Excerpt from Speech of Hon. George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, in the Senate of the United States: Monday, December 29, and Tuesday, December 30, 1890
The Senate having under consideration the bill (H. K. 11045) to amend and supplement the election laws of the United States, and to provide for the more efficient enforcement of such laws, and for other purposes -
Mr. Hoar said:
Mr. President: The progress of liberty is like the advance of a tide. When its crested wave is highest it breaks and recedes. Its strength seems all gone. Its waters scatter and fall away. It seems, for the moment, as if its only office had been to float and to leave on the sand a little froth and a little scum, or deposit in the rank mud the carcasses of drowned animals or decaying fishes. But the eternal, ever-changing, never-changing ocean keeps what it gains. It renews its strength, it repeats its blow, it advances its step. The beach, the bank, the solid rock crumble before it. Its eternal parity is the health and life of the continent it embraces, and from its level all heights and depths are measured.
The great day of the Puritans who planted America, the day when English power and English liberty were born, was followed by that of Charles II, the dissolute pensioner of France, and of James, the cowardly bigot, who slunk away from his kingdom without a blow. But the great gain which England made under Cromwell had not been lost. There came in with William a purer, a wiser, and a more temperate liberty. That gave place in its time to the profligacy and corruption of the time of the early sovereigns of the House of Hanover. Then again the free spirit of England raised its head, uttering its voice in the speech of Chatham and manifesting its power in the victory of Wolfe.
Chatham in his turn gave way to Lord North and George Townsend, and the statesmen of the stamp act, and the purchased House of Commons, and the purchased Irish Parliament, and the prostitution of the jury, and the loss of America. But liberty was not dead, nor sleeping. She was but gathering her forces for the coming triumphs of the reform bill, and the rights of juries, and Catholic emancipation.
It has been the same in our own history. After the period of the Declaration of Independence, and the Revolution, and Yorktown, came that pitiful season of broken faith and unpaid debts, and divided counsels, and Shays"s rebellions, and national weakness and dishonor, when our friends in Europe thought the best we could do was to throw ourselves on our knees before George III and beg him to take us back again under his protection. But out of this period came the greatest forward step ever made by mankind, the framing and adoption of the Constitution of the United States and its inauguration under Washington and John Adams.
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