There is one thing of which I am certain, and that is, that if we could live forever here, we would care nothing for each other. The fact that we must die, the fact that the feast must end, brings our souls together, and treads the weeds from out the paths between our hearts.
And so it may be, after all, that love is a little flower that grows on the crumbling edge of the grave. So it may be, that were it not for death there would be no love, and without love all life would be a curse.
I say it gives me great pleasure to meet you once again; great pleasure to congratulate you on your good fortune—the good fortune of being a citizen of the first and grandest republic ever established upon the face of the earth.
That is a royal fortune. To be an heir of all the great and brave men of this land, of all the good, loving and patient women; to be in possession of the blessings that they have given, should make every healthy citizen of the United States feel like a millionaire.
This, to-day, is the most prosperous country on the globe; and it is something to be a citizen of this country.
It is well, too, whenever we meet, to draw attention to what has been done by our ancestors. It is well to think of them and to thank them for all their work, for all their courage, for all their toil.
Three hundred years ago our country was a vast wilderness, inhabited by a few savages. Three hundred years ago—how short a time; hardly a tick of the great clock of eternity—three hundred years; not a second in the life even of this planet—three hundred years ago, a wilderness; three hundred years ago, inhabited by a few savages; three hundred years ago a few men in the Old World, dissatisfied, brave and adventurous, trusted their lives to the sea and came to this land.
In 1776 there were only three millions of people all told. These men settled on the shores of the sea. These men, by experience, learned to govern themselves. These men, by experience, found that a man should be respected in the proportion that he was useful. They found, by experience, that titles were of no importance; that the real thing was the man, and that the real things in the man were heart and brain. They found, by experience, how to govern themselves, because there was nobody else here when they came. The gentlemen who had been in the habit of governing their fellow-men staid at home, and the men who had been in the habit of being governed came here, and, consequently, they had to govern themselves.
And finally, educated by experience, by the rivers and forests, by the grandeur and splendor of nature, they began to think that this continent should not belong to any other; that it was great enough to count one, and that they had the intelligence and manhood to lay the foundations of a nation.
It would be impossible to pay too great and splendid a tribute to the great and magnificent souls of that day. They saw the future. They saw this country as it is now, and they endeavored to lay the foundation deep; they endeavored to reach the bed-rock of human rights, the bed-rock of justice. And thereupon they declared that all men were born equal; that all the children of nature had at birth the same rights, and that all men had the right to pursue the only good,—happiness.