ould
be an impertinence in me to remind most of you of that. You know as well
as I that you are represented just as much as the English people, by
every monument in that Abbey earlier than the Civil Wars, and by most
monuments of later date, especially by those of all our literary men.
You know that, and you value the old Abbey accordingly. But a day may
come--a generation may come, in a nation so rapidly increasing by foreign
immigration, as well as by home-born citizenship--a generation may come
who will forget that fact; and orators arise who will be glad that it
should be forgotten--for awhile. But if you would not that that evil day
should come then teach your children--That the history and the freedom of
America began neither with the War of Independence, nor with the sailing
of the Pilgrim Fathers, nor with the settlement of Virginia; but 1500
years and more before, in the days when our common Teutonic ancestors, as
free then as this day, knew how

In den Deutschen Forsten
Wie der Aar zu horsten,

when Herman smote the Romans in the Teutoburger-Wald, and the great
Caesar wailed in vain to his slain general, 'Varus, give me back my
legions!' Teach your children that the Congress which sits at Washington
is as much the child of Magna Charta as the Parliament which sits at
Westminster; and that when you resisted the unjust demands of an English
king and council, you did but that which the free commons of England held
the right to do, and did, not only after, but before, the temporary
tyranny of the Norman kings.

Show them the tombs of English kings; not of those Norman kings--no
Norman king lies buried in our Abbey--there is no royal interment between
Edward the Confessor, the last English prince of Cerdic's house, and
Henry the Third, the first of the new English line of kings. Tell them,
in justice to our common forefathers, that those men were no tyrants, but
_kings_, who swore to keep, and for the most part did keep, like loyal
gentlemen, the ancient English laws, which they had sworn in Westminster
Abbey to maintain; and that the few of them who persisted in outraging
the rights or the conscience of the free people of England, paid for
their perjury with their crowns, or with their lives. And tell them,
too, in justice to our common ancestors, that there were never wanting to
the kings, the nobles, or the commons of England, since the days when
Simon de Montfort organised the House of Commons