the deliberate burning of New London, with all its circumstances of cowardly brutality; — all, all are impressed upon your minds and hearts with a distinctness and a vividness which no language can increase, and which no length of time can ever efface.

One of the accomplished daughters of New London, let me add, has recently embodied them all-not forgetting the angelic ministrations of her own sex to the wounded and the dying-in a History, which is as creditable to her own pen, as it is to the people whose fortunes she has described.

That was, indeed, my friends, a sad day for New London and its vicinity, a sad day for New England, and for all the confederated Colonies. And yet, after all, it was a proud day, and one which, I think, you would hardly be willing to spare from the historic pages of our country. The monument before us is, indeed, no monument of triumph. It tells of victims, not of victors. But it tells of those who have nobly dared and nobly died in defence of American liberty. And what can any man desire more or better as the epitaph either of himself or of those with whom he is connected? It is a monument like that at Thermopylae of old, and it well might have borne the very same inscription.

"Go, stranger," was the well-remembered inscription on the stone erected to commemorate the Leonidas of ancient Sparta, "Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedemonians that we have obeyed their laws, and that we lie here."

It was more in keeping with the good old Puritan character of Connecticut to borrow examples and analogies from Holy Writ, and to liken her heroes to the heroes of the ancient people of God; and most apposite and appropriate is the verse from the sacred volume which you have quoted upon yonder tablet:

"Zebulon and Naphthali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field.”

But had you thought fit to borrow of the jewels of the heathen, not less appropriate or less just, certainly, would have been the inscription, "Go, stranger, and tell the American people, that we have defended their liberties, and that we lie here."

Nor, fellow-citizens, did your Leonidas and his little band lie here and die here in vain. Fidelity to duty, fidelity to principle, fidelity to freedom, are never displayed in vain. They may

They may

be overborne and overwhelmed for the moment. subject those who exhibit them to the loss of place, of fortune, of friends, or of life. But the example, the example, will remain; and somewhere or other, somehow or other, at some time or other, early or late, its influence will be felt, and its power will be asserted and recognized. And I need hardly tell you, that the event which you this day commemorate disastrous as it was to New London and its vicinity, and distressing as it was to the whole country did not have to wait long for the manifestation of its influence upon the great cause of American Liberty.

That was, indeed, a dark day, the 6th of September, 1781, there is hardly a darker to be found in all our revolutionary calendar. But its darkness was the immediate precursor of the dawn. In just six weeks from that date, the great crowning victory of Independence was achieved at Yorktown; and it is matter of historical record, that the massacre on this spot was among the strongest incitements which stirred the blood and nerved the arms of our troops to strike that final and decisive blow. It is matter of tradition, that New London and Groton were among the watchwords at Yorktown.

When the chivalrous Lafayette, to whom Washington gave absolute command in storming one of the redoubts, was about proceeding to the attack, he is said to have ordered his party "to remember New London." What a consolation, what a compensation, would it not have been to Ledyard and his fellow-victims, could they have been permitted to hear that order, and to witness its results; could they have seen the arms of America finally victorious, and the stars and stripes lifted at last in triumph to the sky, to float evermore over a great and glorious Republic!

Let me not fail to add, however, that, while the American armies at Yorktown "remembered New London," they remembered humanity and mercy also. They carried the redoubt in triumph; but Hamilton and Laurens, who were Lafayette's lieutenants in storming it, were incapable of cruelty even in the way of retaliation. To their eternal glory be it spoken, they brought off all their prisoners unharmed; and when questioned how this was, they replied, "We could not, we could not, when they begged and cried on their knees for their lives." Incapable of imitating

examples of barbarity (said Hamilton in his official report to Lafayette himself, and with unmistakable allusion to New London) and forgetting recent provocations, they spared every man that ceased to resist.

You will agree with me, my friends, that there are few nobler passages in American history, or in any history, than this. Our armies on that day achieved a double victory, a victory over the British forces, and a still more glorious victory over themselves, in subduing the base passion for revenge, and heaping coals of fire, only in the true scripture sense, upon the heads of their enemies.

