The Ocala banner. (Ocala, Marion County, Fla.) 1883-194?, 1901-07-05
made this the asylum of the Cypress.
ed and the home of the free.

made this the asylum of the Cypress.
ed and the home of the free.
All civilized nations have festive
days or anniversaries which they are
accustomed to celebrate and thus to
commemorate some event in the
political history of each, dear to the
people of such country. But there is
not in the wide range of political his
tory q day more fittingly celebrated,
or one which witnessed events fraught
with greater interest to mankind
than that which we commemorate
today.
The Fourth of July, 1875! What
associations cluster around that i'm
mortal date. On that day q new
light burst forth from out of the dark
ness and gloom, which had hung over
the earth for ages, and casting its
beams across the pathway of man,
kindled anew the fires of hope in the
human breast wherever the glad news
was told that a republic had been
born in this western world, whose
chief corner stone was the rights and
liberties of all the people.
For generations mankind had
CROPPED in darkness ever conscious of a
higher political destiny, but only now
and then catching glimpses of its
light as the centuries came and went.
All men were created equal before the
law and in the enjoyment of liberty
and happiness, but few in all the ages
had understood the full meaning of
this grand truth; and yet the germ
implanted in the human breast, when
man, created in the image and like.
ness of his Creator, first walked the
earth in the presence of Jehovah,
had never died. Although its for
tunes had been various throughout
that long night Of time, no season of
adversely had ever been able to quench
the fires that burned on liberty's altar,
and from the early dawn of civiliza-
ton there has secretly existed a land
on whose shores this light has not
shone, dimly it may have been, but
the spark was always there requiring
the mailed hand of force to keep it
from bursting into consuming
flame.
Far back in the dawn of history be-
fore the pyramids of Egypt first re-
Elected the rays of tropical sun, we
discern the germ of constitutional
government by which it was sought
to make life, liberty and even prop
erty secure. Sacred history tells us of
the government of the patriarchs over
their families, and there it will be
seen that the idea of freedom of will,
of thought and of action was predOm-
mated, God alone being the ultimate
Judge of the action of the individual.
And, again, on the shores of Palestine,
on its sacred mountains and its vine
clad hills, where the hand of Deity
was ever seen, and where God ruled
directly the destinies of His children
liberty was cherished as long as the
will of the people, uncontrolled by ex-
traneous forces, was felt in the shap-
ing of their destinies.
Under the influence of those princi-
plies, crude though they then appeared,
the feeble fugitives who had fled from
Egyptian bondage became an empire
of wisdom, of wealth and power. Their
liberal institutions produced states
men, poets, historians and warriors,
who will continue to challenge the
admiration of posterity by the SPLEEN
dor of their achievements as long as
men shall tread the shores of time.
But an hour came when public vir-
tue was debauched by the lust Of con-
quest and of gain, and when primi-
tive purity faded away until the mass
es broke forth in one wild demand fOI
a king. The king came and ruled
/ Juutd, anu pOpuloI S>oNOA LII "~~
at an end among the Jewish people.
Again, in classic Greece and an
Gent Rome, the sun of liberty arose
shining with a light second only tC
that which, in the 18th century
lighted up the shores of this western
world with its benignant rays. Then
Spartan and the Athenean, in that
far off age, drank deeply at freedoms
fount, and reckoned themselve:
among the favored of earth. They
had their codes of laws, which they
revered, and their delightful memo
ries which they cherished. They
pointed to their great battleields as
we now point to ours, and erected
monuments of marble and of brass in
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