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Webster's Eulogium on Washington.

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in 1775, and subsequently "The School for Scandal." In 1780 he entered Parliament for the borough of Stafford, obtained official employment, distinguished himself by his eloquence and was made a privy councillor. He died "in debt and difficulties," July 6, 1816.]

JUSTICE is not a halt and miserable object; it is not the ineffective bauble of an Indian pagod; it is not the portentous phantom of despair; it is not like any fabled monster formed in the eclipse of reason, and found in some unhallowed grove of superstitious darkness and political dismay! No, my lords.

In the happy reverse of all these, I turn from this disgusting caricature, to the real image,-Justice! I have now before me, august and pure, the abstract idea of all that would be perfect in the spirits and the aspirings of men ;-where the mind rises; where the heart expands; where the countenance is ever placid and benign; where her favourite attitude is to stoop to the unfortunate; to hear their cry, and to help them; to rescue and relieve; to succour and save! Majestic from its mercy; venerable from its utility; uplifted, without pride; firm, without obduracy; beneficent in each preference; lovely, though in her frown!

On that justice I rely, deliberate and sure; abstracted from all party purpose and political speculation; not in words, but in facts. You, my lords, who hear me, I conjure, by those rights it is your best privilege to preserve; by that fame it is your best pleasure to inherit; by all those feelings, which refer to the first term in the series of existence, the original compact of our nature, our controlling rank in the creation! This is the call on all to administer to truth and equity, as they would satisfy the laws and satisfy themselves, with the most exalted bliss possible or conceivable for our_nature-the self-approving consciousness of virtue, when the condemnation we look for will be one of the most ample mercies accomplished for mankind since the creation of the world.

21.-DANIEL WEBSTER AT THE CENTENARY
CELEBRATION OF WASHINGTON.

[Daniel Webster, one of the greatest statesmen and orators of the United States, was born on the Merrimac River in 1782, and for many years held the first rank at the American bar. He was elected to Congress in 1813, and in 1827 became a member of the Senate. He visited England in 1839, in 1840 became Secretary of Foreign Affairs under President Harrison, and again in 1850 under President Fillmore, which office he retained to his death in 1852.]

I RISE, gentlemen, to propose to you the name of that great man, in commemoration of whose birth, and in honour of whose character and services, we have here assembled.

I am sure that I express a sentiment common to every one present when I say, that there is something more than ordinarily solemn and affecting on this occasion.

We are met to testify our regard for him, whose name is intimately blended with whatever belongs most essentially to the prosperity, the liberty, the free institutions, and the renown of our country. That name was of power to rally a nation, in the hour of thick-thronging public disasters and calamities; that name shone, amid the storm of war, a beacon light, to cheer and guide the country's friends; its flame, too, like a meteor, to repel her foes. That name, in the days of peace, was a loadstone, attracting to itself a whole people's confidence, a whole people's love, and the whole world's respect; that name, descending with all time, spread over the whole earth, and uttered in all the languages belonging to the tribes and races of men, will for ever be pronounced with affectionate gratitude by every one in whose breast there shall arise an aspiration for human rights and human liberty.

We perform this grateful duty, gentlemen, at the expiration of a hundred years from his birth, near the place so cherished and beloved by him, where his dust now reposes, and in the capital which bears his own immortal name.

All experience evinces, that human sentiments are strongly affected by associations. The recurrence of anniversaries, or of longer periods of time, naturally freshens the recollection, and deepens the impression of events with which they are historically connected. Renowned places, also, have a power to awaken feeling, which all acknowledge. No American can pass by the fields of Bunker Hill, Monmouth, or Camden, as if they were ordinary spots on the earth's surface. Whoever visits them feels the sentiment of love of country kindling anew, as if the spirit that belonged to the transactions which have rendered these places distinguished still hovered round with power to move and excite all who in future time may approach them.

