at is the power of some wretched miscreant seeking spoils but finding none, with a pistol in his hand to neutralize and nullify the votes of millions and put a beloved president to torture and to death. The rights of the humblest as well as of the highest must be respected and enforced. Labor in all its departments must be justly remunerated and elevated and the true dignity of labor recognized. The poor must be wisely visited and liberally cared for, so that mendicity shall not be tempted into mendacity nor want exasperated into crime. The great duties of individual citizenship must be conscientiously discharged. Peace, order, and the good old virtues of honesty, charity, temperance, and industry must be cultivated and reverenced. The purity of private life must be cherished and guarded and luxury and extravagance discouraged. Polygamy must cease to pollute our land. Profligate literature must be scorned and left unpurchased. Public opinion must be refined, purified, strengthened, and rendered prevailing and imperative by the best thoughts and best words which the press, the platform, and the pulpit can pour forth. The pen and the tongue alike must be exercised under a sense of moral responsibility. In a word, the less of government we have by formal laws and statutes the more we need and the more we must have of individual self-government.

For, my friends, there must be government of some sort and it must be exercised and enforced. Cities and towns must make provision for all that relates to cities and towns. States, which still and always have duties, which still and always have rights, must provide for all that justly relates to States. And the general government of the Union must exercise its paramount authority over everything of domestic or foreign interest which comes within the sphere of its con

stitutional control. Civil service must be reformed.

Elec

tions and appointments, as Burke said, must be made "as to a sacred function and not as to a pitiful job."

The elective franchise must be everywhere protected. Public credit must be maintained in city, State, and nation at every sacrifice. Neither a gold nor a silver currency, nor both conjoined-neither monometallisms nor bimetallismscan form any substitute for the honesty and good faith which are the basis of an enduring public credit. Our independent judicial system, with all the rights and duties of the jurybox, must be respected and upheld. The army and the navy must be adequately maintained for the defence of our coasts, and commerce, and boundaries, and the militia not neglected for domestic exigencies; but peace at home and abroad must still and ever be the aim and end of all our preparations for Above all, the Union-" the Union in any event," as Washington said-must be preserved!

war.

But let me add at once that, with a view to all these ends and as the indispensable means of promoting and securing them all, universal education, without distinction of race, must be encouraged, aided, and enforced. The elective franchise can never be taken away from any of those to whom it has once been granted, but we can and must make education co-extensive with the elective franchise; and it must be done without delay as a measure of self-defence and with the general co-operation of the authorities and of the people of the whole country.

One half of our country during the last ten or fifteen years. has been opened for the first time to the introduction and establishment of free common schools, and there is not wealth enough at present in that region to provide for this great necessity. Two millions of children without the means

of instruction" was the estimate of the late Dr. Sears in

1879.

No

Every year brings another installment of brutal ignorance to the polls to be the subject of cajolement, deception, corruption, or intimidation. Here, here is our greatest danger for the future. The words of our late lamented President in his inaugural come to us to-day with redoubled emphasis rom that unclosed grave on the lake: "All the constitutional power of the nation and of the States and all the volunteer forces of the people should be summoned to meet this danger by the saving influence of universal education." drought or flood or conflagration, no succession of droughts or floods or conflagrations can be so disastrous to our material wealth as this periodical influx, these annual inundations of ignorance, to our moral and political welfare. Every year, every day of delay increases the difficulty of meeting the danger. Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free!

I know whereof I speak; and have certainly given time enough and thought enough to the subject for fourteen years past in my relations to a great Southern trust, to learn at least what that trust has done, what it can do, and what it cannot do. It has been thus far, as a voice crying in the wilderness, -calling on the people of the South to undertake the great work for themselves and preparing the way for its successful prosecution. It may be looked back upon one of these days,

if not now, as the little leaven which has leavened the whole lump.

But the whole lump must be kneaded and molded and worked over with unceasing activity and energy by every town, village, and district, for itself, or there will be no sufficient bread for the hungry and famished masses. And there must be aids and appropriations and endowments by cities and States, and by the nation at large through its public lands, if in no other way, and to an amount compared with which the gift of George Peabody-munificent as it was for an individual benefactor-is but as the small dust of the balance.

It is itself one of the great rights of a free people to be educated and trained up from childhood to that ability to govern themselves which is the largest element in republican self-government, and without which all self-government must be a failure and a farce here and everywhere. It is indeed primarily a right of our children and they are not able to enforce and vindicate it for themselves. But let us beware of subjecting ourselves to the ineffable reproach of robbing the children of their bread and casting it before dogs, by wasting untold millions on corrupt or extravagant projects, and starving our common schools. The whole field of the Union is now open to education and the whole field of the Union must be occupied. Free governments must stand or fall with free schools. These and these alone can supply the firm foundation; and that foundation must at this very moment be extended and strengthened and rendered immovable and indestructible, like that of the gigantic obelisk at Washington, if the boasted fabric of liberty for which this victory cleared the ground is not to settle and totter and crumble.

Tell me not that I am indulging in truisms. I know they are truisms; but they are better a thousand-fold better

than nihilisms or communisms or Fenianisms, or any of the other isms which are making such headway in supplanting them. No advanced thought, no mystical philosophy, no glittering abstractions, no swelling phrases about freedom,—not even science with all its marvellous inventions and discoveries, -can help us much in sustaining this Republic. Still less can any Godless theories of Creation, or any infidel attempts to rule out the Redeemer from his rightful supremacy in our hearts, afford us any hope of security. That way lies despair.

Commonplace truths, old familiar teachings, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Farewell Address of Washington, honesty, virtue, patriotism, universal education, are what the world most needs in these days and our own part of the world as much as any other part. Without these we are lost. With these and with the blessing of God, which is sure to follow them, a second century of our Republic may be confidently looked forward to; and those who shall gather on this field a hundred years hence shall then exult, as we are now exulting in the continued enjoyment of the free institutions bequeathed to us by our fathers, and in honoring the memories of those who have sustained them.

It is matter of record, fellow citizens, that on the day after the surrender here had taken place, Washington issued his general order congratulating the army on the glorious event. That order concluded as follows:

"Divine service is to be performed to-morrow in the several brigades and divisions. The commander-in-chief recommends that the troops not on duty should universally attend with the seriousness of deportment and gratitude of heart which the recognition of such reiterated and astonishing interpositions of Providence demand of us,"