was the great principle of the English revolution.  It was the great principle of our own.  Spanish-America has been doomed for centuries to the practical effects of an odious tyranny.  If we were justified, she is more than justified.  I am no propagandist.  I would not seek to force upon other nations our principles and our liberty, if they do not want them.  But if an abused and oppressed people will their freedom; if they seek to establish it; if, in truth, they have established it, we have a right, as a sovereign power, to notice the fact, and to act as circumstances and our interest require.  I will say in the language of the venerated father of my country, ’born in a land of liberty, my anxious recollections, my sympathetic feelings, and my best wishes, are irresistibly excited, whensoever, in any country, I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom.’”

This same spirit loosed the tongue of Wendell Phillips to plead the cause of the enslaved African in words that burned into the hearts of his countrymen.  It emboldened George William Curtis to assert the right to break the shackles of party politics and follow the dictates of conscience:—­

“I know,—­no man better,—­how hard it is for earnest men to separate their country from their party, or their religion from their sect.  But, nevertheless, the welfare of the country is dearer than the mere victory of party, as truth is more precious than the interest of any sect.  You will hear this patriotism scorned as an impracticable theory, as the dream of a cloister, as the whim of a fool.  But such was the folly of the Spartan Leonidas, staying with his three hundred the Persian horde, and teaching Greece the self-reliance that saved her.  Such was the folly of the Swiss Arnold von Winkelried, gathering into his own breast the points of Austrian spears, making his dead body the bridge of victory for his countrymen.  Such was the folly of the American Nathan Hale, gladly risking the seeming disgrace of his name, and grieving that be had but one life to give for his country.  Such are the beacon-lights of a pure patriotism that burn forever in men’s memories and answer each other through the illuminated ages.”

So long as there are wrongs to be redressed, so long as the strong oppress the weak, so long as injustice sits in high places, the voice of the orator will be needed to plead for the rights of man.  He may not, at this stage of the republic, be called upon to sound a battle cry to arms, but there are bloodless victories to be won as essential to the stability of a great nation and the uplifting of its millions of people as the victories of the battlefield.

When the greatest of modern political philosophers, the author of the Declaration of Independence, urged that, if men were left free to declare the truth the effect of its great positive forces would overcome the negative forces of error, he seems to have hit the central fact of civilization.  Without freedom of thought and absolute freedom to speak out the truth as one sees it, there can be no advancement, no high civilization.  To the orator who has heard the call of humanity, what nobler aspiration than to enlarge and extend the freedom we have inherited from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, and to defend the hope of the world?