Columbus was one of these millions; but he was a leader among them and has not been forgotten.  As the world has got farther away from the time in which he lived, the man Columbus, who did so much and yet died almost unnoticed, has grown more and more famous; his name is immortal, and to-day he is the hero Columbus—­one of the world’s greatest men.

We, in America, are fond of celebrating anniversaries.  I suppose the years that you boys and girls have thus far lived have been the most remarkable in the history of the world for celebrating anniversaries.  For fully twenty years the United States has been keeping its birthday.  The celebration commenced long before you were born, with the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Lexington (in 1875).  It has not ended yet.  But in 1892, We celebrated the greatest of all our birthdays—­the discovery of the continent that made it possible for us to be here at all.

Now this has not always been so with us.  I suppose that in 1592 and in 1692 no notice whatever was taken of the twelfth day of October, on which—­one hundred and two hundred years before—­Columbus had landed on that flat little “key” known as Watling’s Island down among the West Indies, and had begun a new chapter in the world’s wonderful story.  In 1592, there was hardly anybody here to celebrate the anniversary—­in fact, there was hardly anybody here at all, except a few Spanish settlers in the West Indies, in Mexico, and in Florida.  In 1692, there were a few scattered settlements of Frenchmen in Canada, of Englishmen in New England, Dutchmen in New York, Swedes in Delaware, and Englishmen in Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas.  But none of these people loved the Spaniards.  They hated them, indeed; for there had been fierce fighting going on for nearly a hundred years between Spain and England, and you couldn’t find an Englishman, a Dutchman or a Swede who was willing to say a good word for Spain, or thank God for the man who sailed away in Spanish ships to discover America two hundred years before.

In 1792, people did think a little more about this, and there were a few who did remember that, three hundred years before, Columbus had found the great continent upon which, in that year 1792, a new republic, called the United States of America, had only just been started after a long and bloody war of rebellion and revolution.

We do not find, however, that in that year of 1792 there were many, if any, public celebrations of the Discovery of America, in America itself.  A certain American clergyman, however, whose name was the Rev. Elhanan Winchester, celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the Discovery of America by Columbus.  And he celebrated it not in America, but in England, where he was then living.  On the twelfth of October, 1792, Winchester delivered an address on “Columbus and his Discoveries,” before a great assembly of interested listeners.  In that address he said some very enthusiastic and some very remarkable things about the America that was to be: