to relieve those sufferers. And when the scourge of famine and pestilence swept over Ireland, and England failed to supply the wants of the famishing, we did interfere—we hastened to relieve them: an act which Ireland has never forgotten, but which England has. Beyond things like these we have not ventured to interfere in the affairs of nations, remote or near ; and in regard to nations, we have at least the consciousness that in our treatment of them we have endeavored to carry out the great principles which we have designed to lay at the foundation of our own prosperity, that justice, and truth, and honesty, are the best foundation of a nation's progress, as they are of the welfare of an individual-that "righteousness exalteth a nation." That we are innocent in regard to all mento those within our own borders-the Indian, the African, we cannot indeed affirm; to foreign nations our course has not been one of dishonor and shame, and we are willing that it should be known and read by all men.

In all these respects we look with special pleasure and approbation on our treatment of the land of our fathers. England has been dear to us. There are the graves of the ancestors of our Carvers, our Brewsters, our Hancocks, and our Adamses-of our Henrys, and our Pinckneys-of Washington. Its language is ours. Its religion is ours. Its history is ours. We delight to think that Milton, and Cowper, and Shakspeare, and Newton, and Bacon, are no more theirs than ours. We visit that land with emotions such as we can have toward no other land-save Palestine, and in Westminster Abbey we sit down and weep, for there we are surrounded by the monuments, and tread on the graves of the illustrious dead, whose names and works have been familiar to us from our cradles. We have not been unwilling to bear much from England; and to forget all the past, when we could show to her respect and affection. We welcomed the Heir apparent to her throne to our shores, and gave him an "ovation" in the land, not forced and formal, but hearty and sincere, for the nation honored and respected the pure and virtuous character of her that bore him, and wished well to him and to the land where he would occupy the throne.

The past is fixed, and fixed in the main as we would desire it should be, in regard to the manner in which the resources of this land have been developed; to our growth and our: greatness. That we have been proud of this; that we have boasted of it; that we have attributed it to ourselves; that we have felt that we might defy the world; that we have supposed that nothing could now retard our progress; and that, with all that there has been of greatness in that which was good, there has sprung up a rank and pestilential growth of evil corresponding in some measure with the magnitude of the good, we are not disposed to deny.

But still the nation has become great; greater than any other nation has ever become in the same period of time; great in the main, in the right direction. No other nation has ever advanced so rapidly, or developed such resources in the same period of time. Not Egypt; not Assyria; not Babylon; not Persia under Cyrus, and his successors; not Greece; not Rome; not Germany, Gaul, or Britain. Britain-it was long and slow from the time of the Druids, from the time of Alfred, from the time of William the Red-haired, before the resources of the little island were in any measure developed-more than a thousand years from the time of Alfred. We might have hoped that England would have looked on, with gratification, at the amazing development here of institutions and of power, derived in a great measure from herself, and among those who spoke her own language. For the development here was in the same line as that which had made England, small in territory, great in wealth, in influence, and in power. It was a development in agricultural improvements, in schools, in colleges, in the comforts of life, in intelligence, in liberty, in religion, in commerce, in labor-saving inventions. We had carried out in our purposes all that we had derived of good from the mother conntry; we had endeavored to avoid that which was evil in her example, and prevent the ill consequences of what she had entailed upon us. All that had been good in her learning, her religion, her laws, her literature, her morals, her arts, we were endeavoring to make our own, and to spread them as rapidly as possible over the vast domain which God had put in our possession, and we have done it to an extent which the world has never before seen. The evil which there had been in the memory of former things, and the evil in her example, and the evil which she had entailed upon us, we were endeavoring to avoid and remove. We had forgotten, as a people, the history of her persecutions-those persecutions which oppressed our ancestors, and which drove them out on the wide and stormy ocean in frail barks, to an uninhabited wilderness, and we were willing that those things should pass from our memory, and from the memory of mankind;, saying, in kindness, to the people of the mother country, as Joseph did to his brethren: "As for you, ye thought evil against us, but God meant it unto good." (Gen. 50: 20.) We had seen evil in some of the institutions of the mother country, in her form of government, in her aristocracy, in her oppression of the poor, and we endeavored to avoid them, and to carry out, in free institutions, her own ideas of liberty. We did not inherit, perhaps partly from the necessity of the case, since God gave us, without a war of conquest, more territory than we know what to do with, her love of conquest, and we meant to live in peace with all the world. There was, indeed, and there is, one great evil which we had inherited, which has been our bane, and the cause of all our trouble,

Our

which we had not, up to the war, been able to remove. fathers complained that England had forced it upon us. It was an original charge in the Declaration of Independence, that this had been forced upon the Colonies without their consent. England was more responsible for it than we were. Those unhappy foreigners of a different skin had been conveyed here in British ships, and under British laws, and in the use of British capital, and for the purposes of British gain. The suppression of the trade was then demanded by no developed principle in the British constitution, and by no prevailing feeling of the British people, It was long, long after this, that the case of Somerset occurred, in which it was determined that slavery in England was contrary to the British constitution, and the delivery of the opinion of Lord Mansfield in that case constituted an epoch in English history. But the evil was already entailed upon us, and the great principle which was thns, at a late period announced in England, came too late to reach the evil which she had inaugurated in the Colonies, for then we were an independent people. Oh! how happy had it been for us, for England, for Africa, for the world, if Mansfield had lived a century earlier; if a similar case had occurred then; and if the great sentiment of liberty which went forth when he uttered that memorable opinion, had covered the colonies as well as the little parent isle-that sentence which proclaimed that: "The air of England had long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it. Every man who comes into England is entitled to the protection of English laws, whatever oppression he may heretofore have suffered, and whatever may be the color of his skin:

Quamvis ille niger, quamvis tu candidus esses.

