and this great nation of sixty-five millions of people is powerless by law and in fact to prevent the massacre or to bring the murderers to trial. There, again, are the outrages committed against the liberties and rights of the colored people in some parts of the country; and, again, though political platform and pulpit may utter their indignant protests, this great government looks on helplessly. You may attempt a journey in a palace car across the continent, or you may send a train with treasure across; but you do it with the liability that your train or car will be held up by banditti, and the treasure stolen and the passengers robbed. Or look at our latest anti-Chinese bill,— a piece of legislation which is both a perfidy and an atrocity, a violation of our own solemn treaties and an institution of legal measures against unoffending Chinamen, now for years resident in this country, which revives the spirit and some of the features of the fugitive slave law. Let there be needed restriction on immigration, applicable alike to all nationalities; but let, at least, the legislation be equitable and the laws humane. And the humiliating feature about it is that this legislation was adopted against the sober conscience of the country, and at the behest of party expediency. It was one of the things which neither party in Congress dared to oppose nor the President to veto, for fear of losing the support of the Pacific States in the coming campaign.

Noting all these things, are we, it may be well

asked, a nation of civilized men, or are we still in a semi-barbarous condition? And yet, remembering all these things, where, on the whole, shall we find a better country? where one with vaster possibilities for good and a more promising future? Taking things even at their worst among us, what is the duty, what the lesson, of our national birthday? Not to flee the country, not to fold our hands and leave it to be preyed on by the harpies of ruin. Here, rather, is our opportunity to show our patriotism, the opportunity for that higher patriotism which would go to the rescue of a country in peril and save it, an opportunity for making a country which shall be worth living for and worth dying for. Our fathers were not dismayed when first, on these rugged New England shores, they had to fight for their very existence, as well as for their religious liberty, against climate, against the wilderness, against savage man and savage beast, against famine and disease. They did not succumb: they conquered. Our fathers of the Revolutionary epoch did not yield to the discouragements of their era. They did not sink in despair at the thought of their untrained militia. meeting in armed conflict the veteran soldiers of Great Britain, of their poverty contending against England's wealth, of traitors at home ready to attack them in the rear. They had faith in the strength of their cause, in the strength of their hearts, in the strength of their right arms; and they conquered. And, when that more recent trial

hour came, the slaveholders' rebellion,-the country did not falter. At first, indeed, there was the discouraged cry, "Let the wayward sisters go!" But, when the flag was struck, the country's heart felt the blow, and was smitten with a righteous indignation. The country rose to the level of the need. Men, means, statesmanship, military leadership, all came amply adequate to the emergency; and the country was saved,— the whole country, and rededicated entire to liberty. With such memories in our national history we ought to be shamed out of all half-faith in our republican institutions, out of all half-heartedness and cowardly discouragement in face of the evils. that now seem to endanger them.

We

Yet we are not to close our eyes to these evils. We are not to trust in any principle of "manifest destiny" to save us from them. No doctrine of the old-fashioned optimistic fatalism, that, because we are the freest nation and have the best form of government on earth, therefore no evil can befall us, is going to meet present emergencies. must meet them just as the country has always met the evils that have beset it hitherto,- by resolute vigilance and courage, by thoughtfulness, by boldly facing the evils and overcoming them, not necessarily by military power, but by steady application of the best intellect and conscience of the country to the devising of political, legal, and moral remedies. Most solemn duties rest upon upon the people of these States, duties to be performed

under a sense of religious obligation, duties to our country and duties to mankind, whose welfare is so closely involved in the success and prosperity of our free institutions, duties to liberty, to justice, to human rights. We justly honor those who have died for their country. But it is a harder and therefore a nobler task to live for one's country.