"Say ye not, A Confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say ISAIAH, 8, 12. Masis PRINTED Koninklijke BY MORSS AND BREWSTER, Newburyport Herald Office. INTERNATIONALE NEDERLAND RUILING Entered according to an Act of Congress, in the year 1337, by MORSS & BREWSTER, In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. NEWBURYPORT, July 10, 1837. HON. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Dear Sir,The undersigned, a Committee of Arrangements, appointed by the Town of Newburyport, to conduct the late celebration of the Independence of the United States, respectfully request you, in behalf of the Town, to furnish for publication a copy of the able and eloquent Oration delivered by you in Newburyport, on that day. We have the honor to be, Your obedient servants, QUINCY, 11th July, 1837. MESSRS. SAMUEL T. DEFORD, EDWARD BURRILL, JOHN BRADBURY, THOMAS DAVIS, AND EBENEZER D. PETTINGELL, Committee of Arrangements for the celebration of the sixty-first Anniversary of National Independence at Newburyport. Fellow Citizens I cheerfully furnish a copy of the Oration prepared at the invitation of the inhabitants of Newburyport, for their celebration of the recent anniversary of our National Independence. To avoid trespassing too much upon their time, some parts of it were omitted in the delivery. I avail myself of this occasion to repeat to you, gentlemen, and through you to all the inhabitants of the town, my thanks for the kind reception they were pleased to give me, and for the indulgent hearing of that portion of them which composed the auditory on that day. I am, with great respect, Fellow Citizens, Your grateful friend, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. ORATION. WHY is it, Friends and Fellow Citizens, that you are here assembled? Why is it, that, entering upon the sixty-second year of our national existence, you have honored with an invitation to address you from this place, a fellow citizen of a former age, bearing in the records of his memory, the warm and vivid affections which attached him, at the distance of a full half century, to your town, and to your forefathers, then the cherished associates of his youthful days? Why is it that, next to the birth day of the Saviour of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day?— And why is it that, among the swarming myriads of our population, thousands and tens of thousands among us, abstaining, under the dictate of religious principle, from the commemoration of that birth-day of Him, who brought life and immortality to light, yet unite with all their brethren of this community, year after year, in celebrating this, the birth-day of the nation? Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birth-day of the Saviour? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation? Is it not that the |