We probably began to celebrate our Fourth-of-July night in that way one
hundred and twenty-five years ago, and on every Fourth-of-July night
since these horrors have grown and grown, until now, in our five thousand
towns of America, somebody gets killed or crippled on every Fourth-of-
July night, besides those cases of sick persons whom we never hear of,
who die as the result of the noise or the shock. They cripple and kill
more people on the Fourth of July in, America than they kill and cripple
in our wars nowadays, and there are no pensions for these folk. And,
too, we burn houses. Really we destroy more property on every Fourth-of-
July night than the whole of the United States was worth one hundred and
twenty-five years ago. Really our Fourth of July is our day of mourning,
our day of sorrow. Fifty thousand people who have lost friends, or who
have had friends crippled, receive that Fourth of July, when it comes, as
a day of mourning for the losses they have sustained in their families.
I have suffered in that way myself. I have had relatives killed in that
way. One was in Chicago years ago–an uncle of mine, just as good an
uncle as I have ever had, and I had lots of them–yes, uncles to burn,
uncles to spare. This poor uncle, full of patriotism, opened his mouth
to hurrah, and a rocket went down his throat. Before that man could ask
for a drink of water to quench that thing, it blew up and scattered him
all, over the forty-five States, and–really, now, this is true–I know
about it myself–twenty-four hours after that it was raining buttons,
recognizable as his, on the Atlantic seaboard. A person cannot have a
disaster like that and be entirely cheerful the rest of his life. I had
another uncle, on an entirely different Fourth of July, who was blown up
that way, and really it trimmed him as it would a tree. He had hardly a
limb left on him anywhere. All we have left now is an expurgated edition
of that uncle. But never mind about these things; they are merely
passing matters. Don’t let me make you sad.
Sir Mortimer Durand said that you, the English people, gave up your
colonies over there–got tired of them–and did it with reluctance.
Now I wish you just to consider that he was right about that, and that he
had his reasons for saying that England did not look upon our Revolution
as a foreign war, but as a civil war fought by Englishmen.
Our Fourth of July which we honor so much, and which we love so much, and
which we take so much pride in, is an English institution, not an
American one, and it comes of a great ancestry. The first Fourth of July
in that noble genealogy dates back seven centuries lacking eight years.
That is the day of the Great Charter–the Magna Charta–which was born at
Runnymede in the next to the last year of King John, and portions of the
liberties secured thus by those hardy Barons from that reluctant King
John are a part of our Declaration of Independence, of our Fourth of
July, of our American liberties. And the second of those Fourths of July
was not born, until four centuries later, in, Charles the First’s time,
in the Bill of Rights, and that is ours, that is part of our liberties.
The next one was still English, in New England, where they established
that principle which remains with us to this day, and will continue to
remain with us–no taxation without representation. That is always going
to stand, and that the English Colonies in New England gave us.
The Fourth of July, and the one which you are celebrating now, born, in
Philadelphia on the 4th of July, 1776–that is English, too. It is not
American. Those were English colonists, subjects of King George III.,
Englishmen at heart, who protested against the oppressions of the Home
Government. Though they proposed to cure those oppressions and remove
them, still remaining under the Crown, they were not intending a
revolution. The revolution was brought about by circumstances which they