Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, somewhere about
the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings,
I suppose, have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I
suppose to be some of them.
We are now a mighty nation: we are thirty, or about thirty, millions of
people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land
of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for
about eighty-two years, and we discover that we were then a very small
people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a
vastly less extent of country, with vastly less of everything we deem
desirable among men. We look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous
to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away
back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of
prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as
our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men; they fought for the
principle that they were contending for, and we understand that by what
they then did, it has followed that the degree of prosperity which we
now enjoy has come to us.
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