about for the right nail till he has found it, and then drive it home.

"Aye, that is the point," he said. "You men of Boston here, look to your
harbors, crowded with English craft, and think of what is gone, lost to
you forever, unless you will strike a blow for it. Many of you are old
enough to remember how it used to be. Look at Salem Harbor, at Marblehead.
Where are the fleets of noble ships that lay side by side along the great
docks, the ships that did half the carrying trade of the world? Where are
the great merchantmen that used to sail so grandly away to the East and
that came home so richly laden? They are sunk or gone to pieces, or sold
as old timber and copper and nails to the gentlemen who build mudscows.
What are the great merchants doing who owned those fleets? They are
employing their time in building railroads with English iron and foreign
labor into desolate deserts in the West, which they hope to sell for a
handsome profit, and probably will. But when there are no more desolate
deserts and English iron and foreign labor to be had, they will wish they
had their ships again, and that in all these years they had got possession
of the carrying trade of the world, as they might have done.

"That is what I am here to say. The time is come to give up the shifts and
unstable expedients that we needed, or thought we needed, in our early
beginnings. Let us pull down all these scaffoldings and stages that have
helped us to build, and let us see whether our fabric will stand upon its
base, erect, without the paltry support of a few rotting timbers. Let us
substitute the permanent for the transitory, the stable for the unstable,
and the reality for the sham. Let us have a Civil Service in fact as well
as in name, a service of men trained to their duties, and who shall spend
their lives in fulfilling them; a service of competent men to represent us
abroad, and a service of honest men to do the country's business at home,
instead of making the country do theirs and being paid for it into the