EXTRACT FROM AN ORATION, DELIVERED AT PLYMOUTH, DECEMBER 22, 1824. BY EDWARD EVERETT. No character is perfect among nations, more than among men; but it must needs be conceded, that after our own country, England is the most favored abode of liberty; or rather, that besides our own it is the only land where liberty can be said to exist; the only land where the voice of the sovereign is not stronger than the voice of the law. We can scarce revolve with patience, the idea, that we might have been a Spanish colony, a Portuguese colony, or a Dutch colony; we can scarcely compare with coolness, the inheritance of those institutions, which were transmitted to us by our fathers, with that which we must have received from almost any other country; absolute government, military despotism, and the holy inquisition. What would have been the condition of this flourishing and happy land, had these been the institutions, on which its settlement was founded? There are, unfortunately, too many materials for answering this question, in the history of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements on the American continent, from the first moment of unrelenting waste and desolation, to the distractions and conflicts, of which we ourselves are the witnesses. What hope can there be for the colonies of nations, which possess themselves no spring of improvement; and tolerate none in the regions over which they rule; whose administration sets no bright examples of political independence; whose languages send out no reviving lessons of sound and practical science, (afraid of nothing that is true,) of manly literature, of free speculation; but repeat, with every ship that crosses the Atlantic, the same debasing voice of despotism, credulity, superstition, and slavery? What citizen of our republic is not grateful, in the contrast which our history presents? Who does not feel, what reflecting American does not acknowledge, the incalculable advantages derived to this land, out of the deep foundations of civil, intellectual, and moral truth, from which we have drawn in England? What American does not feel proud that he is descended from the countrymen of Bacon, of Newton, and of Locke? Who does not know, that while every pulse of civil liberty in the heart of the British empire beat warm and full in the bosom of our fathers; the sobriety, the firmness, and the dignity with which the cause of free principles struggled into existence here, constantly found encouragement and countenance from the sons of liberty there? Who does not remember, that when the Pilgrims went over the sea, the prayers of the faithful British confessors, in all the quarters of their dispersion, went over with them, while their aching eyes were strained, till the star of hope should go up in the western skies? And who will ever forget, that in that eventful struggle, which severed this mighty empire from the British crown, there was not heard, throughout our continent in arms, a voice which spoke louder for the rights of America, than that of Burke or of Chatham, within the walls of the British parliament, and at the foot of the British throne? No, for myself, I can truly say, that after my native land, I feel a tenderness and a reverence for that of my fathers. The pride I take in my own country makes me respect that from which we are sprung. In touching the soil of England, I seem to return, like a descendant, to the old family seat ;-to come back to the abode of an aged and venerable parent. I acknowledge this great consanguinity of nations. The sound of my native language beyond the sea, is a music to my ear, beyond the richest strains Tuscan softness, or Castilian majesty. I am not yet in a land of strangers, while surrounded by the manners, the habits, the forms, in which I have been brought up. I wander delighted through a thousand scenes, which the historians, the poets, have made familiar to us, of which the names are interwoven with our earliest associations. I tread with reverence, the spots, where I can retrace the footsteps of our suffering fathers; the pleasant land of their birth has a claim on my heart. It seems to me a classic, yea, a holy land, rich in the memory of the great and good; the martyrs of liberty, the exiled heralds of truth; and richer, as the parent of this land of promise in the west. -- I am not, I need not say I am not,—the panegyrist of England. I am not dazzled by her riches, nor awed by her power. The sceptre, the mitre, and the coronet,-stars, garters, and blue ribbons,—seem to me poor things for great men to contend for. Nor is my admiration awakened by her armies mustered for the battles of Europe; her navies overshadowing the ocean; nor her empire grasping the farthest East. It is these, and the price of guilt and blood by which they are maintained, which are the cause why no friend of liberty can salute her with undivided affections. But it is the refuge of free principles, though often persecuted; the school of religious liberty, the more precious for the struggles to which it has been called; the tombs of those who have reflected honor on all who speak the English tongue; it is the birth-place of our fathers, the home of the Pilgrims; it is these which I love and venerate in England. I should feel ashamed of an enthusiasm for Italy and Greece, did I not also feel it for a land like this. In an American it would seem to me degenerate and ungrateful, to hang with passion upon the traces of Homer and Virgil, and follow without emotion the nearer and plainer footsteps of Shakspeare and Milton; and I should think him cold in his love for his native land, who felt no melting in his heart for that other native land, which holds the ashes of his forefathers. But it was not enough that our fathers were of England: the masters of Ireland, and the lords of Hindostan are of England too. But our fathers were Englishmen, aggrieved, persecuted and banished. It is a principle, amply borne out by the history of the great and powerful nations of the earth, and by that of none more than the country of which we speak, that the best fruits and choicest action of the commendable qualities of the national character, are to be found on the side of the oppressed few, and not of the triumphant many. As in private character, adversity is often requisite to give a proper direction and temper to strong qualities, so the noblest traits of national character, even under the freest and most independent of hereditary governments, are commonly to be sought in the ranks of a protesting minority, or of a dissenting sect. Never was this truth more clearly illustrated than in the settlement of New-England. Could a common calculation of policy have dictated the terms of that settlement, no doubt our foundations would have been laid beneath the royal smile. Convoys and navies would have been solicited to waft our fathers to the coast; armies, to defend the infant communities; and the flattering patronage of princes and lords, to espouse their interests in the councils of the mother country. Happy, that our fathers enjoyed no such patronage; happy, that they fell into no such protecting hands; happy, that our foundations were silently and deeply cast in quiet insignificance, beneath a charter of banishment, persecution, and contempt; so that when the royal arm was at length outstretched against us, instead of a submissive child, tied down by former graces, it found a youthful giant in the land, born amidst hardships, and nourished on the rocks, indebted for no favors, and owing no duty. From the dark portals of the star hamber, and in the stern text of the acts of uniformity, the Pilgrims received a commission, more efficient than any that ever bore the royal seal. Their banishment to Holland was fortunate; the decline of their little company in a strange land was fortunate; the difficulties which they experienced in getting the royal consent to banish themselves to this wilderness were fortunate; all the tears and heart breakings of that ever memorable parting at Delfthaven, had the happiest influence on the rising destinies of New England. All this purified the ranks of the settlers. These rough touches of fortune brushed off the light, uncertain, selfish spirits. They made it a grave, solemn, selfdenying expedition. They cast a broad shadow of thought and seriousness over the cause, and if this sometimes deepened into melancholy and bitterness, can we find no apology for such a human weakness? It is sad indeed to reflect on the disasters, which this lit. tle band of Pilgrims encountered. Sad to see a portion of them the prey of unrelenting cupidity, treacherously embarked in an unseaworthy ship, which they are soon obliged to abandon, and crowd themselves into one vessel;` one hundred persons, besides the ship's company, in a vessel of one hundred and sixty tons. One is touched at the story of the long, cold, and weary autumnal passage; of the landing on the inhospitable rocks at this dismal season; where they are deserted before long by the ship, which had brought them, and which seemed their only hold upon the world of fellow men, a prey to the elements and to want, and fearfully ignorant of the numbers, the power and the temper of the savage tribes, that filled the unexplored continent upon whose verge they had ventured. But all this wrought together for good. These trials of wandering and exile, of the ocean, the winter, the wilderness, and the savage foe, were the final assurance of success. It was these that put far away from our fathers' cause all patrician soft ness, all hereditary claims to preeminence. No effeminate nobility crowded into the dark and austere ranks of the Pilgrims. No Carr nor Villiers desired to lead on the illprovided band of despised Puritans. No well endowed clergy |