My lords, this awful subject, so important to our honor, constitution, and our religion, demands the most solemn and effectual inquiry.  And again I call upon your lordships, and the united powers of the State, to examine it thoroughly and decisively and to stamp upon it an indelible stigma of the public abhorrence.  And again I implore those holy prelates of our religion to do away these iniquities from among us.  Let them perform an illustration; let them purify this House and this country from this sin.  Lord Chatham.

From “The Attempt to Subjugate America.”

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Now, there are three questions before the people of the country to-day, and they are all public, all unselfish, all patriotic, all elevated, and all ennobling as subjects of contemplation and of action.  They are the public peace in this large and general sense that I have indicated.  They are the public faith, without which there is no such thing as honorable national life; and the public service, which unless pure and strong and noble makes all the pagans of free government but doggerel in our ears.  William Maxwell Evarts.

From “The Day We Celebrate.”

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Indeed, gentlemen, Washington’s farewell address is full of truths important at all times, and particularly deserving consideration at the present.  With a sagacity which brought the future before him, and made it like the present, he saw and pointed out the dangers that even at this moment most imminently threaten us.  I hardly know how a greater service of that kind could now be done to the community than by a renewed and wide diffusion of that admirable paper, and an earnest invitation to every man in the country to reperuse and consider it.  Its political maxims are invaluable; its exhortations to love of country and to brotherly affection among citizens, touching; and the solemnity with which it urges the observance of moral duties, and impresses the power of religious obligation, gives to it the highest character of truly disinterested, sincere, parental advice.  Daniel Webster.

From “The Character of Washington.”

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Let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country’s liberty and independence; or that I could have become the pliant minion of power in the oppression or the miseries of my countrymen.  The proclamation of the provisional government speaks for our views; no inference can be tortured from it to countenance barbarily or debasement at home, or subjection, humiliation, or treachery from abroad.  I would not have submitted to a foreign oppressor for the same reason that I would resist the foreign and domestic oppressor; in the dignity of freedom I would have fought upon the threshold of my country, and its enemy should enter only by passing over my lifeless corpse.  Am I, who lived but for my country, and who have subjected myself to the dangers of the jealous and watchful oppressor and the bondage of the grave only to give my countrymen their rights and my country her independence—­am I to be loaded with calumny and not suffered to resent or repel it?  No, God forbid!  Robert Emmet.