one man.' Certainly, however, it was not so with ours. The spirit shaped the body, here, according to the Platonic plan. The people formed its own commonwealths, its ultimate Nation; and "the people," says Bancroft, looking back to the peace of 1782, "the people was superior to its institutions, possessing the vital force which goes before organization, and gives to it strength and form."* This vital force, therefore, in the pre-Revolutionary American people, this inherent and energizing life, early developed, largely trained, acting at that time, and acting ever since, on our organized public development-this is the subject which I hope you will accept, as deserving your attention, and not unsuited to this occasion.

At the time when Burke saw the meaning, and interpreted the menace, of this distinctive American spirit, it had all the force which he ascribed to it; and the effect of it was shown, only more speedily, in larger and more energetic discovery, than he expected. It can scarcely be doubted that if the counsels of his wise statesmanship had been listened to by the Parliament on whose unheeding ears they fell, and by the Court which passionately repulsed them, the separation which was inevitable, between England and the colonies, would for a time have been postponed; and some of us might have been born, on American shores, the loyal subjects of King George. But those counsels were not heeded; as those of Chatham, six

* History of the United States, Vol. X, p. 593.

First Movements in the Colonies.

weeks earlier, in the House of Lords, had not been; and just four weeks after they were uttered, before report of them could probably have reached this country, on the 19th of April, at Lexington and at Concord, out of the threatening murk of discontent shot that fierce flash of armed collision between the colonists and the troops of Great Britain, beyond which reconciliation was impossible; of which the war, and the following Independence, were the predestined sequel.

Not quite a month later, as you remember, on the 10th of May, Ticonderoga, with Crown Point, was taken by the provincials; and on the very day of the capture as if to justify the name "Carillon," given by the French to Ticonderoga, and to make its seizure the striking of a chime of bells*-the Continental Congress re-assembled at Philadelphia, with the proscribed John Hancock soon at its head, and entered on the exercise of its long authority; an authority vague and undefined, as such an occasional authority must be, but made legitimate, and made comprehensive, by the voluntary submission of those whom the Congress represented. Washington was appointed Commanderin-Chief. As indicative of the tendencies of public opinion, before the end of May, the citizens of Mecklenburg county, in North Carolina, by public action

*To Ticonderoga, the Indian Meeting of Waters,' they [the French] gave a name apparently singular, Carillon,' a Chime of Bells. Egbert Benson's Mem.; Coll. of the N. Y. Hist. Soc., 2d Series: Vol. 2 page 96.

disowned allegiance to the British Crown, and adopted their declaration of Independence; and on the 17th of June, at Breed's Hill, the ability of the provincials to throw up redoubts under the cannon-fire of a fleet, and to make grass fences, with men behind them, a sufficient barrier to repeated charges of British veterans, was fully proved; and the great drama of our seven years' war was finally opened.

During the years immediately before us, these events, with those which succeeded, will be fully recited; and eloquence and poetry, the picture and the bronze, will again make familiar what the bulk and the prominence of intervening events had partly hidden from our view. The evacuation of Boston by the British; the bloody fight on the heights behind Brooklyn, so nearly fatal to the American cause; the crossing of the Delaware; the night attack on the Hessians at Trenton; Princeton, and Germantown, with the frightful winter at Valley Forge; the battles of Monmouth, Saratoga, Camden, King's Mountain, and Eutaw Springs; the final surrender of Cornwallis, at Yorktown: - all will in their turn be described, as their centennial anniversaries occur. The Past will come back to us. We shall hear again the pathetic and heroic story which touched the common-place life of our childhood with romance and with awe.

And with this will be repeated the narrative-not less impressive of the civil wonders which accompanied the long military struggle; of the separate

Mr. Bancroft's History.

Constitutions adopted by the colonies; of the great Declaration, which raised those colonies into a Nation; of the marvellous State-papers, which seemed to Europe prepared in the woods, yet on which the highest encomiums were pronounced, by eminent Englishmen, in Parliament itself; of the Articles of Confederation, which prepared the way for an organic Union; of the French alliance, which brought soldiers of a monarchy to fight for a republic, and sent back with them a republican spirit too strong for the monarchy; of the money, so worthless that a bushel of it would hardly buy a pair of shoes; of the military stores, so utterly inadequate that barrels of sand had to represent powder, to encourage the troops; of the final adoption, after the war, of that now venerable Constitution of government, which recent changes have expanded and modified, but under which the nation has lived from that day to this. All these will hereafter be recited.

It cannot but be regarded as a fortunate circumstance fortunate for himself, and for those to whose means of historical study he has made such large and brilliant contributions that the concluding volume of his History has just been published by Mr. Bancroft, whose relations to this Society have been so intimate ; and that down to the peace of 1782 he has completed his elaborate and shining narrative. The enthusiasm of youth has survived in him, to animate and enhance the acquisitions of age; and those who read, in their

own youth, his earlier volumes, and admired alike their strength and polish, will rejoice that his hand has placed

the capital upon the tall and fluted shaft. Worthy deeds," said Milton, "are not often destitute of worthy relators; as by a certain fate, great acts and great eloquence have most commonly gone hand in hand, equalling and honoring each other in the same ages.

It is, of course, not my purpose to ask your attention to any of the particulars of that remarkable and fascinating history whose jutting outlines I have traced. Next week, at Lexington and at Concord, eloquent voices will open the story. Others will follow, in swift succession, till every field, and each principal fact, has found celebration. My office is merely preparatory to theirs. The subject before me is not picturesque. It hardly admits of any entertaining or graphic treatment. But it nevertheless is of primary importance; and all who follow will have to assume what I would exhibit. There was a certain energizing spirit, an impersonal but inherent and ubiquitous temper, in the people of the colonies, which lay behind their wide and sudden Revolutionary movement; which pushed that movement to unforeseen ends, and which built a Republic where the only result sought at the outset was relief from a tax. Burke discerned this, before it had been exhibited in the field, or had done more than give its own tone to debates and State-papers. From that time on, to the end of the war, it was constantly de

* Hist. Brit., Book II.