But the evil was fastened upon us. It had struck its roots deep. It threatened to fill the land. We have not been able to remove it, and when we failed from want of power, or want of will, or both, God took the matter into his own hands; and on the throes, and conflicts, and stripes, and blood, and sacrifice, and sorrow, incident to it, England looks without sympathy, without any manifested regard for her own principles, apparently willing now that the curse which she entailed upon us shall rend our Republic, break down forever our free institutions, and bathe the land which she has herself twice endeavored in vain to conquer, in oceans of blood.

We may not boast. We have not been, and are not, as a nation, what we should be; but we may say without boasting, and in graceful language appropriate to this day, that the sun has yet to shine upon a land where there has been more public and private virtue; where there has been more domestic peace

• Lord Campbell's "Lives of the Chief Justices of England," vol. ii., p. 231.

and tranquility; where there has been a wider influence of education; where the obligation of contracts has been more sacredly regarded; where there is more respect to law as law; where there is greater security of property or of personal rights; where there is, on the whole, as much purity of religion; where there is so much happiness springing from the virtues of domestic life. There has been, there is, no land where an unprotected female could travel so far, and meet with so much attention, and be so safe from rudeness. There is no land where so large a proportion of the population can read and keep accounts. There is no land where the laws can be so easily executed without the representatives and the insignia of mili tary power. There is no land where life and property are so safe. I passed, as thousands of others have done, and still do, the early years of my life in a quiet home, on whose doors and windows there never had been a lock, or bolt, or a fastening of any kind-not even a nail; and where a peaceful and industrious family lived for more than half a century, without fear, alarm, or peril. To what other land will men go, save it may be Switzerland, where scenes like these are common?

So much for the years that have gone by, and whose results bave ceased to be our particular history, and have passed into the general history of the world.

We meet to-day, especially, to recall the mercies of another year. It, too, is now passed, with all that it had for us of joy or sorrow, prosperity or adversity, peace or war, laughing or tears, sleep, rest, toil, trouble, anxiety, bereavement, gain, loss, public grief, or private sorrow. It has been such a year as our country has never experienced before, and will make more work for the calm and impartial historian of future times, than any one year in all our public history. For there are sad things to be recorded which may not look as sad as they now do, when they are fairly recorded; things to be explained, which can not now be explained; reverses to be set in a true light, whose causes can not now be understood; plans broken, defeated, or accomplished, not now understood, which are to have an important bearing on our future history, and whose bearings can only be seen in that future. There are men who, during this year, have made their first appearance on the stage of human affairs, whose life, plans, and purposes may exert a most important in fluence on the future history of the world; men whose characters are not yet understood, and whose acts can be explained only in future times, when the smoke and mist which now envelop them shall pass away, and there shall be the return of a clear and unclouded sky; for the land has not only been enveloped in the smoke and dust of battle, but the campaigns, the plans, the victories-why any, why not more; the characters and purposes of many of the actors in these scenes, are as yet enveloped in smoke and dust, like the battle-field. There have

been reverses such as no nation with similar power and resources ever knew; and there have been great deeds which will make the year memorable among all the years of our history. No man commends his own wisdom who pretends now to understand the events of this passing year.

There have been scenes, indeed, which have filled the land with sorrow, for the central part of our land is almost one great hospital or graveyard, and desolation has marched over great tracts which were before, the scene of quiet homes, and green fields, and orchards; the peaceful places of churches and schools. If this were a day for a fasting, humiliation, and prayer, it would seem to be much easier to find topics appropriate for such a day than for a day of thankfulness to God; nor should we forget this while we endeavor to find topics for devout acknowledgement of the divine goodness. "It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord," and man can always find, if he will, that for which his heart should rise in gratitude to his Maker.

Personally, life, health, food, raiment, home, friends, social blessings; the Providence which has kept us in the ways of virtue, honesty, and truth; the advances which we have made in knowledge; the tranquil hours that we have spent; the support we have had in trouble; the blessings of salvation and the hope of heaven; the fact that all along through the year God has been merciful to our unrighteousness, and has been willing to hear our prayers in all circumstances, and to save our souls -all these and kindred things should rise up to remembrance as we recall the events of another year.

Our land, too, even amidst the desolating scenes of war, has yielded abundance. Half a million and more of men have been withdrawn from the peaceful pursuits of life, and have been in tents, or without tents, away from their homes; and these, too, in the main, composed of that class who do the hard work of the field, the plowing, sowing, reaping, and gathering into barns; yet, in our Northern States, it does not appear that an acre less than usual has been cultivated, and never have the fields yielded a more abundant harvest; never have the orchards been borne down with more abundant fruits; never in our history, has there been, strange as it may seem, a greater amount of exports of those things needful for life.

The year has been a year remarkable for health, for freedom from the ravages, even the local ravages of disease. Not as in other years have we heen summoned to sympathize with portions of our country visited with pestilential diseases, and to send or go, that those in attendance on the sick and the dying, might themselves hecome martyrs in the cause of kindness and charity.

Our land, in schools, colleges, churches, seminaries of learning, is still a prosperous and a happy land. Those schools