CENTENNIAL HYMN. BY T. J. SPEAR. SUNG BY MRS. BANTA. COMPOSED FOR THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., JULY 4TH, 1876. OFT the story has been told When our fathers took their stand And the freedom of the seas, For the year of jubilee. The Centennial of the free, That the States are all united A hundred years have flown Thus forever may there be Guarding well their native land, 836 THE PERMANENCY OF OUR INSTITUTIONS. AN ORATION BY HON. C. K. DAVIS, EX-GOV., MINN. DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT ST. PAUL, MINN., JULY 4TH, 1876. OF all the nations of the earth ours alone can commemorate such a day as this. The birthday of all of them excepting ours is lost in the mists of fable, obscured by transactions so equivocal that they have been falsified by history, or is so apochryphal in its character that the time cannot be fixed when independent life began. Like the Christian religion, our nation dates from a certain day -like it from that day dates a new dispensation, like it from that day began an evangelization which finds no limits wherever the freedom of man is unsecured, and which like it has intensified those aspirations for better things yet to come, which in every age have inspired the song of poets, the labors of statesmen, and the visions of political prophets. The origin of the old states, like that of the old religion, is veiled in mystery. The beginning of Buddhism is measured by the preposterous chronology of the Chinese empire. The origin of the Brahminical creeds is commensurate with that vast antiquity which the Hindoo nation claims. The fair and lovely forms of Grecian worship which speak distinctly, in exquisite forms of art, from a past of which nearly all else is dead, are coëval with the shadowy beginnings of the nation. The foundations of the Roman power are laid so deep in mythologic times that no one knows when the state began. The same is true of nearly all modern nations. They began in obscurity. But this land, blessed with its century of life, can point back, like Christianity, to one day, and say, like it, on this day my life began, my mission was known from the circumstances which attended my birth, my forerunners had cried in the wilderness to prepare the nations for my coming, my utterances have been a new political gospel, and while I come not to destroy, I do come to fulfil. This analogy involves something more than a fancied parallelism. The creed in this case has been the fact which made such a nation a possibility. For never until the perfect equality of man was proclaimed as a matter of religious faith was such a republic possible, and the immense period which elapsed before the state grew like a consummate flower out of the creed, after many a growth had come up and died before its day of bloom, only proves how necessary the creed was to the result and how obdurate was the political idolatry which required eighteen hundred years for any effectual extirpation. Like the creed, so did the new state commence its life with a declaration of the importance of the individual-with a declaration of individual personal right. The creed saved not a nation collectively like the Hebrews, but mankind in detail and individually. The formulated principles of the state enfranchised men not collectively as members of a certain tribe or state, but individually as members of the great brotherhood of man of every race and condition. There is such an assurance of permanency in a nation so founded that the mere fact that it has existed a century hardly challenges observation. But almost alone of all the nations it is now what it was in its beginning. The young republic has witnessed changes in the venerable assembly of nations into which it entered full grown one hundred years ago. It has seen monarchy discrowned, hierarchy disrobed and spurious republics brought low. England is not what she was when her cruel maternity ceased towards us. The power of the crown has been abridged; the liberty of the press has been secured; the elective franchise has been extended; the religious tests have been abolished; in short, every principle which was then considered as essential to her existence has been abandoned merely to copy the ideas which were the cause of the American revolution. The kingdom of France passed away. The American revolution was directly the cause of that fearful protest of personal right against the wrongs which for centuries the individual had suffered under the theory which makes the state everything and the person nothing in the scheme of government. The French republic, one and indivisible, came next in imitation of the one just arisen beyond the sea. By the law of reaction, the power of the individual was made so transcendent that there was in fact no state, and the result was that passions and resentments smothered for centuries broke forth with volcanic force and buried beneath their burning lava all law, all forms, all rights, and left a chaos. We saw that fleeting vision of glory and terror pass away. Then came the imperial pageant of Napoleon-as incongruous to our time as the triumph of a Roman conqueror-marching along the arena of history with suppliant kings in its train and encircling with the fiery zone of conquest peoples the most diverse, laying one sceptre over the land from the Biscayan bay to the Baltic sea. We saw that apocalyptic vision pass away like a cloud with all its blood-stained glories. We have seen other changes, until now, in imitation of what their ancestors helped on to establish one hundred years ago, a young republic, the mighty child of those efforts greets us from Finisterre. There is not to-day a state in Germany which remains as it was in 1776. Through revolution and short-lived republics, however, the rights of individual man have been extended to such a degree that the petty princes of that time who could sell their Hessians to fight in any war would not recognize their people or their institutions should they revisit the earth to-day. Spain has changed. The spiritual tyranny which reared its mitred front against every avenue of progress has passed away forever. Man has rights there now. She has been a republic. She is a constitutional monarchy. Her vast colonial possessions in the new world threw off her yoke long ago, and in imitation of the United States became republics, and have preserved that form of government through all the revolutions by which they have been distracted. In this case our example has affected two continents, like that volcanic sympathy which, it is said, makes the remotest extremities of the Andes and Rocky Mountains feel and respond to every convulsive throe occurring anywhere along that mighty spine on which the continents are built. Italy, too, that treasure-house of history, with all its models, examples and warnings, which shows all that man has done in solving. the problem of government; which has enjoyed or has been afflict ed with every form of state, the republic, the despotism, the hierarchy, in sympathy with what was done here a hundred years ago, has cast off her chains, has asserted the rights of individual man, has consolidated her people, and would to-day be unrecognizable by those who ruled her then. Turn the pages of history since 1776, and in the records of every state you will find transcripts from our own experience. All this has occurred not through armed conquest, but through that peaceful means by which good and right always assert themselves and prevail against every obstacle which fraud or force oppose. Let us now gather the experience of the century which closes with to-day; review in brief the progress with which it has been signalized, note with pride the instances in which the republic is an exponent, and, with emotions of repentance, the errors which we are committing. At the outset our fathers were compelled to be false to their principal conception of the equality of man. The fault was not theirs and they inherited a disease. The institution of slavery was entailed upon them. The slave ship, 66 -built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark," was not of their construction. They were impressed into its service by the cupidity of the mother country; by the same cupidity which taxed them without representation, and which held that Magna Charta, the fairest and most perennial growth that ever sprang from the field of Runnymede was not transplanted to those boundless areas of the western world, which freedom spread with cherishing hand and then veiled from the sight of man by ocean's watery curtain, until the age should come when her heirs, the human race, should enter full grown into their inheritance. That our fathers were not in this in advance of their age is not to be wondered at. It was an age when the distinctive lines between nationalities were very sharp and hostile, and particularly between types of mankind so opposed as whites and blacks. The laws of nations were rudimentary. The theory of the common law almost warrants the assertion that an alien was an enemy. The railroad and telegraph had not brought people of diverse blood together. Where now a few days will place the Saxon beside the Chinese in his home, where now you can place your ear to a small mechanism |