1850 it was a little short of 8,000. What was then called "the Neck," the most secluded portion of the old town, although the part which led to its being first pitched upon as a place of settlement, was in 1804 annexed to Boston; and being united with the city by two bridges, has long since exchanged the retirement of a village for the life and movement of the metropolis. The pickaxe is making sad ravages upon one of the venerable heights of Dorchester; the intrenchments of the other, no longer masking the deadly enginery of war, are filled with the refreshing waters of Cochituate lake. New roads have been opened in every part of our ancient town, and two railways traverse it from north to south. The ancient houses built before the revolution have not all disappeared, but they are almost lost in the multitude of modern dwellings. A half century ago there was but one church in the town, that which stood on yonder hill, and the schoolhouse which then stood by its side was, till 1802, the only one dignified by the name of a town school. You have now ten churches and seven school-houses of the first class; and all the establishments of an eminently prosperous town, situated in the vicinity of a great commercial metropolis, have multiplied in equal proportion. But all is not changed. The great natural features of the scene, and nowhere are they more attractive, are of course unaltered: - the same fine sweep of the shore with its projecting headlands, the same extensive plain at the north part of the town, the same gentle undulations and gradual ascent to the south, the same beautiful elevations. I caught a few days ago, from the top of Jones's hill, the same noble prospect (and I know not a finer on the coast of Massachusetts), which used to attract my boyish gaze more than fifty years ago. Old Hill, as we called it then (it has lost that venerable name in the progress of refinement, though it has become half a century older,) notwithstanding the tasteful villas which adorn its base, exhibits substantially the same native grouping of cedars and the same magnificent rocks, and commands the same fine view of the harbor, which it did before a single house was built within its precincts. Venerable trees that seemed big to me in my boyhood, I have been looking at some of them this morning, seem but little bigger now, though I trace the storms of fifty winters on some well-recollected branches. The aged sycamores which shaded the roof, beneath which I was born, still shade it; and the ancient burial ground hard by, with which there are few of us who have not some tender associations, upon whose early graves may yet be seen the massy unhewn stones placed there by the first settlers for protection against the wolves, still attracts the antiquary with its quaint and learned inscriptions, and preserves the memory not merely of "the rude forefathers of the hamlet," but of some of the most honored names in the history of Massachusetts. But I ought to apologize, my friends, for dwelling on topics so deeply tinged with personal recollection. The occasion on which we are met invites all our thoughts to public themes. It is two hundred and twenty-five years since the commencement of the settlement of our ancient town,-the first foothold of the pioneers of Governor Winthrop's expedition. It is the seventy-ninth anniversary of the Declaration of the Independence of the United States. Our minds naturally go back to the foundations of the ancient Commonwealth of which we are citizens, laid as they were within our limits. We dwell with pleasure and pride on the growth of our native town, under the vicissitudes of colonial fortune, from its feeble beginnings to the dimensions of a large and flourishing municipality; and we meditate with just interest upon those eventful scenes at the commencement of the revolutionary war of which our heights were the theatre, and which exerted an undoubted influence upon the continental congress at Philadelphia in hastening the great declaration. Thus the appropriate topics of the day correspond with the three great divisions, which make up the whole system of political philosophy. We have, first, The foundation of a State, the measures and agencies by which, under Providence, a new people is called into the family of nations;· manifestly the most important event, humanly speaking, that can occur in the history of our race. Second, We have the institutions and events which constitute the political life of a community; - the organization and action, by which the divinely appointed ordinance of civil government is administered, so as best to promote the welfare and progress of a people. Third, We have one of those great movements called revolutions, by which a people for urgent causes introduces organic changes in the framework of its government, and materially renovates or wholly reconstructs the fabric of its political relations. In reference to each of these three great branches of political science, the history of our ancient town and the occasion which calls us together furnish us with the most striking illustrations and instructive lessons. The foundation of a new State, in a quarter of the globe before unknown, is an event without a parallel in the domain of authentic history. The time and the manner in which the earliest predecessors of the present inhabitants of Europe became established there, are but imperfectly known; while the first settlement of Asia and Africa, after the original dispersion of mankind, is lost in those unfathomable depths of antiquity, which