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AMERICAN NATIONALITY.

AN ORATION DELIVERED IN BOSTON ON THE EIGHTY-SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, JULY 5, 1858.

It is well that in our year, so busy, so secular, so discordant, there comes one day when the word is, and when the emotion is, "Our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country." It is well that law, our only sovereign on earth; duty, not less the daughter of God, not less within her sphere supreme; custom, not old alone, but honored and useful; memories; our hearts, have set a time in which, scythe, loom, and anvil stilled, shops shut, wharves silent, the flag, our flag unrent, the flag of our glory and commemoration waving on mast-head, steeple, and highland, we may come together and walk hand in hand, thoughtful, admiring, through these galleries of civil greatness; when we may own together the spell of one hour of our history upon us all; when faults may be forgotten, kindnesses revived, virtues remembered and sketched unblamed; when the arrogance of reform, the excesses of reform, the strifes of parties, the rivalries of regions, shall give place to a wider, warmer, and juster sentiment; when turning from the corners and dark places of offensiveness, if such the candle lighted by malignity, or envy, or censoriousness, or truth, has revealed anywhere, when, turning from these, we may go up together to the serene and secret mountain-top and there pause, and there unite in the reverent exclamation, and in the exultant prayer, "How beautiful at last are thy tabernacles! What people at last is like unto thee! Peace be within thy palaces, and joy within thy gates! The high places are thine, and there shalt thou stand proudly, and innocently, and securely."

Happy, if such a day shall not be desecrated by our service! Happy, if for us that descending sun shall look out on a more loving, more elevated, more united America! These, no less, no narrower, be the aims of our celebration. These always were the true aims of this celebration. In its origin, a recital or defence of the grounds and principles of the Revolution, now demanding and permitting no defence, all taken for granted, and all had by heart; then sometimes wasted in a parade of vainglory, cheap and vulgar, sometimes profaned by the attack and repulse of partisan and local rhetoricians; its great work, its distinctive character, and its chief lessons remain and vindicate themselves, and will do so while the eye of the fighting or the dying shall yet read on the stainless, ample folds the superscription blazing still in light, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.

I have wished, therefore, as it was my duty, in doing myself the honor to join you in this act, to give some direction to your thoughts and feelings, suited at once to the nation's holiday, and seasonable and useful in itself. How difficult this may be, I know. To try, however, to try to do anything, is easy, and it is American also. Your candor will make it doubly easy, and to your candor I commit myself.

The birthday of a nation, old or young, and certainly if young, is a time to think of the means of keeping alive the nation. I do not mean to say, however, because I do not believe, that there is but one way to this, the direct and the didactic. For at last it is the spirit of the day which we would cherish. It is our great annual national love-feast which we keep; and if we rise from it with hearts larger, beating fuller, with feeling purer and warmer for America, what signifies it how frugally, or how richly, or how it was spread; or whether it was a strain on the organ, the trumpet tones of the Declaration, the prayer of the good man, the sympathy of the hour, or what it was, which wrought to that end?

I do not, therefore, say that such an anniversary is not a time for thanksgiving to God, for gratitude to men, the living and the dead, for tears and thoughts too deep for tears, for eulogy, for exultation, for all the memories and for all the con-` trasts which soften and lift up the general mind. I do not

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say, for example, that to dwell on that one image of progress which is our history; that image so grand, so dazzling, so constant; that stream now flowing so far and swelling into so immense a flood, but which burst out a small, choked, uncertain spring from the ground at first; that transition from the Rock at Plymouth, from the unfortified peninsula at Jamestown, to this America which lays a hand on both the oceans, from that heroic yet feeble folk whose allowance to a man by the day was five kernels of corn, for three months no corn, or a piece of fish, or a moulded remainder biscuit, or a limb of a wild bird; to whom a drought in spring was a fear and a judgment, and a call for humiliation before God; who held their breath when a flight of arrows or a war-cry broke the innocent sleep or startled the brave watching, - from that handful, and that want, to these millions, whose area is a continent, whose harvests might load the board of famishing nations, for whom a world in arms has no terror; to trace the long series of causes which connected these two contrasted conditions, the Providences which ordained and guided a growth so stupendous; the dominant race, sober, earnest, constructive, changed, but not degenerate here; the influx of other races, assimilating, eloquent, and brave; the fusion of all into a new one; the sweet stimulations of liberty; the removal by the whole width of oceans from the establishments of Europe, shaken, tyrannical, or burdened; the healthful virgin world; the universal progress of reason and art, universal as civilization; the aspect of revolutions on the human mind; the expansion of discovery and trade; the developing sentiment of independence; the needful baptism of wars; the brave men, the wise men; the Constitution, the Union; the national life and the feeling of union which have grown with our growth and strengthened with our strength, I do not say that meditations such as these might not teach or deepen the lesson of the day. All these things, so holy and beautiful, all things American, may afford certainly the means to keep America alive. That vast panorama unrolled by our general history, or unrolling; that eulogy, so just, so fervent, so splendid, so approved; that electric, seasonable memory of Washington; that purchase and that dedication of the dwelling and the tomb, the work of woman and of the orator of the age;

