to cultivate narrow national memories
in regard to the past as it would to cultivate narrow national
prejudices at present. You have come out, as from other relics of
barbarism which still oppress Europe, so from the barbarism of jealous
nationality. You are heirs to all the wealth of the Old World, and must
owe gratitude for a part of your heritage to Germany, France, and Spain,
as well as to England. Still, it is from England that you are sprung;
from her you brought the power of self-government which was the talisman
of colonization and the pledge of your empire here. She it was, that,
having advanced by centuries of effort to the front of the Old World,
became worthy to give birth to the New. From England you are sprung; and
if the choice were given you among all the nations of the world, which
would you rather choose for a mother?

England bore you, and bore you not without a mother's pangs. For the
real hour of your birth wag the English Revolution of the seventeenth
century, at once the saddest and the noblest period of English
history,--the noblest, whether we look to the greatness of the
principles at stake, or to the grandeur of the actors who fill the
scene. This is not the official version of your origin. The official
version makes you the children of the revolutionary spirit which was
abroad in the eighteenth century and culminated in the French
Revolution. But this robs you of a century and a half of antiquity, and
of more than a century and a half of greatness. Since 1783 you have had
a marvellous growth of population and of wealth,--things not to be
spoken of, as cynics have spoken of them, without thankfulness, since
the added myriads have been happy, and the wealth has flowed not to a
few, but to all. But before 1783 you had founded, under the name of an
English Colony, a community emancipated from feudalism; you had
abolished here and doomed to general abolition hereditary aristocracy,
and that which is the essential basis of hereditary aristocracy,
primogeniture in the inheritance of land. You had established, though
under the semblance of dependence on the English crown, a virtual
sovereignty of the people. You had created the system of common schools,
in which the sovereignty of the people has its only safe foundation. You
had proclaimed, after some misgivings and backslidings, the doctrine of
liberty of conscience, and released the Church from her long bondage to
the State. All this you had achiev