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lutions that shall have ended in that victory. How nobly distinguished that people, who shall have planted, and nurtured to maturity, both the political and moral freedom of their species.

This is the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the birthday of Washington-we are met to celebrate this day. Washington is the mightiest name of earth-long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty, still mightiest in moral reformation. pected. It cannot be. glory to the name of Let none attempt it. name, and in its naked, deathless splendor leave it shining on.

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On that name a culogy is exTo add brightness to the sun, or Washington is alike impossible. In solemn awe pronounce the

SPEECH DELIVERED AT PEORIA, ILLINOIS, OCT. 16, 1854.

Finally I insist that if there is any thing which it is the duty of the whole people to never intrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions. And if they shall think, as I do, that the extension of slavery endangers them, more than any or all other causes, how recreant to themselves if they submit the question, and with it the fate of their country, to a mere handful of men, bent only on temporary self-interest. If this question of slavery extension were an insignificant one-one having no power to do harm-it might be shuffled aside in this way; but being as it is, the great Behemoth of danger, shall the strong gripe of the nation be loosened upon him, to intrust him to the hands of such feeble keepers? I have done with this mighty argument of self-government, Go sacred thing; Go in peace! Much as I hate slavery, 1 would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one. But when I go to Union-saving I must believe, at least, that the means I employ have some adaptation to the end.

T. S. ARTHUR.

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S the years pass, and we look back upon the life and work of Abraham Lincoln, during the time he was President of the United States, our admiration and reverence for the man increases. For unselfish devotion to the public welfare, purity of character, freedom from partisanship and personal ambition, and ability to comprehend and deal with the momentous questions at issue in our great struggle for national existence, he was first among the ablest statesmen and most loyal men of his time.

NEW YORK, 1880.

J. S. Arthur.

EXTRACT FROM MR. LINCOLN'S SPEECH,

DELIVERED IN REPRESENTATIVE'S HALL, SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, JUNE 26, 1857.

In those days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison-house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another, they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impos sibility of his escape more complete than it is.

JOHN G. WHITTIER.

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LIBRARY

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'HE weary form, that rested not,
Save in a martyr's grave;

The care-worn face that none forgot,
Turned to the kneeling slave.

We rest in peace, where his sad eyes
Saw peril, strife and pain;
His was the awful sacrifice,
And ours, the priceless gain.

John Whitter

DANVERS, 1880.

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