it. But it was on that
moral principle that our revolution was put through. Whoever denies that
principle denies the United States, denies our foundation principle and
our validity, denies the justice and righteousness of the struggles
which created Switzerland, and all the South American republics
including Cuba, struggles which are still carried on by the Armenians
after seven hundred years of failure and by the Irish for the same
period, struggles which in fact, originally created England, France,
Germany and all the powers which now affect to despise them, struggles
which create nationalities and all that is useful, honorable or valuable
in civil or political life. When you deny the right of a naturally
separated people to struggle without end for independence, you deny the
most fundamental and necessary, the most powerful and far reaching, the
most scientific and well settled principle of moral conduct that history
has disclosed.

I do not wish to take up too much space accumulating instances in our
revolutionary history, but Franklin's conduct is perhaps worth
considering. He was not what is called an enthusiast or fanatic. He was
on the contrary one of the shrewd calculating kind. He had full
knowledge of all the conditions. He resided in England as agent of
Massachusetts and of the rebel cause in general from 1764 to 1775. It
cannot be said that he did not know the power and merit of England. He
admired the English political system. He was very fond of English life
and preferred a residence among learned and cultivated people in England
to one in America. Under these influences he at first believed that the
colonists should submit after trying ordinary peaceful and so-called
legal measures. In a word Franklin was at first of your opinion.

But when he returned to America in 1775 and the spirit or influence of
independence touched him he became the most unrelenting, obstinate and
as you would say unreasoning, fanatical and blind stickler for absolute
and unqualified independence at any price or at the price of
extermination.

The Continental Congress of which your ancestor was a member was, as
late as the year 1780, so determined to keep up the struggle although in
that year it was regarded as hopeless, that they arranged to have
pictures prepared with short descriptions of what they considered
British atrocities, but which were the milk of human kindness compared
with Kitchener's Spanish concentration camps