Excerpt from Our Union and Its Defenders: An Oration, Delivered Before the Citizens of Burlington, N. J., On the Occasion of Their Celebration of the Eighty-Sixth Anniversary of Independence Day, July 4th, 1862 It is one of the uses of history to teach us what are the noblest uses of life; what deeds live longest in the memories of men; what motives give greatest strength and nobility to character; what fruition follows godlike sacrifices for truth and duty; what ideas and principles, embodied in life, lift men above the common level and crown them with immortal honours. It is one of the uses of a day like this to turn us back to higher sources of inspiration, that we may be the more manfully fitted for the duties of our time, that we may learn the cost of liberty, and the worth of patriotism, and the sacredness of principle, and the holiness of duty. It is one of the uses of a day like this to teach us that our selfish aims and interests and motives, our lives of luxury and frivolity, Of leisure-loving and wealth-seeking, all sink to a level of lowest significance, when contrasted with great heroic virtues such as bore our fathers through the storm and struggle of the Revolution. And when these lessons have been learned by a people, and when in the Providence of God the darkest hours of their history have come; when they are compelled themselves to strike for liberty or see it perish; when they have risen to that height Of patriotism that they exclaim with old John Adams in 76, that all that they have, and all that they are, and all that they hope for in this life, they are ready to stake upon the altar of their country; when, filled with such inspiration, they go forth from homes of happi ness and peace to fields of carnage and of death, then, above all, does it belong to the uses of a day like this to teach the mourfining women of the land, and the children that are fatherless, that these dying and dead soldiers are one with the heroes of the Revolution; that our country's history will embalm their names with equal honour and a common. 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.