was the conservator of peace throughout | from the other the respect that is ever the world. We have revolutionized the awarded to brave men, and the affection policy of the government through the bit- that was clouded by the passion that made ter conflicts of opposing opinions, and it has been strengthened by its trials. We have had the fruits of national struggles transferred to the vanquished, without a shade of violence; and the extreme power of impeachment has been invoked in the midst of intensest political strife, and its judgment patriotically obeyed. We have had fraternal war with its terrible bereavements and destruction. We have completed the circle of national perils, and the virtue and intelligence of the people have ever been the safety of the Republic.

both rush to achieve an easy triumph, has returned chastened and strengthened by our common sacrifices. Our battle-fields will be memorable as the theatres of the conflicts of the noblest people the world had to offer to the god of carnage, and the monuments to our dead, North and South, will be pointed to by succeeding generations as the proud records of the heroism of the American people.

The overshadowing issues touching the war and its logical results are now no longer in controversy, and in vain will the At no previous period of our history unworthy invoke patriotism to give them have opportunity and duty so happily unmerited distinction. No supreme danunited to direct the people of this country ger can now confront the citizen who deto the triumphs and to the imperfections sires to correct errors or abuses of our poof our government. We have reached a litical system. He who despairs of free healthy calm in our political struggles. institutions because evils have been toleThe nation has a trusted ruler, just chosen rated, would have despaired of every adby an overwhelming vote. The disappoint-ministration the country has ever had, and ments of conviction or of ambition have of every government the world has ever passed away, and all yield cordial obedi-known. If corruption pervades our instience and respect to the lawful authority of tutions to an alarming extent, let it not be the country. The long-lingering passions forgotten that it is the natural order of hisof civil war have, for the last time, embit-tory repeating itself. It is but the experitered our political strife, and must now be ence of every nation, and our own expericonsigned to forgetfulness. The nation is assured of peace. The embers of discord may convulse a State until justice shall be enthroned over mad partisanship, but peace and justice are the inexorable purposes of the people, and they will be obeyed. Sectional hatred, long fanned by political necessities, is henceforth effaced from our politics, and the unity of a sincere brotherhood will be the cherished faith of every citizen. We first conquered rebellion, and now have conquered the bitterness and estrangement of its discomfiture.

The Vice-President of the insurgent Confederacy is a Representative in our Congress. One who was first in the field and last in the Senate in support of rebellion has just died while representing the government in a diplomatic position of the highest honor. Another who served the Confederacy in the fleld and in the forum, has been one of the constitutional advisers of the national administration. One of the most brilliant of Confederate warriors now serves in the United States Senate, and has presided over that body. The first Lieutenant of Lee was long since honored with responsible and lucrative official trust, and many of lesser note, lately our enemies, are discharging important public duties. The war and its issues are settled forever. Those who were arrayed against each other in deadly conflict are now friends. The appeal from the ballot to the sword has been made, and its arbitrament has been irrevocably ratified by the supreme power of the nation. Each has won

ence returning to us, to call into vigorous action the regenerating power of a patriotic people. We have a supreme tribunal that is most jealous of its high prerogatives, and that will wield its authority mercilessly when the opportune season arrives. We have just emerged from the most impassioned and convulsive strife of modern history. It called out the highest type of patriotism, and life and treasure were freely given with the holiest devotion to the cause of self-government. With it came those of mean ambition, and of venal purposes, and they could gain power while the unselfish were devoted to the country's cause. They could not be dethroned because there were grave issues which dare not be sacrificed. Such evils must be borne at times in all governments, rather than destroy the temple to punish the enemies of public virtue. To whatever extent these evils exist, they are not the legitimate creation of our free institutions. They are not the creation of mal-administration, nor of any party. They are the monstrous barnacles spawned by unnatural war, which clogged the gallant ship of State in her extremity, and had to be borne into port with her. And now that the battle is ended, and the issues settled, do not distrust the reserved power of our free institutions. It will heal the scars of war and efface the stains of corruption, and present the great Republic to the world surpassing in grandeur, might and excellence, the sublimest conceptions ever cherished of human government.

