The Shasta courier., 1869-06-19
Butler on the British Question.

At the late decoration ceremonies at
Soldiers graves in Gloucester, Massachu-
sets, General B. F. Butler delivered an
grafton, OF which the conclusion was as
follows:
While we mourn the departed with
sottened grief, because of the great work
which they have wrought, we may not
forget the wrongs which filed so many of
these graves which have now become the
very altars Of Liberty. While we swear
our children upon them to eternal fealty to
free instisations, equal rights, equal powers
and equal laws for all men, we may not, as
did the Carthageuean, swear his infant son
to eternal hatred to Rome, yet we do re-
member that Government whose ready aid
and perfdious alliance to rebellion in behalf
of slavery cost US so much and so many who
lie buried here. We will teach our chill
dren here by these green mounds which
cover their fathers ashes, to enforce the
lesson, the story of the hatred of that mon
archy of republican institutions which
sought to strangle free government at its
birth, hiring Hessian subsidies and savage
warriors to fight the battle of tyranny
against our fathers in the war for indie
pendence-that Government which then
failed to make slavery and despotism the
rule on land, even against an infant Re-
public, yet vamting herself mistress of the
seas, and through impressment and search
in after years tried but failed to make the
ocean and those who 90 down to the sea
in ships her subjects. Let US tell our
children, too-and call the spirits of the
gallant who hover around us to bear us wit
ness and impress the lesson-teaching the
story how, when slavery, her legacy to us
as nation, had caused treason and rebellion
to raise their paracidal hands against the
nations life, and by its fendish spirit to
arm brother against brother England,
jealous Of our prosperity in rivalry of her
commercial greatness, and in hatred of our
freedom, when she could do so with safety
to herself, when she hoped we were in death
grapple with each other, let loose her pirate
steamers to destroy our ships, as she had
sent out barbarous Indians in revolutionary
times to burn the dwellings of our mothers
and scalp them and their little ones. Here
AFTER when the Gloucester boy shall say to
his father, Where are the fishing vessels
that you once had as the dependence of
your old age 2" the man shall answer, "Boy,
do you remember the smoke you saw from
the Eastern Point, when child That
was your fathers vessel, burned by pirates
sent out from British ports by British
builders, who were cheered for so doing by
the British Parliament" The boy will
say: "What shall be demanded for SO
great wrong?" and the old man shall
write the single word" reparation =
And SO shall remembrance of the injuries
be kept alive in the hearts of the people.
But more and more do these sins of England
become a part of this occasion, because
there is not child whose basket is heavy
with blossoms to place with pious care upon
the green turf of his fathers grave who
does not know that his or his comrades
sire lost his life in war encouraged, aided
and prolonged by hatred of England to the
institutions of his country and her soldiers.