play because of the firm structure of these ancient strongholds of religion and law, which you now desert and refuse to build anew.

Our fathers had formed their opinions upon wiser and deeper views of man and Providence than these, and they had the courage of their opinions.

Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path of civilization, enlightenment, and moral and intellectual culture, they found that the Divine ordinance of government, in every stage of the ascent, was adjustable on principles of common reason to the actual condition of a people, and always had for its objects, in the benevolent councils of the Divine wisdom, the happiness, the expansion, the security, the elevation of society, and the redemption of man. They sought in vain for any title of authority of man over man, except of superior capacity and higher morality. They found the origin of castes and ranks, and principalities and powers, temporal or spiritual, in this conception. They recognized the people as the structure, the temple, the fortress, which the great Artificer all the while cared for and built up. As through the long march of time this work advanced, the forms and fashions of government seemed to them to be but the scaffolding and apparatus by which the development of a people's greatness was shaped and sustained. Satisfied that the people whose institutions were now to be projected had reached all that measure of strength and fitness of preparation for self-government which old institutions could give, they fearlessly seized the happy opportunity to clothe the people with the majestic attributes of their own sovereignty, and consecrate them to the administration of their own priesthood.

The repudiation by England of the spiritual power of Rome at the time of the Reformation was by every estimate a stupendous innovation in the rooted allegiance of the people, a profound disturbance of all adjustments of authority. But Henry VIII., when he displaced the dominion of the Pope, proclaimed himself the head of the Church. The overthrow of the ancient monarchy of France by the fierce triumph of an enraged people was a catastrophe that shook the arrangements of society from center to circumference. Napoleon, when he pushed aside the royal line of St. Louis, announced, “I am the people crowned," and set up a plebian Em

peror as the impersonation and depositary in him and his line forever of the people's sovereignty. The founders of our Commonwealth conceived that the people of these colonies needed no interception of the supreme control of their own affairs, no conciliations of mere names and images of power from which the pith and vigor of authority had departed. They, therefore, did not hesitate to throw down the partitions of power and right and break up the distributive shares in authority of ranks and orders of men which indeed had ruled and advanced the development of society in civil and religious liberty, but might well be neglected when the protected growth was assured and all tutelary supervision for this reason henceforth could only be obstructive and incongruous.

V

A glance at the fate of the English essay at a commonwealth, English and French which preceded, and to the French experiment Republics. at a republic, which followed our own institution "of a new State of a new species," will show the marvelous wisdom of our ancestors, which struck the line between too little and too much; which walked by faith, indeed, for things invisible, but yet by sight for things visible; which dared to appropriate everything to the people which had belonged to Cæsar, but to assume for mortals nothing that belonged to God.

No doubt it was a deliberation of prodigious difficulty, and a decision of infinite moment, which should settle the new institutions of England after the execution of the King, and determine whether they should be popular or monarchial. The problem was too vast for Cromwell and the great men who stood about him, and, halting between the only possible opinions they simply robbed the throne of stability, without giving to the people the choice of their rulers. Had Cromwell assumed the state and style of King, and assigned the Constitutional limits of prerogative, the statesmen of England would have anticipated the establishment of 1688, and saved the disgraces of the intervening record. If, on the other hand, the ever-recurring consent of the people in vesting the Chief Magistracy had been accepted for the Constitution of the State, the revolution would have been intelli

gible, and might have proved permanent. But what a "Lord Protector" was nobody knew, and what he might grow to be everybody wondered and feared. The aristocracy could endure no dignity above them less than a king's. The people knew the measure and the title of the chartered liberties which had been wrested or yielded from the King's prerogative; but what the division between them and a Lord Protector would be no one could forecast. A brief fluttering between the firmament above and the firm earth beneath, with no poise with either, and the discordant scheme was rolled away as a scroll. A hundred years afterward Montesquieu derided "this impotent effort of the English to establish a democracy," and divined the true cause of its failure. The supreme place, no longer sacred by the divinity that doth hedge about a king, irritated the ambitious to which it was inaccessible, except by faction and violence. "The Government was incessantly changed, and the astonished people sought for democracy and found it nowhere. After much violence and many shocks and blows, they were fain to fall back upon the same government they had overthrown."

