rable to take. England by her eight centuries of constitutional
progress has done a great work for you, and the two nations may yet have
a great work to do together for themselves and for the world. A student
of history, knowing how the race has struggled and stumbled onwards
through the ages until now, cannot believe in the finality and
perfection of any set of institutions, not even of yours. This vast
electioneering apparatus, with its strange machinery and discordant
sounds, in the midst of which I find myself,--it may be, and I firmly
believe it is, better for its purpose than anything that has gone before
it; but is it the crowning effort of mankind? If our creed--the Liberal
creed--be true, American institutions are a great step in advance of the
Old World; but they are not a miraculous leap into a political
millennium. They are a momentous portion of that continual onward effort
of humanity which it is the highest duty of history to trace; but they
are not its final consummation. Model Republic! How many of these models
has the course of ages seen broken and flung disdainfully aside! You
have been able to do great things for the world because your forefathers
did great things for you. The generation will come which in its turn
will inherit the fruits of your efforts, add to them a little of its
own, and in the plenitude of its self-esteem repay you with ingratitude.
The time will come when the memory of the Model Republicans of the
United States, as well as that of the narrow Parliamentary Reformers of
England, will appeal to history, not in vain, to rescue it from the
injustice of posterity, and extend to it the charities of the past.

New-comers among the nations, you desire, like the rest, to have a
history. You seek it in Indian annals, you seek it in Northern sagas.
You fondly surround an old windmill with the pomp of Scandinavian
antiquity, in your anxiety to fill up the void of your unpeopled past.
But you have a real and glorious history, if you will not reject
it,--monuments genuine and majestic, if you will acknowledge them as
your own. Yours are the palaces of the Plantagenets,--the cathedrals
which enshrined our old religion,--the illustrious hall in which the
long line of our great judges reared, by their decisions, the fabric of
our law,--the gray colleges in which our intellect and science found
their earliest home,--the graves where our heroes and sages and poets
sleep. It would as ill become you