This anniversary animates and gladdens and unites all American hearts.  On other days of the year we may be party men, indulging in controversies, more or less important to the public good; we may have likes and dislikes, and we may maintain our political differences, often with warm, and sometimes with angry feelings.  But to-day we are Americans all; and all nothing but Americans.  As the great luminary over our heads, dissipating mists and fogs, now cheers the whole hemisphere, so do the associations connected with this day disperse all cloudy and sullen weather in the minds and hearts of true Americans.  Every man’s heart swells within him; every man’s port and bearing become somewhat more proud and lofty, as he remembers that seventy-five years have rolled away, and that the great inheritance of liberty is still his; his, undiminished and unimpaired; his in all its original glory; his to enjoy, his to protect, and his to transmit to future generations.

Fellow-citizens, this inheritance which we enjoy to-day is not only an inheritance of liberty, but of our own peculiar American liberty.  Liberty has existed in other times, in other countries, and in other forms.  There has been a Grecian liberty, bold and powerful, full of spirit, eloquence, and fire; a liberty which produced multitudes of great men, and has transmitted one immortal name, the name of Demosthenes, to posterity.  But still it was a liberty of disconnected states, sometimes united, indeed, by temporary leagues and confederacies, but often involved in wars between themselves.  The sword of Sparta turned its sharpest edge against Athens, enslaved her, and devastated Greece; and, in her turn, Sparta was compelled to bend before the power of Thebes.  And let it ever be remembered, especially let the truth sink deep into all American minds, that it was the WANT OF UNION among her several states which finally gave the mastery of all Greece to Philip of Macedon.

And there has also been a Roman liberty, a proud, ambitious, domineering spirit, professing free and popular principles in Rome itself, but, even in the best days of the republic, ready to carry slavery and chains into her provinces, and through every country over which her eagles could be borne.  What was the liberty of Spain, or Gaul, or Germany, or Britain, in the days of Rome?  Did true constitutional liberty then exist?  As the Roman empire declined, her provinces, not instructed in the principles of free popular government, one after another declined also, and when Rome herself fell, in the end, all fell together.

I have said, Gentlemen, that our inheritance is an inheritance of American liberty.  That liberty is characteristic, peculiar, and altogether our own.  Nothing like it existed in former times, nor was known in the most enlightened states of antiquity; while with us its principles have become interwoven into the minds of individual men, connected with our daily opinions, and our daily habits, until it is, if I