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been encouraged and quickened by it, as well as more directly aided, in the small excursions which we have made into the domain of historical knowledge.

It is a source, therefore, I am sure, of unfeigned satisfaction to all of us to be able this evening to congratulate the honored President of the Society, its officers, and its members, on the success which it has accomplished, and on the promise of increasing prosperity with which its future here salutes us. In its incorporeal and continuing life, it has the dignity of age, without its decays. Its seventy years have brought larger fame, ampler resources, wider responsibilities; but it has still the privilege of youth-the fair and far outlook of existence in its prime. It projects our thoughts, from this eminent anniversary, over the periods which it anticipates, as well as over that which it reviews; and we shall joyfully unite in the hope that its coming career may be only more full of gladness and growth than has been its past, and that its influence may constantly extend, as the years augment its possessions and its fame.

Such institutions are beneficent powers in civilization. Whatever transports us from the present to the past, from the near to the remote, widens the mind as well as instructs it; makes it capacious, and reflective; sets it free, in a relative independence of local impulse and of transient agitation; gives it, in a measure, a character cosmopolitan, and a culture universal. Whatever recalls to us eminent persons- their brilliant and

Usefulness of such Societies.

engaging parts, above all, their fortitude, wisdom, selfsacrifice-re-enforces our manhood, encourages our virtue, and makes us ashamed of our indolent selfindulgence, of our impatient and fitful habit.

A community like ours-restless, changeful, abounding in wealth, vehemently self-confident-especially needs such inspiring impressions from a more austere and temperate past. A Society which presents that, through libraries and lectures, is ethical, educational, and not merely ornamental. In larger proportions, with more copious ministry, it fulfils the office of the statue of Erasmus, standing always, with a book in its hand, in the market-place of Rotterdam, amid the intricate network of canals, and in the incessant roar of traffic. It materializes again the shadowy forms. It breathes upon communities, languid or luxurious, an ennobling force, from vanished actions and silent lips. Presenting, as to immediate vision, the patient and achieving years into whose conquests we have entered, it makes us aware of the duty which always matches our privilege, and of the judgment which coming time will strictly pronounce upon our era. It ministers to whatever most aspires in man, to whatever is worthiest in civilization. And so it concerns the public welfare that this Society should long fulfill its important office, while the city expands to wider splendor, and the years fly on with accelerating haste; that this anniversary should be one in a series, stretching forward beyond our life, beyond the life of those

who succeed us, while the country continues the inviting and affluent home of men.

But this anniversary is not the only one to which our thoughts are to-night directed. By the irresistible progress of time, we are set face to face with others which are at once to occur, the succession of which, during several years, is to make large claim upon our attention; and these are anniversaries, in comparison with whose significance, and whose secular importance, the one which assembles us would lose its dignity if it were not itself associated with them.

History can but picture events; setting forth, in a measure, their causes and consequences, and indicating the varieties of action and of character which were involved in them. It is, as has been said, "the biography of communities." These Societies which promote historical studies have it for their function to collect the materials, cultivate the tastes, assist the ninute and complex investigations, out of which comes the ultimate enlightening historical narrative. Their office is therefore subordinate and auxiliary, though quickening and fine. The office of the historians whom they instruct, is commemorative only, not creative. They are the heralds who marshal the procession, not the princely figures who walk in it. They exhibit actions which they did not perform, and describe events in producing which they had no part. When, then, the events themselves are before us, the mere narrative of which the student writes and the

Another Anniversary.

library assists, our chief attention is challenged by them. Contemplating them, we lose sight, comparatively, of the instruments which had made their outline familiar, forgetting the processes before the vitality and the mass of the facts to which these had brought us. It is with us as with the traveler, who ceases to remember the ship which carried him across the seas, when he treads the streets of the distant town, watches its unfamiliar manners, hears the dissonance of its strange speech, and looks with a surprised delight on its religious or civil architecture. So we, in front of the great events, the signal actions, the mean or the illustrious characters, to which the historical narrative has borne us, forget for the time the narrative itself, or only remember the intellectual grace which moulded its lines, the strength of proof which confirmed its conclusions, the buoyant movement with which it bore us across intervening floods of time.

We stand, as a people, in the presence of a commanding Past, and shall continue so to do in succeeding years of our national experience. One centennial anniversary, dear to the thoughts of every lover of English eloquence and American liberty, has passed already; and you will pardon me, perhaps, if I pause upon that, because it has suggested the theme on which I would offer some remarks.

It was just one hundred years ago, on the twentysecond of March last, that Edmund Burke delivered in the British Parliament that speech on "Concilia

tion with the Colonies," which, of itself, would have assured the fame of any speaker. The profoundest political and legislative wisdom was presented in it with perspicuous clearness, and enforced with an eloquence which Burke himself never surpassed. In eager and majestic utterance, he recited the circumstances which had led him to seek, with impassioned ardor, to promote the reconciliation of the colonies to the Government of Great Britain; and to do this by repealing the acts of Parliament against which resistance had here been aroused, and by adjusting future legislation on the plan of getting an American revenue, as England had got its American empire, by securing to the colonies the ancient and inestimable English privileges.

The speech is, of course, familiar to you; yet a rapid indication of its compact and coercive argument may serve, perhaps, to revive it in your thoughts, as a couplet sometimes recalls a poem, as the touch of even an unskilful crayon may set before us the wide outreach of a landscape.

The circumstance to which he first referred, was the rapid increase of the colonial population; an increase so swift, and so continuing, that, in his own words, "state the numbers as high as we will, whilst the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends. Your children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood, than they [of the colonies] spread from families to communities, and from villages to nations."

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