"Fellow-citizens,--on this occasion, so big with subjects of profitable meditation--when it is so natural that the mind should oscillate between the events of the past and the prospects of the future, we can conceive of nothing more proper than the enquiry, how we can best execute the solemn trust committed to our hand--how we may challenge and secure the admiration and the gratitude of a virtuous and a happy posterity, by transmitting to them the patrimony received from our fathers, not only in all its original entireness, but in vastly augmented beauty, order, and strength. In a word, how we may best conduct ourselves so as to encite them to high and sustained exertion in the cause of virtue and humanity. "In order to impress your minds with the propriety of this enquiry, there is, I trust, no need that I shall remind you of the peculiarity of our condition. It will suffice that I remark, that, should you succeed in rearing upon the foundation already laid,--or, to drop the figure--should you succeed in establishing a community of virtuous, orderly, intelligent, and industrious citizens, this very peculiarity must enter largely into every consideration on the amount of praise to which you shall be held entitled. "Let us, then, for a moment look back, that from the events of the past we may derive hope for the future. "We have not yet numbered twenty-six years since he who is the oldest colonist amongst us was the inhabitant--not the citizen--of a country--and that too the country of his birth--where the prevailing sentiment is, that he and his race are incapacitated, by an inherent defect in their mental constitution, to enjoy that greatest of all blessings, and to exercise that greatest of all rights, bestowed by a beneficent God upon his rational creatures--namely, the government of themselves. Acting upon this opinion--an opinion as false as it is foul--acting upon this opinion, as upon a self-evident proposition, those who held it proceeded with a fiendish consistency to deny the rights of citizens to those whom they had declared incapable of performing the duties of citizens. It is not necessary, and therefore I will not disgust you with the hideous picture of that state of things which followed upon the prevalence of this blasphemous opinion. The bare mention that such an opinion prevailed, would be sufficient to call up in the mind, even of those who had never witnessed its operation, images of the most sickening and revolting character. Under the iron reign of this crushing sentiment, most of us who are assembled here to-day, drew our first breath and sighed away the years of our youth. No hope cheered us: no noble object looming in the dim and distant future kindled our ambition. Oppression--cold,