America for Americans! | Page 4

Unrivalled for luxury and oriental splendor, the Assyrians sprung from a band of hunters. Grand in her pyramids, and obelisks, and sphinxes, Egypt rose from that race despised by mankind. Great in her jurisprudence, giving law to the world, the Romans came from a band of freebooters on the seven hills that have been made immortal by martial genius; and that very nation, whose poets we copy, whose orators we seek to imitate, whose artistic genius is the pride of the race, came from barbarians, cannibals; and that proud nation beyond the sea, that sways her sceptre over land and ocean, sprang from painted barbarians--for such were the aborigines of proud Albion's Isle when C?sar invaded those shores.
Our forefathers stood upon the very summit of humanity. Recall our constitutional convention. Perhaps no such convention had ever assembled in the halls of a nation. That convention, composed of fifty-five men, and such men! They were giants in intellect, in moral character; all occupying a high social position; twenty-nine were university men, and those that were not collegiates were men of imperial intellects and of commanding common sense. In such a gathering were Franklin, the venerable philosopher; Washington, who is ever to be revered as patriot and philanthropist; and Madison, and Hamilton, two of the most profound thinkers of that or of any other age. It is one of those marvels that we should recall of which we have a right to be proud; but in our pride we should not fail to ascertain why the Almighty should start us as a nation at the very acme of humanity--redeemed, educated, and made grand by the influences of a divine Christianity. Those men were not mere colonists, nor were they limited in their patriotism. "No pent-up Utica" could confine their patriotism, for those men grasped the fundamental principle of human rights. Nay, they declared the ultimate truth of humanity, leaving nothing to added since, though a century has passed. Great modifications have come to the governments of Europe. Some changes have taken place in our national life. Yet I appeal to your intelligent memory, to your calm judgments, if anything has been added to our declaration of rights, those declarations founded upon the constitution of nature. These men voiced the brotherhood of the race. All other declarations prior to this were but for dynasties, or were ethnic at most. But those men swept the horizon of humanity. These men called forth, as it were, the oncoming centuries of time, and in their presence declared that all men are created free and equal.
They not only declared the ultimate truth of human rights, but they exhausted the right of revolution. They created a constitution founded upon the will of the people, based upon our great declaration of rights, embracing man's inalienable right to life, liberty, and happiness. The instrument which their genius created was left amendable by the oncoming wants of time, modified in subordinate relations which might be suggested by emergencies and the unfolding of our race. Here then are the great fingers of prophecy pointing to our future.
And we have been equally favored in our population, whether we take the Puritans who landed in New England, the Dutch who landed in New York, or the English who crowded Maryland and Virginia. They were first-class families. Especially do we trace back with pride that glorious genius for liberty, for intelligence, for devotion manifested by those heroic men and women who, amid the desolations of a terrific winter landed on a barren rock to transform a vast wilderness, through which the wild man roamed, into a garden wherein should grow the flowers and the fruits of freedom.
We sometimes deprecate the cosmopolitan character of our population. It is a fact, however, that the best blood of the old world came to us until within ten years--not the decrepit, not the maimed, not the aged; for over fifty per cent. of those who came were between fifteen and thirty, and have grown up to be honorable citizens in the composition of our constitutional society. They came not as paupers. Many of them came, each bringing seventy dollars, some $180 dollars, and in the aggregate they brought millions of dollars.
There has been, however, a change, a manifest change, in the character of those from foreign shores within the last decade. The time was when we welcomed everybody that might immigrate to this country; when we threw our gates wide open; when in our Fourth of July orations, we proclaimed this to be the asylum of the oppressed, the home of the down-trodden. But in the process of time this great opportunity afforded the nations of the old world came to be abused, and to-day is the largest source of our national danger. We are now bound to call