abject, unfurnished with the means of exercising it in their own right and for their own benefit. In a democracy wielded by the arts, and to the ends of a patrician class, the less worthy members of that class, no doubt, throve by the disdain which noble characters must always feel for methods of deception and insincerity, and crowded them from the authentic service of the state. But, through the period whose years we count to-day, the greatest lesson of all is the preponderance of public over private, of social over selfish, tendencies and purposes in the whole body of the people, and the persistent fidelity to the genius and spirit of popular institutions, of the educated classes, the liberal professions, and the great men of the country. These qualities transfuse and blend the hues and virtues of the manifold rays of advanced civilization into a sunlight of public spirit and fervid patriotism which warms and irradiates the life of the nation. Excess of publicity as the animating spirit and stimulus of society more. probably than its lack will excite our solicitudes in the future. Even the public discontents take on this color, and the mind and heart of the whole people ache with anxieties and throb with griefs which have no meaner scope than the honor and the safety of the nation.

Our estimate of the condition of this people at the close of a century-as bearing on the value and efficiency of the principles on which the Government was founded, in maintaining and securing the permanent well-being of a nation-would, indeed be incomplete if we failed to measure the power and purity of the religious elements which pervade and elevate our society. One might as well expect our land to keep its climate, its fertility, its salubrity, and its beauty were the globe loosened from the law which holds it in an orbit, where we feel the tempered radiance of the sun, as to count upon the preservation of the delights and glories of liberty for a people cast loose from religion, whereby man is bound in harmony with the moral government of the world.

It is quite certain that the present day shows no such solemn absorption in the exalted themes of contemplative piety, as marked the prevalent thought of the people a hundred years ago; nor so hopeful an enthusiasm for the speedy renovation

of the world, as burst upon us in the marvelous and wide system of vehement religious zeal, and practical good works, in the early part of the nineteenth century. But these fires are less splendid, only because they are more potent, and diffuse their heat in well-formed habits and manifold agencies of beneficent activity. They traverse and permeate society in every direction. They travel with the outposts of civilization and outrun the caucus, the convention, and the suffrage.

The Church, throughout this land, upheld by no political establishment, rests all the firmer on the rock on which its founder built it. The great mass of our countrymen to-day find in the Bible-the Bible in their worship, the Bible in their schools, the Bible in their households-the sufficient lessons of the fear of God and the love of man, which make them obedient servants to the free constitution of their country, in all civil duties, and ready with their lives to sustain it on the fields of war. And now at the end of a hundred years the Christian faith collects its worshippers throughout our land, as at the beginning. What half a century ago was hopefully prophesied for our far future, goes on to its fulfillment: "As the sun rises on a Sabbath morning and travels westward from Newfoundland to the Oregon, he will behold the countless millions assembling, as if by a common impulse, in the temples with which every valley, mountain, and plain will be adorned. The morning psalm and the evening anthem will commence with the multitudes on the Atlantic Coast, be sustained by the loud chorus of ten thousand times ten thousand in the Valley of the Mississippi, and be prolonged by the thousands of thousands on the shores of the Pacific."

XII.

What remains but to search the spirit of the laws of the land Strength of our as framed by and modeled to the popular governSystem. ment to which our fortunes were committed by the Declaration of Independence? I do not mean to examine the particular legislation, State or General, by which the affairs of the people have been managed, sometimes wisely and well, at others feebly and ill, nor even the fundamental arrange

ment of political authority, or the critical treatment of great junctures in our policy and history. The hour and the occasion concur to preclude so intimate an inquiry. The chief concern in this regard, to us and to the rest of the world, is, whether the proud trust, the profound radicalism, the wide benevolence which spoke in the "Declaration" and were infused into the "Constitution" at the first, have been in good faith adhered to by the people, and whether now these principles supply the living forces which sustain and direct Government and society.

