ent under which we live. The
advantages resulting to the citizens of the Union are
utterly incalculable, and the day when it was received by a
majority of the States shall stand on the catalogue of
American anniversaries second to none but the birthday of
independence.

"In consequence of the adoption of our present system of
government, and the virtuous manner in which it has been
administered by a Washington and an Adams, we are this day
in the enjoyment of peace, while war devastates Europe! We
can now sit down beneath the shadow of the olive, while her
cities blaze, her streams run purple with blood, and her
fields glitter with a forest of bayonets! The citizens of
America can this day throng the temples of freedom, and
renew their oaths of fealty to independence; while Holland,
our once sister republic, is erased from the catalogue of
nations; while Venice is destroyed, Italy ravaged, and
Switzerland--the once happy, the once united, the once
flourishing Switzerland--lies bleeding at every pore!"

He need not have been ashamed of this speech, despite the lumbering
bombast of some of its sentences. All that made him estimable as a
public man is contained in it,--the sentiment of nationality, and a
clear sense of the only means by which the United States can remain a
nation; namely, strict fidelity to the Constitution as interpreted by
the authority itself creates, and modified in the way itself appoints.
We have never read the production of a youth which was more prophetic
of the man than this. It was young New England that spoke through him
on that occasion; and in all the best part of his life he never
touched a strain which New England had not inspired, or could not
reach.

His success at college giving him ascendency at home, he employed it
for the benefit of his brother in a manner which few sons would have
dared, and no son ought to attempt. His father, now advanced in years,
infirm, "an old man before his time" through hardship and toil, much
in debt, depending chiefly upon his salary of four hundred dollars a
year as Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and heavily taxed to
maintain Daniel in college, had seen all his other sons married and
settled except Ezekiel, upon whom he leaned as the staff of his
declining years, and the main dependence of his wife and two maiden
daughters. Nevertheless, Daniel, after a whole