to the honor and glory of our religion, of our political faiths, and of the whole training of our past history. But there was something more dangerous than war. An insidious serpent is more dangerous than a roaring lion-if the lion does not jump before he roars. Repudiation threatened more damnation to the morals of this nation than ever war did with all its mischiefs; and I want to record, to the honor of our foreign population, of whom it is often said, "When you come to a great stress, when questions are to be settled on principles of rectitude and truth, they will be found wanting"-I want to record to the honor of the population that we have borrowed from Europe, the fact that when the question came, "Shall this nation pay every dollar which it promised, and by which it put the boys in blue into the field?" it was through the West and the Northwest, the foreign vote together with the vote of our own people, that carried the day for honesty and for public integrity. Now, for a democratic nation that owns everything-the government, the law, the policy, the magistrate, the ruler; that can change; that can make and unmake; that has in its hands almost the power of the Highest to exalt one and to put down another for such a nation to stand before the world and show that this great people, swarming through our valleys and over our mountains and far away to either shore, and without the continuity necessary to the creation of a common public sentiment, were willing to bear the brunt of a five years' war and to be severely taxed, down to this day, and yet refuse to lighten its burdens in a way that would be wrong and dishonorable-that will weigh more in Europe than any test that any nation is able to put forth, for its honor, its integrity, its strength, and its promise of future life. Look back, then, through the hundred years of our national history. They are to me like ascending stairs, some of which are broader, some narrower, some with higher rising, and some with less than others; but on the whole there has been a steady ascent in intelligence, in conscience, in purity, in industry, in happiness, in the art of living well individually, and in the higher art of living well collectively, and we stand to-day higher Our burdens are flea-bites. We have than at any other time. some trouble about money. I never saw a time when the most of the population did not. We have our trouble because there is too much in some places and too little in others. The trouble with us is like the trouble in winter, when the snow has fallen and drifted, and leaves one-half of the road bare, while it is piled up in the other half, so that you cannot get along for the much the little. But a distribution will speedily bring all things right-and I think we are not far from the time when that will take place. So soon as we touch the ground of universal confidence, so soon as we stand on a basis of silver and gold— then, and not an hour before then, will this nation begin to move on in the old prosperity of business. sumption. I determined not to say anything that could be construed as an allusion to party politics, and what I have said cannot be so construed for both sides around here say that they are for reThe only difference is, that one party say that they are for resumption, and the others say, that they are for resumption, as soon as we can have it. Well, I do not see how anybody can say anything more. You cannot resume before you can. stand in Fellow-citizens, in looking back upon the past, it is not right that we should leave the sphere and field of our remarks without one glance at the future. In another hundred years not one of us will be here. Some other speaker, doubtless, will my place. Other hearers will throng-though not with more courtesy, nor with more kindly patience than you have to listen to his speech. Then on every eminence from New York to Albany there will be mansions and cottages, and garden will touch garden along the whole Eden of the Hudson River Valley. But it does not matter so much to us, who come and go, what takes place in the future, except so far as our influence is concerned. When a hundred years hence the untelling sun, that saw Arnold, and André, and Washington, but will not tell us and on this unchanging river-then it is for us to have set in motion, or to have given renewed impulse to those great causes, intellectual, moral, social, and political, which have rolled our prosperity to such a hight. To every young man here that is beginning life let me say : Listen not to those insidious teachers who tell you that patriotism is a sham, and that all public men are corrupt or corrupters. Men in public or private life are corrupt here and there, but let me say to you, no corruption in government would be half so bad as to have the seeds of unbelief in public administration sown in the minds of the young. If you teach the young that their Chief Magistrates, their Cabinets and their representatives are of course corrupt, what will that be but to teach them to be themselves corrupt? I stand here to bear witness and say that publicity may consist with virtue, and does. There are men that serve the public for the public, though