.MjEwNQ.MjgzNjk

490

the friends of liberty throughout the wide earth, and have the slow unmoving finger of seen pointed at us in all coming time. We have succeeded for a brief half century, a mere line on the scroll of ages. Some of the veterans who achieved our liberties yet linger among us to quicken our patriotisms and keep alive the spirit of the Resolution. The lessons of the past admonish as that the greatest danger we have to apprehend, is in the want of a proper degree of intelligence and public virtue, in the silent in roads of corruption, rather than the bold usurpations of tyranny, or the conquests of military force. Shall we not then profit by these lessons, and so diffuse intelligence among the people of this country, that they will never permit the vestal fires of Freedom which have been kindled upon our shores to be overwhelmed by the waves of ignorance, selfishness and veniality which have hitherto swept over the earth with resistless power, prostrating every generous aspiration for civil liberty and moral grandeur.