As you come to assume the responsibili- | litical administration that the present age ties which must be accepted by the edu- can never reach. cated citizen, you will be profoundly impressed with the multiplied dangers which threaten the government. They will appear not only to be innumerable and likely to defy correction, but they will seem to be of modern creation. It is common to hear intelligent political leaders declaim against the moral and intellectual degeneracy of the times, and especially against the decline in public morality and statesmanship. They would make it appear that the people and the government in past times were models of purity and excellence, while we are unworthy sons of noble sires. Our rulers are pronounced imbecile, or wholly devoted to selfish ends.

You must soon appear in the active struggles for the perpetuity of free govern. ment, and some of the sealed chapters of the past are most worthy of your careful study. I would not efface one good inspiration that you have gathered from the lives and deeds of our fathers, whose courage and patriotism have survived their infirmities. Whatever we have from them that is purifying or elevating, is but the truth of history; and when unborn generations shall have succeeded us, no age in all the long century of freedom in the New World, will furnish to them higher standards of heroism and statesmanship than the defamed and unappreciated times in which we live. Our law-makers are declared to be reek- And when the future statesmen shall tnrn ing with corruption or blinded by ambi- to history for the most unselfish and ention, and greed and faithlessness are held lightened devotion to the Republic, they up to the world as the chief characteristics will pause over the records we have writof our officials. From this painful picture ten, and esteem them the brightest in all we turn to the history of those who ruled the annals of man's best efforts for his race. in the earlier and what we call the better We can judge of the true standard of our days of the Republic, and the contrast sinks government and people only by a faithful us deep in the slough of despair. I am comparison with the true standard of the not prepared to say that much of the com- men and events which have passed away. plaint against the political degeneracy of You find widespread distrust of the success the times, and the standard of our officials, of our political system. It is the favorite is not just; but in the face of all that can theme of every disappointed ambition, and be charged against the present, I regard it the vanquished of every important struggle as the very best age this nation has ever are tempted, in the bitterness of defeat, to known. The despairing accusations made despair of the government. Would you against our public servants are not the pe- know whence comes this chronic or spasculiar creation of the times in which we modic political despair? If so, you must live, and the allegation of wide spread de- turn back over the graves of ages, for it is moralization in the body politic, was no as old as free government. Glance at the more novel in any of the generations of better days of which we all have read, and the past than it is now. We say nothing to which modern campaign eloquence is so of our rulers that was not said of those much indebted. Do not stop with the apwhose memory we so sacredly worship. proved histories of the fathers of the ReLicense is one of the chief penalties, indeed public. They tell only of the transcendent the sole defect of liberty, and it has ever wisdom and matchless perfections of those asserted its prerogatives with tireless in- who gave us liberty and ordained governdustry. It was as irreverent with Wash- ment of the people. Go to the inner temington as it is with Grant. It racked Jef-ple of truth. Seek that which was then ferson and Jackson, and it pained and hidden from the nation, but which in these scarred Lincoln and Chase, and their compatriots. It criticised the campaigns and the heroes of the revolutionary times, as we criticise the living heroes of our day. It belittled the statesmen of every epoch in our national progress, just as we belittle those who are now the guardians of our free institutions. Perhaps we have more provocation than they had; but if so, they were less charitable, for the tide of ungenerous criticism and distrust has known no cessation. I believe we have had seasons when our political system was more free from blemish than it is now, and that we have had periods when both government and people maintained a higher standard of excellence than we can boast of; but it is equally true that we have, in the past, sounded a depth in the decline of our po

days of newspapers and free schools, and steam and lightning, is an open record so that he who runs may read. Gather up the few public journals of a century ago, and the rare personal letters and sacred diaries of the good and wise men whose examples are so earnestly longed for in the degenerate present, and your despair will be softened and your indignation at current events will be tempered, as you learn that our history is steadily repeating itself, and that with all our many faults, we grow better as we progress.