The English experiment to make a commonwealth without sinking its foundations into the firm bed of popular sovereignty, necessarily failed. Its example and its lesson, unquestionably, were of the greatest service in sobering the spirit of English reform in government, to the solid establishment of constitutional monarchy, on the expulsion of the Stuarts, and in giving courage to the statesmen of the American Revolution to push on to the solid establishment of republican government, with the consent of the people as its every-day working force.

But if the English experiment stumbled in its logic by not going far enough, the French philosophers came to greater disaster by overpassing the lines which mark the limits of human authority and human liberty, when they undertook to redress the disordered balance between people and rulers, and renovate the Government of France. To the wrath of the people against kings and priests they gave free course, not only to the overthrow of the establishment of the Church and State, but to the destruction of religion and society. They deified man, and thought to raise a tower of man's building, as of old on the plain

of Shinar, which should overtop the battlements of heaven, and to frame a constitution of human affairs that should displace the providence of God. A confusion of tongues put an end to this ambition. And now out of all its evil have come the salutary checks and discipline in freedom, which have brought passionate and fervid France to the scheme and frame of a sober and firm republic like our own, and, we may hope, as durable.

Men of 1776.

VI.

How much, then, hung upon the decision of the great day we Our Debt to the celebrate, and upon the wisdom and the will of the men who fixed the immediate, and if so, the present fortunes of this people. If the body, the spirit, the texture of our political life had not been collectively declared on this day, who can be bold enough to say when and how independence, liberty, union would have been combined, confirmed assured to this people? Behold, now, the greatness of our debt to this ancestry, and the fountain, as from a rock smitten in the wilderness, from which the stream of this nation's growth and power takes its source. For it is not alone in the memory of their wisdom and virtues that the founders of a State transmit and perpetuate their influences in its lasting fortunes, and shape the character and purposes of its future rulers. "In the birth of societies," says Montesquieu," it is the chiefs of a State that make its institutions; and afterward it is these institutions that form the chiefs of the State."

And what was this people and what their traits and training that could justify this congress of their great men in promulgating the profound views of government and human nature which the Declaration embodies and expecting their acceptance as "self-evident? How had their lives been disciplined and how their spirits prepared that the new-launched ship, freighted with all their fortunes, could be trusted to their guidance with no other chart or compass than these abstract truths? What warrant was there for the confidence that upon these plain precepts of equality of right, community of interest, reciprocity of duty, a polity could be framed which might safely discard Egyptian mystery, and Hebrew reverence, and Grecian subtlety,

and Roman strength-dispense, even, with English traditions of

"Primogenity and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels.

To these questions the answer was ready and sufficient. The delegates to this immortal assembly, speaking for the whole. country and for the respective colonies, their constituents, might well say:

"What we are, such are this people. We are not here as volunteers, but as their representatives. We have been designated by no previous official station, taken from no one employment or condition of life, chosen from the people at large because they cannot assemble in person, and selected because they know our sentiments, and we theirs, on the momentous question which our deliberations are to decide. They know that the result of all hangs on the intelligence, the courage, the constancy, the spirit of the people themselves. If these have risen to a height, and grown to a strength and unanimity that our judgment measures as adequate to the struggle for independence and the whole sum of their liberties, they will accept that issue and follow that lead. They have taken up arms to maintain their rights, and will not lay them down till those rights are assured. What the nature and sanctions of this security are to be they understand must be determined by united counsels and concerted action. These they have deputed us to settle and proclaim, and this we have done. to-day. What we have declared the people will avow and confirm. Henceforth it is to this people a war for the defense of their united independence against its overthrow by foreign arms. Of that war there can be but one issue. And for the rest, as to the Constitution of the new State, its species is disclosed by its existence. The condition of the people is equal, they have the habits of freemen and possess the institutions of liberty. When the political connection with the parent State is dissolved they will be self-governing and self-governed of necessity. As all governments in this world, good and bad, liberal or despotic, are of men, by men, and for men, this new State, having no castes or rank, or degrees discriminating among men in its population, becomes at once a government of the people, by the people, and