In reverting to the period of our origin, other nations have
generally been compelled to plunge into the chaos of
impenetrable antiquity, or to trace a lawless ancestry into the
caverns of ravishers and robbers. It is your peculiar privilege
to commemorate, in this birthday of your nation, an event
ascertained in its minutest details; an event of which the
principal actors are known to you familiarly, as if belonging to
your own age; an event of a magnitude before which
imagination shrinks at the imperfection of her powers. It is
your further happiness to behold, in those eminent characters,
who were most conspicuous in accomplishing the settlement of
your country, men upon whose virtue you can dwell with
honest exultation. The founders of your race are not handed
down to you, like the fathers of the Roman people, as the
sucklings of a wolf. You are not descended from a nauseous
compound of fanaticism and sensuality, whose only argument
was the sword, and whose only paradise was a brothel. No
Gothic scourge of God, no Vandal pest of nations, no fabled
fugitive from the flames of Troy, no bastard Norman tyrant,
appears among the list of worthies who first landed on the
rock, which your veneration has preserved as a lasting
monument of their achievement. The great actors of the day
we now solemnize were illustrious by their intrepid valor no
less than by their Christian graces, but the clarion of conquest
has not blazoned forth their names to all the winds of heaven.
Their glory has not been wafted over oceans of blood to the
remotest regions of the earth. They have not erected to
themselves colossal statues upon pedestals of human bones, to
provoke and insult the tardy hand of heavenly retribution. But
theirs was "the better fortitude of patience and heroic