Do you point to the unfaltering courage and countless sacrifices of those who gave us freedom, so deeply crimsoned with their blood? I join you in naming them with reverence, but I must point to their sons, for whom we have not yet ceased to mourn,

No error is so common among free people as the tendency to depreciate the present and all its agencies and achievements.

who equalled them in every manly and government in the broadest acceptation of patriotic attribute. When wealth and the theory. He summed it up in his luxury were about us to tempt our people memorable utterance to his neighbors when to indifference and ease, the world has no he returned from France. He said:records of heroism which dim the lustre of "The will of the majority, the natural law the achievements we have witnessed in the of every society, is the only sure guardian preservation of the liberty our fathers be- of the rights of man. Perhaps even this queathed to us. Have corruption and may sometimes err, but its errors are honest perfidy stained the triumphs of which we solitary and short-lived." Politically speakboast? So did corruption and perfidy stain ing, with the patriots and statesmen of the the revolutionary "times that tried men's "better days" of the Republic, their consouls." Do we question the laurels with fidence in, or distrust of, the government, which our successful captains have been depended much upon whether Hamilton or crowned by a grateful country? So did our Jefferson ruled. Dream of them as we forefathers question the just dictinction may, they were but men, with the same of him who was first in war and first in ambition, the same love of power, the peace, and he had not a lieutenant who same infirmities, which we regard as the escaped distrust, nor a council of war that peculiar besetting sins of our times. If was free from unworthy jealousies and you would refresh your store of distrust of strife. Do politicians and even statesmen all political greatness, study Jefferson teach the early destruction of our free through Burr and Hamilton, or Washinginstitutions? It is the old, old story; "the ton and Hamilton through Jefferson, or babbling echo mocks itself." It distracted Jackson through Clay and the second the cabinets of Washington and the elder Adams, or Clay and Adams through JackAdams. It was the tireless assailant of son and Randolph, and you will think Jefferson and Madison. It made the Jack-better of the enlightened and liberal age son administration tempestuous. It gave in which you live. us foreign war under Polk. It was a teeming fountain of discord under Taylor, Pierce and Buchanan. It gave us deadly fraternal conflict under Lincoln. Its dying throes convulsed the nation under John- We all turn with boundless pride to the son. The promise of peace, soberly ac- Senate of Clay, Webster and Calhoun. In cepted from Grant, was the crown of an the period of their great conflicts, it was unbroken column of triumphs over the the ablest legislative tribunal the world distrust of every age, that was attacking has ever furnished. Rome and Greece in free government. Do we complain of vio- the zenith of their greatness, never gathlent and profligate legislation? Hamilton, ered such a galaxy of statesmen. But not the favorite statesman of Washington, until they had passed away did the nation was the author of laws, enacted in time of learn to judge them justly. Like the towpeace, which could not have been enforced ering oaks when the tempest sweeps over in our day even under the necessities and the forest, the storm of faction was fiercest passions of war. And when the judgment among their crowns, and their struggles of of the nation repealed them, he sought to mere ambition, and their infirmities, which overthrow the popular verdict, because he have been kindly forgotten, often made the believed that the government was over-thoughtless or the unfaithful despair of thrown. Almost before order began after the political chaos of the revolution, the intensest struggles were made, and the most violent enactments urged, for mere partisan control. Jefferson, the chief apostle of government of the people, did not always cherish supreme faith in his own work. He trembled at the tendencies to monarchy, and feared because of "the dupery of which our countrymen have shown themselves susceptible." He rescued the infant Republic from the centralization that was the lingering dregs of despotism, and unconsciously sowed the seeds which ripened into States' rights and nullification under Jackson, and into rebellion under Lincoln. But for the desperate conflict of opposing convictions as to the corner-stone of the new structure, Jefferson would have been more wise and conservative. He was faithful to popular

our free institutions. Not one of them escaped detraction or popular reprobation. Not one was exempt from the grave accusation of shaping the destruction of our nationality, and yet not one meditated deliberate wrong to the country on which all reflected so much honor. Calhoun despaired of the Union, because of the irrepressible antagonism of sectional interests, but he cherished the sincerest faith in free institutions. But when the dispassionate historian of the future is brought to the task of recording the most memorable triumphs of our political system, he will pass over the great Senate of the last generation, and picture in their just proportions the grander achievements of the heroes and statesmen who have been created in our own time. If we could draw aside the veil that conceals the future from us, and see how our children will judge the trials

tions.

