its significance; for while they isolate us completely from the social and political influence of other nations, they at the same time afford a free commercial intercourse with all the world; showing, that while we are to be permitted to pursue our career without foreign interference, all peoples and all climes are to be made tributary to our advancement Our continent, thus placed in an independent position, is also characterized by a peculiar and strongly-marked structure. Though it is not a repetition of the forms of either of the continents of the Old World, it combines all the characteristic features of both; the unity and grandeur of Asia with the variety and diversity of Europe, blended harmoniously together into one compact organism, with its own important, well-defined functions to perform in the education of the race. The stupendous forms of nature here, while they give massiveness of outline to the continent, inspire loftiness and sublimity of thought and character; and now, that the infant of Asia has grown to vigorous manhood in America, nature here, instead of presenting barriers to his freedom of movement, or cramping his energies and enslaving his faculties, only offers greater temptations to his activity and wider fields for his enterprise. Our extended seacoast, made still greater by its thousands of intensive bays and inlets, affords unrivaled facilities for foreign commerce; while our inland lakes and countless rivers give unbounded freedom of internal trade and social intercourse from one extremity of our vast territory to the other; while variety of physical feature and diversity of climate, soil, and productions give rise to an almost endless variety of character, interest, and occupation, thus developing the greatest number of faculties and thereby securing the greatest possible economical and political freedom: yet nowhere does this diversity of physical conditions furnish contrasts so marked as to justify the existence of separate sovereignties or independent political organizations within our borders; for, above and through all this variety, we can recognize the great predominating feature of unity and compactness of form and structure. See how the great mountain-chains, the huge backbone of the continent, link the North and the South together. The navigable rivers, the great arteries through which the trade of the whole continent pulsates, all flow southward to

the sea. The very rocks on which they stand unite the North and the South on one solid, everlasting foundation. Nature has nowhere put a barrier or dividing line between them. But if she has separated any sections, they are the East and the West. Two unbroken ranges of mountains, with their frowning battlements piercing the clouds, and separated by the trackless plains stretched out between them, seem to interpose a hinderance to the advancement of civilization across the continent. But man here is the master of nature; and like a giant he sweeps away the obstacles she throws in the path of his progress. He binds the Atlantic and the Pacific together with iron bands; and steam and the lightning bring the East and the West together into one common brotherhood. The one great lesson, then, that nature and the enterprise of man have written in legible characters all over this continent, is that of unity and grandeur of form, controlling and harmonizing endless variety: teaching us that physically there is no North, no South; no East, no West. Can we read the lesson ?

See now how our political organization has been based upon and adapted to these great controlling physical characteristics of the continent. Here again we find expressed the same idea of diversity, controlled and harmonized by the all-pervading principle of unity: variety of local organization sufficient to secure the freest individuality, the most stirring activity and the richest material development, yet subordinate to, and fused into, one sublime nationality; a.nationality, at last, and for the first time in history, based upon the dignity and the rights of humanity, recognizing, at last, the right of all men to be free, and pledged before the world and in the sight of Heaven, to enforce that right on every foot of our wide domain : a principle broad enough and vital enough to cement into one harmonious, lasting union, the fragmentary elements of all former civilizations.

It is worth while to note the progressive development of the form of our government, and some of the circumstances which influenced it. The greatly diversified features of our Atlantic coast, as well as the varied characters and interests of the early settlers, naturally favored the establishment of separate colonies, with independent local governments adapted to their

separate necessities, yet all subject to the authority of the mother country. But having all braved the dangers of the deep, and the hardships of the wilderness for the common purpose of finding in the New World a wider liberty and a freer enterprise than narrow Europe could afford them, it was natural that they should combine to resist the tyranny of England, which they had all suffered in common. It was then that through the baptism of blood and fire our fathers rose to the conception of the inalienable right of all men to be free, and the duty of government to secure that right. It was amid the fermentation of the moral elements of that hard struggle that this sublime conception took shape, and became crystalized forever in the Declaration of Independence.

