AN ORATION BY GEORGE TICKNOR CURTIS.

DELIVERED ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1862, BEFORE THE MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES OF THE CITY OF BOSTON.

Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen of the City Council:-Had I felt at liberty to consult my own inclination alone, I should have asked you to excuse me from taking part in the proceedings of this day. At a much earlier period of life I enjoyed the distinction of being placed on the long roll of those who have successively spoken to the people of Boston, at the bidding of their municipal authorities, on this our national anniversary. At this particular juncture I could well have desired to be spared from the performance of any such public duty. I had prepared myself to bear what is now upon us in silence and obscurity, doing the infinitely little that I may to alienate personal suffering, sustaining the hopes of those who are nearest to me, and endeavoring to cherish in my own breast a living faith in the strength and perpetuity of our republican forms of government.

But private wishes are nothing-private tastes are nothing-in the presence of great public trials and dangers. We cannot, if we would, escape the responsibilities which such trials and dangers entail upon us. If we fly to the uttermost parts of the earth the thought of our country is with us there. If we put on the robes of the stoic, or wrap ourselves in the philosophy of the fatalist, the heart beneath will beat for the land of our birth in spite of the outward man. There is no place, there is no hope, there is no happiness in a state of indifference to the welfare and honor of our country. The most sordid of men, whose sole delight consists in laying, day by day, one more piece of gold on his already swollen heaps, has no more assured rest from anxiety for his country, in times of real peril, than he whose whole being quivers beneath the blows which public disasters or disgraces inflict upon a refined and sensitive nature. To love our country; to labor for its prosperity and repose; to contend, in civil life, for the measures which we believe essential to its good; to yearn for that long, deep, tranquil flow of public affairs which we fondly hope is to reach and bear safely on its bosom those in whom we are to have an earthly hereafter-these are the nobler passions and the higher aims which distinguish the civilized from the savage man. Even if I did not feel such emotions deeply, how could I bring here at such a time as this the doubts and migivings of one fearful for himself? The thickly crowding memories of the far-off dead, who have fallen in the bitter contests of this civil war, admonish me of the insignificance of such fears. Who shall bring a thought of the exertions, the sacrifices, or the responsibilities of public discourse into the presence of the calamities of his country?

I am here for a far other purpose. I come to plead for the Constitution of our country. I am here to show you, from my own earnest convictions, how dangerous it may be to forego all care for the connection between the

political past and the political future. I am here to state to you, as I have read them on the page of history, the fundamental conditions on which alone, as I believe, the people of these states can be a nation and preserve their liberties. I am here to endeavor to rescue the idea of union from heresies as destructive as the disorganizing and justly reprobated heresies of secession. I wish to do what I can to define to rational and intelligent minds the real nature and limits of the national supremacy, and to vindicate it from the corroding influences of doctrines which are leading us away from the political faith and prospects of a free people.

Do you say that there is no need of such a discussion? Reflect for a moment, I pray you, on what has already crept into the common uses of our political speech. We hear men talk about the "old" Constitution, as if that admirable frame of government, which is not yet older than some who still live under its sway, and which has bestowed on this nation a vigor unexampled in history, were already in its decrepitude, or as if it had become suspended from its functions by general consent, to await at respectful distance the advent of some new theory as yet unknown. We hear men talk of the "old" Union, as if there were a choice about the terms on which the Union can subsist, or as if those terms were not to be taken as having been fixed on the day on which Washington and his compatriots signed the Constitution of the United States. You will not say that this tendency—this apparent willingness to break away from the past and its obligations, and to throw ourselves upon a careless tempting of the future -does not demand your sober consideration. I beg you also to call before you another symptom of these unsettled times. With an extravagance partly habitual to us, and partly springing from the intense exertions of the year which has just passed, we have encountered the doctrines of secession and disunion with many theories about the national unity and the federal authority which are not founded in history or in law. Are you not conscious that there has been poured forth from hundreds of American pulpits, platforms, and presses, and on floors of Congress, a species of what is called argument, in defence of the national supremacy, which ill befits the nature of our republican institutions? When I hear one of these courtier-like preachers or writers for our American sovereigns resting the authority of our government on a doctrine that might have gained him promotion at the hands of James or Charles Stuart, I cannot help wishing that he had lived in an age when such teachings, if not actually believed to be sound, were at all events exceedingly useful to the teachers. My friends, I cannot bear the thought of vindicating the supremacy of our national government by anything but the just title on which it was founded, and I will not desert the solid ground of our republican constitutional liberty for any purpose on earth while there is a hope of maintaining it.

