If there be a country where the human heart, in public and in
private, may burst forth in unrestrained adulation to the God that made it,
it is here, where the immortal heroes and patriots of more than one hundred
years ago succeeded in establishing these United States, as the 'land of
the free and the home of the brave.' Here, then, human excellence must
attain to the summit of its glory. Mind constitutes the majesty of man,
virtue his true nobility. The tide of improvement which is now flowing like
another Niagara through the land, is destined to flow on down to the latest
posterity, and it will bear on its mighty bosom our virtues, or our vices,
our glory, or our shame, or whatever else we may transmit as an
inheritance. Thus it depends upon ourselves whether the moth of immortality
and the vampire of luxury shall prove the overthrow of this country, or
whether knowledge and virtue, like pillars, shall support her against the
whirlwinds of war, ambition, corruption, and the remorseless tooth of time.
And while assembled here to-night, in this, the very cradle of liberty, let
us not forget that there are evils to be shunned and avoided by us as
individuals and as a common people.
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