On the 4th of July, 1837, Mr. Adams delivered at Newburyport, at the request of its inhabitants, an oration on the Declaration of Independence, the spirit of which may be discerned in the following extract: "Our government is a complicated machine. We have twenty-six states, with governments administered by separate legislatures and executive chiefs, and represented by equal numbers in the general Senate of the nation. This organization is an anomaly in the history of the world. It is that which distinguishes us from all other nations, ancient and modern: from the simple monarchies and republics of Europe, and from the confederacies which have figured in any age upon the face of the globe. The seeds of this complicated machine were all sown in the Declaration of Independence; and their fruits can never be eradicated but by the dissolution of the Union. The calculators of the value of the Union, who would palm upon you, in the place of this sublime invention, a mere cluster of sovereign, confederated states, do but sow the wind to reap the whirlwind. "One lamentable evidence of deep degeneracy from the spirit of the Declaration of Independence is the countenance which has been occasionally given, in various parts of the Union, to this doctrine; but it is consolatory to know that, whenever it has been distinctly disclosed to the people, it has been rejected by them with pointed reprobation. It has, indeed, presented itself in its most malignant form in that portion of the Union the civil institutions of which are most infected by the gangrene of slavery. The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the Southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself. No insincerity or hypocrisy can fairly be laid to their charge. Never, from _their_ lips, was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country; and they saw that, before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery, in common with every other mode of oppression, was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth. Such was the undoubting conviction of Jefferson to his dying day. In the memoir of his life, written at the age of seventy-seven, he gave to his countrymen the solemn and emphatic warning that the day was not distant when they _must_ hear and adopt the general emancipation of their slaves. 'Nothing is more certainly written,' said he, 'in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free.' My countrymen! it is written in a better volume than the book of fate; it is written in the laws of