But now that our service of commemoration is ended, let us go hence and meditate on all that it has taught us. You see how long the holy and beautiful city of our liberty and our power has been in building, and by how many hands, and at what cost. You see the towering and steadfast height to which it has gone up, and how its turrets and spires gleam in the rising and setting sun. You stand among the graces of some--your townsmen, your fathers by blood, whose names you bear, whose portraits hang up in your homes, of whose memory you are justly proud--who helped in their day to sink those walls deep in their beds, where neither frost nor earthquake might heave them,--to raise aloft those great arches of stone,--to send up those turrets and spires into the sky. It was theirs to build; remember it is yours, under Providence, to keep the city,--to keep it from the sword of the invader,--to keep it from licentiousness and crime and irreligion, and all that would make it unsafe or unfit to live in,--to keep it from the fires of faction, of civil strife, of party spirit, that might burn up in a day the slow work of a thousand years of glory. Happy, if we shall so perform our duty that they who centuries hence shall dwell among our graces may be able to remember, on some such day as this, in one common service of grateful commemoration, their fathers of the first and the second age of America,--those who through martyrdom and tempest and battle sought liberty, and made her their own,--and those whom neither ease nor luxury, nor the fear of man, nor the worship of man, could prevail on to barter her away! R. Choate. XXVI. SPECIMEN OF THE ELOQUENCE OF JAMES OTIS. England may as well dam up the wafers of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland. Arbitrary principles, like those against which we now contend, have cost one king of England his life, another his crown; and they may yet cost a third his most flourishing colonies. We are two millions--one fifth fighting men. We are bold and vigorous, and we call no man master. To the nation, from whom we are proud to derive our origin, we ever were, and we ever will be, ready to yield unforced assistance; but it must not, and it never can be extorted.