OUR NATIONAL BANNER. "A GRAND TRIUMPHAL MARCH." BY DEXTER SMITH, RENDERED AT PHILADELPHIA JULY, 4, 1876. I. O'er the high and o'er the lowly II. Let the banner wave forever. Till the stars shall pale on high; III. As it floated long before us, Be it ever floating o'er us, O'er our land from shore to shore; There are freemen yet to wave it, Millions who would die to save it, Wave it, save it evermore. WHAT THE AGE OWES TO AMERICA. AN ORATION DELIVERED BY WILLIAM M. EVARTS, AT PHILADELPHIA, JULY 4TH, 1876. I. THE event which to-day we commemorate supplies its own reflections and enthusiasms and brings its own plaudits. They do not at all hang on the voice of the speaker, nor do they greatly depend upon the contacts and associations of the place. The Declaration of American Independence was, when it occurred, a capital transaction in human affairs; as such it has kept its place in history; as such it will maintain itself while human interest in human institutions shall endure. The scene and the actors, for their profound impression upon the world, at the time and ever since, have owed nothing to dramatic effects, nothing to epical exaggerations. To the eye there was nothing wonderful, or vast, or splendid, or pathetic in the movement or the display. Imagination or art can give no sensible grace or decoration to the persons, the place, or the performance, which made up the business of that day. The worth and force that belong to the agents and the action rest wholly on the wisdom, the courage, and the faith that formed and executed the great design, and the potency and permanence of its operation upon the affairs of the world which, as foreseen and legitimate consequences, followed. The dignity of the act is the deliberate, circumspect, open, and serene performance by these men in the clear light of day, and by a concurrent purpose of a civic duty, which embraced the greatest hazards to themselves and to all the people from whom they held this deputed discretion, but which, to their sober judgments, promised benefits to that people and their posterity, from generation to generation, exceeding these hazards and commensurate with its own fitness. The question of their conduct is to be measured by the actual weight and pressure of the manifold considerations which surrounded the subject before them, and by the abundant evidence that they comprehended their vastness and variety. By a voluntary and responsible choice they willed to do what was done and what, without their will, would not have been done. Thus estimated, the illustrious act covers all who participated in it with its own renown, and makes them forever conspicuous among men, as it is forever famous among events. And thus the signers of the Declaration of our Independence “wrote their names where all nations should behold them, and all time should not efface them." It was, "in the course of human events," intrusted to them to determine whether the fulness of time had come when a nation should be born in a day. They declared the independence of a new nation in the sense in which men declare emancipation or declare war; the declaration created what was declared. Famous always, among men, are the founders of States, and fortunate above all others in such fame are these, our fathers, whose combined wisdom and courage began the great structure of our national existence, and laid sure the foundations of liberty and justice on which it rests. Fortunate, first, in the clearness of their title and in the world's acceptance of their rightful claim. Fortunate, next, in the enduring magnitude of the State they founded and the benificence of its protection of the vast interests of human life and happiness which have here had their home. Fortunate, again, in the admiring imitation of their work, which the institutions of the most powerful and most advanced nations more and more exhibit; and last of all, fortunate in the full demonstration of our later time that their work is adequate to withstand the most disastrous storms of human fortunes, and survive unwrecked, unshaken and unharmed. This day has now been celebrated by a great people, at each recurrence of its anniversary, for a hundred years, with every form of ostentatious joy, with every demonstration of respect and gratitude for the ancestral virtue which gave it its glory, and with the firmest faith that growing time should neither obscure its lustre nor reduce the ardor or discredit the sincerity of its observance. A reverent spirit has explored the lives of the men who took part in the great transaction; has unfolded their characters and exhibited to an admiring posterity the purity of their motives; the sagacity, the bravery, the fortitude, the perseverance which marked their conduct, and which secured the prosperity and permanence of their work. work of 1776. II. Philosophy has divined the secrets of all this power, and eloGrandeur of the quence emblazoned the magnificence of all its results. The heroic war which fought out the acquiescence of the Old World in the independence of the New; the manifold and masterly forms of noble character and of patient and serene wisdom which the great influences of the times begat; the large and splendid scale on which these elevated purposes were wrought out, and the majestic proportions to which they have been filled up; the unended line of eventful progress, casting ever backward a flood of light upon the sources of the original energy, and ever forward a promise and a prophecy of unexhausted power-all these have been made familiar to our people by the genius and the devotion of historians and orators. The greatest statesmen of the Old World for this same period of 100 years have traced the initial step in these events, looked into the nature of the institutions thus founded, weighed by the Old World wisdom, and measured by recorded experience, the probable fortunes of this new adventure on an unknown sea. This circumspect and searching survey of our wide field of political and social experiment, no doubt, has brought them a diversity of judgment as to the past and of expectation as to the future. But of the magnitude and the novelty and the power of the forces set at work by the event we commemorate, no competent authorities have ever greatly differed. The cotemporary judgment of Burke is scarcely an overstatement of the European opinion of the immense import of American independence. He declared: "A great revolution has happened-a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of power in any of the existing States, but by the appearance of a new State, of a new species, in a new part of the globe. It has made as great a change in all the relations and balances and gravitations of power as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world." It is easy to understand that the rupture between the Colonies and the mother country might have worked a result of political independence that would have involved no such mighty consequences as are here so strongly announced by the most philosophic statesman of his age. The resistance of the Colonies, which came to a head in the revolt, was led in the name and for the maintenance of the liberties of Englishmen, against Parliamentary usurpation and a subversion of the British Constitution. A triumph of those liberties might have ended in an emancipation from the rule of the English Parliament, and a continued submission to the scheme and system of the British monarchy, with an American Parliament adjusted thereto, upon the true principles of the English Constitution. Whether this new political establishment should have maintained loyalty to the British sovereign, or should have been organized under a crown and throne of its own, the transaction would, then, have had no other importance than such as belongs to a dismemberment of existing empire, but with preservation of existing institutions. There would have been, to be sure, a "new state," but not "of a new species," and that it was "in a new part of the globe" would have gone far to make the dismemberment but a temporary and circumstantial disturbance in the old order of things. Indeed, the solidity and perpetuity of that order might have been greatly confirmed by this propagation of the model of the European monarchies on the boundless regions of this continent. It is precisely here that the Declaration of Independence has its immense importance. As a civil act, and by the people's decree-and not by the achievement of the army, or through military motives-at the first stage of the conflict it assigned a new nationality, with its own institutions, as the civilly preordained end to be fought for and secured. It did not leave it to be an after-fruit of triumphant war, shaped and measured by military power, and conferred by the army on the people. This assured at the outset the supremacy of civil over military authority, the subordination of the army to the unarmed people. This deliberative choice of the scope and goal of the Revolution made sure of two things, which must have been always greatly in doubt, if military reasons and events had held the mastery over the civil power. The first was, that nothing less than the independence of the nation, and its separation from the system of Europe, would be attained if our arms were prosper |