not another. The love of liberty there was; but a government founded in liberty there was not one besides. Some things other than the love of freedom are needful to form a great and free nation. Let us go farther then, and observe the wisdom and prudence by which, after a long and painful process, our fathers were prepared, in mind and heart, for the permanent possession, tempered enjoyment, and true use of that freedom, the love of which was rooted in their souls; the process by which, iii the words of Milton, they were made into a “right pious, right honest, right holy nation,” as well as a nation loving liberty. In running over that process, I am inclined to attach the most importance to the fact that they who planted New England, and all the generations of successors, to the War of Independence, were engaged in a succession of the severest and gravest trials and labors and difficulties which ever tasked the spirit of a man or a nation. It has been said that there was never a great character,— never a truly strong, masculine, commanding character,— which was not made so by successive struggles with great difficulties. Such is the general rule of the moral world, undoubtedly. All history, all biography verify and illustrate it, and none more remarkably than our own. It has seemed to me probable that if the Puritans, on their arrival here, had found a home like that they left, and a social system made ready for them,—if they had found the forest felled, roads constructed, rivers bridged, fields sown, houses built, a rich soil, a bright sun, and a balmy air,—if they had come into a country which for a hundred and fifty years was never to hear the war-whoop of a savage, or the tap of a French drum,—if they had found a commonwealth civil and religious, a jurisprudence, a system of police, administration, and policy, all to their hands, churches scattered, districts, parishes, towns, and counties, widening one around the other, —if England had covered over their infancy with her mighty wing, spared charters, widened trade, and knit child to mother by parental policy,—it is probable that that impulse of high mind, and that unconquerable constancy of the first emigrants, might have subsided before the epoch of the drama of the Revolution. Their children might have grown light, luxurious, vain, and the sacred fire of liberty, cherished by the fathers in the times of the Tudors and Stuarts, might have died away in the hearts of a feeble posterity. 15
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