they themselves thrive by it also. I would sow in your minds a romance of patriotism and love of country that shall be next to the love which you have for your own households; and I would say to every mother that teaches her child to pray, Next to the petition, "Our Father which art in heaven," let it learn this aspiration Our Fatherland; and so let our children grow up to love God, to love man, and to love their country, and to be glad to serve their country as well as their God and their fellow men, though it may be necessary that they should lay down their lives to serve it. I honor the unknown ones that used to walk in Peekskill and who fell in battle. I honor, too, every armless man, every limping soldier, that through patriotism went to the battle-field and came back lame and crippled; and bears manfully and heroically his deprivation. What though he find no occupation? What though he be forgotten? He has in him the imperishable sweetness of his thought: "I did it for my country's sake." For God's sake and for your country's sake, live and you shall live forever. OUR NOBLE HERITAGE. AN ORATION BY HON. GEORGE W. CURTIS, DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, NORTHFIELD, STATEN MR. PRESIDENT, FELLOW-CITIZENS, NEIGHBORS, AND FRIENDS :On the 19th of April, 1775, when Samuel Adams well called the father of the Revolution, heard the first shots of the British upon Lexington Green, he knew that war had at last begun, and full of enthusiasm, of hope, of trust in America, he exclaimed with rapture, "Oh? what a glorious morning." And there is no fellow-citizen of ours, wherever he may be to-day-whether sailing the remotest seas or wandering among the highest Alps, however far removed, however long seperated from his home, who, as his eyes open upon this glorious morning, does not repeat with the same fervor the words of Samuel Adams, and thank God with all his heart, that he too is an American. In imagination he sees infinitely multiplied the very scene that we beFrom every roof and gable, from every door and window of all the myriads of happy American homes from the seaboard to the mountains, and from the mountains still onward to the sea, the splendor of this summer heaven is reflected in the starry beauty of the American flag. From every steeple and tower in crowded cities and towns, from the village belfry, and the school-house and meeting-house on solitary country roads, ring out the joyous peals. From countless thousands of reverend lips ascends the voice of prayer. Everywhere the inspiring Of the great Declaration that we have heard, the charter hold. words of our Independence, the scripture of our liberty, is read aloud in eager, in grateful ears. And above all, and under all, pulsing through all the praise and prayer, from the frozen sea to the tropic gulf, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the great heart of a great people beats in fullness of joy, beats with pious exultation, that here at last, upon our soil-here, by the wisdom of our fathers and the bravery of our brothers, is founded a Republic, vast, fraternal, peaceful, upon the divine corner- stone of liberty, justice and equal rights. There have indeed been other republics, but they were founded upon other principles. There are republics in Switzerland to-day a thousand years old. But Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden are pure democracies not larger than the county in which we live, and wholly unlike our vast, national and representative republic. Athens was a republic, but Marathon and Salamis, battles whose names are melodious in the history of liberty, were won by slaves. Rome was a republic, but slavery degraded it to an empire. Venice, Genoa, Florence, were republican cities, but they were tyrants over subject neighbors, and slaves of aristocrats at home. There were republics in Holland, honorable forever, because from them we received our common schools, the bulwark of American liberty, but they too were republics of classes, not of the people. It was reserved for our fathers to build a republic upon a declaration of the equal rights of men; to make the Government as broad as humanity; to found political institutions upon faith in human nature. "The sacred rights of mankind," fervently exlaimed Alexander Hamilton, "are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records; they are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself." That was the sublime faith in which this century began. The world stared and sneered -the difficulties and dangers were colossal. For more than eighty years that Declaration remained only a Declaration of faith. But, fellow-citizens, fortunate beyond all men, our eyes behold its increasing fulfillment.The sublime faith of the fathers is more and more the familiar fact of the children. And the proud flag which floats over America to-day, as it is the bond of indissoluble union, so it is the seal of ever enlarging equality, and ever surer justice. Could the men of that earlier day, could Samuel Adams and all his associates have lived through this amazing century to see this glorious morning, as they counted these teeming and expanding States, as they watched the ad |