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reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.

2. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind; let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little, if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecu tions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking, through blood and slaughter, his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some, and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety: but every difference of opinion is not a difference of prin

ciple.

3. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand, undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, -that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has, so far, kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, to be the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of

the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels, in the form of kings, to govern him? Let history answer this question.

4. Still one thing more, fellow-citizens: a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, but which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned, this is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

CHAPTER LIII.-EDWARD EVERETT.-1794-1865.

I.—Biographical.

1. Of four illustrious contemporary orators of Massachu setts,-Rufus Choate, Daniel Webster, Wendell Phillips, and Edward Everett, the last was called by his associates "the golden-mouthed." The outline of his history is as follows. He was born at Dorchester, Mass., graduated at Harvard University in his seventeenth year, was tutor there until his twentieth year, and preached the following year in Brattle-Street Church, Boston. He passed four years in Europe to prepare himself for the Greek professorship at Harvard, filled that position and edited the North American Review five years, was a representative in Congress ten years, was Governor of Massachusetts four years, was Minister to England under Tyler, was president of Harvard College three years, was President Fillmore's Secretary of State after the death of Daniel Webster, was elected to the United States Senate in 1853, but resigned in two years

in consequence of ill health, was candidate for the VicePresidency on the Union ticket with Mr. Bell in 1860, and died suddenly on the 15th of January, 1865.

2. Mr. Everett passed three years, from 1856, in charitable and patriotic service, lecturing in all parts of the Union on the Life and Character of Washington, to aid the Ladies' Mount Vernon Association in the purchase and dedication to the nation of the Mount Vernon estate, and assisting, by eloquent addresses, to fill the treasuries of charitable and literary societies. It is estimated that the sum thus gained and bestowed during these years was not less than ninety thousand dollars.

3. Mr. Everett's chosen field was oratory. To this pursuit he brought a mind naturally brilliant, and disciplined by a severe and wide range of studies. No detail of fact, of expression, of intonation, or of gesture, was too minute to escape his care. Hence he became a writer of great elegance, and a speaker of the highest polish and grace. The occasions of his addresses were varied and numerous. They were delivered in the Lyceum, before academic, literary, historical, and agricultural societies, on commemorative anniversaries of towns, of the State, and of the nation, and in eulogy of distinguished merchants, scholars, and statesmen.

4. Wherever Mr. Everett was placed, he was equal to all the positions that he held, acquitting himself in the pulpit, in the class-room, on the platform, in Senate-halls, in executive office, and in diplomacy, with great judgment and ability. He enjoyed the acquaintance of men conspicuous for their influence in all departments of public life in Europe and at home. He has left no great connected work behind him, but the volumes of his orations and addresses will long remain as standards of chaste elocution, as monuments of philosophical sagacity blended with a pure poetic taste, and as examples of historical research embodied in picturesque narrative. An accomplished Boston critic of art

and literature, Mr. Henry T. Tuckerman, distinguishes the greatest two American orators of this century with this fitting characterization :-" If Webster is the Michael Angelo of American oratory, Everett is the Raphael."

5. The following selections, differing much in character, are good examples of the exceeding grace and beauty of Mr. Everett's style. The first is an extract from an address delivered at Cambridge, Mass., on the 4th of July, 1826; and it derives additional interest from the circumstance that the two venerable ex-Presidents, Adams and Jefferson, whose virtues it commemorates, died on that very day, almost while the orator was pronouncing their eulogy, and within a few hours of each other.

II. The Men and Deeds of the Revolution.

1. Go back, fellow-citizens, to that day when Adams and Jefferson composed the sub-committee who reported the Declaration of Independence. Think of the mingled sensations of that proud and anxious day, compared to the joy of this. What reward, what crown, what treasure, could the world and all its kingdoms afford, compared with the honor and happiness of having been united in that commission, and living to see its most wavering hopes turned into glorious reality!

2. Venerable men, you have outlived the dark days which followed your more than heroic deed; you have outlived your own strenuous contention, who should stand first among the people whose liberty you had vindicated. You have lived to bear each other the respect which the nation bears to you both; and each has been so happy as to exchange the honorable name of the leader of a party," for that more honorable one, the Father of his country. While this our tribute of respect, on the jubilee of our indepen

a John Adams was the leader of the old Federal party, and Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic party.

dence, is paid to the gray hairs of the venerable survivor in our neighborhood," let it not less heartily be sped to him whose hand traced the lines of that sacred charter, which, to the end of time, has made this day illustrious.

3. And is an empty profession of respect all that we owe to the man who can show the original draught of the Declaration of the Independence of the United States of America, in his own handwriting? Ought not a title-deed like this to become the acquisition of the nation? Ought it not to be laid up in the public archives? Ought not the price at which it is bought to be a provision for the ease and comfort of the old age of him who drew it? Ought not he who, at the age of thirty, declared the independence of his country, at the age of eighty to be secured by his country in the enjoyment of his own?

4. Nor would we, on the return of this eventful day, forget the men who, when the conflict of council was over, stood forward in that of arms. Yet let me not, by faintly endeavoring to sketch, do deep injustice to, the story of their exploits. The efforts of a life would scarce suffice to draw this picture in all its astonishing incidents, in all its mingled colors of sublimity and woe, of agony and triumph. But the age of commemoration is at hand. The voice of our fathers' blood begins to cry to us from beneath the soil which it moistened. Time is bringing forward, in their proper relief, the men and the deeds of that high-souled day. The generation of contemporary worthies is gone; the crowd of the unsignalized great and good disappears; and the leaders in war, as well as the cabinet, are seen, in fancy's eye, to take their stations on the mount of remembrance.

5. They come from the embattled cliffs of Abraham;

a Adams was then living in what is the present town of Quincy, ten miles from Cambridge.

Jefferson was then living at Monticello, Virginia.

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