accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and
barter with every pitiful little German prince that sells and sends
his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are
forever vain and impotent If I were an American as I am an
Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I would
never lay down my arms--never--never--never!"

Wherever the principle of Anglo-Saxon freedom and the rights of man
have been at stake, the all-animating voice of the orator has kept
alive the sacred flame. In the witenagemote of the earlier tongs, in
the parliament of the later kings, in the Massachusetts town-meeting
and in the Virginia House of Burgesses, in the legislature of every
State, and in the Congress of the United States, wherever in
Anglo-Saxon countries the torch of liberty seemed to burn low, the
breath of the orator has fanned it into flame. It fired the
eloquence of Sheridan pleading against Warren Hastings for the
down-trodden natives of India in words that have not lost their
magnetic charm:--

"My Lords, do you, the judges of this land and the expounders of its
rightful laws, do you approve of this mockery and call that the
character of Justice which takes the form of right to execute wrong?
No. my Lords, justice is not this halt and miserable object; it is
not the ineffective bauble of an Indian pagoda; 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 this I turn from the disgusting caricature to
the real image. Justice I have now before me, august and pure, the
abstract ideal of all that would be perfect in the spirits and