invoked the charm; and as if realizing the glory of the title which subsequent history has given to him, of the "father of English commerce,"-" a title by which he may claim more of the gratitude of his countrymen than as the hero of Crecy,"her great Edward opened a stream of emigration from the manufacturers of the continent which continued to pour its lifegiving influences into his realm for an hundred years afterwards. The commerce of the Baltic sprang into existence, and Northern and Southern Europe greeted each other for the first time in peace and on shipboard; ships of nearly a thousand tons astonished the god of the sea; maritime law and the law system of nations took form and expression; international comity and freedom rose to influence and respect; banks started into life, the repositories of so many hopes, and bills of exchange were invented, those fictitious cords which bind together remote nations in faith and confidence; the desolation of the wars of the roses was quickly repaired; manufactures and trade obtained a place in the statutes of Parliament, and from that day down they have swelled the volumes of its proceedings with the record of their fraternal progress, their equal beneficence, their indissoluble glory. Those who were engaged in these occupations became respectable before the law and began to assume an equality with the landed proprietor, for by a statute it was provided that an artisan or tradesman, you will bear in mind that the two have travelled in company together on the same benevolent mission to the race and to its now conceded honors,if possessed of real estate of the value of £500, should be permitted to dress himself like a squire of £100.

The struggle between arbitrary power and the rising classes was protracted in its duration and varied in its vicissitudes of success and defeat, but every generation brought it nearer to its termination. The hue of change was passing over the social condition, and the power of landholders was yielding to the free spirit of the towns. It was not in the tent, but in the workshop,

that modern liberty was dreaming of her coming joys; it was not in Gothic halls, but in the marts of trade, that equality of rights was panting with a new-born consciousness; it was not in rural but in urban life, in the smoke of cities, in the din of ports, that the reforms were maturing that should strike the century bells with the last note of the middle ages and awake mankind by the click and whirl and thunder of the arts to the amazing scenery which is now unfolding before us without exciting our surprise. There it was that new ideas of profit and of property, new conceptions of creative power and artistic combination, disturbed the stagnation of all previous time; and it was there, in the consciousness of common strength, and invigorated by a more rapid circulation of thought, that the stubborn spirit of freedom first made its roots broadly and profoundly. The king became disquieted at the rapid increase of London; but artisanship, trade and shipping found their way into Parliament. The democratical interest, distinguishing the orders of industry from the territorial aristocracy, was steadily diffusing itself and accumulating its power, running in even flood with ideas of equality and independence. Aided by the practical arts, it gained the first modern triumph; for while in an earlier day Wat Tyler could only summon a powerless rabble around his standard, who fell easily before the knights in their armor of steel, Cromwell afterwards gathered his heroic numbers from the houses of mechanics and merchants, Puritans in their religion and workmen in their lives, and a new era was opened at Marston Moor.

The first conflict and the first victory of the arts you celebrate this evening was waged and won in the land of our ancestors, whose history is strown with choice memorials of the sources of our own freedom. The progress of Great Britain, since she emerged from the middle period, has been the gradual yet constant growth of a nation of mechanics. The constitution of England, her unwritten law, deeply imbedded in the

