usurpation to create another that may be equally intolerant of honest public purposes. They have made a noble struggle for the conscientious discharge of the most sacred duties of citizenship, independent of the arbitrary dictation of selfish and often incompetent leaders, and such a victory won in this progressive age will make future partisan enthrallment impossible. It will aim a death-blow at the sanctity of political traditions and precedents, for intelligent independence will discharge new duties as new occasions present them. It may make and dissolve political organizations with each national contest. It will protract no party to advance personal ends, after its mission is fulfilled. It will forbid the rule of incompetency, and the adventurous place-man will have no vocation of promise. It will demand statesmanship for the duties of statesmen, and integrity and fidelity will be among the expected qualities of those who govern. Do not understand me as assuming that a political millennium is at hand, or that it ever can come in this or any other government. Bad men will attain power to a greater or less extent under any political control, and errors of policy will continue while man is fallible; but I look to the future of American politics as fraught with the most beneficent progress, and with the grandest triumphs of free government.

THE DUTIES OF TO-DAY.*

GENTLEMEN OF THE LITERARY SOCIETIES:

This is one of the occasions when the truth, for the truth's sake, can be most fitly presented. Rhetoric here plays its part, and it is one of no mean importance. The honors of which the student dreams, and for which he so fervently struggles before unemotional judges and sympathizing friends, are battled for, and won or lost; but I am called to maintain the time-honored custom of giving counsel to the teachers of the future, who are soon, at the latest, to fill the places of those who are the leaders of to-day. With all the wide diffusion of general intelligence among the people of our land from our multiplied schools and colleges and popular publications, the duties and responsibilities of the educated men, the scholars of the country, are greater now than ever before in the history of the Republic. And you, whom I now address; you, who look to far distant days of sober manhood and its grave exactions, will soon pause in the fitful, fleeting visions of youth, to wonder how they have mocked and fled, and left you chief actors in society and government.

And to what duties are you to be called? Not merely to those to which the present has been schooled; for every new generation brings new occasions, and new occasions bring new necessities. The generation that has preceded you on the theatre of human action has made the history of man illustrious in heroism and in the achievements of science and statesmanship. In our

* An address delivered before the Literary Societies of Pennsylvania College, Gettysburg, Pa., June 26, 1878.

own green land, patriotism has written its brightest and most imperishable annals, and free government has taught civilization its priceless value by the unsparing sacrifice of the noblest people of the earth for its preservation. Those who have seen and felt the passions and the sorrows of fraternal war; who have cherished the long, lingering memories of bereavement, and noted the fadeless stains upon the very altar of authority, may tell you that your lots have been cast in pleasant seasons, and that no great struggles are to confront you. It is a delusion; a grievous error, and to impress this truth upon you, with all the earnestness of heartfelt sincerity, is the office I have accepted.

Let me go directly to the lesson I would teach. Those who have gone before you have rescued free government from armed rebellion, and we are reminded that free institutions are the secured patrimony for our children and our children's children. We are pointed to our battlefields of world-wide fame for skill and gallantry; to the wisdom and patriotism which ruled in civil authority through the distractions of bloody sectional conflict; to the furled insurgent flag and a restored brotherhood; to the supremacy of the laws of the Union in every clime, and we are told that the Republic has triumphed over all its foes, and that its peace, progress and perpetuity are no longer problems to vex our people or employ our statesmanship. It is not so. The danger to free government and to the beneficent civilization that alone could have created it was never so great and never so immediate as I do not except even the dark day when the flag of rebellion first flaunted its threatened desolation from Seminary Hill, and the sullen retreat of the Federal armies through the streets of Gettysburg, and the shouts of the insurgent victors told that a Reynolds had fallen and that the first struggle of the decisive battle of the war had been lost. There were brave and skillful captains

now.

and corps of veteran soldiers hastening to the conflict to retrieve the disaster, and behind them were twenty millions of unfaltering and unconquerable people and a country teeming with wealth and plenty. It was but the darkness that precedes the light, and there was abiding faith not only along the rude battlements of Cemetery Hill, and throughout the ranks of the hurriedly marching columns, but in the homes and in the hearts of the people as well, that no defeat, even to the annihilation of an army, could compass the dismemberment of this Union. Do you ask what peril can be greater? What can so gravely threaten the liberties of a nation that is at peace with all the world and its authority confessed by all at home? What can have entered the temple of free government but fifteen years after its rededication to its holiest purposes on the memorable field of Gettysburg, and dimmed the lustre of its patriotism and palsied the grandeur of its achievement? It is no longer the flame of battle that gathered its fearful harvest of death hard by us that calls us to guard our homes and our government. It is not the tempest that proclaims its coming by the distant thunders and warns all to be in readiness for its shock, but it is the subtle moral miasma that courses unnoticed through the political system and that withers patriotism and blunts public sensibility, until demoralization reigns in Church and State. The generation with which you whom I specially address will act, and for which the men of your class, in a greater or less degree, must act, will, I verily believe, be called upon to solve the problem of the perpetuity of this Republic and the supremacy of the Christian civilization that gave freedom its birth in the New World a century ago. The arch enemy is before you, behind you, on every side of you; it crowds about the sanctuary, deforms the cabinet, poisons the home and makes the very atmosphere we breathe sickening with its pollution. Let me strip it of

its mask and introduce it to you by the name that all must recognize. Gentlemen: scholars, statesmen, leaders of the future, I present to you-The growing contempt for Public Morality, for Law and for Religion!

These are the foes with which you must accept battle, and ere your generation shall have written its brief records, there will be no Christian civilization, and no Republic on this continent, which are not living lies, or there will be a return to the sanctity of public and private morality that must shame the mousing placeman from official trust, and recall society, its homes, its altars, and all its channels of effort from the liberty of license to the liberty of law. Do you ask where this terrible foe is to be found?—where its intrenchments, where its lines of battle? I answer-where are they not? Look out over the broad land, enter the highest temples of authority, mingle with the most conspicuous statesmen, drink of the fountains from which come our laws, and thence turn to the social structure that is the first author of all that is good or evil in any people, and the great enemy will confront you wheresoever you wander. It is not wholly illogical that it should be so. There are seasons of greatness and seasons of decline in the history of every nation, and in none can the transitions be so swift and so sharply contrasted as in a government like ours. It has no example in all the achievements of men. It is the only great Republic that the world has ever known. There have been free democracies where the ebbs and flows of popular passion ruled, until anarchy was overthrown by despotism, and there have been republics in name without any of the essential attributes of the individual sovereignty of the people; but here, for the first time in the varied experiments of civil government, has a nation peopled a continent extending over distant sections, with diversified interests, maintained the absolute sovereignty of the private citizen, and made liberty and law the