Removing the Last Earth Barrier in the Canal against the Waters of the Pacific, by an Explosion of Twenty Tons of Dynamite, August 31

all mankind,' where the settlers 'should be governed by laws of their own making.' The first charter of the Jerseys which were largely peopled by Quakers, and Scotch and Irish Presbyterians declared that 'no person shall at any time, in any way, or on any pretense, be called in question, or in the least punished or hurt, for opinion in religion.' And Oglethorpe's Colony of Georgia was founded to be a refuge for the distressed people of Britain, and the persecuted Protestants of Europe;' then the German Moravian settled side by side with the French Huguenot and the Scotch Presbyterian under the motto, 'We toil not for ourselves, but for others.'

"Père Hyacinthe, after a tour in New England, said he had remarked in every town three institutions that epitomized American society, the bank, the school, and the church. A true picture. And you see the intellectual and the spiritual are two to one against the material,- the bank, the storehouse of gains and savings; the school and the church, the distributing reservoirs of what is freely taken from the bank and given to those educating and spiritualizing forces of society.

""The Americans,' says De Tocqueville, 'show by their practise that they feel the high necessity of imparting morality to democratic communities by means of religion.' It is not on Sunday alone, as De Tocqueville imagined, 'that the American steals an hour from himself, and laying aside for a while the petty passions which agitate his life and the ephemeral interests which engross it, strays at once into an ideal world, where all is great, eternal, and pure.'"- Id., pp. 219, 220.

The success of the United States in erecting at once a permanent and stable form of government, has been an astonishment to other nations. Edouard Laboulaye, one of the foremost patriots and publicists of France, just after the revolution of 1848 said:

"In the last sixty years we have changed eight or ten times our government and our constitution; have passed from anarchy to despotism; tried two or three forms of the republic and of monarchy; exhausted proscription, the scaffold, civil and foreign war; and after so many attempts, and attempts paid with the fortune and the blood of France, we are hardly more advanced than at the outset. The constitution of 1848 took for its model the constitution of 1791, which had no life: and to-day we are agitating the same questions that in 1789 we flattered ourselves we had resolved. How is it that the Americans have organized liberty upon a durable basis, while we, who surely are not inferior to them in civilization,— we who have their example before our eyes, have always miscarried?"

Thompson ("United States as a Nation," p. 107) quotes the foregoing from "Etudes Morales et Politiques," p. 285, and spends a few moments considering a proper answer to this question which the Frenchman in so much astonishment asks. He makes the answer to consist principally in the fact that the Americans conceived and adopted a superior Constitution, a Constitution which has sprung from the noble principles which have given this nation its political and religious influence, as noticed in this chapter. He says:

"But in this point of constitution-making, it will also be seen

THE REASON OF OUR STABILITY

67

that the Americans, with a rare felicity, succeeded in incorporating the constitution of the nation, which is its life principle, with the national Constitution, which gives to the national life its definitive form and expression. They not only achieved independence, but, in the happy phrase of the French critic, they 'organized liberty.' This success was due to training, to methods, and to men, or rather to that mysterious conjunction of men and events that make the genius of an epoch akin to inspiration."

The value and influence of this Constitution is shown in the fact that "to-day a leading organ of opinion in England pronounces the Constitution of the United States 'the most sacred political document in the world.' "-Id., p. 160.

The stability of our government through the changes and vicissitudes which have revolutionized if not overthrown other governments, is a further evidence of the solid political and religious basis on which its foundations are laid. On this point we quote again from Thompson, p. 148:

"Frederick the Great died: and, twenty years after, the Prussia that he had created lay dismantled, dismembered, disgraced, at the dictation of Napoleon. Napoleon abdicated; and France has wandered through all forms of government, seeking rest and finding none. Washington twice voluntarily retired from the highest posts of influence and power, the head of the army, the head of the state; but the freedom he had won by the sword, the institutions he had organized as president of the Federal Convention, the government he had administered as President of the Union, remained unchanged, and have grown in strength and majesty through all the growing years."

American missionaries have gone to all the world, and in numbers and activity hold an equal place with those of any other nation; while the American Bible Society, in the extent of its operations, sending out millions of copies of the Scriptures in all the leading languages of the world, stands next to the original society of the mother country. The American Bible Society was organized in New York City in 1817. The original society of the mother country, the

British and Foreign Bible Society, London, was organized in 1804.

This country has now come to be looked upon as the model, after which other governments may profitably pattern. Under the title of "The Model Republic," Cyrus D. Foss, pastor of St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal church, New York, preached a sermon, from which the reader will be pleased to read the following extracts, as a fitting close to the present chapter:

"Let every thoughtful American bless God that he lives in this age of the world, and in this country on the globe; not in the dark past, where greatness and even goodness could accomplish so little; not in the Oriental world, where everything is stiffened and is hard as cast-iron; but now where such mighty forces are at work for the uplifting of humanity, and just here at this focal point of power. .

"I maintain to-day that God has signalized this great American nation, this democratic republican nation, this Protestant

AMERICA'S PLACE IN THE CENTURIES

69 Christian nation, above all the nations that are, or ever have been, upon the face of the globe, by the place and the work he has assigned it. Look at its place on the globe, and its place among the centuries. What a magnificent arena for a young nation to step forth upon, and begin its march to a destiny inconceivably glorious. Suppose an angel flying over all the earth two hundred years ago, looking down upon the crowded populations of Europe and Asia, and the weak and wretched tribes of Africa, perceiving that humanity never rises to its noblest development, save in the north temperate zone; turning his flight westward across the Atlantic, there dawns upon him the vision of a new world, a world unpopulated save by a few scattered and wandering tribes of aboriginal savages, and by thirteen sparse colonies of the hardiest and best of immigrants along the Atlantic coast. He beholds a continent marvelously beautiful, with unlimited resources to be developed; its rivers open all parts of the country, and bring all into communication with two great oceans and with the tropic gulf. He sees a soil inexhaustibly fertile; he sees the mountains (for an angel's eye can search their treasures) full of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal. He sees a country insulated by three thousand miles of ocean from all the nations, needing contiguity with none a Cosmos in itself. Would not this angel-gazer say, 'My God has assuredly made and endowed this peerless continent for some glorious end. The rest of the world is occupied, and the most of it cursed by occupation. Here is virgin soil; here is an arena for a new nation, which, perchance, profiting by the mistakes of the long, dark past, may, by the blessing of God, work out for itself and for humanity a better destiny.'

"Note again the place of America in the scale of the centuries. Why was this continent hid from the eye of Europe so long? And why, after its discovery, was it kept unsettled for a century and a quarter longer, the thought of it all that time being only a disturbing leaven in the mind of Europe? Ah! God would not suffer that tyrannical ideas of government or religion should take root here. He veiled the New World from the vision of the Old, until the Old had cultivated a seed worthy to plant the New. No crowned despots, no hooded monks, were to flourish here. No hoary superstitions, no ancient usurpations, were to take root here. Why was the era of this nation's birth coeval with that of the development of inventive genius? Why was it that this land was comparatively unsettled until the iron horse was ready to career across its plains, leap its