* * *
In thus meeting together to offer our homage to the exceeding worth of our departed friend, while we do justice to our own feelings, and to the memory of the dead, we follow the custom which prevailed when the Father of his Country died -- a custom that obtained in the best times of ancient manners: for the free states of old were accustomed thus to commemorate the funeral of their patriots and sages. It is a good custom, that should be cherished by freemen. It is the award of posterity sitting in judgement on the actions and the life of a distinguished citizen who has finished his course. While honorable to the dead, it is an incentive to the living. Who is he, solicitous for posthumous fame, that darling object of ingenuous minds, that will not be impelled onward in his virtuous course by the honors every where offered to the memory of Madison? It is a terror likewise to the wicked. What great criminal is so hardened in his iniquity that will not tremble when, in anticipation, he sees posterity passing on his crimes, and, instead of honor, reproach awaiting his memory?
Besides, the life of a good and great man, when fairly
delineated and committed to history, will survive when the pyramids of Egypt
shall have passed away: it will stand forever a lofty beacon amid the
vicissitudes and the wastes of time.
Athens and Rome, the master states of antiquity, where liberty once
delighted to dwell, for two thousand years have been doomed to ignorance, to
superstition, and to worse than Egyptian bondage; yet the lives of their great
worthies, shining with an undiminished lustre, after this long and fearful
eclipse, warmed the bosoms of modern patriots, by whose efforts have been
regained the jewel of inestimable value, so long lost to the world.
And if, in fulfillment of that stern decree which denounces
decay and death on all human things -- a decree before which Babylon and
Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, and all that was illustrious in antiquity, have
crumbled into dust -- if it be irreversible to all, and American be doomed to
travel through the ages of bondage, let us indulge the consolatory hope that
the life of Madison, triumphing over the injuries of time, may become a pillar
of light by which some future patriot may reconduct his countrymen to their
lost inheritance. . .
* * *
Let me invoke the reflection of the admirers of military
renown, by contrasting the acts, and their effects on the condition of the
world, of the greatest captain of ancient or modern times, Napoleon, with our
Madison's. Of the former it has been
said, "the earthquake voice of victory was the breath of his
nostrils." This colossus of power,
of ambition, and of crime, having crushed the liberties of his country, placed
one foot on the pillars of Hercules, and sought to stretch the other to the
arctic pole: his scepter was the besom of desolation: the pedestal of his fame
was composed of the carcasses of three millions of his kind, cemented with the
blood of his victims, and bedewed with the tears of their widows and orphans:
his ministry seemed to be that of a ruthless instrument of vengeance to
chastise and humble a guilty world. But
mark his end! His mad ambition devoted
his country to the horrors of conquest, in part by barbarous hordes who lived
beyond civilization: he himself was precipitated to the dust. He is deserted by the multitude, the
sycophant of success, whose morality teaches that while misfortune can furnish
no excuse, victory, no matter how obtained, is not required to give an account
of her actions. Thus abandoned, he
becomes an outlaw of the civilized world, and dies a wretched captive in one of
Afric's distant isles, loaded with the execrations of the widows and orphans
which his ambition had made, and with the curses of a world; while Madison,
disinterestedly devoting every fibre of his heart, and every attribute of his
mind, to the cause of liberty, and the happiness of his kind -- leading a
nation through the hitherto untrodden paths of political science, like another
Moses conducting his countrymen through the wilderness to the land of the
promise -- laying the foundations of a constitution, which, if his example and
his counsels prevail, will, with the blessing of God, be immortal -- finally
departing in peace, when every hill and every valley of this vast republic
resound with the benedictions on his name, and one universal voice proclaims
him the benefactor of his kind. Behold
the contrast! And yet, if Napoleon had
continued successful, the subjects of the extraordinary delusion I am
encountering would have required the sculptor and the poet to exhaust their art
in perpetuating his name, while they would have suffered Madison's to go down
to the grave unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
