Fire and fagot, chains and stone walls, have been clamored away; nothing remains but to mortify a man's pride and to limit his resources, and to set a mark upon him by cutting him off from his fair share of political power. By this receipt insolence is gratified, and humanity is not shocked.

The gentlest Protestant can see, with dry eyes, Lord Stourton excluded from Parliament, though he would abominate the most distant idea of personal cruelty to Mr. Petre. This is only to say that he lives in the nineteenth, instead of the sixteenth century, and that he is as intolerant in religious matters as the state of manners existing in his age will permit. Is it not the same spirit which wounds the pride of a fellow-creature on account of his faith, or which casts his body into the flames? Are they any thing else but degrees and modifications of the same principle? The true spirit is to search after God and for another life with lowliness of heart; to fling down no man's altar, to punish no man's prayer; to heap no penalties and no pains on those solemn supplications which, in divers tongues and in varied forms, and in temples of a thousand shapes, but with one deep sense of human dependence, men pour forth to God.

REV. SYDNEY SMITH.

LV.. - TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF PEACE.

WHILE we act, sir, upon the maxim "In peace prepare for war," let us also remember that the best preparation for war is peace. This swells your numbers; this augments your means; this knits the sinews of your strength; this covers you all over with a panoply of might. And, then, if war must come in a just cause, no foreign state-no, sir, not all combined-can send forth an adversary that you need fear to encounter.

But, sir, give us these twenty-five years of peace. I do believe, sir, that this coming quarter of a century is to be the most important in our whole history. I do beseech you to let us have these twenty-five years, at least, of peace. Let these fertile wastes be filled up with swarming millions; let this tide of emigration from Europe go on; let the steamer, the canal, the railway, and especially let this great Pacific railway, subdue these mighty distances, and bring this vast extension into a span.

Let us pay back the ingots of California gold with bars of Atlantic iron; let agriculture clothe our vast wastes with waving plenty; let the industrial and mechanic arts erect their peaceful fortresses at the waterfalls; and then, sir, in the train of this growing population, let the printing-office, the lecture-room, the

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village school-house, and the village church, be scattered over the country. And in these twenty-five years we shall exhibit a spectacle of national prosperity such as the world has never seen on so large a scale, and yet within the reach of a sober, practical contemplation.

EDWARD EVERETT.

LVI. — EFFECT OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS.

OVER how broad a portion of the world, sir, have we extended the advantages we ourselves enjoy! Our domain unites the noblest valley on the surface of the globe, competent to grow food for human beings many more than now dwell on the face of the earth, with an eastern wing fitted for the site of the principal manufacturing and commercial power of existing Christendom, and a western flank well situated to hold the same position on the Pacific, when Asia shall renew her youth, and Australia shall have risen to the level of Europe. Bewildering, almost, is the suddenness of our expansion to fill these limits, and astounding are the phenomena that accompany this development. This day there stands before the councils of the nation, deputed to participate in their deliberations, a young man* born within sight of old Concord bridge, and educated under the institutions which Concord fight secured, who, when he revisits the old homestead, elaims to represent a territory larger than France and the united British kingdom,-capable of containing, if settled to the present density of Great Britain, more than a hundred millions of souls,— a territory lately the joint inheritance of the Indian and the grisly bear, now outstripping, in its instant greatness, all recorded colonies, the Ophir of our age, richer than Solomon's, richer than the wildest vision that ever dazzled Arabian fancy.

Occupying such a continent, receiving it consecrated by the toils and sufferings and outpouring of ancestral blood, which on the day we now commemorate began, how delightful is the duty which devolves on us, to guard the beacon-fire of liberty, whose flames our fathers kindled! Suffer it not, my friends, suffer it not, posterity that shall come after us, to be clouded by domestic dissension, or obscured by the dank, mephitic vapors of faction! Until now, its pure irradiance dispels doubt and fear, and revivifies the fainting hopes of downcast patriotism. For ever may it shine brightly as now; for as yet its pristine luster fades not, but still flashes out the ancient, clear, and steady illumination, joy-giving as the blaze that, leaping from promontory to promon

The representative from California.

tory, told the triumph of Agamemnon over fated Troy! It towers and glows, refulgent and beautiful, far seen by the tempest-tost on the sea of revolution, darting into the dungeons of gaunt despair beams whose benignant glory no lapse of time shall dim; the wanderers in the chill darkness of slavery it guides, and cheers, and warms; it fills the universe with its splendor.