customs of her people, goes back for its derivation through all the stages of her advancement in these utilities. The stern features of feudalism, which first gave to it an ascendancy over the crown, have received in successive periods the softening influences of the arts which have made her system of industry a nursery of liberal ideas. Their imperial life, their enfranchised individuality, from which we at first derived our own, have grown up from her wharves, and warehouses, and workshops, until now they have become the first estate of the realm. That no tax should be extorted without the consenting voice of the legislature, has come from the early traders and mechanics. whose defiance spoke in the cause of John Hampden; every representative reform has been the achievement of the towns rising over the ruins of baronial bowers; that no man shall be imprisoned by the royal will, is one of the flowers not of regal dispensation, but of the new classification of labor; religious freedom to the dissenter has gushed out from the wealth and influence of dissenters who run machinery and watch the hustings; the independence of the judges is a fruit of the middle interest of the nation which can disrobe the ermine when it becomes impure; the limitation of Parliaments is the decree which is heard from the Manchesters, the Sheffields, and the Liverpools; the liberty of the press is the inspiring utterance that rises from a thousand fields, on her land and sea, in which a roar of waterfalls mingles with a myriad of steam-engines in tones which all the kings of the earth eannot silence. In the whole round of her drum-beat her conquests have been the conquests of these arts. If it be true, as it has been said, that Arkwright, who placed cotton spinning in the weird sisterhood of national powers, bore the English nation triumphantly through the wars of the French revolution, it is equally true that neither Pitt nor Wellington, but Watt, who organized the steam-engine, was the conqueror of Napoleon. And within our own memory the final disenthralment from an overshadowing aristocracy

was secured in a single day by the brilliant triumph of the "untaught inarticulate genius" of George Stephenson, when he gave the first start under high pressure to the express train that made over the Liverpool and Manchester road the grand trial trip of the age of progress,-the inventor and engineer being the plain Northumberland mechanic,-the witnesses, Brougham and Wellington and Huskisson, ladies, court and people,—and the freight, all the interests and all the hopes of civilization. Truthfully and philosophically did Dr. Arnold of Rugby exclaim, as he stood upon one of the bridges and watched the train flashing through the fields belonging to lords who had done their utmost to thwart the experiment: "I rejoice to see it, and to think that FEUDALITY IS GONE FOREVER."

It would be pursuing a topic already too familiar to discuss at any length the relations of the mechanic arts with the development of public liberty in this country. They were, more distinctly than other interests, the causes and agencies of its independence. About the middle of the last century manufactures acquired an importance in Europe which distanced all former example, and spread rapidly to this side of the water where they found a population in the Northern colonies who for many years had been trying their hands at the same kind of work. Under the new impulse which now began everywhere to stimulate these pursuits the people of Massachusetts and of other colonies eagerly caught at all suggestions which came from Europe and quickly added to them their own originalities of invention. Then came the repressive and at times prohibitory policy of Great Britain, having all the power of Parliament to support it, aiming to destroy these hives of skilled labor while they were yet forming and before they should be able to compete with those of the Mother country. The purpose was the impoverishment of the colonies in the departments of handicraft, and as Mr. Burke said in his great speech on Conciliation, the English nation seemed to act upon the thought that America was becoming

her rival in this class of production. Such legislation aroused a responsive spirit of resolution on our side, and the men who were pursuing these labors and were imparting to the life of New England a vigor and elasticity she had never before possessed, became restive under the restraint, resentful to tyranny, and ready for independence. So that when the time came for rupturing the tie of empire, the question of taxation was rather the occasion than the primary cause of the war. The Revolution was a necessity out of years of accumulating measures of despotic rigor and repression, all directed to shattering the arm of art and skill in these northern communities. The last blow which evoked the spark that burst into a blaze of conflict fell ostensibly indeed upon commerce; but the thousands who had been struggling at the infant manufactures of the time, whose manly hopes and sinewy arms had been kept down by legislative oppression dictated from a throne three thousand miles away, now outnumbered the merchants and helped them to spread the flame. These were the men, the mechanics and artisans of Boston and the seaboard, who made up the constituency that stood behind Samuel Adams as he walked these streets watching and directing the rising storm. There was something in their experience under the British colonial system that urged them on to the contest; there was something more in their occupation, as creators in the system of political economy and in the domain of art, which elevated them to lofty conceptions of manhood and made them fit for earnest service in the struggle for liberty.

Singularly and especially after the Revolution, were your interests instrumental in organizing peace under a constitutional union of the States. The name of the early President of this Association, PAUL REVERE, worthily retained in our day in the relations of hospitality, of trade, and of manufactures, remembered in connection with all that he accomplished for the establishment of our national government, at the first mention of it