rth. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, all this I feel, and all this
I know, reflecting upon your freedom, your institutions, and your Union;
but casting back my look into the mirror of the past, there I see upon
mouldering ground, written with warning letters, the dreadful truth,
that all this has nothing new; all this has been; and all this has never
yet been proved sufficient security. Freedom is the fairest gift of
Heaven; but it is not the security of itself. Democracy is the
embodiment of freedom, which in itself is but a principle. But what is
the security of democracy? And if you answer, "The Union is;" then I
ask, "And where is the security of the Union?" Yes, ladies and
gentlemen, Freedom is no new word. It is as old as the world. Despotism
is new, but Freedom not. And yet it has never yet proved a charter to
the security of nations. Republic is no new word. It is as old as the
word "Society." Before Rome itself, republics absorbed the world. There
were in all Europe, Africa and Asia Minor, but republics to be found,
and many among them democratic. Men had to wander to far Persia if they
would have desired to know what sort of thing a monarch is. And all they
have perished; the small ones by foreign power, the large ones by
domestic vice. And union, and confederacy, the association of
societies--a confederate republic of republics, is also no new
invention. Greece has known it and flourished by it, for a while. Rome
has known it; by such associations she attacked the world. The world has
known them; with them it defended itself against Rome. The so-called
Barbarians of Europe, beyond the Danube and the Rhine, have known it; it
was by a confederacy of union that they resisted the ambitious mistress
of the world. Your own country, America, has known it; the traditionary
history of the Romans of the West, of those six Indian Nations, bears
the records of it, out of an older time than your ancestors settled in
this land; the wise man of the Onondaga Nation has exercised it long
before your country's legislators built upon that basis your independent
home. And still it proved in itself alone no security to all those
nations who have known it before you. Your own fathers have seen the
last of the Mohawks burying his bloody tomahawk in the namesake flood,
and have listened to the majestic words of Logan, spoken with the
dignity of an Aemilius, that there exists no living being on earth in
the veins of whom one drop of the blo