It is, then, no disparagement of the good and wise. who have gone before us, to claim that we have been brought to a deeper perception of the foundations of our nationality, and to a more correct interpretation of those great ideas which are incorporated into our body politic. There are things which experience alone can teach, and doubly sad would seem our bitter sacrifices should they leave us no compensating lessons. Against our will the appeal to arms was made, and in the unerring course of that righteous Providence which holds nations not less than men to an account, they that imagined a vain thing were ruled with a rod of iron and dashed in pieces like a potter's vessel. But in such a political system as ours, the sword can never be the final arbiter. It flashes from its scabbard at the bidding of ideas. The mutual recognition, by the mass of the people, of fundamental principles of policy, is the only safeguard of public peace. "The foundation of government," said one of the fathers of the Republic, "is some principle or passion in the minds of the people."

Nations are only larger men, like men endowed with individual life, obeying analogous laws of growth subject, alas, as the silent gates of Thebes, the tottering columns of the Acropolis, the sunken pavement of the Forum alike testify, to the same decay. And like the individual, the nation comes only in the course of years to know itself, to interpret its own deeper tendencies and instincts. Its moral greatness and energy are always proportioned to this self-consciousness. Americans have been laughed at for their faith in manifest destiny. Like all supreme convictions of the soul, when not viewed in relation to the whole scope of duty,

it may prove the pathway to transgression and ruin. But a "sense sublime" of some indissoluble relation to the vast range and purposes of that divine administration. which overarches all ages and nations, and whose triumphant issue shines from the serene splendors of the latter day, can alone lift any nation to the level of historic greatness. The absence of this conviction. leaves the annals of the great oriental monarchies as flat and dry as the Desert of Sahara; its presence renders the three great successive commonwealths, the Hebrew, the Roman and our own, the noblest growth of time. Instead, then, of remitting our faith in manifest destiny, we ought to covet an ampler sense of our historic mission. Of necessity absorbed in the unexampled growth of a material civilization, the meaning of our own recorded past has remained hitherto an enigma to us. There has been little in its outward form to awaken interest. It is the history, for the most part, of plain, honest men. It is decorated with none of the illusions of antiquity and romance. No venerable monuments of by-gone ages overshadow us with a legendary lore that silently infuses its fascinating lessons. We have lived in the future more than in the past. Not the most hurtful, discordant, contradictory views aroused us to a just appreciation of our annals.

Need I mention, in proof of the slight degree to which the nation has reflected on itself, the fact, known to all, that the first philosophic study of our institutions proceeded from a foreigner. Nor was this fact without most momentous consequences, for great and undeniable as were the merits of De Tocqueville's book, and far as I should wish to be from detracting anything

from its well-deserved repute, yet no one, to-day, can doubt that his strange assertion "that the Union was an accident," and his confident prediction that in case of a collision between the States and the Federal authority, the latter must inevitably yield, had a vast and most pernicious influence in shaping the public sentiment of England at the outset of our civil conflict. The conclusions of the fair-minded Frenchman were accepted without dispute, and were the source of those opinions so freely expressed in Parliament and in so many public meetings; and had England incurred the deep damnation of that step to which at one time she approached so near, had she recognized as one of the family of nations the confederacy whose corner stone was an arrogant denial of what England for years had made her boast, the direful consequences might justly have been traced to this fundamental error respecting the nature of our Federal system which the authority of De Tocqueville had done so much to disseminate. Of such vital importance is it to know for ourselves, and to make others comprehend, the true foundations of our nationality.

The author of the Palmetto Geography, published during the war for the benefit of southern youths, who derived the common law from the book of Leviticus, did not in fact shoot wider of the mark than many of those English writers who have aimed to enlighten their countrymen respecting our institutions. Well read in Thucydides and Aristotle, but ignorant of Hamilton and Madison, they have reasoned from the narrow municipal life of the ancient democracies, to our essentially original and imperial system. Misled by names, they have overlooked real distinctions. They have

repeated stale aphorisms respecting Republican institutions, forgetting, or not caring to remember, that the term Republic has been equally applied to the Dutch Confederation, in which dwelt no direct principle of popular liberty; to Poland, the most oppressive compound the world has ever seen, of monarchy and aristocracy; to the Italian cities of the middle ages, which were mere oligarchies; and to imperial Rome, where the distingushing feature of American republicanism, the representative system, was never recognized. Strange to say, the sole English statesman of any note who seems to have seized hold of the fact that there was anything distinctive or peculiar in our liberties, was the leader of the Tory party in the House of Commons, Mr. Disraeli, who termed the United States a "territorial democracy," an apt designation, provided the immense difference be recognized between an American farmer and an European peasant, one of a class which has never yet proved itself capable of local selfgovernment.

We cannot too deeply engrave on all our minds the fact that our political system is an essentially new experiment in the life of States. The form of government here established has no prototype in any former age. It refuses to conform to the well-known division of Aristotle. We seek in vain to explain it by Greek or Roman analogies. It embodies novel political ideas, and can be explained only from analysis of its own interior principles. For purposes of comparison we may class it, as a recent English writer has done, with the Achaian League, with the Swiss Cantons, with the seven United Provinces of the Netherland, but the resemblance is superficial. Neither in the constitution

of our Federal system, nor in the elements out of which the Federal system itself is formed, is there any real analogy. As our democracy is an original and unexampled democracy, so our Federal system is an original and unexampled Federal system. We shall halt and stumble in all our conclusions, if we do not reason from this postulate.

Settled for the most part as English colonies, inheriting English maxims and usages, copying to a great extent in the method of our colonial administration, English parliamentary forms; above all, bringing with us across the sea the boon of the Common Law, it has been our habit to regard England as the exclusive source of our political existence. Nor has the error been confined to our side of the Atlantic. England has loved to speak of America as an unruly but vigorous offspring. That our institutions are a mere offshoot of theirs, has been a favorite opinion, especially with that class of Englishmen who have given us their most hearty sympathy. America, they have repeated, is but another England, without her battlemented castles, her ivied manor-houses, her gray cathedrals, her court and her upper class. New York and Philadelphia and Boston, are Liverpool and Manchester and Edinburgh. In other words, that famous English middle class, whose characteristics Matthew Arnold has so keenly analyzed, reaches in America its perfect growth.

Without wishing to depreciate the debt we owe to England, I maintain that this theory of the genesis of our political ideas is a radical mistake. We brought much from the mother land, so much that, notwithstanding the mean subserviency to selfish interests that has crept over English politics since the treaty of Utrecht,