I said, the men who helped to make my country, and yours too. It would be an impertinence in me to remind most of you of that. You know as well as I that you are represented just as much as the English people, by every monument in that
Abbey earlier than the Civil Wars, and by most monuments of later date, especially by those of all our literary men. You know that, and you value the old Abbey accordingly. But a day may come—a generation may come, in a nation so rapidly increasing by foreign immigration, as well as by home-born citizenship—a generation may come who will forget that fact; and orators arise who will be glad that it should be forgotten—for awhile. But if you would not that that evil day should come then teach your children—That the history and the freedom of America began neither with the War of Independence, nor with the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers, nor with the settlement of Virginia; but 1500 years and more before, in the days when our common Teutonic ancestors, as free then as this day, knew how
In den Deutschen Forsten
Wie der Aar zu horsten,
when Herman smote the Romans in the Teutoburger-Wald, and the great Cæsar wailed in vain to his slain general, ‘Varus, give me back my legions!’ Teach your children that the Congress which sits at Washington is as much the child of Magna Charta as the Parliament which sits at Westminster; and that when you resisted the unjust demands of an English king and council, you did but that which the
free commons of England held the right to do, and did, not only after, but before, the temporary tyranny of the Norman kings.
Show them the tombs of English kings; not of those Norman kings—no Norman king lies buried in our Abbey—there is no royal interment between Edward the Confessor, the last English prince of Cerdic’s house, and Henry the Third, the first of the new English line of kings. Tell them, in justice to our common forefathers, that those men were no tyrants, but kings, who swore to keep, and for the most part did keep, like loyal gentlemen, the ancient English laws, which they had sworn in Westminster Abbey to maintain; and that the few of them who persisted in outraging the rights or the conscience of the free people of England, paid for their perjury with their crowns, or with their lives. And tell them, too, in justice to our common ancestors, that there were never wanting to the kings, the nobles, or the commons of England, since the days when Simon de Montfort organised the House of Commons in Westminster Hall, on the 2nd of May, 1258—there were never wanting, I say, to the kings, the nobles, or the commons of England, counsellors who dared speak the truth and defend the right, even at the risk of their own goods and their own lives.
Remind them, too—or let our monuments remind
them—that even in the worst times of the War of Independence, there were not wanting, here in England, statesmen who dared to speak out for justice and humanity; and that they were not only confessed to be the leading men of their own day, but the very men whom England delighted to honour by places in her Pantheon. Show them the monuments of Chatham, Pitt, and Fox—Burke sleeps in peace elsewhere—and remind them that the great earl, who literally died as much in your service as in ours, whose fiery invectives against the cruelties of that old war are, I am proud to say, still common-places for declamation among our English schoolboys, dared, even when all was at the worst, to tell the English House of Lords—‘If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms—never, never, never!’
Yes—an American as well as an Englishman may find himself in the old Abbey in right good company.
Yes—and I do not hesitate to say, that if you will look through the monuments erected in that Abbey, since those of Pitt and Fox—you will find that the great majority commemorate the children, not of obstruction, but of progress; not of darkness, but of light.