danger, and big
with events of immeasurable importance. The country was on the very
brink of a civil war, of which no man could foretell the duration or the
result. Something more than a courageous hope, or characteristic ardor,
would have been necessary to impress the glorious prospect on his
belief, if, at that moment, before the sound of the first shock of
actual war had reached his ears, some attendant spirit had opened to him
the vision of the future;--if it had said to him, "The blow is struck,
and America is severed from England for ever!"--if it had informed him,
that he himself, during the next annual revolution of the sun, should
put his own hand to the great instrument of independence, and write his
name where all nations should behold it and all time should not efface
it; that erelong he himself should maintain the interests and represent
the sovereignty of his newborn country in the proudest courts of Europe;
that he should one day exercise her supreme magistracy; that he should
yet live to behold ten millions of fellow-citizens paying him the homage
of their deepest gratitude and kindest affections; that he should see
distinguished talent and high public trust resting where his name
rested; that he should even see with his own unclouded eyes the close of
the second century of New England, who had begun life almost with its
commencement, and lived through nearly half the whole history of his
country; and that on the morning of this auspicious day he should be
found in the political councils of his native State, revising, by the
light of experience, that system of government which forty years before
he had assisted to frame and establish; and, great and happy as he
should then behold his country, there should be nothing in prospect to
cloud the scene, nothing to check the ardor of that confident and
patriotic hope which should glow in his bosom to the end of his long
protracted and happy life.

It would far exceed the limits of this discourse even to mention the
principal events in the civil and political history of New England
during the century; the more so, as for the last half of the period that
history has, most happily, been closely interwoven with the general
history of the United States. New England bore an honorable part in the
wars which took place between England and France. The capture of
Louisburg gave her a character for military achievement; and in the war
which terminated with the peace of 1