thank God for pouring out upon them the spirit of liberty, and humbly ask Him to transmit it, as it breathed in them, their children, and their children’s children, to the thousandth generation! I have said part of what I intended of one trait in the character of our fathers of the revolutionary age,—their spirit of liberty. But something more than the love of liberty is needful to fit a people for the enjoyment of it. Other men, other nations, have loved liberty as well as our fathers. The sentiment is innate, and it is indestructible, and immortal. Yet of the wide-spread families of the earth, in the long procession of the generations, that stretches backward to the birth of the world, how few have been free at all; how few have been long free; how imperfect was their liberty while they possessed it; how speedily it flitted away; how hard to woo it to return! In all Asia and Africa—continents whose population is more than four sevenths of the human race on earth, whose history begins ages before a ray of the original civilization of the East had reached to Europe—there was never a free nation. And how has it been in Europe, that proud seat of power, art, civilization, enterprise, and mind? Alas for the destiny of social man! Here and there in ancient and in later times, in Greece, in Rome, in Venice, in France, men have called on the Goddess of Liberty in a passionate and ignorant idolatry; they have embodied her angelical brightness and unclouded serenity in marble; they have performed dazzling actions, they have committed great crimes in her name; they have built for her the altars where she best loves to be worshipped,—-republican forms of government; they have found energy, genius, the love of glory, the mad dream of power and pride in her inspiration. But they were not wise enough, they were not virtuous enough for diffused, steady, lasting freedom. Their heads were not strong enough to bear a draught so stimulating. They perished of raging fever, kindled by drinking of the very waters of social life! These stars one after another burned out, and fell from their throne on high! England guarded by the sea; Holland behind her dikes; a dozen Swiss Cantons breathing the difficult air of the iced mountain tops,—these, in spite of revolutions, all were free governments. And in the whole of the Old World there was 14
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