My fellow citizens (if any such are before me) who do not possess wealth, and who have scarcely tasted of the cup of knowledge! You surely need no exhortation to quaff freely of that cup, when it shall come within your grasp: but I do exhort you to employ your influence as men, and your constitutional power as voters, in persuading your fellow citizens, and in prompting your public agents, to adopt the requisite measures for dispelling, now and forever, the clouds and darkness in which republican freedom can never long live. And if, at the remotest point of future time, to which we may look forward as witnessing the existence of human government any where, our democratic forms shall still retain, unimpaired, even their present purity, and present fertility of substantial freedom and happiness; much more, if they shall have waxed purer, and stronger, and more fruitful of good, with each revolving century,--defying the power or conciliating the love of foreign states--maintaining domestic harmony--oppressing none, protecting all--and so fully realizing the fondest hopes of the most sanguine statesman, that no "despair of the republic" can trouble the faintest heart:--all will be owing (under Providence,) to the hearkening of this generation and the succeeding ones, to that voice--not loud, but solemn and earnest--which, from the shrine of Reason and the tombs of buried commonwealths, reiterates and enforces the momentous precept--"ENLIGHTEN THE PEOPLE!" THE WISSAHICCON. Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray, And gushed from cleft to crag with saltless spray. _Byron_.