I remember another Fourth of July at which Edward Everett’s measured rhetoric and silver voice held the attention of a numerous assemblage. Mr. Everett was certainly master of the art of graceful oratory, and was always heard with appreciation, even by those who felt little satisfaction in his public career. One of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s finest poems was written for the celebration of the Fourth in his own town of Concord. The two opening lines of this dwell always in my memory: “Oh! tenderly the haughty Day Fills his blue urn with fire.” But, beautiful as they are, the solemn lesson of the poet exceeds them in interest. “United States! the Ages plead, Present and Past in under-song; Go, put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue. “Be just at home, then write your scroll Of honor o’er the sea, And bid the broad Atlantic roll A ferry of the Free.” Here is a thought picture which we may love to dwell upon. Emerson, the descendant of the Puritans, himself a transfigured Puritan, reading these stanzas of his, whose fire is tempered by the weight of thought, in that old town of Concord, where, in his own phrase: “—the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.” A fiercer fight was then before us, whose issue is simply prefigured in the words: “_Be just at home_.” Surely, we might take this saying for a national motto, its reminder still needed, though the slave is freed from the whip and fetter. Of the day on which our Independence was declared John Adams said: “It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be celebrated with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.” These words show how comprehensive was the view which the old statesman took of a Nation’s holiday. He desired that all classes and all ages should participate in the joy expressed. The time which has elapsed since his memorable utterance has brought nothing to diminish this joy. It has however brought into being a new society for which “pomp and parade, bells, guns and bonfires” are less available for good than pleasures of a more elevated character. We now desire a celebration which shall speak less to the bodily sense and more to the inner sense. This is because the historic development of the race goes ever forward. John Adams would have had both sober and wild rejoicing over the birth of a new state, representing a new order of things. We stand face to face with the question: How shall we maintain our deliverance from old-world trammels? This freedom which was declared in 1776, what are its conditions, what its true uses?