perpetuate their existence which they find it impossible to suppress,
impels them to secure the admiration of succeeding generations in the
performance of deeds, by which, although dead, they may yet speak. In
commemorating events thus powerful in forming the manners and sentiments
of mankind, and in rousing them to strenuous exertion and to high and
sustained emulation, it is obvious that such, and such only, should be
selected as virtue and humanity would approve; and that, if any of an
opposite character be held up, they should be displayed only as beacons,
or as towering Pharos throwing a strong but lurid light to mark the
melancholy grave of mad ambition, and to warn the inexperienced voyager
of the existing danger.

Thanks to the improved and humanized spirit--or should I not rather say,
the chastened and pacific civilization of the age in which we
live?--that laurels gathered upon the field of mortal strife, and
bedewed with the tears of the widow and the orphan, are regarded now,
not with admiration, but with horror; that the armed warrior, reeking in
the gore of murdered thousands, who, in the age that is just passing
away, would have been hailed with noisy acclamation by the senseless
crowd, is now regarded only as the savage commissioner of an unsparing
oppression, or at best, as the ghostly executioner of an unpitying
justice. He who would embalm his name in the grateful remembrance of
coming generations; he who would secure for himself a niche in the
temple of undying fame; he who would hew out for himself a monument of
which his country may boast; he who would entail upon heirs a name which
they may be proud to wear, must seek some other field than that of
battle as the theatre of his exploits.

We have not yet numbered twenty-six years since he who is the oldest
colonist amongst us was the inhabitant--not the citizen--of a country,
and that, too, the country of his birth, where the prevailing sentiment
is, that he and his race are incapacitated by an inherent defect in
their mental constitution, to enjoy that greatest of all blessings, and
to exercise that greatest of all rights, bestowed by a beneficent God
upon his rational creatures, namely, the government of themselves by
themselves. Acting upon this opinion, an opinion as false as it is
foul--acting upon this opinion, as upon a self-evident proposition,
those who held it proceeded with a fiendish consistency to deny the
rights of citizens to those