rained by his life in the Old World, for the conspicuous part he was
to enact in the New. He was acquainted with hardships, inured to trials,
practised in self-abnegation. He had reformed religions, revolutionized
society, and shaken the thrones of tyrants. He had learned that tyranny
you may have anywhere--it is a weed which grows on any soil--but if you
want freedom you must go forth and fight for it. [Long continued
applause.]

At his very birth he had had breathed into his nostrils the breath of
that true liberty which can turn blind submission into rational
obedience, which, as Hall says, can "smother the voice of kings,
dissipate the mists of superstition, and by its magic touch kindle the
rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, the flames of eloquence."
[Applause.] He had the courage of his convictions, he counselled not
with his fears. He neither looked to the past with regret nor to the
future with apprehension. He might have been a zealot--he was never a
hypocrite; he might have been eccentric--he was never ridiculous. He was
a Hercules rather than an Adonis. In his warfare he fired hot shot; he
did not send in flags of truce; he led forlorn hopes; he did not follow
in the wake of charges. When he went forth with his sledge-hammer logic
and his saw-mill philosophy, all who stood in the path of his righteous
wrath went down before him, with nothing by which to recognize them
except the pieces he had left of them. When he crossed the seas to plant
his banners in the West, when he disembarked upon the bleak shores of
America, the land which was one day to speak with the voice of a mighty
prophet, then the infant just discovered in the bulrushes of the New
World, he came with loins girded and all accoutred for the great work of
founding a race which should create a permanent abiding place for
liberty, and one day dominate the destinies of the world. [Prolonged
applause.] Unlike the Spanish conqueror upon far southern coasts, the
leader did not have to burn his ship to retain his followers, for when
the Mayflower spread her sails for home, not a man of Plymouth Colony
returned on board her.

The Puritan early saw that in the new land, liberty could not flourish
when subject to the caprices of European Courts; he realized with Burke
that there was "more wisdom and sagacity in American workshops than in
the cabinets of princes." He wanted elbow-room; he was philosophic
enough to recognize the truth of the adage th