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CLIMAX.

(See Tone Drill No. 41.)

[In its purest form Climax is a manifestation of increasing intensity of feeling or of an increasing importance in the thought. Climax has no distinct tone. It manifests itself in increasing degrees of the particular tone demanded.]

Liberty Under Law.
(Abridged.)

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

The day we celebrate commemorates the introduction upon this Continent of the master principle of its civilization. I do not forget that we are a nation of many nationalities. I remember the forget-me-nots of Germany; I recall the delicate shamrock; I remember, surely, sir, the lily of France, and the thistle of Scotland; I recall the daisy and the rose of England; and, sir, in Switzerland, high upon the Alps, on the very edge of the glacier, the highest flower that grows in Europe, is the rare edelweiss. And here in America, higher than the shamrock or thistle, higher than rose, lily or daisy, higher than the highest, blooms the perennial Mayflower. For, sir and gentlemen, it is the English-speaking race that has moulded the destiny of this Continent; and the Puritan influence is the strongest influence that has acted upon it.

I am surely not here to assert that the men who have represented that influence have always been men whose spirit was blended of sweetness and light. I confess truly their hardness, their prejudice, their narrowness. All this I know. But, sir, we estimate the cause beyond the man. If we would see the actual force, the creative power of the Pilgrim principle, we are not to look at the company who came over in the cabin of the "Mayflower;" we are to look upon the forty millions who fill this Continent from sea to sea. The

"Mayflower," sir, brought seed and not a harvest. In a century and a half the religious restrictions of the Puritans had grown into absolute religious liberty, and in two centuries it had burst beyond the limits of New England, and John Carver of the "Mayflower" had ripened into Abraham Lincoln of the Illinois prairie.

Do you ask me then what is this Puritan principle? Do you ask me whether it is as good for today as for yesterday; whether it is good for every national emergency; whether it is good for the situation of this hour? I think we need neither doubt nor fear. The Puritan principle in its essence is simply individual freedom. From that spring religious liberty and political equality. The free State, the free Church, the free School-these are the triple armor of American nationality, of American security. But the Pilgrims, while they have stood above all men for their idea of liberty, have always asserted liberty under law, and never separated it from law. They knew that the will of the people alone is but a gale smiting a rudderless and sailless ship, and hurling it a mass of wreck upon the rocks. But the will of the people, subject to law, is the same gale filling the trim canvas of a ship that minds the helm, bearing it over awful and yawning abysses of ocean safely to port.

Now, gentlemen, in this country, the Puritan principle in its development has advanced to this point, that it provides us a lawful remedy for every emergency that may arise. I stand here as a son of New England. In every fibre of my being am I a child of the Pilgrims. The most knightly of all the gentlemen at Elizabeth's court said to the young poet when he would write an immortal song, "Look into your own heart and write." And I, sir and brothers, if, looking into my own heart at this moment, I might dare to think that what I find written there is also written upon the heart of my mother, clad in her snows at home, her voice at this hour

would be a message spoken from the land of the Pilgrims to the capital of this nation-a message like that which Patrick Henry sent from Virginia to Massachusetts when he heard of Concord and Lexington: "I am not a Virginian-I am an American." And so, gentlemen, at this hour we are not Republicans, we are not Democrats-we are Americans.

The voice of New England, I believe, going to the capital, would be this, that neither is the Republican Senate to insist upon its exclusive partisan way, nor is the Democratic House to insist upon its exclusive partisan way, but Senate and House, representing the American people and the American people only, in the light of the Constitution and by the authority of the law, are to provide a way over which a President, be he Republican or be he Democrat, shall pass unchallenged to his chair. Ah! gentlemen, think not, Mr. President, that I am forgetting the occasion or its amenities. I am remembering the Puritans; I am remembering Plymouth Rock, and the virtues that made it illustrious. But we, gentlemen, are to imitate those virtues, as our toast says, only by being greater than the men who stood upon that rock.

Sons of the Pilgrims, you are not to level forests, you are not to war with savage men and savage beasts, you are not to tame a continent, nor even found a State, that was their task. Our task is nobler, is diviner. Our task, sir, is to reconcile a nation. It is to curb the fury of party spirit. It is to introduce a loftier and manlier tone everywhere into our political life. It is to educate every boy and every girl and then leave them perfectly free to go from any schoolhouse to any church. Above all, sir, it is to protect absolutely the equal rights of the poorest and the richest, of the most ignorant and the most intelligent citizen, and it is to stand forth, brethren, as a triple wall of brass around our native land against the mad blows of violence or the fatal dry-rot of fraud. At this moment, sir, the grave and august

shades of the forefathers whom we invoke bend over us in benediction as they call us to this sublime task. This, brothers and friends, this is to imitate the virtues of our forefathers; this is to make our day as glorious as theirs.

The Irish Aliens.

RICHARD L. SHIEL.

The Duke of Wellington is not a man of an excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I cannot help thinking that, when he heard his Roman Catholic countrymen (for we are his countrymen) designated by a phrase as offensive as the abundant vocabulary of his eloquent confederate could supply,-I cannot help thinking that he ought to have recollected the many fields of fight in which we have been contributors to his renown. "The battles, sieges, fortunes that he has passed," ought to have come back upon him. He ought to have remembered that, from the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern warfare, down to that last and surpassing combat which has made his name imperishable,-from Assaye to Waterloo-the Irish soldiers, with whom your armies are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to the glory with which his unparalleled successes have been crowned.

Whose were the arms that drove your bayonets at Vimiéra through the phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war before? What desperate valor climbed the steeps and filled the moats at Badajos? All his victories should have rushed and crowded back upon his memory,-Vimiéra, Badajos, Salamanca, Albuéra, Toulouse, and last of all, the greatest. Tell me,-for you were there,-I appeal to the gallant soldier before me (Sir Henry Hardinge), from whose opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an

intrepid breast;-tell me,-for you must needs remember,on that day when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while death fell in showers, when the artillery of France was levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the onset, tell me if, for an instant, when to hesitate for an instant was to be lost, the "aliens" blenched?

And when, at length, the moment for the last and decided movement had arrived, and the valor which had so long been wisely checked was, at last, let loose, when, with words familiar, but immortal, the great captain commanded the great assault, tell me if Catholic Ireland with less heroic valor than the natives of this your own glorious country precipitated herself upon the foe? The blood of England, Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the same stream, and drenched the same field. When the chill morning dawned, their dead lay cold and stark together;—in the same deep pit their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven upon their union in the grave. Partakers in every peril, in the glory shall we not be permitted to participate; and shall we be told, as a requital, that we are estranged from the noble country for whose salvation our life-blood was poured out?

Marullus to the People.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home? What tributaries follow him to Rome,

To grace in captive bonds his chariot-wheels?

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,

Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements,

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