Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1896 — WHAT THE DAY MEANS. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WHAT THE DAY MEANS.

The Fourth of July In the Greatest National Holiday in the World.

,HE greatest national holiday in the world is that on which is celebrated the birthday of the United States. Oth-“ er nations have their days of jubilee, when some leading event in their history is

commemorated. France celebrates the destruction of the Bastile; Germany, the triumph of Sedan; Italy, the entity of the Italian troops into Rome. The Hebrews to this day commemorate in joy and feasting the deliverance of their race from the bondage of Egypt; but not one of these celebrations can compare in world-wide significance with the Fonrth of July. The Bastile was a monument of ancient despotism, the overthrow of which signified that the people had cast off the chains of their tyrants; Sedan was a great military victory, but it was a victory of conquest; and the day which marks the union of the Italian peninsula witnessed not so much the birth of a new nation as the resurrection of a race. How much more memorable than all these is that great day, when the delegates of Great Britain’s American colonies assembled in Philadelphia, proclaimed that a new nation had been founded in the New World, having for its basis the inalienable right of mankind to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and, in the name of a few weak communities fringing the Atlantic shore of the Western continent, threw down a challenge of defiance to one of the most powerful empires of the earth! The Declaration of Independence was not the assertion of freedom by a’nation of slaves. Americans were always free. The Pilgrims who landed on the bleak New England shore were freemen; bound, It ia true, to British allegiance, but exercising from the first the rights of selfgovernment. The American colonies never lost the freedom which the Fathers established, and the brief tyranny of Andros only scathed, without destroying, the heritage of liberty handed down by the founders to their sons. The Declaration of Independence was as much an assertion of rights which had long been enjoyed, and a protest against tyrannical attempts to encroach upon those rights, as H was a proclamation of that independence which Americans deemed to be necessary for the protection of their freedom.