But neither of these sources of emotion equals the power with which great moral examples affect the mind. When sublime virtues cease to be abstractions, when they become embodied in human character, and exemplified in human conduct, we should be false to our own nature, if we did not indulge in the spontaneous effusions of our gratitude and our admiration. A true lover of the virtue of patriotism delights to contemplate its purest models; and that love of country may be well suspected which affects to soar so high into the regions of sentiment as to be lost and absorbed in the abstract feeling, and becomes too elevated, or too refined, to glow either with power in the commendation or the love of individual benefactors. All this is immaterial. It is as if one should be so enthusiastic a lover of poetry as to care nothing for Homer or Milton; so passionately attached to eloquence as to be indifferent to Tully and Chatham; or such a devotee to the arts, in such an ecstasy with the elements of beauty, proportion, and expression, as to regard the masterpieces of Raphael and Michael Angelo with coldness or contempt. We may be assured, gentlemen, that he who really loves the thing itself, loves its finest exhibitions. A true friend of his country loves her friends and benefactors, and thinks

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it no degradation to commend and commemorate them. The voluntary out-pouring of public feeling made to-day, from the north to the south, and from the east to the west, proves this sentiment to be both just and natural. In the cities and in the villages, in the public temples and in the family circles, among all ages and sexes, gladdened voices to-day bespeak grateful hearts, and a freshened recollection of the virtues of the father of his country. And it will be so, in all time to come, so long as public virtue is in itself an object of regard. The ingenuous youth of America will hold up to themselves the bright model of Washington's example, and study to be what they behold; they will contemplate his character till all its virtues spread out and display themselves to their delighted vision, as the earliest astronomers, the shepherds on the plains of Babylon, gazed at the stars till they saw them form into clusters and constellations, overpowering at length the eyes of the beholders with the united blaze of a thousand lights.

Gentlemen, we are at the point of a century from the birth of Washington; and what a century it has been! During its course the human mind has seemed to proceed with a sort of geometric velocity, accomplishing more than had been done in fives or tens of centuries preceding. Washington stands at the commencement of a new era, as well as at the head of the new world. A century from the birth of Washington has changed the world. The country of Washington has been the theatre on which a great part of that change has been wrought; and Washington himself a principal agent by which it has been accomplished. His age and his country are equally full of wonders, and of both he is the chief.

If the prediction of the poet, uttered a few years before his birth, be true; if indeed it be designed by Providence that the proudest exhibition of human character and human affairs shall be made on this theatre of the western world; if it be true that

"The first four acts already past,

A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last,"

how could this imposing, swelling, final scene be appropriately opened; how could its intense interest be adequately sustained, but by the introduction of just such a character as our Washington?

Washington had attained his manhood when that spark of liberty was struck out in his own country, which has since kindled into a flame, and shot its beams over the earth. In the flow of a century from his birth, the world has changed in science, in arts, in the extent of commerce, in the improvement of navigation, and in all that relates to the civilization of man. But it is the spirit of human freedom, the new elevation of individual man, in his moral, social, and political character, leading the whole long train of other improvements, which has most remarkably distinguished the era. Society, in this century, has not made its progress, like Chinese skill, by a greater acuteness of ingenuity in trifles: it has not merely lashed itself to an increased speed round the old circles of

thought and action, but it has assumed a new character, it has raised itself from beneath governments, to a participation in governments; it has mixed moral and political objects with the daily pursuits of individual men, and, with a freedom and strength before altogether unknown, it has applied to these objects the whole power of the human understanding. It has been the era, in short, when the social principle has triumphed over the feudal principle; when society has maintained its rights against military power, and established, on foundations never hereafter to be shaken, its competency to govern itself.

22.-MAZZINI TO THE MEMORY OF THE MARTYRS OF COSENZA.

[Joseph Mazzini was born at Genoa in 1809. He was educated for the law, but devoted himself to political life. In 1857 he made an attempt to revolutionize Italy; but the scheme proving abortive, he escaped in disguise.]

