Here, too, you find where once the Old Liberty Tree, connected with so many of your memories, grew.  You ask your legend, and learn that it was cut down for firewood by the British soldiers, as some of your meeting houses were pulled down.  They burned the old tree, and it warmed the soldiers enough to enable them to evacuate the city. [Laughter.] Had they been more slowly warmed into motion, had it burned a little longer, it might have lighted Washington and his followers to their enemies.

But they were gone, and never again may a hostile foe tread your shore.  Woe to the enemy who shall set his footprint upon your soil; he comes to a prison or he comes to a grave! [Applause.] American fortifications are not intended to protect our country from invasion.  They are constructed elsewhere as in your harbor to guard points where marine attacks can he made; and for the rest, the breasts of Americans are our parapets. [Applause.]

But, my friends, it is not merely in these military associations, so honorably connected with the pride of Massachusetts, that one who visits Boston finds much for gratification.  If I were selecting a place where the advocate of strict construction of the Constitution, the extreme asserter of democratic state rights doctrine should go for his text, I would send him into the collections of your historical association.  Instead of finding Boston a place where the records would teach only federalism, he would find here, in bounteous store, that sacred doctrine of state rights, which has been called the extreme and ultra opinion of the South.  He would find among your early records that at the time when Massachusetts was under a colonial government, administered by a man appointed by the British crown, guarded by British soldiers; the use of this old Faneuil Hall was refused by the town authorities to a British Governor, to hold a British festival, because he was going to bring with him the agents for collecting, and naval officers sent here to enforce, an unconstitutional tax upon your commonwealth.  Such was the proud spirit of independence manifested even in your colonial history.  Such the great stone your fathers hewed with sturdy hand, and left the fit foundation for a monument to state rights! [Applause.] And so throughout the early period of our country you find Massachusetts leading, most prominent of all the States, in the assertion of that doctrine which has been recently so much decried.

Having achieved your independence, having passed through the confederation, you assented to the formation of our present constitutional Union.  You did not surrender your state sovereignty.  Your fathers had sacrificed too much to claim as the reward of their trials that they should merely have a change of masters.  And a change of masters it would have been had Massachusetts surrendered her State sovereignty to the central government, and consented that that central government should have the power to coerce a State.  But if this