, the ancient glory of England.

No English-speaking people could, if it would, escape its distinctive
name, and, since Greece and Judea, no name has the same worth and honor
among men. We Americans may flout England a hundred times. We may oppose
her opinions with reason, we may think her views unsound, her policy
unwise; but from what country would the most American of Americans
prefer to have derived the characteristic impulse of American
development and civilization rather than England? What language would we
rather speak than the tongue of Shakespeare and Hampden, of the Pilgrims
and King James's version? What yachts, as a tribute to ourselves upon
their own element, would we rather outsail than English yachts? In what
national life, modes of thought, standards and estimates of character
and achievement do we find our own so perfectly reflected as in the
English House of Commons, in English counting-rooms and workshops, and
in English homes?

No doubt the original stock has been essentially modified in the younger
branch. The American, as he looks across the sea, to what Hawthorne
happily called "Our old home," and contemplates himself, is disposed to
murmur: "Out of the eater shall come forth meat and out of the strength
shall come forth sweetness." He left England a Puritan iconoclast; he
has developed in Church and State into a constitutional reformer. He
came hither a knotted club; he has been transformed into a Damascus
blade. He seized and tamed a continent with a hand of iron; he civilizes
and controls it with a touch of velvet. No music is so sweet to his ear
as the sound of the common-school bell; no principle so dear to his
heart as the equal rights of all men; no vision so entrancing to his
hope as those rights universally secured.

This is the Yankee; this is the younger branch; but a branch of no base
or brittle fiber, but of the tough old English oak, which has weathered
triumphantly the tempest of a thousand years. It is a noble contention
whether the younger or the elder branch has further advanced the
frontiers of liberty, but it is unquestionable that liberty, as we
understand it on both sides of the sea, is an English tradition; we
inherit it, we possess it, we transmit it, under forms peculiar to the
English race. It is as Mr. Chamberlain has said, liberty under law. It
is liberty, not license; civilization, not barbarism; it is liberty clad
in the celestial robe of law, because law is the onl