The Orangeburg news. [volume] (Orangeburg, S.C.) 1867-1875, 1869-07-03
The Fourth Of July.


germ grows in its seminary womb, and
at the proper moment "is born into the
world" The anniversary of these birth
days are occasions of jubilant joy.
- The land Of Columbus halls among
her memorial days the Fourth of July,
as che brightest in the calander, Those
waits, floating upon the bosom of the
untried ocean of experiment, drifting
from the over-crowded emporia of Flu
ropean civilization, terminating in the
virgin soil of new world, united and
attracted by the sympathy of enterprise,
Of danger and of hope, moulded their in
terests into a grand community of des-
tiny. The wonderful Utopia, of which
I Columbus had told the gorgeous legend,
had scarcely been reduced to reality
nor the Ey Dorado of marvellous and
superstitious credulity been reduced to
its market value by the enterprise and
|, ayarice of astonished Europe, when those
ideas of religious and political liberty,
which. in the old world were but. .meteoric
CLEANS or volcanic fires, destructive to
/, opposition but powerless themselves to
live, finding in the forests of America
Il field for expansion, and a fostering
! asylum, astonished men with their logic
and their success Freedom of con-
science-a pure democracy, coeval with
! che discovery, grew with the growth of
the new creation, and America and po-
{ litical and religious liberty became reali-
ties, simultaneously and together. The
fable of new world was dissipated and
the truth Of the existence Of another con-
tinent took its place, and the laurels of
the diseoverer faded and withered, in
the eommonsense realization of the fact.
AS soon as great blessings become wide
spread and familiar, men forget that
they are blessings or that their dicover-,
/. era or inventors are ksaefaetc--- frf :
ms the universai moral of all history.
6 America now became known to Eu-
rope, as the rendezvous for all that
vas ecentric, erratic, hereto and new.
ALL Of these epithcts were odiously ap-
piled by conservative, bigotcd aud stag
nant Europe. But among the new ele-
ments that constituted the America of
that day were the germs of the grandest
and highest principles of Progress and
Freedom that had yet ''visted the green
earth"
The growing sense and appreciation
0e Liberty, exhibiting itself in England
in the scenes of the Protectorate, and
accepting the return of the Crown, al
tered and amended in accordance with
mans realization Of his right and in
France, in the hollow mutterings and
subteranean reveberations of that unrest
and chafng at the deboched and mon
stroas tyrannyof the Bourbons, this sense
ofLiberty in America unopposed and un-
shackled reared its proportions of Majes-
ty and Beauty, and became the "great
spirit" of religious enthusiasm and wor-
ship. Here Liberty found her vast and
peerless temple, her forest cathedral,
"Its dome-the unlimited arch glowing FER
lis sense--yon budding spray, swung by the
breeze;
It's music-the hymn Of the fountain before
us;
It's iight--heavens smile, stealing soft thro'
the trees,'
and here mans heart worshipped his
ideal God. This was the idea with
which history was pregnant and germin-
ating to its birth, was ushered into life
npon the fourth of July, 1776. The de-
claration of American Independence
the record of mans resolution to be free,
the Magma Charta of Liberty, the appeal
Of humanity from tyranny, to the Su-