defence!
R. Choate.


XXV.

THE CITY OF OUR LIBERTY.

But now that our service of commemoration is ended, let us go hence and
meditate on all that it has taught us. You see how long the holy and
beautiful city of our liberty and our power has been in building, and by
how many hands, and at what cost. You see the towering and steadfast height
to which it has gone up, and how its turrets and spires gleam in the rising
and setting sun. You stand among the graces of some--your townsmen, your
fathers by blood, whose names you bear, whose portraits hang up in your
homes, of whose memory you are justly proud--who helped in their day to
sink those walls deep in their beds, where neither frost nor earthquake
might heave them,--to raise aloft those great arches of stone,--to send up
those turrets and spires into the sky. It was theirs to build; remember it
is yours, under Providence, to keep the city,--to keep it from the sword
of the invader,--to keep it from licentiousness and crime and irreligion,
and all that would make it unsafe or unfit to live in,--to keep it from the
fires of faction, of civil strife, of party spirit, that might burn up in a
day the slow work of a thousand years of glory. Happy, if we shall so
perform our duty that they who centuries hence shall dwell among our graces
may be able to remember, on some such day as this, in one common service of
grateful commemoration, their fathers of the first and the second age of
America,--those who through martyrdom and tempest and battle sought
liberty, and made her their own,--and those whom neither ease nor luxury,
nor the fear of man, nor the worship of man, could prevail on to barter her