"'Your oppressions planted them in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated, unhospitable country where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable, among others to the cruelties of a savage foe; they grew by your neglect of them. As soon as you began to care for them, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule them, to spy out their liberties, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon them; men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them; men promoted to the highest seats of justice, some who, to my knowledge, were glad, by going to a foreign country, to escape being brought to the bar of a court of justice in their own. The colonists have nobly taken up arms in your defence; have asserted a valor amid their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier was drenched in blood. And, believe me--remember, I warn you--the same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first will accompany them still.' "And how prophetic now seem the words of Burke in the same great debate: "'There is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.' "Standing at his hour almost within hailing distance of the spot that witnessed the surrender of Cornwallis and the termination of the War of the Revolution, it would be passing strange if we should fail to catch something of the inspiration of the impassioned words of Barre and of Burke, and their wondrous associations. "It is said that in Venice there is sacredly preserved a letter written by Columbus a few hours before he sailed from Palos. With reverent expression of trust in God--humbly but with unfaltering faith--he spoke of his past voyage to 'that famous land.' His dream while a suppliant in the outer chambers of kings, and while keeping lonely vigil upon the deep, was the discovery of a new pathway to the Indies. Yet who can doubt that to his prophetic soul was even then fore-shadowed something of 'that famous land' with the warp and woof of whose history, tradition, and song his name and fame are linked for all time. Can it not truly be said of the members of the first House of Burgesses, as was said of Columbus and his compeers, 'They were pioneers in the march to independence--precursors in the only progress of freedom which was to have no backward steps?' They only 'opened the gates' and lo! there came in the builders of a new and mighty nation.