“Ring! Ring! RING!”
and then the Liberty Bell echoed the gospel, as foreordained in its inscription: “Proclaim liberty to the land: to all the inhabitants thereof.”
That is the most dramatic incident in American history.
Whether we view its inception or its outcome, it stands unrivaled. We shall forever “celebrate it with thanksgiving” so long as the nation endures.
This incident responds to every test. It is the action of a single person actuated by intense emotion; he, a child, was a type of the fact he expressed; through his puny action began the independent life of a nation to whose future none dares prescribe limits.
Discovery and colonization were inevitable, and are common to all lands. Civil wars are expressions rather than causes of great crises. Civil and commercial progress are inevitable. But the Declaration of Independence was an act of conscious choice.
No other incident in our history was so momentous, none so dramatic and comprehensive of past and future.
Columbus was an unconscious instrument in opening a new world; the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English explorers were all working toward a consummation none foresaw; the founders of colonies had their ideals, but all have been swallowed up in our national development. The Revolution alone looked both backward and forward, and the fathers of the republic gave us the law of our national being.
The birth-cry of the nation came from the lips of the child who cried aloud in the streets:
“Ring! Ring! RING!”