Excerpt from An Oration: Delivered Before the Washington Benevolent Society at Cambridge, July 4, 1814

The day which we have met to celebrate, we once vainly imagined, was to work an universal change in the condition and character of man; that it was to spread its light over the nations which We supposed were sitting in the gloom of slavery, ignorance and crime; and that they were to come forth the renovated beings of freedom, wis dom and virtue. In vision, the very face of na ture was changing; every weak thing was waxing strong, and every dry thing green. The world, with its swamps and deserts, was shooting forth in all the beauty and freshness of Eden and man walking m the midst, sinless and flee as Adam. But, alas! All that our feveled imaginations pic tured out was but a dream. The physical and moral world have undergone no change - notwith standing the American Revolution, Arabia still has its deserts, and mankind their sins. Human nature has not yet reached that stage of perfecti bility in which laws are but useless entangle ments, and the power of government but a cum brous restraint upon virtue. Cunning and vio lence are not yet eradicated; the simple me still defrauded, and the weak oppressed; the prodigal is neighbour to the frugal, the idle to the indus trions, the factions to the peaceable.

The rise, the progress, and would I could say the fall of this doctrine of equality, perfectibility, and absolute liberty in man, is well worthy a few moments consideration. The untimely check it has put upon the improvements and growing pow er of this new country - its fatal connexion with a like system in Europe; and the tremendous force with which, so far as it extended, it swept away all that was worthy the pride of the old world, give the subject a strong, though melancholyin terest, in the heart of every man whose under standing it has not bewildered; or whose good ness it has not corrupted.

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