the deep sea-line of research has never sounded. It is only after comparing the authentic pages of our early history with the clouds of insipid fable that hang over the origin of Athens, and Rome, and Great Britain,- fables which neither Plutarch, nor Livy, nor Milton, has been able to raise into dignity and interest, — that we perceive the real grandeur of the work of which the foundations were laid two centuries and a quarter ago on Dorchester plain. - So with respect to the second branch of political philosophy, the organization and administration of States, I am disposed to affirm that there are secrets of practical wisdom and prudence, elements of growth and prosperity, -in our municipal system, which deserve to be thoughtfully explored. Our towns, of course, are but units in the great sum which makes up the State. They possess none of the higher powers of government. Not by their hands is wielded the mace of legislation, or the scales of justice, the purse or the sword of the Commonwealth. But whenever the prosperity of New England and of the younger States modelled on its type is traced to its ultimate causes, it will be found to a good degree in this municipal system. In the pages of these ancient volumes, these old town records which have in few cases been better preserved than in Dorchester, there will be found lessons of experience, of blessed common sense, shaping itself to the exigency of uncommon times, of patient submission to present evils, in the hope of a brighter day, of fortitude and courage in an humble sphere, of provident care for the rising generation and posterity, of unwearied diligence for the promotion of religion, morals, and education, which in their joint effect have done much toward giving us this goodly heritage. Lastly, of those great movements by which organic changes are wrought in established governments, and a new order in the political world brought in, it must be admitted that the event which we commemorate to-day, in the character of the parties, — an infant confederacy of republics just starting out of a state of colonial pupilage on the one hand, and one of the oldest monarchies in Europe on the other; the long and silent preparation and the gradual approach; the soundness of the principles which impelled the movement, acknowledged as it was by the most illustrious statesmen of the mother country; the purity and pristine simplicity of manners that characterized the revolutionary leaders; the almost total absence of those violent and sanguinary incidents that usually mark the progress of civil war; and the gradual development, out of the chaos of the struggle, of well-balanced systems of republican government and federal union;—in all these respects, it must be allowed, that there is a solitary dignity and elevation in our American Revolution. They make it perhaps the only instance in history of the severance of a mighty empire, equally to the advantage of the new State and the parent country; the single case of a rising republic not built upon the calamitous ruins of earlier organizations. You will readily perceive, my friends, that the thorough treatment of this subject in all its parts would occupy much more time than can be reasonably devoted to a public address; and that in attempting to embrace them all in the remarks I venture to offer you, I must wholly omit some important topics, and pass lightly over others. It is impossible fully to comprehend the importance of the work which was accomplished in the colonization of America, without regarding it as a part of the great plan of Providence, in disposing the time and circumstances of the discovery of our continent;-hidden as it was till the end of the fifteenth century from the rest of the world. This thought was brought so forcibly to my mind a few years since by a circumstance personal to myself, that I think you will pardon me for alluding to it, though in itself of a trifling domestic character. In the year 1841, I occupied with my family the Villa Careggi, near Florence, once, as its name imports (Casa regia), a princely residence, belonging to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, but of late years private property, and occasionally leased to travellers.* Half fortress, half palace, it was built by Cosmo de' Medici in 1444, nine years before the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453. By that appalling event, a barbarous race (which had issued from the depths of Asia some centuries before, and had ingrafted the Mahometan imposture on the primitive stock of Tartarian paganism) had stormed the last strong-hold of the ancient civilization, the metropolis of the Greek empire, and established the religion of the Koran at the heart of the old world. The relations of the Turks to the rest of Europe are so entirely changed, that it is now scarcely possible to conceive the terror caused by this event. Had nothing occurred to renovate and strengthen the civilization of the west, it is not easy to imagine what might have been at this day the condition of Christendom. Even as it was, the Sultan was for two cen * Roscoe's Lorenzo de'Medici, p. 292. This most interesting villa remained a part of the grand ducal domain till 1788, when with other estates it was sold by the Grand Duke Leopold from motives of economy. It has lately passed into the possession of Mr. Sloane, an English gentleman of taste and fortune, by whom the grounds and approaches have been greatly improved, and the whole establishment restored to something like its original magnificence. |