d,
And only pausing to fire and load._

_"So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm;
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For born on the night wind of the past,
Through all our history to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere."_

How my soul thrills with recollection when I think where I stood in
Carpenters Hall, Philadelphia, on the 4th of July, 1776, among the signers
of the Declaration of Independence, and heard that grandest of human
productions proclaimed to the world.

Each of the fifty-six signers was a modern Moses in himself, and to-day
their heroic statues, in imperishable bronze, should stand aloft on the
shining marble copings of the National Capitol.

The glowing features and earnest, eloquent tones of

HANCOCK, JEFFERSON, FRANKLIN, AND ADAMS

come back to me now, in the sunlight and zenith of republican glory; and as
the old bell in the tower rang out Liberty to all the people of the land,
the city of Brotherly Love took up the acclaim, while on the wings of the
wind it echoed and reached from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, and
from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, sounding across the seas, and
reverberating among the sparkling halls of royalty, shivering the idols of
"Divine Right," and forcing the plain, common people of the world into
their long-neglected heritage of Freedom!

And there, side by side with Franklin and Jefferson, sat one of the
Secretaries of the Continental Congress,

TOM PAINE,

the great deist, patriot and philosopher; whose elementary proclamations,
"The Crisis," "Rights of Man," "Common Sense," and "Age of Reason," did
more for the promulgation of freedom during and after the American and
French revolutions than any other utterance of man.

The logic and philosophy of the great deist and agnostic was worth more to
the Colonies, and did more injury to King George and his murdering minions,
than all the purblind, bigoted, saphead pulpit thumpers who ever preached
for ready cash.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced no nobler or better man
than the brave Tom Paine, the personal and political compeer and