditional anniversary of the founding of the city fills its streets with civic processions, with military display, and the most elaborate fire-works in Europe; you may have seen Holland, in 1782, when the whole country bloomed with orange on the three-hundredth anniversary of the capture by the sea-beggars of the city of Briel, and of the revolt against Spanish domination which thereupon flashed on different sides into sudden explosion. But these celebrations, and others like them, have been chiefly local. The world outside has taken no wide impression from them. This of ours is the first of which many lapds, in different tongues, will have had report. Partly because the world is narrowed in our time, and its distant peoples are made neighbors, by the fleeter machineries now in use; partly because we have drawn so many to our population from foreign lands, while the restless and acquisitive spirit of our people has made them at home on every shore; but partly, also, and essentially, because of the nature and the relations of that event which we commemorate, and of the influence exerted by it on subsequent history, the attention of men is more or less challenged, in every centre of commerce and of thought, by this anniversary.

Indeed it is not unnatural to feel-certainly it is not irreverent to feel that they who by wisdom, by valor, and by sacrifice, have contributed to perfect and maintain the institutions which we possess, and have added by death as well as by life to the lustre of our history, must also have an interest in this day; that in their timeless habitations they remember us beneath the lower circle of the heavens, are glad in our joy and share and lead our grateful praise. To a spirit alive with the memories of the time, and rejoicing in its presage of nobler futures, recalling the great, the beloved, the heroic, who have labored and joyfully died for its coming, it will not seem too fond an enthusiasm to feel that the air is quick with shapes we cannot see, and glows with faces whose light serene we may not catch! They who counseled in the Cabinet, they who defined and settled the law in decisions of the Bench, they who pleaded with mighty eloquence in the Senate, they who poured out their