nment would
make an instructive and interesting study; but I lack the learning and
the ability for such disquisitions. I must therefore content myself for
the purpose of unfolding the duties and destinies of American
citizenship, to review but historically, how from simple communities
seeking to free themselves from the rule of individuals or classes, to
govern themselves by law, and make that law supreme in every exigency,
great charters were established and the reign of law instead of the rule
of princes permanently established.

Even in the establishing of their free system of public administration,
the Anglo-Saxon aim and purpose was to secure the most absolute
guarantees of personal security. The liberty of the individual unit of
society secured in the exercise of the largest liberty consistent with
the public welfare, and that liberty protected by the just and
righteous administration of public laws, was the ideal of the
Anglo-Saxon state.

In their religion, philosophy, poetry, oratory, and literature they have
always confessed that oppression was venal and wrong. If selfishness,
greed, or pride have allured them for a while from that royal path of
national rectitude and honor, they have in the final test returned
conquering to their true and higher selves. Their inborn hate of
oppression, their magnanimous and tolerant spirit of freedom gloriously
in the ascendant.

Thus it is that the free institutions of Great Britain and America have
grown and towered in strength, and in their onward march startled the
world by their progress, and appalled the very lips of prophecy by their
bold and daring sweep. They will not stop, for liberty is fearless and
the current of freedom is irresistible.

But in the early Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth, the rights, liberties, and
privileges of the citizen were not as broad and full as we find them
to-day. The spirit of liberty was weak at first, but her demands grew
apace with her strength. Neither by the generosity of princes, nor by
the wisdom of legislation, were the ordinary English rights of free
citizenship enlarged and established. Nor are the first and elemental
principles of free government which we find springing up on English soil
after the conquests, and whose history in the re-establishment of
political liberty we shall trace through countless struggles and
repressions, the original of that divine idea of freedom which it has
been the mission of the Anglo-Saxon race to