ies;--"What
though the assertion be true? Of what avail is a mere piece of
parchment? In itself, though it be written all over with words of
truth and freedom--Though its provisions be as impartial and just as
words can express, or the imagination paint--though it be as pure as
the Gospel, and breathe only the spirit of Heaven--it is powerless; it
has no executive vitality: it is a lifeless corpse, even though
beautiful in death. I am famishing for lack of bread! How is my
appetite relieved by holding up to my gaze a painted loaf? I am
manacled, wounded, bleeding, dying! What consolation is it to know,
that they who are seeking to destroy my life, profess in words to be
my friends?" If the liberties of the people have been betrayed--if
judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off, and
truth has fallen in the streets, and equity cannot enter--if the
princes of the land are roaring lions, the judges evening wolves, the
people light and treacherous persons, the priests covered with
pollution--if we are living under a frightful despotism, which scoffs
at all constitutional restraints, and wields the resources of the
nation to promote its own bloody purposes--tell us not that the forms
of freedom are still left to us! "Would such tameness and submission
have freighted the May-Flower for Plymouth Rock? Would it have
resisted the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, or any of those entering wedges
of tyranny with which the British government sought to rive the
liberties of America? The wheel of the Revolution would have rusted on
its axle, if a spirit so weak had been the only power to give it
motion. Did our fathers say, when their rights and liberties were
infringed--"_Why, what is done cannot be undone_. That is the first
thought." No, it was the last thing they thought of: or, rather, it
never entered their minds at all. They sprang to the conclusion at
once--"_What is done_ SHALL _be undone_. That is our FIRST and ONLY
thought."

"Is water running in our veins? Do we remember still Old Plymouth
Rock, and Lexington, and famous Bunker Hill? The debt we owe our
fathers' graves? and to the yet unborn, Whose heritage ourselves must
make a thing of pride or scorn?

Gray Plymouth Rock hath yet a tongue, and Concord is not dumb; And
voices from our fathers' graves and from the future come: They call on
us to stand our ground--they charge us still to be Not only free from
chains ourselves, but foremost to