Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/164

THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS when every friend puts it to blush and every triumph but rebukes its weakness! If England continued still to accredit this calumny, I would direct her for conviction to the hero, for whose gift alone she owes us an eternity of gratitude; whom we have seen leading the van of universal emancipation, decking his wreath with the flowers of every soil and filling his army with the soldiers of every sect; before whose splendid dawn, every tear exhaling and every vapor vanishing, the colors of the European world have revived and the spirit of European liberty (may no crime avert the omen!) seems to have risen! Suppose he was a Catholic, could this have been? Suppose Catholics did not follow him, could this have been? Did the Catholic Cortes inquire his faith when they gave him the supreme command? Did the regent of Portugal withhold from his creed the reward of his valor? Did the Catholic soldier pause at Salamanca to dispute upon polemics? Did the Catholic chieftain prove upon Barossa that he had kept no faith with heretics? or did the creed of Spain, the same with that of France, the opposite of that of England, prevent their association in the field of liberty?

Oh, no, no, no! the citizen of every clime, the friend of every color, and the child of every creed, Liberty walks abroad in the ubiquity of her benevolence, alike to her the varieties of faith and the vicissitudes of country; she has no object but the happiness of man, no bounds but the extremities of creation. Yes, yes, it was reserved 154