USA > New York > Cortland County > Virgil > Festal gathering of the early settlers! and present inhabitants of the town of Virgil, Cortland County, N.Y., 1853 > Part 14
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In the progress of the world's improvements the United States have contributed a large share. The telegraph, by the aid of which news is transmitted on land and beyond the seas with the speed of electricity, is the invention of an American. Steam as a propelling power in navigation is American. The cotton gin, without which the manufacture of cotton goods would necessarily be limited, or produced at much cost, is the product of American skill. The reap- er and the mower, now indispensable to successful farming, are American. The sewing machine, a necessity in every household, is American. The rotary printing press, by which the newspaper is worked off with marvelous rapidity, to be scattered over the country as plentiful as autumn leaves, is American. The planing mill and grain elevator are American. The manufacture of ice, producing it under a tropical sun, is the product of American mind. A vast number of other improvements and inventions in manufactures and machinery, of but little less importance, are of American origin, mostly within the past fifty years.
Our progress, too, in governmental science, has been in corres- pondence with the advance of education and the growth of liberal ideas. Old limitations to political rights have been extended, and the people invested more fully with the privilege of self-govern- ment. Laws incompatible with the genius of our free institutions have been abolished and new ones enacted, more in consistency with the welfare of the people.
At this point the inquiry naturally arises, will a like progress mark the coming half century, as during the past ? Discoveries
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and improvements are with rare exceptions the result of an educated mind. If the education of the people continues to go increasingly on, it is reasonable to expect progress in art and invention, during the next fifty years, as in the past. Science in its investigations is limitless in material things. It searches through the arena of nature, and brings into activity elements of power that have lain dormant through all the centuries of the past. It goes to the ocean depths ; it scans the empyrean of the heavens, and pushes inquiry among the stars.
Although the unfoldings of the past may seem to have exhausted the power of man for further achievement, still there is a boundless field yet to be explored. Among the possibilities that may be reached at no distant period, a few are suggested : Motive power, more simple and convenient than steam for driving machinery, and adapted to plowing on the farm. Agencies for generating heat, which shall relieve the poor from the burdensome expenses of wood and coal. New facilities for safe travel, transcending the speed of railway locomotives. Cheap light, surpassing a hundred street lamps. Simple means for fertilizing the soil, increasing its produc- tiveness an hundred fold. New and inexpensive building material, supplying the deficiency of our decreasing lumber forests. An en- larged sphere of activity and employment for women, which shall command respect and be consistent with female delicacy and refine- ment, thus making available a large industrial element now contrib- uting but little to the general stock of wealth. An extension of her legal rights, giving her a voice in matters involving the taxation of her property ; in the management of the public schools, in which her children are educated, and in the protection of her family from licensed demoralization. Also a better understanding of the laws of health, leading to an avoidance of much sickness and suffering, and increasing the average longevity of human life. The discovery of effective remedies for the treatment of diseases now deemed in- curable. More economical methods of living; cheapening expenses without abridging family luxuries, or interfering with the enjoy- ments, the culture and the refinement of society.
If it be said these suggested possibilities of the ensuing half cen- tury are chiefly chimerical, it may be answered, the same might
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have been said with equal force fifty years ago to-day, in respect to the discoveries, inventions and improvements since then realized.
In the direction of civil progress, the field is broad and capable of improvement. Laws for the government of the people, adapted to a higher condition of civilization and refinement, which no states- manship has ever yet devised. The recognition of law courts, mak- ing them tribunals of equity ; abolishing useless forms and techni- calities ; setting aside the rigorous rulings of law and evidence to the end that the adjustment of differences between parties shall not be mere trials of professional skill, as men play games at chess.
In the direction of moral and religious advancement, less adher- ence to denominational lines between those who hold in unity the essentials of the christian faith. Talent, time and money expended for higher purposes than building up fragmentary religious sects and parties ; more of right action ; less of theologic theory ; more of God and less of creed. Methods for the moral training of the young, which shall better fit coming generations for the true mission of life. Although all truth is eternal, without beginning and with- out end, still there is undeveloped truth yet to be applied to the edu- cation of children and youth, which shall change the moral struc- ture of society. If this be not so-if there be no agencies yet un- employed, then this world will never be prepared for the promised millennial era. "All the space between man's mind and God's mind is filled with truth." What a vast domain yet to be occupied ? What heights of moral grandeur yet to be reached ? Is man always to occupy so low a scale in the order of being? Are there no un- developed possibilities yet to be brought into action which shall give the world the semblance of new creation ? Man was created "a little lower than the angels,"-can it be that the angels are but a little remove above the average man as now developed ?
There is a tendency in the popular mind to conclude that our progress in art, invention and discovery, will alone insure the perpe- tuity of our free institutions and secure the highest happiness of the people. This is an error full of danger. Unless there be a cor- responding growth of sound public sentiment, and of correct moral principle to give direction to our increasing material developments, our future welfare as a nation, can not be assured. Our national horizon is not an unclouded one; public honesty is on trial. The inquiry comes from every quarter, what can be done to arrest the
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tide of corruption in places of trust and responsibility ? The future can but excite apprehension. The remedy is not alone in the en- actment of better laws by Congress, or by State Legislatures. Hu- man enactments, however wise, are powerless to regenerate the hearts of the people; nor can courts of justice alone surpress the tendency to crime. There is a power above all these that controls human affairs. He who governs the world, and in Whose hands are the destinies of nations, needs to be reverenced and His laws obeyed. The imperative necessity of the times is a higher sense of public honesty, a more sacred regard for personal obligation, and a more conscientious respect for divine law. The essential elements of good government and of well ordered society can not be enforced upon the people by the law-making power.
But while it is true that law-makers cannot create a conscientious regard for right action, it is also true they can do much by unwise legislation to lower the standard of morality and of public virtue. Legislators of the present day have a weighty responsibility,-de- mands are made to remove some of the landmarks that guided our forefathers through the perils of our early history, and which have been recognized through later times. By the blessing of heaven we have grown from infancy to vigorous manhood. And now, since we have become a great nation, strong in national resources and de- fenses, men who have outgrown the moral teachings of the past, as- sume we can stand alone, and have no further need to acknowledge the Divine Being, in the way our fathers were accustomed to do. They would have our civil institutions divorced from the higher law ; and they ask that there shall be no recognition of God in governments; State or National. And now comes the request for the removal of the Bible from the public schools, where it has had an undisturbed place a hundred years. Every enlightened christian nation on the globe acknowledges the Bible as its moral and religious standard. Then why exclude a book universally accepted by the christian world from the schools of the land, where its influence is needed to shape the character of those to whom the destinies of this great commonwealth are to be committed ? The law of the State very properly prohibits and confiscates immoral publications, but why single out the Bible and put it on the list of expurgated books ? Of what has the Bible been guilty, that there should come the de-
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mand at this late day to bar the doors of education against its ad- mission ? The Bible by the common respect of mankind, and by the right of long possession, is entitled to retain its place in the schools, to be read without note or comment, and allowed to be its own interpreter.
As a matter of history, forcibly brought to mind on this anniver- sary occasion, I will remark that forty-seven years ago to-day I address- ed a large audience in this Village, (church) on the evils of intemper- ance. On that day a society was formed to discourage the use of spirituous liquors. This was the first temperance organization in the southern half of the county. Although the movement met with opposition, yet public opinion was becoming so aroused to the necessity of reform, its friends were encouraged to hope that the use of spirituous liquors as a beverage, would, at no distant day, be rend- ered powerless for mischief. This expectation was not realized.
A vast amount of successful labor has been expended by the friends of the cause; radical changes have been effected in the cus- toms of society, and many have been saved from untimely graves. Yet the evil of intemperance has followed the tide of population, penetrating every remote settlement where the habitations of men are found. The manufacture of alcoholic liquors is interwoven with the government, and has become one of the largest sources of Na- tional revenue. At intervals the evil has been checked, but not sub- dued. It has marched on like a desolating army, sustaining occa- sional defeats, but reviving again, overcoming organized opposition and breaking through the restraints of law.
When we commemorated the Fiftieth Anniversary of our Nation- al Independence, one-half of the States of this Union were slave and half nominally free. We were reproached by the enlightened na- tions of Europe with being false to our professions of freedom and of equal rights. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to the world the inalienable right of all men to liberty ; but this right was denied to the weak and defenseless. The constitution guaran- teed freedom of speech and liberty of the press; but these rights were refused to the people of the South by statutory enactments, and to the North by a despotic public opinion. The pulpit and the press in the nominally free States dared give no utterances as to the wrong of chattel slavery. Proscription and sometimes personal vio-
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lence were visited upon those who publicly expressed their convic- tions of the wickedness of selling men and women like cattle in the market.
The people of the northern States were compelled to do the bid- ding of the South. A law of Congress made it an offense, punish- able by fine and imprisonment, to obey the precepts of the Divine law. To feed, clothe and give a cup of cold water to a thirsty, famishing human being, guilty of no crime, but that of loving lib- erty better than bondage, was held to be a misdemeanor. When- ever property, claimed in a human being, escaped to a free State, the free State citizen was required to pursue the fleeing chattel, and aid in returning it to the alleged owner. The highest judicial offic- er, the Chief Justice of the United States, uttered the declaration, "the negro has no rights, which white men are bound to respect."
. But this unnatural condition of human affairs could not always last. After long and weary years the cry of crushed humanity reached the throne of Eternal Justice : the day of deliverance came, but not in the way man's wisdom had devised. By the blow of one man the shackles of the enslaved were broken, and more than three millions of people were invested with the rights to which they were entitled by God and nature. The name of Abraham Lincoln will be honored while time endures. Freemen through coming years will join the jubilant acclaim :
" Ring, O bells !
