a thousand voices the reign of freedom, law, order, morality, and religion; as you look upon these charities of God, these schools of useful learning and graceful accomplishment, these great workshops of your manufacturers, in which are witnessed—performed every day—achievements of art and science to which the whole genius of the ancient world presents nothing equal; as you dwell on all this various, touching, inspiring picture in miniature of a busy, prosperous, free, happy, thrice and four times happy, and blessed people,— it is well that standing here you should look backwards as well as around you and forward,—that you should call to mind, to whom under God you owe all these things; whose weakness has grown into this strength; whose sorrows have brought this exceeding great joy; whose tears and blood, as they scattered the seed of that cold, late, ungenial, and uncertain spring, have fertilized this natural and moral harvest which is rolled out at your feet as one unbounded flood. The more particular history of Ipswich from its settlement to this day, and of the towns of Hamilton and Essex—shoots successively from the parent stock—has been written so minutely and with such general accuracy, by a learned clergyman of this country, that I may be spared the repetition of details with which he has made you familiar. This occasion, too, I think, prescribes topics somewhat more general. That long line of learned ministers, upright magistrates, and valiant men of whom we are justly proud—our municipal fathers—were something more and other than the mere founders of Ipswich; and we must remember their entire character and all their relations to their own times and to ours, or we cannot do them adequate honor. It is a boast of our local annals that they do not flow in a separate and solitary stream, but blend themselves with that broader and deeper current of events, the universal ante-revolutionary history of North America. It is the foundation of an empire, and not merely the purchase and plantation of Agawam, which we commemorate,—whether we will or not; and I do not fear that we shall enlarge our contemplations too far, or elevate them too high, for the service to which we have devoted this day. The history of the Colonies which were planted one after another along our coast in the seventeenth century, and 3
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