Tribune, Vol. 33

Excerpt from The Tribune, Vol. 33: Independence Day Orations, July 4, 1876 A reverent spirit has explored the lives of the men who took part in the great transaction; has unfolded their characters and exhibited to an admiring posterity the purity of their motives; the sagacity, the bravery, the fortitude, the perseverance which marked their conduct, and which secured the prosperity and permanence of their work. II. Grandeur of the Work of 1776. Philosophy has divined the secrets of all this power, land eloquence emblazoned the magnificence of all its results. The heroic war which fought out the acquiescence of the Old World in the independence of the New; the manifold and masterly forms of noble character and of patient and serene wisdom which the great influences of the times begat; the large and splendid scale on which these elevated purposes were wrought out, and the majestic proportions to which they have been filled up; the unended line of eventful progress, casting ever backward a flood of light upon the sources of the original energy, and ever forward a promise and a prophecy of unexhausted power - all these have been made familiar to our people by the genius and the devotion of historians and orators. The greatest statesmen of the Old World for this same period of 100 years have traced the initial steps in these events, looked into the nature of the institutions thus founded, weighed by the Old World wisdom, and measured by recorded experience, the probable for tunes of this new adventure on an unknown sea. This circumspect and searching survey of our wide field of political and social experiment, no doubt, has brought them a diversity of judgment as to the past and of expectation as to the future. But of the magnitude and the novelty and the power of the forces set at work by the event we commemorate, no competent authorities have ever greatly differed. The cotemporary judgment of Burke is scarcely an overstatement of the European opinion of the immense import of American independence. He declared: "A great revolution has happened - a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of power in any of the existing States, but by the appearance of a new State, of a new species, in a new part of the globe. It has made as great a change in all the relations and balances and gravitations of power as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world." It is easy to understand that the rupture between the Colonies and the mother country might have worked a result of political independence that would have involved no such mighty consequences as are here so strongly announced by the most philosophic statesman of his age. The resistance of the Colonies, which came to a head in the revolt, was led in the name and for the maintenance of the liberties of Englishmen, against Parliamentary usurpation and a subversion of the British Constitution. A triumph of those liberties might have ended in an emancipation from the rule of the English Parliament, and a continued submission to the scheme and system of the British monarchy, with an American Parliament adjusted thereto, upon the one principles of the English Constitution. Whether this new political establishment should have maintained loyalty to the British sovereign, or should have been organized under a crown and throne of its own, the transaction would, then, have had no other importance than such as belongs to a dismemberment of existing empire, but with preservation of existing institutions. There would have been, to be sure, a "new state," but not "of a new species," and that it was in a new part of the globe would have gone far to make the dismemberment but a temporary and circumstantial disturbance in the old order of things. Indeed, the solidity and perpetuity of that order might have been greatly confirmed by this propagation of the