[Speech at the Anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, Jan. 8.]
F.P. Blair, Esq., in the name of the Democratic Association, pronounced an elaborate address, vindicating the interposition of the King of France to aid the American Colonies when they revolted from England, and pointing out that America, in defence of her institutions, may be called on to support the masses of the European nations as a breakwater between herself and Despotism. He showed the certain danger to which English freedom would be exposed from the triumph of despotism, and asked:—
What have we to expect from neutrality? We may anticipate the treatment which we received from both belligerents when Napoleon pressed on to empire over all the nation as Russia does now…. Can we hope, that when the war is intended to exterminate the principle of which our government is the great exemplar, our people will be allowed the immunity of free trade with the belligerents to grow rich and strong by their calamities?… The impending danger can only be averted from us by the ability of the people of Europe, now kept down by military mercenaries, to rise and assert their own rights. To encourage such efforts is the duty of every free people, and of all that would be free…. Shall our government hesitate to denounce, as a violation of the law of nations, the intervention of the Czar? Shall it hesitate to declare it a justification of a counter-intervention?… Our countrymen will not assent to the one-sided doctrine. They will intervene to lift up those stricken down by intervention,—
The exiles from Europe—Liberty and Louis Kossuth.
The band struck up the well-known Marseilles Hymn, and Kossuth, rising to respond, was received with prolonged cheers. The music having ceased, three hearty cheers were given, and Louis Kossuth responded to the toast and the address in the following remarks, which were received with warm enthusiasm:—
Gentlemen: I feel sincerely gratified with the honour of being invited to be present on this solemn occasion, dedicated to the memory of a glorious as well as highly responsible fact in your history.
There is high political wisdom in the custom yearly to revive the memory of civil virtue and national glory in the mind of the living generation, because nothing else is so efficient to keep alive the spirit of patriotism—that powerful genius, which, like the angels of Scripture, guards with flaming sword the Paradise of national liberty and independence. Happy the land where the history of the past is the history of the people, and not a mere flattery of kings; and doubly happy the land where the rewards of the past are brightened by present glory, present happiness; and where the noble deeds of the dead, instead of being a mournful monument of vanished greatness which saddens the heart, though it ennobles the mind, are a lasting source of national welfare to the age and to posterity. But where, as in this your happy land, national history is the elementary basis of education—where the very schoolboy is better acquainted with the history of his country than in monarchies almost the professors are—in such a country it would be indeed but a ridiculous parading of vanity for a stranger to dwell upon facts which every child is better acquainted with than he can be. Allow me therefore, gentlemen, rather briefly to expound what is the practical philosophy of that great victory which you are assembled to celebrate—what is the moral of the strain as it presents itself to the inquirer's mind.
As a man has to pass through several periods of age, each of them marked with its own peculiarities, before he comes to a settled position in life, even so a nation. A nation has first to be born, then to grow; then it has to prove its passive vitality by undergoing a trial of life. Afterwards it has to prove its active force to rise within its own immediate horizon. At last, it must take its proper seat amongst the nations of the world as a power on earth. Every one of these periods of national life must be gone through. There is no help for it. It is a necessary process of life. And every one of these life-periods has its own natural condition, which must be accepted as a necessity, even if we should not be pleased with it.
Gentlemen, having passed through the ordeal of an earnest life, with the prospect of yet having to steer through stormy gales, it is natural that, while I grasp my helm, I gaze at History, as my compass. And there is no history more instructive than yours, because you have concentrated within the narrow scope of a few years that natural process of national life, which elsewhere was achieved only through centuries. It would be a mistake, and a mistake not without danger, to believe that your nation is still in its youth because it has lived but seventy-five years. The natural condition of nations is not measured by years, but by those periods of the process of life which I have mentioned. And there is no nation on earth in whose history those periods were so distinctly marked as in yours. First, you had to be born. That is the period of your glorious struggle for independence. Endless honour be to those who conducted it! You were baptized with blood, as it seems to be the destiny of nations; but it was the genius of Freedom which stood god-father at your baptism, and gave to you a lasting character by giving you the Christian name of "Republic." Then you had to grow, and, indeed, you have grown with the luxuriant rapidity of the virgin nature of the American soil. Washington knew the nature of this soil, fertilized by the blood of your martyrs and warmed by the sun of your liberty. He knew it, when he told your fathers that you wanted but twenty years of peaceful growth to defy any power whatsoever in a just cause. You have grown through those twenty years, and wisely avoided to endanger your growth by undertaking a toil not becoming to your growing age; and there you stood about another twenty years, looking resolutely but unpretendingly around, if there be anybody to question that you were really a nation. The question was put in 1812, and decided by that glorious victory, the anniversary of which you celebrate to-day. That victory has a deeper meaning in your history than only that of a repulsed invasion. It marks a period in your national life—the period of acknowledged, unshakeable security of your national existence. It is the consummation of your declaration of independence. You have proved by it that the United States possess an incontestable vitality, having the power to preserve that independent national position which your fathers established by the declaration of independence. In reality, it was the victory of New Orleans by which you took your seat amongst the independent nations of the world never to be contested through all posterity.
If the history of New Orleans showed the security of your national existence, the victorious war against Mexico proved that also your national interests must be respected. The period of active vitality is attained. It remains yet to take your seat, not amongst the nations of the earth, for that you have since the day of New Orleans, but amongst the powers on earth. What is the meaning of that word "power on earth?" The meaning of it is, to have not only the power to guard your own particular interests, but also to have a vote in the regulation of the common interests of humanity, of which you are an independent member—in a word, to become a tribunal enforcing the law of nations, precisely as your supreme court maintains your own constitution and laws. And, indeed, all argument of statesmanship, all philosophy of history, would be vain, if I were mistaken that your great nation is arrived at this unavoidable period of life.