our produce. In this we have no pay, part, nor lot. On the south we were reaching across gulf and sea to the tropics at our doors and to the republics of our continent. Once we had mutual relations with the Dominion on our north; but this and all such visions of material supremacy and splendor have faded. The ocean coast still gives us its thunderous line of breakers, its seven thousand miles and more indented with harbors of safety and bays of wondrous beauty. The net-work of our hundred thousand miles of railway still trembles with its immense freight, the garnered opulence of our sky, sun, soil, and mine. Cotton, corn, and petroleum -the triumvirate of our common weal-head the stately procession in which a thousand forms of labor and graces of art move and chant their praises to our smiling and copious land. The time was when amid the glory and pride of our country our models of ships and adventure at sea were the theme of lyre and the praise of eloquence. It was comfort and wealth in peace, hope and safety in war. It was the horn of plenty and the nursery of seamen for the maintenance of our independence and rights. Why should America not have her part in these glories of the sea? Was she not discovered by the genius, daring, and devotion of Columbus? Were not our colonies created into commonwealths by the men who braved the dangers of the sea to found here new empires? Our country is born of the sea! Its freedom is of the wind and wave. Shall these praises be forever an echo of the past? Are we to take no part in the enlightenment and progress in science and art, of which commerce is the procreant cause and infallible gauge? Has the sea rolled back and away from us at the command of the insolent monarchs of capital? To one born inland the sea has a weird and wondrous mystery. I have studied its moods as a lover those of his mistress. Through the generosity of my fellow legislators here we have been able to mitigate somewhat of its terrors. Its enchantment has led me over liquid leagues on leagues to remotest realms. Not alone does it enchant because of its majestic expanse, its resistless force, its depth and unity, its cliffs, bays, and fiords, its chemical qualities, its monstrous forms, its riches and rocks, its tributes, its graves, its requiem, its murmur of repose and mirror of placid beauty, but for its wrath, peril, and sublimity. These have led adventurous worthies of every age, by sun, star, and compass over its trackless wastes, and returned them for their daring untold wealth and the eulogy of history. But it is for its refining, civilizing, elevating influences upon our kind that the ocean lifts its mighty minstrelsy. Unhappy that nation which has no part in the successes of the sea. Happy in history those realms like Tyre, Sidon, Carthage, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Norway, whose gathered glories are symboled in the trident. Happy in the present are those nations who, under the favoring gales of commerce, the fostering economies of freedom, and the unwavering faith in the guidance of Providence, bear the blessings of varied industry to distant realms and bring back to their own the magnificent fruits of ceaseless interchange. Happy that nation whose poet can raise his voice to herald the hope and humanity of its institutions in the grandeur of the familiar symbol of Longfellow: "Sail on, O Union, strong and great! With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!" 'Amid this divided marine dominion, in which one power alone has half the rule of the ocean, shall America sit scepterless and forlorn-dethroned, ignoble, dispirited, and disgraced? The ensign of our nationality takes its stars from the vault of heaven. By them brave men sail. It is now an unknown emblem upon the sea. We welcome every race to our shores in the vessels of other nations. Our enormous surplus, which feeds the world, is for others to bear away. We gaze at the leviathans of commerce entering our harbors and darkening our sky with the pennons of smoke; but the thunder of the engines is under another flag and the shouting of the captains is in an alien tongue. Others distribute the produce, capitalize the moneys, gather the glories, and elevate their institutions by the amenities and benignities of commerce, and we, boasting of our invention, heroism, and freedom, allow the jailers of a hated and selfish policy to place gyves upon our energy, and when we ask for liberty to build and for liberty to buy imprison our genius in the sight of these splendid achievements. Mr. Speaker, if you would that we should once more fly our ensign upon the sea, assist us to take off the burdens from our navigation and give to us the first, last, and best-the indispensable condition of civilization by commerce-liberty. KING THO HOMAS STARR KING, a distinguished American orator and clergyman, was the son of a Universalist clergyman and was born in New York city December 17, 1824. After the death of his father he was for some time a clerk in a store in Charlestown, Massachusetts, but in 1840 was appointed an assistant teacher in a school in that town. In 1842, while principal of a school in West Medford, Massachusetts, he studied for the Universalist ministry under Hosea Ballou, and after a few years spent in preaching in and about Boston was ordained pastor of the Hollis Street Unitarian church in Boston, where he remained eleven years. During this period his remarkable eloquence made him one of the most popular preachers in Boston, while on the lecture platform he was equally successful. Among his lectures those on "Substance and Show," Socrates," and "Sight and Insight were perhaps the most generally popular. In 1860 he accepted a call to a Unitarian church in San Francisco, where he met with extraordinary success. In the political canvass of 1860 he urged with great eloquence the paramount duty of supporting the Union cause and to his patriotic efforts the preservation of California to the Union at that time was largely due. While the civil war was in progress he was active in behalf of the sanitary commission. He was an enthusiastic lover of nature and was one of the first to direct public attention to the beauties of the White Mountains of New Hampshire and of the Yosemite Valley. His death occurred in San Francisco March 4, 1864, and in 1889 his statue was erected in the Golden Gate Park in that city. He was the author of "The White Hills: their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry (1859); "Patriotism and Other Papers (1865); "Christianity and Humanity" (1877); "Substance and Show and Other Lectures " (1877). ON THE PRIVILEGE AND DUTIES OF PATRIOTISM FROM AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE "SUMMER LIGHT GUARD," L ET us waste no words in introduction or preface. I am to speak to you of the privilege and duties of American patriotism. First the privilege. Patriotism is love of country. It is a privilege that we are capable of such a sentiment. Selflove is the freezing point in the temperature of the world. 'As the heart is kindled and ennobled it pours out feeling and interest, first upon family and kindred, then upon country, then upon humanity. The home, the flag, the cross, these are the representatives or symbols of the noblest and most sacred affections or treasures of feeling in human nature. We sometimes read arguments by very strict moralists which cast a little suspicion upon the value of patriotism as a virtue, for the reason that the law of love, unrestricted love, should be our guide and inspiration. We must be cosmopolitan by our sympathy, they prefer to say. Patriotism if it interferes with the wider spirit of humanity is sectionalism of the heart. We must not give up to country "what is meant for mankind." Such sentiments may be uttered in the interest of Christian philanthropy but they are not healthy. The divine method in evoking our noblest affections is always from particulars to generals. God "hath set the solitary in families," and bound the families into communities, and organized communities into nations; and he has ordained special duties for each of these relationships and inspired affections to prompt the discharge of them and to exalt the character. The law of love is the principle of the spiritual universe, just as gravitation is the governing force of space. It binds each particle of matter to every other particle, but it attracts inversely as the square of the distance and thus becomes practically a series of local or special forces, holding our feet perpetually to one globe, and allowing only a general unity which the mind appropriates through science and meditation with the kindred but far-off spheres. The man that has most of the sentiment of love will have the most intense special affections. You cannot love the whole world and nobody in particular. If you try that it will be true of you as of the miser who said, "what I give is nothing to nobody." |