Nor may you omit due honors to the virtues of the unrecorded dead; not as mourners who require consolation, but with a clear perception of the glory of their end. The debt of nature all must pay. To die, if need be, in defense of the country is a common obligation; it is granted to few to exchange life for a victory so full of benefits to their fellow-men. These are the disinterested, unnamed martyrs, who, without hope, or fame, or gain, gave up their lives in testimony to the all pleading love of country, and left to our statesmen the lesson to demand of others nothing but what is right, and to submit to no wrong.
"We have met the enemy," were Perry's words as he reported the result of the battle. And who was that enemy? A nation speaking another tongue? A state abandoned to the caprices of despotism? A people inimical to human freedom? No! they were the nation from whom most of us sprung, using the same copious language, cherishing after their fashion the love of liberty, enjoying internally the freest government that the world had known before our own. But the external policy of their government has been less controlled by regard for right than their domestic administration; and a series of wanton aggression, upon us, useless to England, condemned by her own statesmen and judges as violations of the law of nature and the law of nations, forced into a conflict two peoples whose common sympathies should never have been disturbed. And is this aggressive system forever to be adventured by her rulers? How long is the overshadowing aristocratic element in her government to stand between the natural affections of kindred nations.
[OUR DOMAIN.—Ibid.]
Even now a British minister, whose past career gave hope of a greater fairness, is renewing the old system of experiments on the possible contingency of the pusillanimity, the indifference, or the ignorance of some future American administration, and disputes our boundary in the Northwest, though the words of the treaty are too plain to be perverted, and though the United States claims no more than the British secretary of state, who offered the treaty, explained as its meaning before it was signed. British soldiers are now encamped on part of our territory which bears the name of Washington. With a moderation that should have commanded respect, the United States waived their better claim to Vancouver, and even to any part of it, thinking it conducive to peace to avoid two jurisdictions on different parts of the same island; and in return for this forbearance the British Minister, yielding perhaps to some selfish clamor of a trading company, as much against British interests as against American rights, reproduces on an American island the inconvenience of divided occupation, which it was the very purpose of the treaty to avoid.
If the hum of the American seaboard is in part the echo of sentiments from abroad, here the unmixed voice of America may be heard, as it pronounces that it is too late to wrest territory from the United States by prevarication, by menace, or by force. From the English dockyards it is a long voyage to San Juan; the only good land route across the continent lies south of Lake Superior; in a few years there will be three Ohios on the shores of the Pacific. It is England's interest as well as duty to give effect to the treaty as it was interpreted by her own minister to ours. Your voices on this memorable day give the instruction to our own Government to abide by the treaty faithfully, on the condition that Britain will do the same; but the treaty must bind neither party or both—must be executed in good faith or canceled. The men who honor the memory of Perry will always know how to defend the domain of their country.
Has any European statesman been miscounting the strength of this nation, by substituting a reminiscence of our feeble confederation for the present efficient and almost perfect organism of the body politic? Has any foreign ruler been so foolish as to listen with credulity to the tales of impending disunion? Every man of the people of Ohio, this great central highway of national travel, will, without one exception, tell the calumniator or the unbeliever that the voices of discontent among us are but the evanescent vapor of men's breath; that our little domestic strifes are no more than momentary disturbances on the surface, easily settled among ourselves; that the love of Union has wound its cords indissolubly round the whole American people.
So, then, our last word shall be for the Union. The Union will guard the fame of its defenders, and ever more protect our entire territory; it will keep alive for mankind, the beacon lights of popular liberty and power; it will dissuade nations in a state of unripeness from attempting to found republican governments before they spring up naturally by an inward law; and its mighty heart will throb with delight at every true advance in any part of the world, toward republican happiness and freedom.