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that record of his generals; that visit to battle-fields; that reverent wiping away of dust from great urns; that speculation, that dream of her past, present, and future; every ship builded on lake or ocean; every treaty concluded; every acre of territory annexed; every cannon cast; every machine invented; every mile of new railroad and telegraph undertaken; every dollar added to the aggregate of national or individual wealth, these all as subjects of thought, as motives to pride and care, as teachers of wisdom, as agencies for probable good, may work, may insure, that earthly immortality of love and glory for which this celebration was ordained.

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My way, however, shall be less ambitious and less indirect. Think, then, for a moment, on AMERICAN NATIONALITY itself; the outward national life, and the inward national sentiment; think on this; its nature, and some of its conditions and some of its ethics-I would say, too, some of its dangers, but there shall be no expression of evil omen in this stage of the discourse, and to-day, at least, the word is safety, or hope.

To know the nature of American nationality, examine it first by contrast, and then examine it in itself.

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In some of the elemental characteristics of political opinion, the American people are one. These they can no more renounce for substance than the highest summit of the highest of the White Hills, than the peak of the Alleghanies, than the Rocky Mountains can bow and cast themselves into the sea. Through all their history, from the dawn of the colonial life to the brightness of this rising, they have spoken them, they have written them, they have acted them, they have run over with them. In all stages, in all agonies, through all report, good and evil, some learning from the golden times of ancient and mediæval freedom, Greece and Italy and Geneva, from Aristotle, from Cicero and Bodinus, and Machiavel and Calvin; or later, from Harrington and Sidney and Rousseau; some learning, all reinforcing it directly from nature and nature's God, all have held and felt that every man was equal to every other man; that every man had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and a conscience unfettered; that the people were the source of power, and the good of the people was the political object of society itself. This creed, so grand, so broad, in its general and duly qualified, so true,

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planted the colonies, led them through the desert and the sea of ante-revolutionary life, rallied them all together to resist the attacks of a king and a minister, sharpened and pointed the bayonets of all their battles, burst forth from a million lips, beamed in a million eyes, burned in a million bosoms, sounded out in their revolutionary eloquence of fire and in the Declaration, awoke the thunders and gleamed in the lightning of the deathless words of Otis, Henry, and Adams, was graved forever on the general mind by the pen of Jefferson and Paine, survived the excitements of war and the necessities of order, penetrated and tinged all our constitutional composition and policy, and all our party organizations and nomenclature, and stands to-day, radiant, defiant, jocund, tiptoe, on the summits of our greatness, one authoritative and louder proclamation to humanity by Freedom, the guardian and the avenger. But in some traits of our politics we are not one. In some traits we differ from one another, and we change from ourselves. You may say these are subordinate, executory, instrumental traits. Let us not cavil about names, but find the essences of things. Our object is to know the nature of American nationality, and we are attempting to do so, first, by contrasting it with its antagonisms.

There are two great existences, then, in our civil life, which have this in common, though they have nothing else in common, that they may come in conflict with the nationality which I describe; one of them constant in its operation, constitutional, healthful, auxiliary, even; the other rarer, illegitimate, abnormal, terrible; one of them a force under law; the other a violence and a phenomenon above law and against law.

It is first the capital peculiarity of our system, now a commonplace in our politics, that the affections which we give to country we give to a divided object, the States in which we live and the Union by which we are enfolded. We serve two masters. Our hearts own two loves. We live in two countries at once, and are commanded to be capacious of both. How easy it is to reconcile these duties in theory; how reciprocally, more than compatible, how helpful and independent they are in theory; how in this respect our system's difference makes our system's peace, and from these blended colors, and this action and counteraction, how marvellous a beauty, and how

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