No, we may almost say it, there can not truly be a nation without something that may be called its heroic age; or if there have been such, the want of this necessary fountain of political vitality has been the very reason why they have perished from the pages of history. We, too, have had such a period in our annals, and we are all the better for it, and shall be all the better for it, as long as our political existence shall endure. Some such chapter in our history seems necessary to legitimate our claim to the appellation; and however extravagant it may seem, the assertion may, nevertheless, be hazarded, that one borrowed from the maternal nationality, or from a foreign source, or even altogether mythical, would be better than none at all. If we had not had our Pilgrim Fathers, our Mayflower band, our Plymouth Rock, our Bunker Hill, our Saratoga, our Washingtons, our Warrens, our Putnams, our Montgomerys, our heroic martyr-Congresses, voting with the executioner and the ax before their eyes, we might better have drawn upon the epic imagination for some such introduction to our political existence, than regard it as commencing merely with prosaic paper compacts, or such artificial gatherings as are presented in your unheroic, though very respectable Baltimore and Harrisburg Conventions. Some such chivalrous commencement is, moreover, absolutely essential to that great idea of national _continuity_, so necessary for the highest ends of political organization; and yet so liable to be impaired or wholly lost in the strife of those ephemeral parties, those ever-gathering, ever-dissolving factions, which, ignoring both the future and the past, are absorbed solely in the magnified interests of the present hour. For this purpose, we want an antiquity of some kind--even though it may not be a distant one--something parted from us by events so grand, so unselfish, so unlike the common, every-day acts of the current years, as to have the appearance at least of a sacred and memory-hallowed remoteness. We need to have our store of glorious olden chronicles, over which time has thrown his robe of reverence--a reverence which no profane criticism of after days shall be allowed to call in question, no subsequent statistics be permitted to impair. We need to have our proud remembrances for all parties, for all interests, for all ages--our common fund of heroic thought, affording a constant supply for the common mind of the state, thus ever living in the national history, connecting each present not only with such a heroic commencement, but, through it, with all the past that intervenes, and in this way furnishing a historical bond of union stronger than can be found in any amount of compromises or paper constitutions.