ctual and moral emancipation from frivolity and
pharisaism--its rescue from the Scarlet Woman and the mailed hand--and
its crystallization into a national character and polity, ruling by
force of brains and not by force of arms.

Gentlemen--Sir--I, too, have been to Boston. Strange as the admission
may seem, it is true; and I live to tell the tale. I have been to
Boston; and when I declare that I found there many things that suggested
the Cavalier and did not suggest the Puritan, I shall not say I was
sorry. But among other things, I found there a civilization perfect in
its union of the art of living with the grace of life; an Americanism
ideal in its simple strength. Grady told us, and told us truly, of that
typical American who, in Dr. Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who,
in Abraham Lincoln's actuality, had already come. In some recent studies
into the career of that great man, I have encountered many startling
confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its
sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and
Puritan branches deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a
shapely tree--symmetric in all its parts--under whose sheltering boughs
this nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and
mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled
from oppression. Thank God, the axe, the gibbet, and the stake have had
their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost
arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and
great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human
blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that
tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes
in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship. Else how
could this noble city have been redeemed from bondage? It was held like
a castle of the Middle Ages by robber barons, who levied tribute right
and left. Yet have the mounds and dykes of corruption been carried--from
buttress to bell-tower the walls of crime have fallen--without a shot
out of a gun, and still no fires of Smithfield to light the pathway of
the victor, no bloody assizes to vindicate the justice of the cause; nor
need of any.

So I appeal from the men in silken hose who danced to music made by
slaves--and called it freedom--from the men in bell-crowned hats, who
led Hester Prynne to her shame--a