A Centennial Address: to My Old and Young Friends and Fellow Citizens, Occasioned by the Lapse of a Century Since My Birth

Overview
William Edward Hickson’s 1861 essay adopts the voice of a centenarian addressing friends and fellow citizens to take stock of a hundred years of life and national experience. The occasion becomes a moral panorama: personal reminiscence widens into social diagnosis, and private gratitude into public exhortation. Hickson balances celebration of material progress with a call to cultivate the inner virtues that alone can make progress safe, insisting that prosperity without principle is a fragile gain.

Recollections and Change
Hickson begins with the quiet textures of an earlier age, small communities knit by neighborly duty, simple trades, and frugal habits, then contrasts them with the spectacle of mid-nineteenth-century transformation. Steam, railways, and the electric telegraph have compressed distance and time; print has multiplied voices; commerce has widened horizons and linked destinies. He acknowledges how these forces have enlarged opportunity, softened ancient hardships, and put knowledge within reach of the many. Yet the same forces, he warns, have quickened temptations: haste overtakes deliberation, novelty displaces reverence, cities concentrate both enterprise and vice. The century’s gains are real, improvements in health, law, and education, but they carry obligations that cannot be delegated to machines or markets.

Liberty, Law, and the Common Good
A central thread is civic responsibility. Hickson salutes the broadening of civil and religious liberty and the amelioration of old wrongs, while urging vigilance against new monopolies of power, whether economic or political. The true end of reform is not agitation but justice, laws that are equal in their protection and burdens that are fairly shared. He connects public freedom with private self-command: a people fit for liberty must be trained in truthfulness, temperance, thrift, and sympathy. Schools, churches, and voluntary associations form the seedbeds of such character, but their efforts must be joined by a press that enlightens rather than inflames, and by statesmen who prize the nation’s long welfare over party triumphs.

Education and Work
Hickson treats education as the century’s decisive lever. Reading, he suggests, opens the conscience as well as the mind, and practical instruction dignifies labor by quickening intelligence in every craft. He praises steady industry and perseverance, not as mere engines of wealth, but as disciplines that form citizens. Work seasoned by honesty builds households and communities; work corrupted by speculation, gambling, and drink unravels them. He urges the young to prefer patient mastery over quick success, to choose companions wisely, to measure enjoyment by its moral residue rather than its momentary charm.

Religion, Gratitude, and Mortality
The address is animated by gratitude to Providence. Hickson’s religious tone is modest and encompassing: faith steadies hope, sanctifies labor, and teaches charity that outlasts disputes. He looks back on friendships and losses with humility, confessing faults and giving thanks for mercies. The brevity of life, most vivid at a hundred years, sharpens his counsel: honor the day’s duty, make amends swiftly, and sow seeds whose harvest others may reap. Reputation fades; example abides.

Appeal to the Future
Hickson closes by turning memory into mandate. If the first century taught the power of invention, let the next prove the power of conscience. Let knowledge be wedded to kindness, freedom to forbearance, strength to service. Nations grow great not by what they seize but by what they build, habits of justice, homes of peace, institutions that elevate the least. To old and young alike he commends steadfastness and good cheer: improvement is rarely sudden, but the steady will can make a people wiser and happier than it found them.