He who doubts needs but to look around to find all things full of the original spirit, and testifying to its wisdom and strength. We have taken no steps backward, nor have we needed to seek other paths in our progress than those in which our feet were planted at the beginning. Weighty and manifold have been our obligations to the great nations of the earth, to their scholars, their philosophers, their men of genius and of science, to their skill, their taste, their invention, to their wealth, their arts, their industry. But in the institutions and methods of gov ernment; in civil prudence, courage, or policy; in statesmanship, in the art of " making of a small town a great city;" in the adjustment of authority to liberty; in the concurrence of reason and strength in peace, of force and obedience in war: we have found nothing to recall us from the course of our fathers, nothing to add to our safety or to aid our progress in it. So far from this, all modifications of European politics accept the popular principles of our system, and tend to our model. The movements towards equality of representation, enlargement of the suffrage, and public education in England; the restoration of unity in Italy; the confederation of Germany under the lead of Prussia; the actual Republic in France; the unsteady throne of Spain; the new liberties of Hungary; the constant gain to the people's share in government throughout Europe; all tend one way, the way pointed out in the Declaration of our Inde. pendence.

The care and zeal with which our people cherish and invigorate the primary supports and defenses of their own sovereignty, have all the unswerving force and confidence of instincts.

The community and publicity of education, at the charge and as an institution of the State, is firmly imbedded in the warts and the desires of the people. Common schools are rapidly extending through the only part of the country which had been shut against them, and follow close upon the footsteps of its new liberty to enlighten the enfranchised race. Freedom of conscience easily stamps out the first sparkles of persecution, and snaps as green withes the first bonds of spiritual domination. The sacred oracles of their religion the people wisely hold in their own keeping as the keys of religious liberty, and refuse to be beguiled by the voice of the wisest charmer into loosing their grasp.

Freedom from military power and the maintenance of that arm of the Government in the people; a trust in their own adequacy as soldiers, when their duty as citizens should need to take on that form of service to the State; these have gained new force by the experience of foreign and civil war, and a standing army is a remoter possibility for this nation, in its present or prospective greatness, than in the days of its small beginnings.

But in the freedom of the press, and the universality of the suffrage, as maintained and exercised to-day throughout the length and breath of the land, we find the most conspicuous and decisive evidence of the unspent force of the institutions of liberty and the jealous guard of its principal defenses. These indeed are the great agencies and engines of the people's sovereignty. They hold the same relations to the vast democracy of modern society that the persuasions of the orators and the personal voices of the assembly did in the narrow confines of the Grecian States. The laws, the customs, the impulses, and sentiments of the people have given wider and wider range and license to the agitations of the press, multiplied and more frequent occasions for the exercise of the suffrage, larger and larger communication of its franchise. The progress of a hundred years finds these prodigious activities in the fullest play-incessant and allpowerful-indispensable in the habits of the people, and impregnable in their affections. Their public service, and their subordination to the public safety, stand in their play upon one another and in their freedom thus maintained. Neither

could long exist in true vigor in our system without the other. Without the watchful, omnipresent and indomitable energy of the press, the suffrage would languish, would be subjugated by the corporate power of the legions of placemen which the administration of the affairs of a great nation imposes upon it, and fall a prey to that "vast patronage which," we are told, "distracted, corrupted, and finally subverted the Roman Republic." On the other hand, if the impressions of the press upon the opinions and passions of the people found no settled and ready mode of their working out, through the frequent and peaceful suffrage, the people would be driven, to satisfy their displeasure at government or their love of change, to the coarse methods of barricades and batteries.

XIII.

We cannot then hesitate to declare that the original princiOur Country ples of equal society and popular government still To-day. inspire the laws, live in the habits of the people, and animate their purposes and their hopes. These principles have not lost their spring or elasticity. They have sufficed for all the methods of government in the past; we feel no fear for their adequacy in the future. Released now from the tasks and burdens of the formative period, these principles and methods can be directed with undivided force to the everyday conduct of government, to the staple and steady virtues of administration. The feebleness of crowding the statute-books with unexecuted laws; the danger of power outgrowing or evading responsibility; the rashness and fickleness of temporary expedients; the constant tendency by which parties decline into factions and end in conspiracies; all these mischiefs beset all governments and are part of the life of each generation. To deal with these evils-the tasks and burdens of the immediate future-the nation needs no other resources than the principles and the examples which our past history supply. These principles, these examples of our fathers, are the strength and the safety of our State to-day: "Moribus antiquis, stat res Romana, virisque." Unity liberty, power, prosperity-these are our possessions to-day. Our territory is safe against foreign dangers; its com