and triumphs of the last decade, we would | fenders of the Union. It will not be rebe shamed at our distrust of ourselves and membered that faction ran riot in the highof the instruments we have employed to est places, and that the struggle for the discharge the noblest duties. Our agents throne embittered cabinet councils and escame up from among us. We knew them tranged eminent statesmen, even when the before they were great, and remembered artillery of the enemy thundered within well their common inheritance of human sound of the Capital. defects. They are not greater than were It will not be declared how great captains men who had lived before them, but the toyed with armies and decimated them nation has had none in all the past who upon the deadly altar of ambition, and how could have written their names higher on blighted hopes of preferment made jangled the scroll of fame. We knew Lincoln as strife and fruitless campaigns. Nor will the uncouth Western campaigner and ad- the insidious treason that wounded the vocate; as a man of jest, untutored in the cause of free government in the home of graces, and unschooled in statesmanship. its friends, blot the future pages of our We know him in the heat and strife of the history in the just proportions in which political contests which made him our the living felt and knew it It will be told President, and our passions and prejudices that in the hour of greatest peril, the adsurvived his achievements. If his friends, ministration was criticised, and the constiwe were brought face to face with his im-tution and laws expounded, with supreme perfections, and perhaps complained that ability and boldness, while the meaner he was unequal to impossibilities. If his struggles of the cowardly and faithless will enemies, we antagonized his policy and be effaced with the passions of the times magnified his errors. We saw him wrestle that created them. And it is best that with the greed of the place-man, with the these defects of greatness should slumber ambitious warrior and with the disappoint- with mortality. Not only the heroes and ed statesman. We received his great act rulers, but the philanthropists as well, of of Emancipation as a part of the mere po- all nations and ages, have had no exemplitical policy of his rule, and judged it by tion from the frailties which are colossal the light of prejudiced partisan convic- when in actual view. That we have been no better than we have seen ourselves, does But how will those of the future judge not prove that we are a degenerate people. him? When the hatreds which attached On the contrary, it teaches how much of to his public acts have passed into forget-good and great achievement may be hoped fulness; when his infirmities shall have for with all the imperfections we see about been buried in oblivion, and when all his us. In our unexampled struggle, when master monuments shall stand out in bold faction, and corruption, and faithlessness relief, made stainless by the generous offi- had done their worst, a regenerated naces of time, his name will be linked with tionality, saved to perfected justice, liberty devotion wherever liberty has a worship- and law, was the rich fruits of the patriotic per. And it will be measurably so of those efforts of the people and their trusted but who were his faithful co-laborers. It will fallible leaders. There is the ineffaceable be forgotten that they were at times weak, record we have written for history, and it discordant, irresolute men when they had will be pointed to as the sublimest tribute to confront problems the solution of which the world has given to the theory of selfhad no precedents in the world's history. government. The many grievous errors It will not be conspicuous in the future and bitter jealousies of the conflict which records of those great events, that the weakened and endangered the cause; the most learned and experienced member of venality that grew in hideous strength, his cabinet would have accepted peace by while higher and holier cares gave it any supportable compromise, and that one safety; the incompetency that grasped of the most trusted of his constitutional place on the tidal waves of devotion to advisers would have assented to peaceable country, and the wide-spread political evils dismemberment to escape internecine war. which still linger as sorrowful legacies Few will ever know that our eminent Min-among us, will in the fulness of time be ister of War was one of those who was healed and forgotten, and only the grand least hopeful of the preservation of the consummation will be memorable. This unity of the States, when armed secession generous judgment of the virtue and intelmade its first trial of strength with the ad-ligence of the people, that corrects the ministration. It will not be recorded how the surrender of Sumter was gravely discussed to postpone the presence of actual hostilities, and how the midsummer madness of rebellion made weakness and discord give way to might and harmony, by the first gun that sent its unprovoked messenger of death against the flag and de

varying efforts and successes of political prostitution; that pardons the defects of those who are faithful in purpose, and without which the greatest deeds would go down to posterity scarred and deformed, is the glass through which all must read of the noblest triumphs of men.

Our Republic stands alone in the whole

Republic. It was the creation of ambition and conquest. Her great chieftain swept over the Pyrenees and the Alps with his victorious legions, and even made the gates of the Eternal City tremble before the impetuous advance of the Carthagenians. But Carthage never was free until the cormorant and the bittern possessed it, and the God of nations had "stretched out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness." Conqueror and conquered are blotted from the list of the nations of the earth. We read of the Grecian Republic; but it was a libel upon free government. Her so-called free institutions consisted of a loose, discordant confederation of independent States, where despotism ruled in the name of liberty. Sparta has made romance pale before the achievements of her sons, but her triumphs were not of peace, nor were they for free government. Athens abolished royalty more than a thousand years before the Christian era, and made Athenian history most thrilling and instructive, but her citizens were strangers to freedom. The most sanguinary wars with sister States, domestic convulsions almost without cessation, and the grinding oppression of caste, were the chief offerings of the government to its subjects. Solon restored her laws to some measure of justice, only to be cast aside for the usurper. Greece yet has a name among the nations of the world, but her sceptre for which the mightiest once warred to enslave her people under the banner of the Republic, has long since been unfelt in shaping the destiny of mankind. Thus did Rome and Carthage and Greece fade from the zenith of distinction and power, before constitutional government of the people had been born among men.

records of civil government. In its theory, in its complete organization, and in its administration, it is wholly exceptional. We talk thoughtlessly of the overthrow of the old Republics, and the weak or disappointed turn to history for the evidence of our destruction. It is true that Republics which have been mighty among the powers of the earth have crumbled into hopeless decay, and that the shifting sands of time have left desolate places where once were omnipotence and grandeur. Rome made her almost boundless conquests under the banner of the Republic, and a sister Republic was her rival in greatness and splendor. They are traced obscurely on the pages of history as governments of the people. Rome became mistress of the world. Her triumphal arches of costliest art recorded her many victories. Her temples of surpassing elegance, her colossal and exquisite statues of her chieftains, her imposing columns dedicated to her invincible soldiery, and her apparently rapid progress toward a beneficent civilization, give the story of the devotion and heroism of her citizens. But Rome never was a free representative government. What is called her Republic was but a series of surging plebeian and patrician revolutions, of Tribunes, Consuls and Dictators, with seasons of marvelous prowess under the desperate lead of as marvelous ambition. The tranquillity, the safety, and the inspiration of a government of liberty and law, are not to be found in all the thousand years of Roman greatness. The lust of empire was the ruling passion in the ancient Republics. Hannibal reflected the supreme sentiment of Carthage when he bowed at the altar and swore eternal hostility to Rome; and Cato, the Censor, as faithfully spoke for Rome when he declared to an approv-day there is not an established sister Reing Senate-" Carthago delenda !" Such was the mission of what history hands down to us as the great free governments of the ancients. Despotism was the forerunner of corruption, and the proudest eras they knew were but hastening them to inevitable destruction.

To

public that equals our single Commonwealth in population. Spain, France and Mexico have in turn worshiped Emperors, Kings, Dictators and popular Presidents. Yesterday they were reckoned Republics. What they have been made to-day, or what they will be made to-morrow, is unThe imperial purple soon followed in certain and unimportant. They are not Rome, as a debauched people were pre- now, and never have been, Republics save pared to accept in form what they had in name, and never can be free governlong accepted with the mockery of free- ments until their people are transformed dom. Rulers and subjects, noble and ig- into law-creating and law-abiding comnoble, church and state, made common munities. With them monarchy is a recause to precipitate her decay. At last fuge from the license they miscall liberty, the columns of the barbarian clouded her and despotism is peace. Switzerland is valleys. The rude hosts of Attila, the called a Republic. She points to her ac"Scourge of God," swarmed upon her, and knowledged independence four hundred their battle-axes smote the demoralized years ago, but not until the middle of the warriors of the tottering empire. The Goth present century did the Republic of the and the Vandal jostled each other from the Alps find tranquillity in a constitutional degraded sceptre they had conquered, and government that inaugurated the liberty Kome was left widowed in her ruins. And of law. Away on a rugged mountain-top Carthage!-she too had reared a great in Italy, is the only Republic that has government by spoliation, and called it a maintained popular government among