The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1876-07-06
The Nations Centennial.
Grafton of Hon. George f. Talbot i'm City
Hall, July 4, 1870.


do to individuals, their birthdays. So
transient are our single lives, so miserably
inadequate to the tolls and pains and eX-
hausting arts by which we acquire wealth,
reputation and power, are the heeting
years allowed to us for their use and en-
joyment, that we can only give zest to our
activities and dignity to our employments
by devoting them to the work of providing
q better fortune for our families. But the
family succumbs sooner or later to the in
evitable alienation of death and life, and
distributes its envied accumulations of
property, character and genius to men of
other name and lineage. In contemplating
the grand millenniums, which are the life
time of nations, in pouring our rill of
thought into the general intelligence, in
contributing upright lives to swell the ag-
gregate of the public virtue, we forget our
petty deaths in the Immortality of our
race, and make our humble employments
noble, in that they help to make our coun-
try greater, and the world more in accord
with the aspirations of the soul. With
minds enlarged by such contem-
plation, we lose our individuality in the
deathless career of our country. All her
history seems to enter into our experience,
and in her growth and glory, our hopes
and sympathies bring to US the conscious
ness of Immortality.
ONE PERIOD OF PROSPERITY, TWO OF
PERIL.
One great goal is reached. A rounded
century of nationality lies behind us, and
common sentiment summons great and
united people to contemplate its history.
1t naturally divides itself into two periods
of peril, and one of prosperity. From
1776 to 1883 we were occupied with the
weary war, by which Independence was
secured, and with the organization into
harmonious political system of the dis
cordant elements that made up our popu-
lation. Organized into homogeneous
nationality under the authority, which the
virtue and patriotism of Washington chiefly
inspired, we entered then upon our halcyon
years, which lasted down to 1860. Fortu-
nate was tile generation of our fathers,
whose serene lives lay within this favored
period. Exempt from the wars and revo-
lutions that kept Europe alarmed, crippled
its industry, arrested its progress, and
decimated its inhabitants, our people were
left unmolested to multiply themselves and
attract migration of the bravest and best
among the oppressed classes of the older
world. The wilderness was cleared and
cultivated; ships were built and sent to
gather wealth from the most distant seas;
intelligence was diffused, and invention
stimulated, by which new forces were won
from nature, increasing the efficiency, and
adding to the rewards of human labor.
Probably in no country and in no period
We're the best conditions of happy human
existence so completely realized, as in the
United States during this its early golden
age. Then broke upon us our final and
greater peril, not wholly unforeseen by
patriotic seers, but not the less on that ac-
count unprovided for. So potent demon
as slavery could not be cast out of the
body polite without rending and tearing;
and we come up to this our high centen-
NAL festival, the wounds of the great
struggle still bleeding, and grasp each
| others hands in an honest purpose of
| reconciliation and repentance, the tears of
| grief and mutual resentment moi yet dried
| in our eyes.
THE REPUBLIC A NATURAL GROWTH.
Going back to the time and place, when
the statesmen, whose counsel guided and
whose courage inspired our fathers, wisely
rash, resolved upon Independence, we
may say:
nHere was the doom fixed; here is marked the date
When this New World awoke to mans estate
Burnt its last ship and ceased to look behind"
The American people had taken their
fortunes into their own hands. They be-
| tinent, with its majestic stretch of noun
| tain, forest and plain, bounded only by
| lakes, oceans and tropic seas, had a des-
| tiny of its own, which it was their duty to
| develop.
The feudal and aristocratic forms of Eu-
| rOpean society seemed nowhere capable of
| transplantation into the soil of the New
| World. Come whence they might, from
monarchical England and France, from
| feudal Germany, even from despotic and
| ecclesiastic Spain, the colonists of both
| North and South America became democ-
| racies at the outset, or lapsed into that
| condition, as soon as foreign constraint
| was withdrawn. In Virginia, even in New
England, a few grand families tried to
| maintain in society prestige, which they
| could not claim in the state, but their liv-
| cried servants, their gay apparel, and their
| stately manners were as ludicrouSly out of
| place among the homespun settlers, ,as were
the chivalric feats and knightly bearing of
| Don Quixote in the prosaic times upon
| which he fell. Our sickly domestic aris-
| tocracies, whose monuments are still seen
| in dilapidated mansions, and heirlooms of
| plate, portraits and brocades, soon perished
| under the necessity, imposed first or last
| upon all hands, of earning livelihood.
Metternich said to an American in 1886:
| democracy is natural to you; you have
| always been democrats, and democracy is
| therefore verify in America. In Europe
| it is a falsehood, and l hate all falsehood."
| So when it fell to our forefathers to estab-
| lish national government to replace that
| whose allegiance they had disowned, few
| theorists believed that we might copy the
| very form of government that had op-
pressed us, and use the popularity of
| Washington to establish royal line, and
1e md Of
| ton as the nucleus of an order of nobility;
but to all clear-headed men it was appar-
| ent, that we could not create new form
of society, but must take that which had
| come by natural growth. We had always
had the republic in free states, many of
whose constitutions survived unchanged
down to our own times, and democracy
in the New England town meeting. Ac-
cordingly the Federal Constitution was
wisely built upon no model of antiquity, no
ideal theory, but upon the reality of the
situation, and with its adoption came a
harmonious order in our municipal, state
and national governments.
In this inevitable step wise sagacitv
shaped the enthusiastic politics of our
fathers. The instinct of independence had
in it the promise and potency of our future
growth and glory. For from the national
independence sprang personal independ-
ence. self-reliance, the daring to undertake
difficult things, that Impotence of OBJ
stacle and restraint, which, though
sometimes Extensively and ludicrously ex-
hibited in boasting and vain glory, lie at
the basis of all that is effective in the
American character.
YEAR OF JUBILEE.
The ancient Hebrews, blest in coun-
try of marvellous fertility, land, in their
own poetic language, flowing with milk
and honey, established this ordinance.
Every fiftieth year was year of jubilee.
The land was not to be cropped; the slave
went free of his master; all mortgaged
estates, with the exception of dwelling
houses in walled cities "a provision favor
ing rural life) went back without payment
to the mortgager, and every Israelite re-
turned from the obligation of servitude, to
which poverty or debt had subjected him,
free to his family and redeemed homestead.
1t was year of rest to the land, during
which, though it was lawful to buy of ones
neighbor, and to sell to him, no hard bar
gains and no oppression or extortion was
permitted. Contented with past gains,