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It was in some degree, perhaps, owing to the elegance and daintiness of his dress that, while the New England men among his hearers were moved to tears, many Southern members, like Colonel Benton, regarded the speech merely as a Fourth-of-July oration delivered on the 6th of January.

Webster always spoke slightingly of his early oratorical efforts, and requested Mr. Everett, the editor of his works, not to search them out. He was not just to the productions of his youth, if we may judge from the Fourth-of-July oration which he delivered in 1800, when he was a Junior at Dartmouth, eighteen years of age.

Perhaps we shall have to use our home-grown; but then, mistletoe is mistletoe, and one is n't asking one's self what kind of mistletoe hangs overhead when one chances to get under the chandelier. They tell me there are going to be no toys this year, none of old Chris's kind but only weird, fierce, Fourth-of-July things from Japan.

The Dawes er person is undoubtedly worthy and capable in her way, but well er we know that Wellmouth is not Bayport." The reference to "our great commonwealth" had been given in the voice and the manner wont to thrill us at our Fourth-of-July celebrations and October "rallies." Two of his hearers, at least, were visibly impressed.

The public discussion and literature of the time reflect the confusion and anxiety with which the unprecedented manifestations of popular discontent had affected all serious persons. The old-fashioned Fourth-of-July boastings had ceased to be heard in the land.

With the exception of the Atlantic seaboard, our country has been developed in an age pre-eminent for records and statistics; and there is scarcely a town or city in the land that has not its records and its public documents, its newspaper files and its Fourth-of-July orations, all replete with information waiting for the historian.

The American people and politicians cherish it as a priceless political heirloom. It is considered to be the equivalent of the Declaration of Independence in the field of foreign affairs; and it arouses an analogous volume and fury of conviction. Neither is this conviction merely the property of Fourth-of-July Americans.

They propose to create a National Sentiment, in the only way that is possible under conditions like ours, by clearing the way for the development of a nation which shall be, not only in Fourth-of-July orations, but on every day in the year, and in the mouths of all peoples, great and wise, just and brave, and whose idea, always august and venerable, by turns lovely and terrible, shall bind us all in a common nationality by our loyalty to what is true, our reverence for what is good, our love for what is beautiful, and our sense of security in what is mighty.

And well they might be, for all the falling stars and Fourth-of-July fireworks of a generation, put together and rained down simultaneously out of heaven in one brilliant shower upon one helpless roof, would not have any advantage of the pyrotechnic display that was making my house so magnificently conspicuous in the general gloom of the storm.

The custom arose of assigning this duty to young men covetous of distinction, and this led in time to the flighty rhetoric which made sounding emptiness and a Fourth-of-July oration synonymous terms.