grave at North Elba, the Old Dominion will take pride in the fact that
she for a little while gave a home to the latest--I trust not the
last--of the Puritans; and the traveller, in 1959, as he goes through
Harper's Ferry, may see upon the site of the old engine-house, looking
out upon the regenerate Commonwealth, cunningly graven in bronze, copied
perhaps from the bust in your own Union League, the undaunted features
of John Brown. [Applause.] And the South that is to be, standing
uncovered beside the grave of the Union soldier, will say: "It was for
us, too, that he died," and will render beside the tomb in the capital
city of Illinois a reverence akin to that which she pays amid the shades
of Mount Vernon. [Great applause.]

The Czar of to-day honors the memory of John Howard (who died a hundred
years ago next January), and offers 15,000 roubles for an essay on his
life; but when George Kennan, following in the steps of Howard, draws
back the curtain and shows the shuddering horrors in the prisons of
Siberia, the Czar would willingly offer much more than 15,000 roubles
for a successful essay upon his life. John Howard sleeps in innocuous
silence at Kherson; George Kennan speaks through the everywhere-present
press to the court of last appeal, the civilized world. [Applause.]

There was not much money, there was not much popularity then, in being a
Puritan, in being a Pilgrim; there is not much profit, there is not much
applause, in being to-day a son of the Puritans, in standing as they did
for great ideas and convictions, for liberty and righteousness, in
holding the same relation to our age that they held to theirs. But let
us be satisfied if, through unpopularity and loneliness and obloquy, we
shall have done our duty as they did theirs, and let us hope that when
another hundred years have passed, and when the ideal of to-day has
become the commonplace of to-morrow, another generation may write over
your grave and mine, "A Son of the Puritans."

DANIEL WEBSTER

THE CONSTITUTION AND THE UNION

[Speech of Daniel Webster at the dinner of the New England Society
in the City of New York, December 23, 1850. The early published
form of this address is very rare. It bears the following
title-page: "Speech of Mr. Webster at the Celebration of the New
York New England Society, December 23, 1850. Washington: printed by
Gideon & Co., 1851." The presiding officer of the celebration,