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marvellous constellation. The war with Mexico, of which the gallant hero (General Scott) is your fellow-citizen, whose absence at this board has just been so much regretted, in adding this thirty-first star to our flag, has opened to us the vast mineral treasures of the Pacific coast; and as Congress was bestowing upon the veteran victor the commemorative medal which he so well deserved, but which was so meagre a memorial of his merits, we could not but recall the noble lines of a great English poet:

"In living medals see our wars enrolled,

And vanquished realms supply recording gold!"

But this is but of yesterday. If you would realize the rapidity of our country's progress, we must go a little farther back. We must go back to the beginning of that very half-century over which the existence of your Society has now extended. Fifty years ago! What was our country then? what is it now? Look on that picture and on this! Ohio but just admitted, with a single representative in the national councils. Louisiana just annexed, most of it a bare, untenanted, unexplored wilderness. Not a steamboat on the Hudson, or anywhere else except in the brain of some scheming Fitch or hair-brained Fulton. Not a railroad or a telegraph within twenty years of being dreamed of. The cotton crop still in its infancy. New York hardly yet one of the great States; for you will remember that Virginia and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were the three great States of the revolutionary and constitutional periods. By the constitutional apportionment, Virginia had ten representatives, and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania eight each, while New York was allowed but six. Sir, we must look on this picture of our country, and then upon that presented in the statistics of the census just completed, if we would appreciate in any degree the railroad rapidity, I had almost said the lightning velocity, of our national career.

And where, where is it all to end? That, sir, is to be written hereafter. But let us not forget, that, in part at least, it is to be decided now. It requires no ghost to tell us, no second-sight or spiritual communication to assure us, that if we are true to

ourselves, true to the principles and examples of our fathers, and true to the institutions which they founded, our country may go forward, with the blessing of God, to higher and higher degrees of prosperity and power in safety and in peace; its destiny ever written in the motto of its greatest state, Excelsior, EXCELSIOR! While if we are faithless to our trust, — if, lulled into a false security by long-continued and uninterrupted success, we suffer the public vigilance to be relaxed, and the public virtue to be corrupted, or, if dizzied by the rapid whirl of our career, and yielding to the rash impulses of the hour, we permit our country to be dragged to the verge, and even plunged into the vortex, of domestic discord or foreign strife, it may be even our own ignoble and ignominious distinction, in some volume of history to be written at no distant day, that we helped to make shipwreck of the noblest bark that was ever launched on the tide of time.

Sir, I beg pardon for detaining you so long. Let me only sum up all that I have said, and all that I feel, in a concluding sentiment:

THE STATE OF NEW YORK:- Upon her soil the first formal proposition of Union was made; upon her soil the first victory which gave assurance of Liberty was won; upon her soil the Constitution of the United States was originally organized. May history record that her example and her influence were always given to the support of Union, Liberty, and the Constitution!

DEDICATION OF THE WINTHROP

SCHOOL.

A SPEECH MADE AT THE DEDICATION OF THE WINTHROP SCHOOLHOUSE, IN BOSTON, 24 FEBRUARY, 1855.

I CAME here, Mr. Mayor and gentlemen, as my friend Mr. Bishop will bear witness, upon the express understanding that I was not to be responsible for any thing in the nature of a formal address. But I cannot refuse to comply with the call which has just been made upon me to add a few words to what has been already so well said. I must at least be permitted to thank the Committee of Arrangements for the opportunity of being present on this occasion. I thank them for the privilege of witnessing these interesting ceremonies, of listening to the charming voices of these happy children and these intelligent young ladies, and of participating in the congratulations which belong to such an hour.

