in Westminster Hall, on
the 2nd of May, 1258--there were never wanting, I say, to the kings, the
nobles, or the commons of England, counsellors who dared speak the truth
and defend the right, even at the risk of their own goods and their own
lives.

Remind them, too--or let our monuments remind them--that even in the
worst times of the War of Independence, there were not wanting, here in
England, statesmen who dared to speak out for justice and humanity; and
that they were not only confessed to be the leading men of their own day,
but the very men whom England delighted to honour by places in her
Pantheon. Show them the monuments of Chatham, Pitt, and Fox--Burke
sleeps in peace elsewhere--and remind them that the great earl, who
literally died as much in your service as in ours, whose fiery invectives
against the cruelties of that old war are, I am proud to say, still
common-places for declamation among our English schoolboys, dared, even
when all was at the worst, to tell the English House of Lords--'If I were
an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in
my country, I never would lay down my arms--never, never, never!'

Yes--an American as well as an Englishman may find himself in the old
Abbey in right good company.

Yes--and I do not hesitate to say, that if you will look through the
monuments erected in that Abbey, since those of Pitt and Fox--you will
find that the great majority commemorate the children, not of
obstruction, but of progress; not of darkness, but of light.

Holland, Tierney, Mackintosh, Grattan, Peel, Canning, Palmerston, Isaac
Watts, Bell, Wilberforce, Sharp, the Macaulays, Fowell Buxton, Francis
Horner, Charles Buller, Cobden, Watt, Rennell, Telford, Locke, Brunel,
Grote, Thackeray, Dickens, Maurice--men who, each in his own way, toiled
for freedom of some kind; freedom of race, of laws, of commerce, of
locomotion, of production, of speech, of thought, of education, of human
charity, and of sympathy--these are the men whom England still delights
to honour; whose busts around our walls show that the ancient spirit is
not dead, and that we, as you, are still, as 1500 years ago, the sons of
freedom and of light.

But, beside these statesmen who were just and true to you, and therefore
to their native land, there lie men before whose monuments I would ask
thoughtful Americans to pause--I mean those of our old fighters, by land
and sea. I do not speak merely of those w