And now, fellow-citizens, if our fathers at Yorktown, six weeks. only after the Groton massacre took place, could forget the provocation, and hold back their hands from the retaliation which was within their immediate reach, we of this generation, more than threescore and ten years afterwards, are not assembled today in a spirit of inferior magnanimity. You are not here, I am sure, Sons of Connecticut, to commemorate this sad chapter in your history with any feelings of resentment towards Great Britain. You cannot have forgotten, either, that, after all, it was no native Briton who commanded the expedition which perpetrated this inhuman massacre. You cannot have forgotten that it was your own soil, which, reversing for once the whole character of its products, and concentrating all its poisonous ingredients in a single nature, gave being to that bold, bad man, who, not satisfied with turning traitor to his country in general, made haste to signalize his new allegiance by dealing this parricidal blow at the very State and neighborhood in which he had been born and brought up. Let me not pollute this pure air by giving utterance to his name! Let it be blotted out from the remembrance of men! Or, if recalled at all, let it only be as a warning of the unimagined depths of depravity and infamy, into which a daring and desperate valor and a vaulting and vainglorious ambition may plunge a man, when utterly unrestrained by any thing of moral and religious principle.

Nor under any circumstances would it be worthy of us to employ such an occasion as this in reviving a feeling of bitterness and animosity towards those with whom all differences upon this score have been long ago settled. Great Britain and the

United States may continue to have their little jealousies and controversies and contentions, and now and then ambitious and arrogant men on both sides of the ocean may push matters, for their own partisan purposes, to the very verge-and even beyond the verge, down into the fearful and fiery vortex- of war. Heaven forbid that any such catastrophe should be witnessed in our generation! But, in the long run, these two mighty nations must go along, side by side and shoulder to shoulder, together, in the great cause of civilization and Christianity, of civil and religious liberty, or that cause will be put back, and lost, it may be, for ever! Let us, then, cherish and cultivate a spirit of conciliation and kindness towards the old mother country. Let us never be ashamed to say, what every one of us at this moment feels, that, if we could have chosen our parentage from among all the families of the earth, we would not have come of any other stock; we would not have spoken any other language than that of Shakspeare and Milton and Chatham; we would not have inherited any other history or traditions than those of Runnymede and Magna Charta, and the Petition of Right, and the Revolution of 1688. Let us realize, as we proudly contemplate our own national growth and grandeur, that, after all, she was the only mother capable of bearing such a child. Let us go behind these remembrances of her injustice or inhumanity, and revert to that old original spirit which animated the founders of your Colony, when they gave the names of the "Thames" and of "New London" to yonder river and town, not surely, as imagining that they could ever rival the wealth and splendor of the great metropolis of the world, but out of regard and affection (as I have seen it in the handwriting of John Winthrop himself) to "their dear native country," and in honor of its famous capital.

No, my friends, it is with no view of raking open the ashes in which your resentments towards Britain were long ago buried, that you have gathered anew upon these memorable heights. You have come to renew your pledges of devotion to your own country, and not to indulge in any feelings of hostility towards other countries. You have come to remember the valor of your own dead, and the hopes of your own living.

The one great end of commemorations like this ought to be, and is, to impress upon our own minds, and upon the minds of our children, a deeper sense of the value of that liberty and of those institutions which it cost our fathers so much treasure and blood to establish. Certainly, in view of such scenes of suffering and slaughter as were witnessed here and elsewhere during our revolutionary struggle, we may say, as was said on another occasion, "With a great sum obtained they this freedom." And now it is for us to see to it, that this great price was not paid in vain, and that the estate goes down, not only unimpaired, but improved and fortified, to posterity. We are not called on, as they were, let us thank God that we are not, to peril our fortunes, and jeopard our lives unto the death, in its defence. We are not summoned to fight against the armies of the aliens, or to wrestle against flesh and blood. But we are called upon to confront foes by no means less formidable. We are called upon to contend against the temptations and blandishments of national and individual prosperity. We are called on to restrain and resist the inordinate lusts which involve more danger to our liberties than ten thousand hostile armies or hostile fleets, the lust of power, the lust of wealth, the lust of office, the lust of territory, the lust of national aggrandizement, and, I may add, "the lust of the flesh and the pride of life," and whatever else goes to make up the aggregate of that corrupting luxury which has caused the decline and downfall of so many other republics before our own.

In one word, my friends, we of this generation are summoned, by infallible signs and signals, to a stern moral warfare for the maintenance of the institutions for which our fathers fought and bled. We have reached an era in our national existence, if I mistake not, in which a fresh recurrence is demanded to those old-fashioned, Connecticut, Puritan virtues moderation and temperance and justice and self-denial and purity and pietywhich have been so often and so admirably illustrated and personified by your Shermans and Wolcotts and Griswolds and Trumbulls and Williamses, and of which no false delicacy shall restrain me from saying that John Winthrop of Connecticut, like his father of Massachusetts, was among the brightest examples