 | CONCLUSION. Logan |  |
CONCLUSION.
I have now done. I am dying. I am an American.
England! land of the noble and valiant, farewell! Thou
hast wronged thy brave children of the west.
Englishmen! Let me utter some plain truths before
I depart. There are multitudes among you, who rank
my countrymen with the men of Botany Bay, the refuse
of your most degenerate and profligate children—
multitudes, that have never heard of our revolution,
and know nothing of our history, but regard us yet, as
rebels.
Men of England! Be generous to us. Glory in us,
as we do in our ancestry—we were your youngest
born. Believe not in your scoundrel politicians, the
vile and abominable creatures of your corruption, out-numbering
your good and great, as reptiles outnumber
men. They have kept you ignorant of a people, that
have changed the destinies of the world, shaken the
foundations of your own empire, and filled the earth
with republicanism.
I am an American. I remember when first I set my
Our Eagle too, was only a butt, for derision
and ribaldry. How is it now? I have lived to see that
name ringing from kingdom to kingdom—to see that
BIRD breaking onward, through cloud and storm, even
to the four corners of the sky.
I am an American. But I know, and venerate a
true Englishman. His heart was godlike, full of heroick
thought, and high purpose—magnanimous by constitution,
generous by birthright, brave by habit. But
ye—O, ye are degenerate. It is now a part of your loyalty
to revile America. Nay, your very ministry are
stooping from their high estate, to blaspheme the destinies
of my country. Hearken to your lying witnesses,
with hearts of gall, and fronts of brass! Nay, some of
your reviewers, men who affect to handle and govern secretly—the
machinery of state—are they not drunk and
delirious with arrogance and hatred toward us?—and
there are your travellers too, a vagabond horde, wandering,
like hunted convicts, over the face of our fair
and beautiful inheritance, proscribed and interdicted
by their very manners, from all intercourse with whatever
is dignified, pure, or excellent; herding, when they
get to America, with the outcasts of all the earth, the
offscourings of all that is base and licentious, the rejected
and disgorged of dungeons and galleys, bloated
and diseased with spleen and envy, and re-absorbing
in their contact with such detestable natures, all the
bile and bitterness that their heart, sore with repletion,
and festering with disappointment and corruption,
have discharged—and, they, they are the men, to
whom you trust for all that you know of a great and
gallant nation! O, shame on you! Why, when you are
sending whole classes of the learned and magnanimous,
to all the corners of the earth, why not send some one
to America?—who shall dare to dwell among us, till
he knows us, and then dare to tell you the truth? Not
that we want to be flattered, no! it may be well meant,
but flattery is not the aliment for a nation, and least of
all, to a nation of republicans.
But this will not always be. I will venture to predict
us, as we are, the strongest, (though boastful
and arrogant) progeny of yourselves, in your Herculean
vigour, when your nation was a colossus, reaching
to Heaven, setting her foot upon the east and the
west, and shadowing the ocean with her garment.
Forty years ago—you must bear with me—I am on
the threshold of eternity, and what I say to you, is
said in the presence of the Almighty, nay, in the
spirit of prophecy. Forty years ago, you employed generals
and statesmen to destroy us, and they that were
proud of heart, were handcuffed and pinioned to the
service. But of late, you are served by volunteers,
ballad-mongers, and blockheads. Then you caused power
and character to advance against us—now, the lewd
and puerile are detached for our discomfiture. You
assail us with the sparkling nonsense of some poet, the
lumbering detail of some farmer, or push forward the
burning, acrimonious, and vindictive demon of Gifford;
his cold, thick blood crawling, like a blind worm,
through his palsied arteries, clotted and ropy with the
venom concocted at the fountain—having all the shrewdness
and foresight, and anatomical insensibility, but none
of the holy probity of a Scotchman—hated, not for his
strength, but for his disposition—the contempt of the
magnanimous, and terrour of the feeble—his heart dissolving
in the mortal poison of its own nature, with
the sense of his solitude and desolation, encompassing
him like death, and knowing that a vapour of repulsion
is forever escaping from him in the fearful process of
decomposition.
Forty years have passed away. Great God! what a
revolution! My beloved country standing up, with her
forehead in the sky, her bright hair streaming from
ocean to ocean—helmeted and cuirassed—starred and
glittering with `intolerable light!'—and lo! her tyrant
in the dust!— where is his manhood now?—where the
presence, before which Europe trembled and was afraid?
—he, before whose bidding, the Great Spirit of the
ocean walked over it, from sea to sea, in earthquake and
thunder?—and where the strong children of his youth?
gone, in the retribution of the Eternal!
You trod upon our shores, once—I have not forgotten
it, and poured out your vials of wrath upon a poor,
manacled, and bleeding people, till the very earth reddened
to its centre, and armed men leaped through
the smoke and flame of sacrifice, and rescued your victim,
even at the altar. Forty years ago—but no, I
must have done—the dream is passing—the last of its
musick is now in my ears—a little longer, and I awake!
awake! to what?—O, my wife! my babes!
—Father of heaven! let not the curse of the
widow and the fatherless—the broken in heart, and the
wasted in spirit! O, let it not be cast up to this people,
in their day of retribution! I forgive them—I do—I
did not thnik that I could, but I do forgive them—my
wife! I am coming, my poor, dear babes, I am coming!
Englishmen! I have cursed you—I am sorry for it—
I was sorry for it, even when I did it, but it was prophecy,
and I was constrained to utter it—I now forgive
you, and O, it may be, for my curses have been
heard—that—in the tempest and wreck of your greatness,
ye shall hear my voice! when the great God shall
rain fire upon you, I will be there! When the earthquake
shall upheave your proud cities, there will I also
be; and there! when your great navy shall strew the
waters, of all the earth, with its burning and blasted
fragments, O, it may be that ye shall then hear my
spirit weeping alone, amid the general exultation of the
world, at your almighty downfal!
Farewell!
A DESCENDANT OF LOGAN.
| CONCLUSION. Logan | |