seen in the
United States had convinced him that no government can be so good as a
Republic. There was a time in the Presidency of Monroe, about fifty-five
years ago, which men still speak of as "the era of good feeling," when
most of the incongruities that had come down from the Stuarts had been
reformed, and the motives of later divisions were yet inactive. The
causes of old-world trouble,--popular ignorance, pauperism, the glaring
contrast between rich and poor, religious strife, public debts, standing
armies and war,--were almost unknown. No other age or country had solved
so successfully the problems that attend the growth of free societies,
and time was to bring no further progress.

But I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the
beginning of my task. In the ages of which I have spoken, the history of
freedom was the history of the thing that was not. But since the
Declaration of Independence, or, to speak more justly, since the
Spaniards, deprived of their king, made a new government for themselves,
the only known forms of liberty, Republics and Constitutional Monarchy,
have made their way over the world. It would have been interesting to
trace the reaction of America on the Monarchies that achieved its
independence; to see how the sudden rise of political economy suggested
the idea of applying the methods of science to the art of government;
how Louis XVI., after confessing that despotism was useless, even to
make men happy by compulsion, appealed to the nation to do what was
beyond his skill, and thereby resigned his sceptre to the middle class,
and the intelligent men of France, shuddering at the awful recollections
of their own experience, struggled to shut out the past, that they might
deliver their children from the prince of the world and rescue the
living from the clutch of the dead, until the finest opportunity ever
given to the world was thrown away, because the passion for equality
made vain the hope of freedom.

And I should have wished to show you that the same deliberate rejection
of the moral code which smoothed the paths of absolute monarchy and of
oligarchy, signalised the advent of the democratic claim to unlimited
power,--that one of its leading champions avowed the design of
corrupting the moral sense of men, in order to destroy the influence of
religion, and a famous apostle of enlightenment and toleration wished
that the last king might be strangled with the entrails of