night, the thumb of his left hand was so severely frost bitten as to bring on a serious illness. Several remedies were tried, and several physicians were consulted, but to no purpose, and at last amputation became necessary. Much prayer was offered that God would spare his life. One prayer, however, offered by Richard Owen in his own congregation at Bala produced such a memorable effect that it is spoken of to this day. Referring to the sparing of Hezekiah's life, he repeated again and again the petitlon with such importunity as greatly affected all present. 66 Fifteen years more, O Lord, we beseech Thee to add fifteen years more to the life of Thy servant. And wilt Thou not, O our God, grant him fifteen years for the sake of Thy church and Thy cause?" It is a remarkable fact that Mr. Charles was spared, and only for the fifteen years. He heard of this prayer, and it made a deep impression on him. He afterwards frequently mentioned it as a reason for renewed diligence, saying that his fifteen years would soon be completed. Some three years before his death, he was traveling in Montgomeryshire on horseback, and having come to a gate, by a great exertion to open it he felt a great inward pain, and this proved to be the commencement of a rupture. His friends now noticed with great grief that he was drawing nearer home and about leaving them. In the month of August, 1814, the energetic man was at last obliged to yield. He and his wife, who was now a great invalid, visited Barmouth, hoping for renewed strength from its healthy seabreezes. But the lost energy did not return, and talking over his infirmity with his wife, he said: " 'Well, dear Sarah, the fifteen years are nearly completed." He returned home thro' Machynlleth, where he preached his jast sermons on the 4th of September. He was getting weaker, and on the 10th, when helped into his own house at Bala, he said: "I feel very thank. ful to the Lord for thus enabling me once more to come home." And he soon after added: "Now I have nothing more to do but to die." Early in the morning of the 4th of October he said: "I have been thinking whereabouts heaven is, and how I could find it; but I thought after, that the Lord would send some kind angel to show me the way." On retiring to rest for the night, he said to his wife: "Well, my dear, if I die and leave you, the Lord still lives to take care of you; He cannot die." On Wednesday morning, October 5, 1814, a friend came to nis bedside, and said to him: "Well, Mr. Charles, the day of tribulation has come;" to which he replied, "There is a refuge." These were his last words, and in two hours he was at home with the Lord. JOHN BRIGHT. That pledge the heavens above him heard, That vow the sleep of centuries stirred; In world-wide wonder listening peoples bent Their gaze on Freedom's great experiment. Could it succeed? Of honor sold And hopes deceived all history told. Above the wrecks that strewed the mournful past, Was the long dream of ages true at last? Thank God! the people's choice was just, The one man equal to his trust, Wise beyond lore, and without weakness good, Calm in the strength of flawless rectitude! His rule of justice, order, peace, Made possible the world's release; Taught prince and serf that power is but a trust, And rule, alone, which serves the ruled, is just. That Freedom generous is, but strong In bate of fraud and selfish wrong, Pretense that turns her holy truths to lies, And lawless license masking in her guise. Land of his love! with one glad voice Let thy great sisterhood rejoice; A century's sun o'er thee have risen and set, And God be praised, we are one nation yet. And still, we trust. the years to be Shall prove his hope was destiny, Leaving our flag with all its added stars Unrent by faction and unstained by wars! Lo! where with patient toil he nursed And trained the new-set plant at first, The widening branches of a stately tree Stretch from the sunrise to the sunset sea. And in its broad and sheltering shade, Sitting with none to make afraid, Were we now silent through each mighty limb, The winds of heaven would sing the praise of him. Our first and best!-his ashes lie Beneath his own Virginian sky. Forgive, forget, O true and just and brave. The storm that swept above thy sacred grave! For, ever in the awful strife And dark hours of the nation's life, Through the fierce tumult pierced his warning word, Their father's voice his erring children heard! The change for which he prayed and sought In that sharp agony was wrought; 173 We celebrate to-day the Centenary of our nationality. One hundred years ago the United States began their existence. The powers of government were assumed by the people of the Republic, and they became the sole source of authority. The solemn ceremonial of the first inauguration, the reverent oath of Washington, the acclaim of the multitude greeting their President, marked the most unique event of modern times in the development of free institutions. The occasion was not an accident, but a result. It was the culmination of the working out by mighty forces through many centuries of the problem of self-government. It was not the triumph of a system, the application of a theory, or the reduction to practice of the abstractions of philosophy. The time, the country, the heredity and environment of the people, the folly of its enemies, and the noble courage of its friends, gave to liberty after ages of defeat, of trial, of experiment, of partial success and substantial gains, this immortal victory. Henceforth it had a refuge and recruiting station. The oppressed found free homes in this favored land, and invisible armies marched from it by mail and telegraph, by speech and song, by precept and example, to regenerate the world. Puritans in New-England, Dutchmen in New York, Catholics in Marylank, Huguenots in South Carolina had felt the fires of persecution and were wedded to religious liberty. They had been purified in the furnace, and in high debate and on bloody battle-fields had learned to sacrifice all material interests and to peril their lives for human rights. The principles of constitutional gov ernment had been impressed upon them by hundreds of years of struggle, and for each principle they could point to the grave of an ancestor whose death attested the ferocity of the fight and the value of the conces sion wrung from arbitrary power. They knew the limitations of authority, they could pledge their lives and fortunes to resist encroachments upon their rights, but it required the lesson of Indian massacres, the invasion of the armies of France from Canada, the tyranny of the British Crown, the seven years' war of revolution, and the five years of Chaos of the Confederation to evolve the idea, upon which rest the power and permanency of the Republic, that liberty and union are one and inseparable. The traditions and experience of the Colonists had made them alert to discover and quick to resist any peril to their liberties. Above