ed while you still were, and gloried
in being, a colony of England. You have done great things, since your
quarrel with George III., for the world as well as for yourselves. But
for the world, perhaps, you had done greater things before.

In England the Revolution of the seventeenth century failed. It failed,
at least, as an attempt to establish social equality and liberty of
conscience. The feudal past, with a feudal Europe to support it, sat too
heavy on us to be cast off. By a convulsive effort we broke loose, for a
moment, from the hereditary aristocracy and the hierarchy. For a moment
we placed a popular chief in power, though Cromwell was obliged by
circumstances, as well as impelled by his own ambition, to make himself
a king. But when Cromwell died before his hour, all was over for many a
day with the party of religious freedom and of the people. The nation
had gone a little way out of the feudal and hierarchical Egypt; but the
horrors of the unknown Wilderness, and the memory of the flesh-pots,
overpowered the hope of the Promised Land; and the people returned to
the rule of Pharaoh and his priests amidst the bonfires of the
Restoration. Something had been gained. Kings became more careful how
they cut the subject's purse; bishops, how they clipped the subject's
ears. Instead of being carried by Laud to Rome, we remained Protestants
after a sort, though without liberty of conscience. Our Parliament, such
as it was, with a narrow franchise and rotten boroughs, retained its
rights; and in time we secured the independence of the judges and the
integrity of an aristocratic law. But the great attempt had miscarried.
English society had made a supreme effort to escape from feudalism and
the hierarchy into social justice and religious freedom, and that effort
had failed.

Failed in England, but succeeded here. The yoke which in the
mother-country we had not strength to throw off, in the colony we
escaped; and here, beyond the reach of the Restoration, Milton's vision
proved true, and a free community was founded, though in a humble and
unsuspected form, which depended on the life of no single chief, and
lived on when Cromwell died. Milton, when the night of the Restoration
closed on the brief and stormy day of his party, bated no jot of hope.
He was strong in that strength of conviction which assures spirits like
his of the future, however dark the present may appear. But, could he
have beheld it, the morning, moving