AND THE APOSTLES OF SELF GOVERNMENT. AN ORATION, DELIVERED BEFORE THE NEW-ENGLAND SOCIETY OF LOUISIANA, DECEMBER 22, 18 4 8. Joseph Stevens Buckminster MEMBER OF THE NEW-ENGLAND SOCIETY OF LOUISIANA. NEW.ORLEANS.; PRINTED BY WILLIAM H. TOY, 1849. us 10880.5 L 1868, April 80. Gift ( ) Ken. John G. Paltrey. (Class of 1815:) HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY NEW ORLEANS, DEC. 22, 1848. HON. JUDGE THACHER. DEAR SIR, At a meeting of the New-England Society of Louisiana this evening, I was charged with the agreeable duty of communicating to you theîr thanks for the able and instructive discourse pronounced by you before them to-day, and to solicit a copy for publication. I avail myself of this occasion to express to you my gratification personally on the manner in which you developed the principles of the founders of our Republic. I am very much flattered by the great compliment of your Society in requesting a copy for publication of the oration delivered by me yesterday before its members, and I place it at your control. I likewise feel grateful for the kind expression of your own sentiments respecting my humble efforts to illustrate the principles of our Founder Fathers. I am, Most respectfully, Your friend and ob'd't serv't, J. S. B. THACHER. THE ERA AND THE APOSTLES OF SELF-GOVERNMENT. It is a sublime contemplation to retrace mighty events to their causes, revolutions to their starting point, and nations to their origin. It raises human action to grandeur by connecting apparently small beginnings with lofty achievements and magnificent results. It has therefore been a passion with all great nations to indulge and glory in the retrospect of the eras in which, and the founders by whom, their mighty trees of empire were planted on some lone island or forest-covered shore. Judea's sacred lyrics are perpetually running back to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the founders of their Theocratic nation; to the era of their early captivity; to their baptismal passage of deliverance through the billows of a cloven sea; to the forty years of armed sojourn in the Arabian deserts, where the death of an entire generation bleached the stains of hundreds of years of bondage from the national character, and prepared them to pass the defiles of Idumea, and enter upon the conquest of the teeming vales of Palestine, an embattled host, irresistibly disciplined, and prepared for the career of power under their Seers, Judges and Kings, which made Jewry immortal in annals, and Jerusalem the home of of sacred literature, the seat of heaven-born Theocracy, and the theatre of the great Drama of Salvation. Egypt, too, was proud of her early dynasty of Shepherd Kings, and going still farther back, endeavored, in the lofty sentiment of ancestral dignity, to link their origin to the reign of the immortal gods on earth. Greece, too,-while she sought to forget that much of her ancestry were the pirate hordes that infested the Ægean and the Tyrrhene seas, hiding amidst the rocks and secret bays of Epirus and the Strophades, never ceased to remember her Phoenician origin, Ionia |