WHEN I was commissioned by you, young men, to proffer, in this temple, a few words consecrated to the memory of the brothers Bandiera and their fellow-martyrs at Cosenza, I thought that some one of those who heard me might perhaps exclaim with noble indignation, "Why thus lament over the dead? The martyrs of liberty are only worthily honoured by winning the battle they have begun; Cosenza, the land where they fell, is enslaved: Venice, the city of their birth, is begirt with strangers. Let us emancipate them, and until that moment let no words pass our lips save those of war.

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But another thought arose and suggested to me, "Why have we not conquered? Why is it that whilst they fight for independence in the North of Italy, liberty is perishing in the South? Why is it that a war which should have sprung to the Alps with the bound of a lion, has dragged itself along for four months with the slow uncertain motion of the scorpion surrounded by the circle of fire? How has the rapid and powerful intuition of a people newly arisen to life been converted into the weary helpless effort of the sick man turning from side to side ?" Ah! had we all risen in the sanctity of the idea for which our martyrs died: had the holy standard of their faith preceded our youth to battle; had we reached that unity of life which was in them so powerful, and made of our every thought an action, and of our every action a thought; had we devoutly gathered up their last words in our hearts, and learned from them that Liberty and independence are one; that God and the People, Country and Humanity, are the two inseparable terms of the device of every people striving to become a nation; that Italy can only exist, one and holy, in the equality and love of all her children, great in the worship of eternal Truth, and consecrated to a lofty mission, a moral priesthood among the peoples of Europe we should not now have war, but victory; Cosenza would not be

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compelled to venerate the memory of her martyrs in secret, nor Venice be restrained from honouring them with a monument; and we here gathered together might gladly invoke those sacred names, without uncertainty as to our future destiny, or a cloud of sadness on our brows, and might say to those precursor souls, "Rejoice, for your spirit is incarnate in your brethren, and they are worthy of you."

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The idea which they worshipped, young men, does not as yet shine forth in its full purity and integrity upon your banner. The sublime programme which they dying bequeathed to the rising Italian generation, is yours; but mutilated, broken up into fragments by the false doctrines which, elsewhere overthrown, have taken refuge amongst us. I look around, and I see the struggles of desperate populations, an alternation of generous rage and of unworthy repose; of shouts for freedom and of formula of servitude, throughout all parts of our peninsula; but the heart of the country, where is it? What unity is there in this unequal and manifold movement-where is the word which should dominate the hundred diverse and opposing counsels which mislead or seduce the multitude? I hear words usurping the national omnipotence "the Italy of the North 'the League of the States -"federative compacts between princes;" but ITALY, where is it? Where is the common country-the country which the Bandiera hailed as thrice initiator of a new era of European civilization? Intoxicated with our first victories, improvident for the future, we forgot the idea revealed by God to those who suffer; and God has punished our forgetfulness by deferring our triumph. The Italian movement, my brethren, is, by decree of Providence, that of Europe. We arise to give a pledge of moral progress to the European world. But neither political fictions, nor dynastic aggrandizements, nor theories of expediency, can transform or renovate the life of the peoples. Humanity lives and moves through faith; great principles are the guiding stars of Europe towards the future. Let us turn to the graves of our martyrs, and ask from the inspiration of those who died for us all, the secret of victory in the adoration of a principle of faith. The Angel of Martyrdom and the Angel of Victory are brothers; but the one looks up to heaven, the other looks down to earth, and it is only when, from epoch to epoch, their eyes meet between earth and heaven, that creation is embellished with a new life, and a people arises, evangelist or prophet, from the cradle or the tomb.

I will now, young men, sum up to you, in a few words, the faith of our martyrs: their external life is known to you all, it is now matter of history; I need not recall it to you.

The faith of the brothers Bandiera, which was and is our own, was based upon a few simple incontrovertible truths, which few indeed venture to declare false, but which are, nevertheless, forgotten or betrayed by most.

God and the people,-God at the summit of the social edifice; the people, the universality of our brethren, at the base. God, the

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