conduct which, distinguished even the first fervid years of the Revolutionary age. How little giddiness, rant, and foolery do you see there! No riotous and shouting processions,—no grand festivals of the goddess of reason,—no impious dream of human perfectibility,—no unloosing of the hoarded-up passions of ages from the restraints of law, order, morality, and religion, such as shamed and frightened away the newborn liberty of revolutionary France. Hence our victories of peace were more brilliant, more beneficial, than our victories of war. Hence those fair, I hope everlasting, monuments of civil wisdom, our State and Federal Constitutions. Hence the coolness, the practised facility, the splendid success, with which they took up and held the whip and reins of the fiery chariot flying through the zodiac, after the first driver had been stricken by the thunder from his seat. Do you not think it was a merciful appointment that our fathers did not come to the possession of independence, and the more perfect freedom which it brought with it, as to a great prize drawn in a lottery,—an independent fortune left unexpectedly by the death of a distant relative of whom they had never heard before,—a mine of gold opened just below the surface on the side of the hill by a flash of lightning? If they had, it would have turned their heads or corrupted their habits. They were rather in the condition of one of the husbandmen of old Ipswich, a little turned of one-and- twenty, who has just paid off the last legacy, or the last gage upon the estate left him by his father,—an estate where his childhood played with brothers and sisters now resting in early graves, in which the first little labors of his young hands were done, from which he can see the meeting-house spire above the old intervening elms, to which his own toil, mingled with that of his ancestors of many generations, has given all its value, which, before he had owned, he had learned how to keep, how to till, how to transmit to his heirs enlarged and enriched with a more scientific and tasteful cultivation. I can only allude to one other labor, one other trial of the Colonial Age,—the wars in which for one hundred and fifty years our fathers were every moment engaged, or to which they were every moment exposed, and leave you to estimate the influence which these must have had on the mind and character, and at last on the grand destinies of New England and of North America.
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