a lifeless corpse, even
though beautiful in death. I am famishing for lack of bread! How is my
appetite relieved by holding up to my gaze a painted loaf? I am
manacled, wounded, bleeding dying! What consolation is it to know,
that they who are seeking to destroy my life, profess in words to be
my friends?" If the liberties of the people have been betrayed--if
judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off, and
truth has fallen in the streets, and equality cannot enter--if the
princes of the land are roaring lions, the judges evening wolves,
the people light and treacherous persons, the priests covered with
pollution--if we are living under a frightful despotism, which scoffs
at all constitutional restraints, and wields the resources of the
nation to promote its own bloody purposes--tell us not that the
forms of freedom are still left to us! Would such tameness and
submission have freighted the May-Flower for Plymouth Rock? Would it
have resisted the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, or any of those entering
wedges of tyranny with which the British government sought to rive
the liberties of America? The wheel of the Revolution would have
rusted on its axle, if a spirit so weak had been the only power to
give it motion. Did our fathers say, when their rights and liberties
were infringed--"_Why, what is done cannot be undone_. That is the
first thought." No, it was the last thing they thought of: or, rather,
it never entered their minds at all. They sprang to the conclusion at
once--"_What is done_ SHALL _be undone_. That is our FIRST and ONLY
thought."

"Is water running in our veins? Do we remember still
Old Plymouth Rock, and Lexington, and famous Bunker Hill?
The debt we owe our fathers' graves? and to the yet unborn,
Whose heritage ourselves must make a thing of pride or scorn?"

"Gray Plymouth Rock hath yet a tongue, and Concord is not dumb;
And voices from our fathers' graves and from the future come:
They call on us to stand our ground--they charge us still to be
Not only free from chains ourselves, but foremost to make free!"

It is of little consequence who is on the throne, if there be behind
it a power mightier than the throne. It matters not what is the
theory of the government, if the practice of the government be unjust
and tyrannical. We rise in rebellion against a despotism
incomparably more dreadful than that which induced the colonists to
take up arms against the mother co