ROBERT RANTOUL.

LVII. VOYAGE OF THE MAYFLOWER.

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METHINKS I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future State, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now, scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now, driven in fury before the raging tempest, in their scarcely seaworthy vessel.

The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth; weak and exhausted from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their shipmaster for a draught of beer on board; drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes.

Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers! Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes enumerated within the boundaries of New England! Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast! Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures, of other times, and find the parallel of this!

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Was it the winter's storm, beating upon the houseless heads of women and children? — was it hard labor and spare meals? — was it disease?-was it the tomahawk ? was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at the recollection of the loved and left, beyond the sea? was it some or all of these united that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate? And is it possible that no one of these causes, that not all combined, were able to blast this bud of hope? Is it possible that from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admiration as of pity, there have gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, an expansion so ample, a reality so important, a promise, yet to be fulfilled, so glorious?

EDWARD EVERETT.

LVIII. THE COMMON-SCHOOL SYSTEM.

MR. PRESIDENT and gentlemen, I thank you for the honor you have done me by calling upon me to respond to a sentiment in behalf of the common schools of New England. I am all the more thankful, because it is too late in the day to require a vindication of common schools as an institution established by the Pilgrim Fathers. In their minds education was an integral element of the great republican idea included in every conception they could form for the organization of a State. Sir, under their rigid exterior the Puritans cherished an intense, a Hebrew faith in God and in everlasting realities; a faith such as shook the strings of David's harp, and fired the lips of the prophets. They were ever seeking to do God's will, and felt that God was with them. They did not seek for material success, but merely for the great elements of the permanent welfare of the individual and the State. They established and cherished the interests of education.

It has been said that external circumstances favored the singleness of purpose and the devotion to permanent realities by which they were distinguished. No doubt there is truth in this. Had they landed on a luxuriant shore, had golden placers opened before their feet, they might have been tempted to luxurious sensuality, and the material scramble for this world's goods. But for them there was no luxury, and their reliance was upon the manly elements that grow up in suffering and privation to their full strength. The inclement winter, and the waves dashing upon their icy rocks, drove them back upon the soil, and enabled their vision to detect what were the qualities that alone enable

man to assert his superiority over the elements, and wring the victory from the iron hand of nature.

This brings up the great fact which this talking, philosophical, material age needs to have reiterated, that no great thing was ever wrought save by an intense religious faith. It was faith in Providence, the faith that every hero maintains in great principles. I know that when we look into history we see more genial charaçters than the Puritans; but when we look for foundation-men, men who lay the Cyclopeän base of a republic, they alone were the men worthy of the work. God ordains that a republic is not proclaimed from noisy barricades and polytechnic schools. It is found hewn out rough in the quarry of suffering and endurance, and is laid in resolution and in prayer. God appoints for it a granite soil and granite men. The Pilgrims builded better than they knew; it was God that filled them with a great ideal, which they themselves did not comprehend. How else did they lay hold of the great fact that the state is more interested in the coming generation than in our own? This was the idea that animated the hearts of the Pilgrims.

I

I do not intend to attribute to them all the liberty and the great results which we behold around us. I know how much is due to the Hollander, how much to the generous toleration of Calvert. They are all so mixed up in our present institutions that, thank God! it is impossible for any party to claim a per⚫sonal property in any part. But it is certain that here alone is a great and true republic. I do not forget Switzerland; but still say, that here alone is a republic endowed with the power of a great and progressive development. We must remember Italy, stricken down and oppressed; France, where nothing is permanent, and where freedom is but a name; and that other country, where the Danube rolls beside the graves of martyred heroes, and which sends out her most distinguished son* and exile to plead her cause in a voice that shakes the nations. But here the only true republic has risen and expanded into greatness and power.

If we ask whence springs this giant republic, we must look back to that grand historical picture, with its fringe of dark roots, its back-ground of tossing winter waves, with mothers shielding their babes from the icy cold, and fathers treading the crackling snow! We must look back to that stern and manly people that laid there and then the foundation for free thought, free speech, and free schools.

* Kossuth, the Hungarian,

E. H. CHAPIN.