show the seams and scars of the conflict. Sectional hostility must
sooner or later produce political fragments. The danger lies at your
door, it is time to arrest it. It is time that men should go back to
the origin of our institutions. They should drink the waters of the
fountain, ascend to the source, of our colonial history.

You, men of Boston, go to the street where the massacre occurred in
1770. There learn how your fathers unfaltering stood for community
right. And near the same spot mark how proudly the delegation of the
democracy came to demand the removal of the troops from Boston, and
how the venerable Samuel Adams stood asserting the rights of the
people, dauntless as Hampden, clear and eloquent as Sidney.

All over our country these monuments, instructive to the present
generation, of what our fathers felt and said and did, are to be
found. In the library of your association for the collection of your
early history, I found a letter descriptive of the reading of the
address to his army by Gen. Washington during one of those winters
when he sought shelter for the ill clad, unshod, but victorious army
with which he achieved the independence we enjoy; he had built a log
cabin for a meeting house, and there reading his address, his sight
failed him, he put on his glasses and with emotion which manifested
the reality of his feelings, said, "I have grown gray in the service
of my country, and now I am growing blind." Who can measure the value
of such incidents in a people's history? It is a privilege to have
access to documents, which cause us to realize the trials, the patient
endurance, the hardy virtue and moral grandeur of the men from whom we
inherit our political institutions, and to whose teachings it were
well that the present generations should constantly refer.