Humanity has ever advanced, urged by instincts and necessities implanted by God,--thwarted sometimes by obstacles, causing it for a time, a moment only in the immensity of ages, to deviate from its true line, or seem to retreat, but still…

At last we know the law of this movement; we fasten our eyes upon that star, unobserved in the earlier ages, which lights the way to the Future, opening into vistas of infinite variety and extension.

With this faith, we place our hands, as those of little children, in the great hand of God.

He will guide and sustain us--through pains and perils it may be--in the path of Progress.

In such a faith there are motives to beneficent activity which will endure to the last syllable of life.

Let the young embrace this law; it shall be to them an ever-living spring.

Let the old cherish this law; it shall be to them a staff for support.

It will give to all, young and old, a new appreciation of their existence, a new sentiment of their force, a new revelation of their destiny.

Though not ourselves partakers of these brighter days, ours may be the pleasure at least of foreseeing them, of enjoying them in happy vision, or the satisfaction, sweeter still, of hastening by some moments the too distant epoch.

Look at the last days of Talleyrand, and learn the wretchedness of an old age enlightened by no memory of generous toil, by no cheerful hope for our fellow-men.

Be it, then, our duty and our encouragement to live and to labor, ever mindful of the Future.

From one has come art; from another jurisprudence; from another the compass; from another the printing-press; from all have descended priceless lessons of truth and virtue.

The daily increasing rapidity of discovery and improvement, and the daily multiplying efforts of beneficence, outstripping the imaginations of the most sanguine, furnish assurance that the advance of man will be with a constantly…

Though the goal is distant, and ever advancing, the march is none the less certain.

As well attempt to make the sun stand still in his course, or restrain the sweet influences of the Pleiades, as arrest the incessant, irresistible movement which is the appointed destiny of man.

Learn to reconcile order with change, stability with progress.

Blending these two in one, may we not seek to be, at the same time, Reforming Conservatives and Conservative Reformers?

And, finally, let a confidence in the Progress of our race be, under God, a constant faith.

Let the sentiment of loyalty, earth-born, which once lavished itself on King or Emperor, give place to that other sentiment, heaven-born, of devotion to Humanity.

So may we open to our country new fields of peaceful victory, which shall not want the sympathies and gratulations of the good citizen or the praises of the just historian.

Grateful for this cordial welcome, I must consider it offered, not to myself, but to the cause, whose humble representative I am.

It is the cause, the good old cause of Freedom, so familiar to early echoes of this hall, which justly awakens your regards, irrespective of men.

And why, in this nineteenth century, are we assembled here in Faneuil Hall, to vow ourselves to Freedom?

The principles of our fathers, of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, nay, the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, are assailed.

Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.