Every stroke exultant tells Of the burial hour of crime ; Loud and long, that all may hear; Ring for every listening ear Of Eternity and Time."
"Loud and Long Lift the old exultant song ; Sing with Miriam by the sea ; He has cast the mighty down ; Horse and rider sink and drown; He has triumphed gloriously."
" It is done ! In the circle of the sun Shall the sound thereof go forth ; It shall bid the sad rejoice; It shall give the dumb a voice ; It sball belt with joy the earth."
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Friends of the preceding half century-we are to-day irresistibly carried back in memory to other years. We live over again the periods of childhood and youth, and see once more in imagination the many familiar forms of those in whose presence we once took delight. Home life and home scenes crowd upon the recollection ; the old household furnishments, the simple adornments of our dwell- ings and the happy inmates reappear in the retrospect. Well we remember when not a suit of broadcloth was worn by any citizen of this Town. Our clothing for every day and Sunday wear was made from cloth, the wool of which was grown on the farm, spun, woven and dyed at home. The prevailing color was a dusky brown, which was obtained by immersing the cloth in a dye made from the bark of the butternut tree.
Clad in home-made apparel, many a young man led his chosen bride to the hymeneal altar. The rosy-cheeked girls, too, of that period, dressed in garments of home manufacture, the cloth often being woven in plaids of pleasing colors. Summer wear was also largely of home production, every farmer taking care to raise a sup- ply of flax, from the fibre of which was spun and woven by the wife and daughters, the lighter cloths for family use. The spinning- wheel had a place in every dwelling, and the young woman incap- able of operating it, was presumed to be an invalid or feeble-minded. That modern family necessity, the servant-girl, had then not yet been born. The more costly articles of dress were sometimes worn by the female members of the family. A mother's silk dress, perhaps her wedding garment, by careful usage, was not unfrequently made to answer in turn for the daughter and granddaughter, undergoing occasional modifications at the hands of a dressmaker.
Some of the prevailing customs of that early period would appear novel now. Then it was the practice of young men, on coming to the village from the surrounding country, for the purpose of engag- ing in parties of amusement, to bring the young women on horse- back ; the young man sitting in the saddle, and the young woman sitting sideways behind him, clinging to his person to preserve her equilibrium. This kind of horseback-riding also prevailed to some extent with church-goers ; not only young persons, but older peo- ple sometimes economized the use of a horse in this manner.
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Many of us remember when there was not a farm in the Town- ship, on which there was not an inhabited log dwelling, or the re- mains of a vacated one. In a majority of these habitations there was but one main room, which served the purpose of kitchen, din- ing-room, sitting-room, parlor, and also sleeping-room for the older members of the family. In these humble and unpretentious abodes many a young man has formed high resolves, which shaped his fu- ture destiny. From no other Town of such limited educational ad- vantages have more young men gone out, who have made an honor- able record. Some of these, years ago, passed from the ranks of the living, but are not forgotten. There are those who found homes in other States, absent to-day, as well as honored names present, whose biographical sketches would have been fitting on this occa- sion. No rural town in the State has had the facts of its early his- tory more fully collected and published than has been done in this Town by one of its citizens-Hon. Nathan Bouton. In this con- nection it would be a historical omission not to mention that the build- ing of the New York and Erie Railroad-an enterprise second to the New York and Erie Canal-was first suggested by a citizen of this Town-Mr. Nathaniel Bouton. He personally examined the route, became satisfied of its feasibility and importance, and called public attention to it, advocating its construction through the press.
Time has rolled on, and former things have passed away. As old and worn-ont garments are cast aside, so has much of the past been discarded as obsolete and out of fashion. Old customs and old household arrangements have disappeared. The industrial buzz of the spinning-wheel and the noise of the loom have long since been hushed, and the more fascinating music of the piano has taken their place. The simple ballads sung in our early homes are no longer in accordance with modern taste. Operatic warblings occu- py a higher sphere in music. The knitting work lying on the par- lor table is a vulgarism,-Goody, Harper and gilt-edged volumes have a monopoly there. Home manufactured clothing, linen and woolen, belong to, an age gone by. The finer cloths of machine labor have superseded the coarser fabrics.
While some of these changes seem of questionable profit, yet upon the whole they mark advancement in civilization and refinement.
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Young men of to-day-you have a wider field of activity than . was enjoyed fifty years ago. Many of the obstacles which young men were then obliged to encounter, have ceased to exist. Your advantages for the acquisition of knowledge are far more favorable than were theirs. The school-houses in their boyhood days were uncomfortable structures, often at distances remote from their homes. Now the school-house is brought within the convenient reach of every family, and the higher institutions of learning are of easy access. In this age, widely-separated States and Territories, by the increased facilities of travel, have been brought into near proximity,-dis- tances which once required months to overcome, are now passed over in a brief space of time. Much of the drudgery of manual labor has been lessened, or entirely obviated by modern machinery.
