In the ways of Providence, there is always fitness in the smallest as in the greatest things. It is on the Fourth of July, in midsummer, that we hold the anniversary festivals of American Independence. And it is a beautiful ordering of the Providence that rules the seasons and the nations, that the time of these anniversaries is so well suited to the occasion. For it is fitting, that in the midst of glorious summer days, when the earth lies richest in the sunlight; when the fields are golden with the harvests; when the air is fragrant with the scent of flowers and the new hay; when, in a word, the beauty and the bounty of nature, unite to fill the heart with gladness and with gratitude, we should meet in kindred joy and thankfulness to celebrate our nation’s natal day. For sunshine is the symbol of prosperity, and summer the symbol of peace; and the wondrous bounty of the season fitly typifies the fruits of that civil and religious liberty, to establish which our fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour. Not that all these anniversaries have been, or will be days of jubilee. Not that the chill and sombreness of winter have not settled, will not settle, upon some. For many stormy years were passed, before the hope that dawned on that July morning in ’76 became a full and crowned reality. And then, you remember the day of the grand jubilee proper, the fiftieth anniversary of our Independence, when both Jefferson—the author, and Adams—the most eloquent supporter, of the declaration, died. And then, you remember to-day one year ago, when the American Congress met in a beleaguered city, within the sound of rebel cannon, with rebel ensigns flaunting almost in the face[6] of the Capitol, met in solemn and determined counsel to devise ways and means to save the nation from destruction at the hands of its own misguided children. And then, to-day; what shall I say of to-day? To-day, when sorrow sits brooding in a million homes, when the shadow of civil war still rests like a pall upon the nation, when in the beautiful Virginia that Washington loved, his children are grappling in the struggle of death. Still, it is true, that in the eighty odd years of our Independence that have passed, there have been few of these anniversary days that have not wholly been days of jubilee, and with the blessing of God a little longer on our union armies, there will be fewer yet in the eighty years that are to come; fewer yet, I trust, in all the vast and pregnant future upon which the summer will not smile in poetic fitness, and which a grateful people will not greet with shouts of gladness and with songs of praise. We have all learned to revere the memory of the men who framed and adopted the Declaration of Independence. All men and all nations have learned to regard with admiration the energy, the courage, the fortitude, the exhaustless patience with which our fathers fought the battles of freedom and inaugurated on this continent the “great experiment” of popular government. No one now dares to question the wisdom of their policy, the lofty purity of their lives and purposes, or the sublime quality of that heroic faith in the final triumph of their cause, which never failed them in the darkest hours of their long and bitter struggle to be free. There were tories then all around them, as there are tories now in the war we are waging, but there is no one now to vouchsafe a word of praise on behalf of the tories of the Revolution. They have sunk to that oblivion, or have earned that unenviable immortality, which belongs to the lot of all who fail their country in its hour of trial, and have neither voice nor sympathy but for its enemies. Only those who aided the Colonies in their struggle with Britain and remembered now with gratitude. And having been, for eighty years and more, a great and prosperous and happy[7] people, we feel increasingly, as the years go by, that we cannot venerate the men too highly, through whose blood and tears, and prayers and blessings, we were made and kept a nation. On a day like this, and in these hours of our history, facts like these have great significance.
It is one of the uses of history to teach us what are the noblest uses of life; what deeds live longest in the memories of men; what motives give greatest strength and nobility to character; what fruition follows godlike sacrifices for truth and duty; what ideas and principles, embodied in life, lift men above the common level and crown them with immortal honours. It is one of the uses of a day like this to turn us back to higher sources of inspiration, that we may be the more manfully fitted for the duties of our time, that we may learn the cost of liberty, and the worth of patriotism, and the sacredness of principle, and the holiness of duty. It is one of the uses of a day like this to teach us that our selfish aims and interests and motives, our lives of luxury and frivolity, of leisure-loving and wealth-seeking, all sink to a level of lowest significance, when contrasted with great heroic virtues such as bore our fathers through the storm and struggle of the Revolution. And when these lessons have been learned by a people, and when in the Providence of God the darkest hours of their history have come; when they are compelled themselves to strike for liberty or see it perish; when they have risen to that height of patriotism that they exclaim with old John Adams in ’76, that all that they have, and all that they are, and all that they hope for in this life, they are ready to stake upon the altar of their country; when, filled with such inspiration, they go forth from homes of happiness and peace to fields of carnage and of death, then, above all, does it belong to the uses of a day like this to teach the mourning women of the land, and the children that are fatherless, that these dying and dead soldiers are one with the heroes of the Revolution; that our country’s history will embalm their names with equal honour and a common[8] love, and that a grateful people throughout all the long and coming years will “keep their memory green.”
And this shall be my theme to-day; to consider whither the nation our fathers left us is drifting; to consider what we are fighting for; and to enquire whether the heroes of the struggle of to-day do not deserve equal honor with their illustrious sires. Nor have I any doubt of the fitness of this theme for the time and the occasion. For our fathers fought to create a nation. We fight to have that nation live, to keep it one and indivisible, and vain were the struggles of the Revolution, and vain the consecration of days like this to Revolutionary memories, if they failed to bring out into highest prominence such deeds as those of the past and passing year. Our fathers fought to create a nation. And for eighty years there was no sublimer sight beneath the stars than the nation they created. During these eighty years, this people grew from three to thirty millions, from thirteen to thirty-four States. They developed energies such as the world had seldom witnessed. With marvellous rapidity they levelled forests and builded cities; they tunnelled mountains, and cultivated valleys vast as empires; they made their mountain streams turn mills and factories and bear on their bosoms to the sea, and to all the world, the fruits of this industry and the products of the land. They dug out from the bosom of the rocky hills and from dark subterranean recesses a wealth greater than the Indies, and made the wilderness above them to “bud and blossom as the rose.” They grew to be a thinking, toiling, tireless people, and turning from their material successes, they began to manifest progress and proficiency in literature, in science and in art. And all along they conducted a system of government which had no parallel in history, the success of which was distrusted by many of our early statesmen and by all the world beside. And high above all the evidences of their wealth and power, above all the beauties and beneficence of their soil and clime, rose the crowning fact that these teeming, toiling millions were the freest people upon[9] earth; that they enjoyed, in larger measure than the world had ever known, the privileges and prerogatives that belong to manhood, and that they held inviolably sacred, as their fathers before them, their right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I know to what criticism these remarks are open. I know somewhat of the faults and follies of this age and nation. I know how prone we are upon days like this to forget our mistakes, our follies and our crimes, and to indulge in strains of national eulogy, and, I confess, these strains I have rarely relished. I know, too, how common is the autocratic talk that the equal rights, the enlarged liberties, which our institutions secure to the citizen, tend only to license in thought and speech, to fanaticism, to lawlessness, to disrespect of authority, to no-government. And yet I know that it has not been the bestowment............