effort and sacrifice--it _is_ a
grand thing that here, at last, each voter has just the weight of one
man; no more, no less; and the weakest, by virtue of his recognized
manhood, is as strong as the mightiest. And consider, for a moment, what
it is to cast a vote. It is the token of inestimable privileges, and
involves the responsibilities of an hereditary trust. It has passed into
your hands as a right, reaped from fields of suffering and blood. The
grandeur of History is represented in your act. Men have wrought with
pen and tongue, and pined in dungeons, and died on scaffolds, that you
might obtain this symbol of freedom, and enjoy this consciousness of a
sacred individuality. To the ballot have been transmitted, as it were,
the dignity of the sceptre and the potency of the sword. And that which
is so potent as a right, is also pregnant as a duty; a duty for the
present and for the future. If you will, that folded leaf becomes a
tongue of justice, a voice of order, a force of imperial law; securing
rights, abolishing abuses, erecting new institutions of truth and love.
And, _however_ you will, it is the expression of a solemn
responsibility, the exercise of an immeasurable power for good or for
evil, now and hereafter. It is the medium through which you act upon
your country--the organic nerve which incorporates you with its life and
welfare. There is no agent with which the possibilities of the Republic
are more intimately involved, none upon which we can fall back with more
confidence, than the Ballot-Box.

But there is a symbol which represents the power and greatness of a
Republic more significantly than all the rest, and is comprehensive of
all the rest. It is the fruit of unfettered thought and political
equality, of intelligence and virtue, of private sovereignty and public
duty--it is a free, true, harmonious _Man_. As the crown or the sceptre
is the symbol of a Monarchy; as heraldic honors are the symbols of an
Oligarchy; so, I repeat, the most expressive symbol of a Republic is a
man--a man free in limb and soul, a man intelligent and self-governed, a
man whose spiritual vision is clear, and in whose breast the voice of
conscience is peremptory, with whom the conception of duties is deeper
even than the conception of rights; in short, a man who embodies all the
elements, and represents to the world the best results of Liberty. Laws
are nothing, institutions are nothing, national power and greatness are
noth