560 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



doubtedly true, that in no part of the world has the sentiment 

 of right taken such deep root, and become so widely diffused, 

 as among the masses of the people of this country. Especially 

 is this true of the agricultural population of the great rural dis- 

 tricts. How exposed to open trespass, and to petty aggressions, 

 are all their rights ! And yet how seldom are they invaded ! 

 And this in a country, whose government rests upon the popu- 

 lar will, indicates the existence, in the broad bosom of the 

 population, of a sensitive and all pervading sense of right and 

 of justice. 



Our rights are of a two-fold character — of person and of 

 property. The former hold, in their comprehensive embrace, 

 life, liberty, and happiness ; and, as republican citizens, these 

 are the patrimony bequeathed to us, in equal measure, by a 

 more than heroic age. Guarded well the legacy has been by 

 the generations that have preceded us. Let these three great 

 properties of humanity become the cynosure of every man, 

 from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the north to the farthest 

 south, and there is hope that this heritage of freedom, of right, 

 and of justice, will be consecrated to a duration as lasting as 

 the pillars of time. 



Property, in the catalogue of rights, has a secondary classi- 

 fication. And yet it is so mixed up and blended in with the 

 rights of person as scarcely to admit of a difference that is 

 anything more than an abstraction. Invasions of the rights of 

 property are the prolific sources of the accumulations of wretch- 

 edness that meet the eye of the philanthropic at every turn. 

 " Man's INJUSTICE to man" sustains the courts of law, and keeps 

 running the machinery of justice. And the mass of litigation, 

 that is seen on every side, not only mars the happiness of 

 society, but imposes an immense tax upon the producing ener- 

 gies of the people for its support. Next, therefore, in impor- 

 tance, to a perpetual observance of the rights of person, and 

 the amenities of life that should ever accompany that observ- 

 ance, a respect for the rights of property should be inculcated 

 with the earliest lessons of childhood, that it may grow up with 

 the man, and become so incorporated with his very being that 

 he shall ever feel that an injury done to another, is an injury 

 done to himself. 



