Excerpt from An Oration Delivered by Request Before the Whigs of Philadelphia, on the Fourth of July, 1834 Assembled to commemorate the triumphs of our ancestors, let us rejoice that we are still worthy to honour them. Though we have distress around us, and before us a struggle of which the result is in the hands of Providence, yet we keep this festival with the cheerful hearts of freemen. Determined in any event, not to disgrace our fathers, we can speak of their deeds without the blush of shame, or the downcast eye of conscious degeneracy. We look back to them, not as slaves look to the memory of kind protectors or generous avengers, - but as freemen turn with honest pride to their predecessors. When we shall cease to revere them, we shall have been rendered incapable of the admiration of heroic actions: - when we shall despair of imitating them, we shall have lost our distinguishing characteristic as a people, and become a reproach to our common country. In Washington, and the men of 1776, was embodied the spirit of our race, the spirit of liberty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.