I have suffered in that way myself.  I have had relatives killed in that way.  One was in Chicago years ago—­an uncle of mine, just as good an uncle as I have ever had, and I had lots of them—­yes, uncles to burn, uncles to spare.  This poor uncle, full of patriotism, opened his mouth to hurrah, and a rocket went down his throat.  Before that man could ask for a drink of water to quench that thing, it blew up and scattered him all, over the forty-five States, and—­really, now, this is true—­I know about it myself—­twenty-four hours after that it was raining buttons, recognizable as his, on the Atlantic seaboard.  A person cannot have a disaster like that and be entirely cheerful the rest of his life.  I had another uncle, on an entirely different Fourth of July, who was blown up that way, and really it trimmed him as it would a tree.  He had hardly a limb left on him anywhere.  All we have left now is an expurgated edition of that uncle.  But never mind about these things; they are merely passing matters.  Don’t let me make you sad.

Sir Mortimer Durand said that you, the English people, gave up your colonies over there—­got tired of them—­and did it with reluctance.  Now I wish you just to consider that he was right about that, and that he had his reasons for saying that England did not look upon our Revolution as a foreign war, but as a civil war fought by Englishmen.

Our Fourth of July which we honor so much, and which we love so much, and which we take so much pride in, is an English institution, not an American one, and it comes of a great ancestry.  The first Fourth of July in that noble genealogy dates back seven centuries lacking eight years.  That is the day of the Great Charter—­the Magna Charta—­which was born at Runnymede in the next to the last year of King John, and portions of the liberties secured thus by those hardy Barons from that reluctant King John are a part of our Declaration of Independence, of our Fourth of July, of our American liberties.  And the second of those Fourths of July was not born, until four centuries later, in, Charles the First’s time, in the Bill of Rights, and that is ours, that is part of our liberties.  The next one was still English, in New England, where they established that principle which remains with us to this day, and will continue to remain with us—­no taxation without representation.  That is always going to stand, and that the English Colonies in New England gave us.

The Fourth of July, and the one which you are celebrating now, born, in Philadelphia on the 4th of July, 1776—­that is English, too.  It is not American.  Those were English colonists, subjects of King George III., Englishmen at heart, who protested against the oppressions of the Home Government.  Though they proposed to cure those oppressions and remove them, still remaining under the Crown, they were not intending a revolution.  The revolution was brought about by circumstances