Even after they had thrown off the yoke of England, with their European ideas and prejudices yet clinging about them, they still endeavored to establish and maintain their independent sovereignties. But soon they began to catch glimpses of the future that was opening before them; and in the unity of material interests and the common principle they had given birth to, and consecrated with their blood, they began to recognize the obligation of a common duty to humanity. They then saw clearly the necessity of an organization capable of protecting those interests, and securing forever to the race the rights for which, with a common devotion, they had all fought. Then rising, with the dignity of the duty, above their European ideas of government, their local prejudices and petty ambitions, the thirteen sovereign states, surrendering all hopes of independent power and greatness, magnanimously sacrificed their sovereignties on the altar of a common Nationality, dedicated to the cause of human freedom. Nor did they stop here. To make the sacrifice still more sublime and forever irrevocable, they refused to recognize that their former sovereignties had ever existed, and proclaimed to the world, "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America."

That was the spirit in which our fathers, under the guidance of a far-reaching foresight, akin to inspiration, organized

our government and adapted it to the work of subduing the continent, and developing its unlimited sources of wealth and physical power, in order only to make them contribute to the fulfillment of its higher and holier duty of securing to every man, over whom its flag floats, the freest and fullest development of all his faculties, and establishing here the most perfect civilization of which the race is capable. And they made it strong enough to do all this, and yet reserved to the states power enough to prevent the possibility of its ever defeating the high end for which, under God, they had created it.

It was the ushering into the astonished family of nations of such a government, recognizing such principles and with such resources of power to enforce them, that so clearly and sharply defined the character of this new epoch, the manhood of the race, as to place it far above and beyond all that had preceded it. The destiny of man then took such a stride onward that the whole earth shook beneath its majestic tread; for

"When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from East to West;
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime

Of a century bursts full-blossom'd on the thorny stem of Time.

Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the ages wings earth's systems to and fro;

At the birth of each new era, with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,

'And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart."

France was the first to feel the trembling vibrations of the new impulse across the sea, and :

"The brute despair of trampled centuries

Leap'd up with one hoarse yell and snapp'd its bands,
Groped for its right with horny, callous hands,

And stared around for God with blood-shot eyes."

It was but anarchy and crime that, in her blindness, she mistook for the freedom she had dreamed of in her dull and troubled sleep; and, like a child, soon tiring of this bloody plaything, she cast it away for the glittering bauble of Napoleon's glory. But such a live, free nation, like ours, cannot exist in the world without still, at times, making the pulsations of its great strong heart felt across the ocean. It is then that

the crushed and besotted peoples of Europe start wildly from their leaden sleep, and groping, like a blind giant, for the pillars of despotism, only bury their own hopes under the ruin they make.

The feebleness and fruitlessness of these pregnant convulsions, as well as all the experience of history, teach us this important lesson: that, as new wine cannot be put into old bottles-as the vigor of youth cannot be infused into the palsied limbs of age-so the vital principle of a new civilization cannot be galvanized into the withered forms of the old. The doctrine of self-government is too vital and powerful an element of progress to be compressed into the effete systems of Europe. It requires new and higher social and political forms to embody it; a wider theater, with grander scenery and a new set of actors, for its representation. This idea of a government created by the people and for the people, is adapted only to the manhood of the race; and can only be fully realized on this continent, by this form of government and by this great American race, formed by the assimilation with the Anglo-Saxon of all the best blood of all the historic nations, and educated by the lessons of all past history, and disciplined by the stern experience of its own career, up to the comprehension of its power and its duty.

But above and over all the influences shaping and determining our national career, controlling and vitalizing them all, is Christianity. Freed from the corrupting influences of government, which had made it the instrument of oppression; and the senseless mummeries and lifeless forms which had cramped and perverted it, it has here the opportunity to accomplish the mission for which its Divine Founder intended it. Wrested from the control of a bigoted hierarchy, it here becomes the common heritage of the people; and instead of the handmaid of slavery, it becomes the bulwark of liberty. Combining in its doctrines all the fragments of truth that lie scattered through all history-uniting the idea of the infinite and the finite, divinity and humanity in the office and person of Christ -it becomes the sublimed expression of the philosophy as well as the religion, the reason as well as the faith, of this third and last phase of historical development. It was only when, through religious freedom, the masses of the people