So I appeal from the men in silken hose who danced to music made by slaves—­and called it freedom—­from the men in bell-crowned hats, who led Hester Prynne to her shame—­and called it religion—­to that Americanism which reaches forth its arms to smite wrong with reason and truth, secure in the power of both.  I appeal from the patriarchs of New England to the poets of New England; from Endicott to Lowell; from Winthrop to Longfellow; from Norton to Holmes; and I appeal in the name and by the rights of that common citizenship—­of that common origin—­back of both the Puritan and the Cavalier—­to which all of us owe our being.  Let the dead past, consecrated by the blood of its martyrs, not by its savage hatreds—­darkened alike by kingcraft and priestcraft—­let the dead past bury its dead.  Let the present and the future ring with the song of the singers.  Blessed be the lessons they teach, the laws they make.  Blessed be the eye to see, the light to reveal.  Blessed be Tolerance, sitting ever on the right hand of God to guide the way with loving word, as blessed be all that brings us nearer the goal of true religion, true Republicanism, and true patriotism, distrust of watchwords and labels, shams and heroes, belief in our country and ourselves.  It was not Cotton Mather, but John Greenleaf Whittier, who cried:—­

    “Dear God and Father of us all,
    Forgive our faith in cruel lies,
    Forgive the blindness that denies.

    “Cast down our idols—­overturn
    Our bloody altars—­make us see
    Thyself in Thy humanity!”

JOHN MORLEY

FOUNDER’S DAY ADDRESS

(Abridged)

Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pa., November 3, 1904.

What is so hard as a just estimate of the events of our own time?  It is only now, a century and a half later, that we really perceive that a writer has something to say for himself when he calls Wolfe’s exploit at Quebec the turning point in modern history.  And to-day it is hard to imagine any rational standard that would not make the American Revolution—­an insurrection of thirteen little colonies, with a population of 3,000,000 scattered in a distant wilderness among savages—­a mightier event in many of its aspects than the volcanic convulsion in France.  Again, the upbuilding of your great West on this continent is reckoned by some the most important world movement of the last hundred years.  But is it more important than the amazing, imposing and perhaps disquieting apparition of Japan?  One authority insists that when Russia descended into the Far East and pushed her frontier on the Pacific to the forty-third degree of latitude that was one of the most far-reaching facts of modern history, tho it almost escaped the eyes of Europe—­all her perceptions then monopolized by affairs in the Levant.  Who can say?  Many courses of the sun were needed before men could take the full historic measures of Luther,