I know of no just foundation for the title of government in this country but consent that consent which resides in compact, contract, stipulation, concession -the do et concedo of public grants. Give me a solemn cession of political sovereign powers, evidenced by a public transaction and a public charter, and you have given me a civil contract, to which I can apply the rules of public law and the obligations of justice between man and man; on which I can separate the legitimate powers of the government from the rights of the people; on which I can,

with perfect propriety, assert the authority of law in the halls of criminal jurisprudence, or, if need be, at the mouth of the cannon. But when you speak of any other right of one collection of people or states to govern another collection of people or states; when you go beyond a public charter to create a national unity, and a duty of loyalty and submission independent of that charter; when you undertake to found government on something not embraced by a grant-I understand you to employ a language and ideas that ought never to be uttered by an American tongue, and which, if carried out in practice, will put an end to the principles on which your liberties are founded.

For these and many other reasons-most appropriate for our consideration this day-let us recur to certain indisputable facts in our history. I shall make no apology for insisting on the precedents of our national history. No nation cau safely lay aside the teachings, the obligations, or the facts of its previous existence. You cannot make a tabula rasa of your political condition, and write upon it a purely original system, with no traditions, no law, no compacts, no limitations, derived from the generations who have gone before you, without ruinously failing to improve. Revolutionary France tried such a proceeding, and property, life, religion, morals, public order, and public tranquillity went down into a confusion no better than barbarism, out of which society could be raised again only by the strong hand of a despot. We are of a race which ought to have learned by the experience of a thousand years that reforms, improvements, progress, must be conducted with a fixed reference to those antecedent facts which have already formed the chief condition of the national existence. Let us attend to some of the well-known truths in our history.

1. The Declaration of Independence was not accepted by the people of the colonies, and their delegates in Congress were not authorized to enter into a union without a reservation to the people of each colony of its distinct separate right of internal self-government. To represent the abstract sentiments of the Declaration as inconsistent with any law or institution existing in any one of the colonies is to contradict the record and history of its adoption. What, for example, do you make of the following resolution of the people of Maryland in convention, adopted on the 28th day of June, 1776, and laid before the Continental Congress three days before the Declaration of Independence was signed : "That the deputies of said Colony or any three or more of them be authorized and empowered to concur with the other United Colonies, or a majority of them, in declaring the United Colonies free and Independent States; in forming such further compact and confederation between them; in making foreign alliances, and in adopting such other measures as shall be adjudged necessary for securing the liberties of America; and that said Colony will hold itself bound by the resolutions of the majority of the United Colonies in the premises; provided, the sole and exclusive right of regulating the internal government and police of that Colony be reserved to the people thereof."

This annunciation of the sense and purpose in which the people of Maryland accepted the Declaration is just as much a part of the record as the Declaration itself, and it clearly controls for them the meaning and application of every political axiom or principle which the Declaration contains. It was intended to signify to the country and to the world that the people of Maryland consented to

separate themselves from the sovereignty of Great Britain, on the condition that the right to maintain within their own limits just such a system of society and government as they might see fit to maintain should belong to them, notwithstanding anything said in the Declaration to which they were asked to give their assent.

Several of the other colonies made a similar express reservation; and all of them, and all the people of America, understood that every colony accepted the Declaration, in fact, in the same sense. No man in the whole country, from the 4th of July, 1776, to the adoption of the Articles of Confederation, ever supposed that the Revolutionary Congress acquired any legal right to interfere with the domestic concerns of any one of the colonies which then became states, or any moral authority to lay down rules for determining what laws, institutions, or customs, or what condition of its inhabitants, should be adopted or continued by the states in their internal government. From that day to this it has ever been a received doctrine of American law that the Revolutionary Congress exercised, with the assent of the whole people, certain powers which were needful for the common defence, but that these powers in no way touched or involved the sovereign right of each state to regulate its own internal condition.

2. When the Articles of Confederation were finally ratified, 1781, there was placed in the very front of the instrument the solemn declaration that "each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled ;" and the powers given to the United States in Congress related exclusively to those affairs in which the state had a common concern, and were framed with a view to the common defence against a foreign. enemy, in order to secure, by joint exertions, the independence and sovereignty of each of the states.

3. When the Constitution of the United States was finally established in 1788 the people of each state, acting through authorized agents, executed by a resolution or other public act a cession of certain sovereign powers, described in the Constitution, to the government which that Constitution provided to receive and exercise them. These powers being once absolutely granted by public instruments, duly executed in behalf of the people of each state, were thenceforth incapable of being resumed; for I hold that there is nothing in the nature of political powers which renders them, when absolutely ceded, any more capable of being resumed at pleasure by the grantors than a right of property is when once conveyed by an absolute deed. In both cases those who receive the grant hold under a contract; and if that contract, as is the case with the Constitution, provides for a common arbiter to determine its meaning and operation, there is no resulting right in the parties, from the instrument itself, to determine any question that arises under it.

At the same time it is never to be forgotten that the powers and rights of separate internal government which were not ceded by the people of the states, or which they did not by adopting the Constitution agree to restrain, remained in the people of each state in full sovereignty. It might have been enough for their safety to have rested upon this as a familiarly understood and well-defined principle of public law implied in every such grant. But the people did not see

fit to trust to implication alone. They insisted upon annexing to the Constitution an amendment which declares that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

We thus see that from the first dawn of our national existence, through every form which it has yet assumed, a dual character has constantly attended our political condition. A nation has existed because there has all along existed a central authority having the right to prescribe the rule of action for the whole people on certain subjects, occasions, and relations. In this sense and in no other, to this extent but no further, we have been since 1776, and are now a nation. At the beginning the limits of this central authority, in respect to which we are a nation, were defined by general popular understanding; but more recently they were fixed in written terms and public charters, first by the Articles of Confederation, and ultimately, with a more enlarged scope and a more efficient machinery, by the Constitution. The latter instrument made this central authority a government proper, but with limited and defined powers, which are supreme within their own appropriate sphere. In like manner, from the beginning, there has existed another political body—distinct, sovereign within its own sphere, and independent as to all the powers and objects of government not ceded or restrained under the Federal Constitution. This body is the statea political corporation of which each inhabitant is a subject, as he is at the same time a subject of that other political corporation known as the United States.

All this is familiar to you. But I state it here because I wish to remind you that the careful preservation of this separate political body, the state-this sovereign right of self-government as far as it has been retained by the people of cach state has ever been a cardinal rule of action with the American people, and with all their wisest statesmen, Northern and Southern, of every school of politics. There have been great differences of opinion and great controversies respecting the dividing line which separates, or ought to be held to separate, the national from the state powers. But no American statesman has ever lived at any former period who would have dared to confess a purpose to crush the state sovereignties out of existence, and no man can now confess such a wish without arousing a popular jealousy which will not slumber even in a time of civil war and national commotion.

What is the true secret of this undying popular jealousy on the subject of state rights? What is it that even now-when we are sending our best blood to be poured ont in defence of the true principle of the national supremacy-causes all men who are not mad with some revolutionary project to shrink from measures that appear to threaten the integrity of state authority, and to pray that at least that bitter and dreaded cup may pass from us? It is the original, inborn, and indestructible belief that the preservation of the state sovereignty within its just and legitimate sphere is essential to the preservation of republican liberty. Beyond a doubt it was this belief which led the people from the first to object, as they sometimes did unreasonably object, to the augmentation of the national powers. Perhaps they could not always explain-perhaps they did not always fully understand-all the grounds of this conviction. It has been, as it were, an