I need not say that I have felt something more than a common interest in this scene. As a mere citizen of Boston, born upon her soil, educated in her public schools, and bound to her by a thousand ties of affection and gratitude which no time can sever, I should, indeed, have found abundant reason for gratification and for pride in seeing her engaged, in the person of her chief magistrate, in dedicating so spacious and noble an edifice to the cause of popular education. As a humble but sincere friend to free government and republican liberty, too, I could not have failed to rejoice at beholding another buttress added to the bulwarks which are to save them from overthrow and downfall. For, my friends, it cannot be too often repeated, trite and com

mon-place as it may sound, that these free institutions of ours can rest securely on no other basis than that of intelligence and virtue; and that intelligence and virtue can be disseminated and inculcated by no other agencies than the school and the church. Our schoolhouses and churches, these are the true towers and bulwarks of a republic, and the only standing army of freedom is that innumerable host of children who are in process of being trained up, in our sabbath schools and our week-day schools, in the fear of God, in the love of their neighbor, and in the elements of all useful knowledge and all sound learning. It may well be a subject for joy, then, to every patriotic heart, and I hope mine is one, - to see our cities and towns vying with each other, not, like those of the old world, in the sumptuousness of their private mansions, or the magnificence of their government halls, but in the elegance and spaciousness and completeness of their common schoolhouses.

have passed away since he now King's Chapel Burying City Hall, where a humble

But, my friends, it would be affectation in me to conceal that I have another and peculiar interest in this occasion. I am sure that I need feel no delicacy in speaking of the distinguished person in whose honor this school has been primarily named. Six entire generations have now intervened between him and myself. More than two hundred years-a long time in your little calendar, my young friends was laid beneath the sod in what is Ground, within a few feet of the tomb-stone may be seen bearing the inscription "John Winthrop, 1649." My relation to him, though direct, is thus almost too remote to subject any thing I may say of him to the imputation of being dictated by any mere partiality or family pride. His name, too, is an historical name, upon which the judgment of the world has long ago been irrevocably pronounced.

Coming over here in 1630, as the leader and Governor of the Massachusetts Company, with their charter in his hand, he was identified, perhaps beyond all other men, at once with the foundation of our Commonwealth and of our city. And there is not a page of our colonial records, or of our Town records, during the nineteen years of his living here, which does not bear testimony to his labors and his zeal for the public service. The very first

entry in the records of Boston, if I mistake not, was in the handwriting, still extant, of John Winthrop. The first voluntary subscription for the support of Free Schools, in 1636, bore his name, as one of the three equal and largest contributors. The first statute for the establishment of a system of Education in New England, was passed under his auspices, as Governor of the Commonwealth. The neighboring Common, the pride of our city, the play-place of our children, the source of so much health and happiness to us all, was originally laid out while he was at the head of the old Town Government, and by a Committee of which he was Chairman. The evidences of his services and of his sacrifices might be multiplied on every side. He spent his whole strength and his whole substance in the service of the infant Colony, and died at last a poor man; poor in every thing but that good name which is above all price.

But it is not so much what he did, as what he was, that entitles him to the grateful remembrance of the sons and daughters of Boston and of Massachusetts. He was a man of the purest life, of the sternest integrity, of the loftiest moral and religious principle; and he has left an example of moderation and magnanimity, of virtue and piety, second to none which can be found in the annals of our country. His residence was near the site of the Old South Church,-his garden, I believe, including the land upon which that venerated edifice now stands, and it would scarcely be too much to say, that the atmosphere within those hallowed walls, purified as it is by the weekly prayers and praises of a thousand worshippers, is hardly more pure than when it was the atmosphere of John Winthrop's mansion.

I know not how, Mr. Mayor, I can do any thing more appropriate to this occasion, or furnish any more striking illustration of the principles of him whose name has been inscribed upon these walls, than to read you a few brief sentences from one of his own letters. The letter is dated on the 16th of October, 1622, and was addressed to his eldest son, then a lad of sixteen years old, who was pursuing his studies at Trinity College, Dublin. It furnishes ample proof that the writer was not a man to be satisfied with any mere intellectual education, but that his first care was for the moral and religious instruction of the young.