THE BP AAE PJi JUBILEE OF THE CONSTITUTION. A DISCOURSE. WHEN in the epic fable of the first of Roman Poets, the Goddess mother of Æneas delivers to him the celestial armour, with which he is to triumph over his enemy, and to lay the foundations of Imperial Rome, he is represented as gazing with intense but confused delight on the crested helm that vomits golden fires — "His hands the fatal sword and corslet hold, One keen with temper'd steel-one stiff with gold. For on that shield the heavenly smith had wrought the anticipated history of Roman glory, from the days of Æneas down to the reign of Augustus Cæsar, cotemporaneous with the Poet himself. FELLOW-CITIZENS AND BRETHREN, ASSOCIATES OF THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY: Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination. to conceive, that on the night preceding the day of which you now commemorate the fiftieth anniversary-on the night preceding that thirtieth of April, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, when from the balcony of your city-hall, the chancellor of the state of New York, administered to George Washington the solemn oath, faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States-that in the visions of the night, the guardian angel of the Father of our country had appeared before him, in the venerated form of his mother, and, to cheer and encourage him in the performance of the momentous and solemn duties that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a suit of celestial armour-a helmet, consisting of the principles of piety, of justice, of honour, of benevolence, with which from his earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the presence of all his brethren-a spear, studded with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence-a sword, the same with which he had led the armies of his country through the war of freedom, to the summit of the triumphal arch of independence-a corslet and cuishes of long experience and habitual intercourse in peace and war with the world of mankind, his cotemporaries of the human race, in all their stages of civilization— and last of all, the Constitution of the United States, a SHIELD embossed by heaveny hands, with the future history of his country. Yes, gentlemen! on that shield, the CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES was sculptured,(by forms unseen, and in characters then invisible to mortal eye,) the predestined and prophetic history of the one confederated people of the North American Union. They had been the settlers of thirteen separate and distinct English colonies, along the margin of the shore of the North American continent: contiguously situated, but chartered by adventurers of characters variously diversified, including sectarians, religious and political, of all the classes which for the two preceding centuries had agitated and divided the people of the British islands-and with them were intermingled the descendants of Hollanders, Swedes, Germans, and French fugitives from the persecution of the revoker of the Edict of Nantes. In the bosoms of this people, thus heterogeneously composed, there was burning, kindled at different furnaces, but all furnaces of affliction, one clear, steady flame of LIBERTY. Bold and daring enterprise, stubborn endurance of privation, unflinching intrepidity in facing danger, and inflexible adherence to conscientious principle, had steeled to energetic and unyielding hardihood the characters of the primitive settlers of all these Colonies. Since that time two or three generations of men had passed away-but they had increased and multiplied with unexampled rapid ity; and the land itself had been the recent theatre of a ferocious and bloody seven years' war between the two most powerful and most civilized nations of Europe, contending for the possession of this continent. Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Britain. She had conquered the provinces of France. She had expelled her rival totally from the continent over which, bounding herself by the Mississippi, she was thenceforth to hold divided empire only with Spain. She had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes, still tenanting the forests unexplored by the European man. She had established an uncontested monopoly of the commerce of all her colonies. But forgetting all the warnings of preceding ages-forgetting the lessons written in the blood of her own children, through centuries of departed time, she undertook to tax the people of the colonies without their consent. Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic, inflexible resistance like an electric shock startled and roused the people of all the English colonies on this continent. This was the first signal of the North American Union. The struggle was for chartered rights-for English liberties-for the cause of Algernon Sidney and John Hambden-for trial by jury-the Habeas Corpus and Magna Charta. But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament was omnipotent—and Parliament in their omnipotence, instead of trial by jury and the Habeas Corpus, enact ed admiralty courts in England to try Americans for offences charged against them as committed in America-instead of the privileges of Magna Charta, nullified the charter itself of Massachusetts Bay; shut up the port of Boston; sent armies and navies to keep and teach the colonies that John Hambden the peace, English liberties had failed them. From the omnipotence of Parliament the colonists appealed to the rights of man and the omnipotence of the God of battles. Union! Union! was the instinctive and simultaneous cry throughout the land. Their Congress, assembled at Philadelphia, once--twice had petitioned the king; had remonstrated to Parliament; had addressed the people of Britain, for the rights of Englishmen in vain. Fleets and armies, the blood of Lexington, and the fires of Charlestown and Falmouth, had been the answer to petition, remonstrance and address. Independence was declared. The colonies were transformed into States. Their inhabitants were proclaimed to be one people, renouncing all allegiance to the British crown; all co-patriotism with the British nation; all claims to chartered rights as Englishmen. Thenceforth their charter was the Declaration of Independence. Their rights, the natural rights of mankind. Their government, such as should be instituted by themselves, under the solemn mutual pledges of perpetual union, founded on the self-evident truths proclaimed in the Declaration. The Declaration of Independence was issued, in the |