all things they feared and distrusted power. The town meeting and the Colonial Legislature gave them confidence in themselves, and courage to check the Royal Governors. Their interests, hopes and affections were in their several commonwealths, and each THE ORATION OF MR. CHAUNCY M. DEPEW. blow by the British Ministry at their freedom, each attack upon their rights as Englishmen, weakened their love for the mother-land and intensified their hostility to the crown. But the same causes which broke down their allegiance to the Central Government increased their confidence in their respective colonies, and their faith in liberty was largely dependent upon the maintenance of the sovereignty of their several States. The farmer's shot at Lexington echoed round the world, the spirit which it awakened from its slumbers could do and dare and die, but it had not yet discovered the secret of the permanence and progress of free institutions. Patrick Henry thundered in the Virginia Convention, James Otis spoke with trumpet tongue and fervid eloquence for united action in Massachusetts, Hamilton, Jay and Clinton pledged New York to respond with men and money for the common cause, but their vision only saw a league of indeperdent colonies. The vail was not yet drawn from before the vista of population and power, of empire and liberty, which would open with National Union. VICTORIES WON FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. The Continental Congress partially grasped, but completely expressed, the central idea of the American Republic. More fully than any other body which ever assembled did it represent the victories won from arbitrary power for human rights. In the new world it was the conservator of liberties secured through centuries of struggles in the old. Among the delegates were the descendants of the man who had stood in that brilliant array upon the field of Runnymede, which wrested from King John the Magna Charta, that great charter of liberty, to which Hallam in the nineteenth century bears witness "that all which 175 had been since obtained is little more than as confirmation or commentary." There were the grandchildren of the statesmen who had summoned Charles before the Parliament and compelled his assent to the Petition of Rights, which transferred power from the Crown to the Commons, and gave representative government to the English-speaking race. And there were those who had sprung from the iron soldiers who had fought and charged with Cromwell at Naseby and Dunbar and Marston Moor. Among its members were Hugenots, whose fathers had followed the white plume of Henry of Navarre, and in an age of bigotry, intolerance and the deification of absolutism had secured the great edict of religious liberty from French despotism; and who had become a people without a country, rather than surrender their convictions and forswear their consciences. In this Congress were those whose ancestors were the countrymen of William of Orange, the Beggars of the Sea, who had survived the cruelties of Alva, and broken the proud yoke of Philip of Spain, and who had two centuries before made Declaration of Independance and formed a federal union which were models of freedom and strength. These men were not revolutionists, they were the heirs and the guardians of the priceless treasures of mankind. The British King and his Ministers were the revolutionists. They were reactionaries. seeking arbitrarily to turn back the hands upon the dial of time. A year of doubt and debate, the baptism of blood upon battlefields, where soldiers from every colony fought, under a common standard, and consolidated the Continental Army, gradually lifted the soul and understanding of this immortal Congress to the sublime declaration: "We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are and of right ought to be, free and independent States." To this declaration John Hancock, proscribed and threatened with death, affixed a signature which stood for a century like the pointers to the North Star in the firmament of freedom, and Charles Carroll, he, the richest man in America, might escape, added decription and indentification with "of Carrollton." Benjamin Harrison, a delegate from Virginia, the ancestors of the distinguished statesman and soldier who to-day so worthily fills the chair of Washington, voiced the unalterable determination and defiance of the Congress. He seized John Hancock, upon whose head a price was set, in his arms, and placing him in the Presidential chair, said, "We will show Mother Britain how little we care for her by making our President a Massachusetts man, whom she had excluded from pardon by public proclamation"; and when they were signing the declaration, and the slender Elbridge Gerry uttered the grim pleasantry, "We must hang together or surely we will hang separately," the portly Harrison responded with a more daring humor, "It will be all over with me in a moment, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I am gone." Thus flashed athwart of the great Charter, which was to be for its signers a death warrant or a diploma of immortality, as with firm hand, high purpose and undaunted resolution, they subscribed their names, this mockery of fear and the penalties of treason. THE CENTRAL IDEA OF THE DECLARATION. claration of Independence was the The grand central idea of the Desovereignty of the people. It relied for original power, not upon States but recognized as the authority for or Colonies, or their citizens as such, nationality the revolutionary rights of the people of the United States. It stated with marvellous clearness the encroachments upon liberties which threatened their suppression and justified revolt, but it was inspired by the very genius of freedom, and the prophetic possibilities of united commonwealths covering the Continent in one harmonious Republic, when it made the people of the thirteen Colonies all American and devolved upon them to administer by themselves, and for themselves, the prerogatives and powers wrested from Crown and Parliament. It condensed Magna Charter, the Petition of Rights, the great body of English liberties embodied in the common law and accumulated in the decisions of the Courts, the Statutes of the realm, and an undisputed though unwritten Constitution; but this original principle and dynamic force of the people's power sprang from these old seeds planted in the virgin soil of the New World. More clearly than any statesman of the period, did Thomas Jefferson grasp and divine the possibilities of Popular Government. He caught and crystallized the spirit of free institutions. His philosophical mind was singularly free from the power of preHe had an unquestioning and abiding cedents or the chains of prejudice. faith in the people, which was accepted by but few of his compatriots. Upon his famous axiom, of the equality of all men before the law, he constructed his system. It was the triphammer essential for the emergency |