ry out the traditions of a Government
established these 137 years.

I feel to-day the compulsion of these men, the compulsion of examples
which were set up in this place. And of what do their examples remind
us? They remind us not merely of public service but of public service
shot through with principle and honor. They were not histrionic men.
They did not say--

Look upon us as upon those who shall hereafter be illustrious.

They said:

Look upon us who are doing the first free work of constitutional
liberty in the world, and who must do it in soberness and truth, or
it will not last.

Politics, ladies and gentlemen, is made up in just about equal parts of
comprehension and sympathy. No man ought to go into politics who does
not comprehend the task that he is going to attack. He may comprehend it
so completely that it daunts him, that he doubts whether his own spirit
is stout enough and his own mind able enough to attempt its great
undertakings, but unless he comprehend it he ought not to enter it.
After he has comprehended it, there should come into his mind those
profound impulses of sympathy which connect him with the rest of
mankind, for politics is a business of interpretation, and no men are
fit for it who do not see and seek more than their own advantage and
interest.

We have stumbled upon many unhappy circumstances in the hundred years
that have gone by since the event that we are celebrating. Almost all of
them have come from self-centered men, men who saw in their own interest
the interest of the country, and who did not have vision enough to read
it in wider terms, in the universal terms of equity and justice and the
rights of mankind. I hear a great many people at Fourth of July
celebrations laud the Declaration of Independence who in between Julys
shiver at the plain language of our bills of rights. The Declaration of
Independence was, indeed, the first audible breath of liberty, but the
substance of liberty is written in such documents as the declaration of
rights attached, for example, to the first constitution of Virginia,
which was a model for the similar documents read elsewhere into our
great fundamental charters. That document speaks in very plain terms.
The men of that generation did not hesitate to say that every people has
a right to choose its own forms of government--not once, but as often as
it pleases--and to accommodate those forms of government to its existing