“With peculiar propriety, we may now felicitate ourselves on that happy form of mixed government under which we live.  The advantages resulting to the citizens of the Union are utterly incalculable, and the day when it was received by a majority of the States shall stand on the catalogue of American anniversaries second to none but the birthday of independence.

“In consequence of the adoption of our present system of government, and the virtuous manner in which it has been administered by a Washington and an Adams, we are this day in the enjoyment of peace, while war devastates Europe!  We can now sit down beneath the shadow of the olive, while her cities blaze, her streams run purple with blood, and her fields glitter with a forest of bayonets!  The citizens of America can this day throng the temples of freedom, and renew their oaths of fealty to independence; while Holland, our once sister republic, is erased from the catalogue of nations; while Venice is destroyed, Italy ravaged, and Switzerland—­the once happy, the once united, the once flourishing Switzerland—­lies bleeding at every pore!”

He need not have been ashamed of this speech, despite the lumbering bombast of some of its sentences.  All that made him estimable as a public man is contained in it,—­the sentiment of nationality, and a clear sense of the only means by which the United States can remain a nation; namely, strict fidelity to the Constitution as interpreted by the authority itself creates, and modified in the way itself appoints.  We have never read the production of a youth which was more prophetic of the man than this.  It was young New England that spoke through him on that occasion; and in all the best part of his life he never touched a strain which New England had not inspired, or could not reach.

His success at college giving him ascendency at home, he employed it for the benefit of his brother in a manner which few sons would have dared, and no son ought to attempt.  His father, now advanced in years, infirm, “an old man before his time” through hardship and toil, much in debt, depending chiefly upon his salary of four hundred dollars a year as Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and heavily taxed to maintain Daniel in college, had seen all his other sons married and settled except Ezekiel, upon whom he leaned as the staff of his declining years, and the main dependence of his wife and two maiden daughters.  Nevertheless, Daniel, after a whole night of consultation with his brother, urged the old man to send Ezekiel to college also.  The fond and generous father replied, that he had but little property, and it would take all that little to carry another son through college to a profession; but he lived only for his children, and, for his own part, he was willing to run the risk; but there was the mother and two unmarried sisters, to whom the risk was far more serious.  If they consented, he was willing.  The mother said: