And this shall be my theme to-day; to consider whither the nation our fathers left us is drifting; to consider what we are fighting for; and to enquire whether the heroes of the struggle of to-day do not deserve equal honor with their illustrious sires. Nor have I any doubt of the fitness of this theme for the time and the occasion. For our fathers fought to create a nation. We fight to have that nation live, to keep it one and indivisible, and vain were the struggles of the Revolution, and vain the consecration of days like this to Revolutionary memories, if they failed to bring out into highest prominence such deeds as those of the past and passing year. Our fathers fought to create a nation. And for eighty years there was no sublimer sight beneath the stars than the nation they created. During these eighty years, this people grew from three to thirty millions, from thirteen to thirty-four States. They developed energies such as the world had seldom witnessed. With marvellous rapidity they levelled forests and builded cities; they tunnelled mountains, and cultivated valleys vast as empires; they made their mountain streams turn mills and factories and bear on their bosoms to the sea, and to all the world, the fruits of this industry and the products of the land. They dug out from the bosom of the rocky hills and from dark subterranean recesses a wealth greater than the Indies, and made the wilderness above them to “bud and blossom as the rose.” They grew to be a thinking, toiling, tireless people, and turning from their material successes, they began to manifest progress and proficiency in literature, in science and in art. And all along they conducted a system of government which had no parallel in history, the success of which was distrusted by many of our early statesmen and by all the world beside. And high above all the evidences of their wealth and power, above all the beauties and beneficence of their soil and clime, rose the crowning fact that these teeming, toiling millions were the freest people upon earth; that they enjoyed, in larger measure than the world had ever known, the privileges and prerogatives that belong to manhood, and that they held inviolably sacred, as their fathers before them, their right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I know to what criticism these remarks are open. I know somewhat of the faults and follies of this age and nation. I know how prone we are upon days like this to forget our mistakes, our follies and our crimes, and to indulge in strains of national eulogy, and, I confess, these strains I have rarely relished. I know, too, how common is the autocratic talk that the equal rights, the enlarged liberties, which our institutions secure to the citizen, tend only to license in thought and speech, to fanaticism, to lawlessness, to disrespect of authority, to no-government. And yet I know that it has not been the bestowment of privileges upon the _many_, but the despotic domination