However desirable may be the acquisition of wealth by honest endeaver, no young man should make that his chief ambition. "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches." One of the demoralizing tendencies of the times is an undne passion for money- getting. Honor and reputation are sacrificed to this end. Men are not content to acquire property in a legitimate way ; a spirit of restlessness is abroad. Young men leave their industrial employ- ments on the farm and enter the professions, which are already filled to repletion. Many quit the rural districts and go to the crowded city, with the expectation of gaining a livelihood in a more easy and genteel way. As a result the cities are over-peopled ; great num- bers live in poverty, without employment, while millions of acres of fertile lands are lying waste for the want of tillers of the soil. No avocation promises more certain remuneration than farming. This Town furnishes an illustration of what can be accomplished by the business of agriculture. Thirty years ago the people were compar- atively poor, but without the aid of any considerable commercial or manufacturing interests, relying on the moderate but sure profits of the farm, thrift and independence are now seen on every hand.
Young men, look well to your institutions of learning, especially the common schools. These are the future safeguards of our free institutions. Our national life is dependent on the general educa- tion of the people; without this the Republic will prove a failure.
Also see to it, that your churches do not languish for proper maintenance and support. Aside from higher interests, thrift and
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prosperity mark the communities where churches are encouraged and sustained. Among the first attentions of the early settlers of New England were the church and the school-house. From the in- fluence of these followed culture, enterprise and noble activities.
Survivors of the Fiftieth Anniversary-there must come parting words. Many of us here to-day from distant States and widely- separated portions of the land, greet each other for the last time. Before the setting sun of the Hundredth Anniversary, some of us will exchange the last farewell, never again to revive together the recollections and the friendships of early days. Another such re- union as this is not among the possibilities of the future. We are nearing our final home; the shadows begin to gather, our sun will soon sink below the horizon of the living. But let us be cheered with the hope of another and a happier reunion in the great here- after. And as we journey onward may we hear music in the air, drawing us nearer to the celestial city.
Whatever of time yet remains of our earthly pilgrimage, we will cherish the recollection of this day, and the occasion it commemor- ates. A hundred years of our national life have passed into history, and as we stand on the threshold of a new century we unite with the millions, who this day, from ocean to ocean, celebrate the Cen- tennial Anniversary of American Independence. Our country to the last shall be our theme :
"Thou, too, sail on. O ship of state ! Sail on, O Union, strong and great; Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate ! We know what masters laid thy keel, What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel ; Who made each mast and sail and rope, What anvils ring, what hammers beat ; In what a forge, in what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope. Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 1
'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale. In spite of rock and tempests' roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea, Our hearts, our hopes are all with thee; Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee-are all with thee."
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Further Proceedings of the Day.
President-Hon. A. P. Smith, Cortland.
Vice-Presidents-Deacon N. Bouton and Elisha Winslow, of Virgil, S. H. Steele, of Harford; Dr. Wm. Fitch, of Dryden, and Jerome Hulbert, of Marathon.
Marshal-Colonel William Squires, of Marathon.
Assistant Marshals-Captain Nathan Smith, of Virgil; Major Samuel M. Byram, of Cortland, and Martin L. Sheerar, of Virgil.
President Smith's address was in his happiest vein. He referred to the fact that fifty years ago the fathers of those present had cele- brated the Fourth of July in this Village, and that then prayer had been made by the same person who would offer it to-day, and that the Orator and Reader of the Declaration, acted each in the same capacity in 1826. A celebration under such circumstances, he said, would not be witnessed in any other place in the land. At the close of his remarks he quaintly and gracefully introduced Deacon Bou- ton, by saying, that he "who prayed for our fathers fifty years ago, would now pray for us." The Deacon then rose, and with trembling voice offered a prayer as fervent and as full of feeling, we venture to say, as any that ever fell from his lips. It was listened to silent- ly and reverently by an assemblage, who will long remember it.
The Declaration was read by Dr. Hyde in a clear, strong voice, and with an evident appreciation of and love for the grand princi- ples it sets forth.
No one who reads the oration by Colonel Frank can fail to ad- mire it, though they will miss the charm of the speaker's delivery. It struck us at the time as one of the finest orations to which we had ever listened, and such, we believe, was the verdict of all who
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heard it. The occasion lent an added interest to it, and Colonel Frank had the taste and wisdom to discard the stereotyped and hackneyed form of the regular Fourth of July oration, and furnish something fresh and appropriate, as well as eloquent. At its close it was moved and unanimously carried that the Colonel be asked for a copy of the oration, and that it be published.
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