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Updated: June 15, 2025
I wept, not so much from my own suffering as from sorrow that such things should be in our own country, where Justice and Freedom and Liberty of Conscience have been the annual boast of Fourth-of-July orators so many years. It seemed that our forefathers in the faith had wrought and suffered in vain, when the privileges they so dearly bought were so soon set aside.
I never saw a Fourth-of-July procession in the remotest of our rural districts which was not beautiful, compared to this forlorn display; but the popular homage is duly given, the bells jangle incessantly, and, as the procession passes, all men uncover their heads or have their hats knocked off by official authority.
And it would have been a grander speech if I'd stood quite sure as to precisely what it meant and what I intended to do. Yet it seemed sufficiently climactic for my visitor, who, after a queenly and combative stare into what must have looked like an ecstatically excited Fourth-of-July face, turned imperially about and swung open the door of her motor-car.
If the animal had not been such "a fourth-of-July" brute, his opponent would in all probability have finished him, as he was a splendid shot; but Kit fortunately escaped, the bullet merely grazing him under the ear, leaving a scar which he then showed me.
You don't hear of the Citizens' Union people holdin' Fourth-of-July celebrations under a five-pound silk hat, or any other way, do you? The Cits take the Fourth like a dog I had when I was a boy. That dog knew as much as some Cits and he acted just like them about the glorious day.
The spirit of his antagonism is shown in a phrase of his fourth-of-July oration: "The Democratic organization look upon this administration as hostile to their rights and liberties; they look upon their opponents as men who would do them wrong in regard to their most sacred franchises."
His Fourth-of-July orations, if we may judge of them by the fragments that have been found, show that his mind had strengthened more than it had advanced. His style wonderfully improved from eighteen to twenty-five; and he tells us himself why it did.
Why, that friend of mine, he heaved the bag of nuggets in the gutter and he raised up his hands, and just as sure as I sit here tellin' you about it, friends and brothers, he made a Fourth-of-July speech five minutes long, and never repeated himself once! I wouldn't go near him, feelin' in his excited state of mind it might lead to trouble. The little old man at last dragged him away.
The textbooks in use came largely from the United States and glorified that land and all its ways in the best Fourth-of-July manner, to the scandal of the loyal elect. The press was represented by a few weekly newspapers; only one daily existed in Upper Canada before 1840.
"Then came the great war, and wars are always in one way demoralizing. West Point in the early sixties was utterly unlike the West Point of to-day, and no worse than a dozen of our greatest colleges. The corps still had its tales and traditions of the old time Fourth-of-July dinners at the mess hall, when everybody made a dash for the decanters and drank everything in sight.
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