o have no
Dutch blood in our veins. We feel that these old Dutch names are really
more closely associated in our minds with the city of New York than with
Holland itself.

The men from whom you sprang were well calculated to carry on the great
work undertaken by them. In the first place, in that good old land they
had educated the conscience. The conscience never lost its hold upon the
man. He stood as firm in his convictions as the rock to its base. His
religion was a religion of the soul, and not of the senses. He might
have broken the tables of stone on which the laws were written; he never
would have broken those laws themselves. He turned neither to the past
with regret nor to the future with apprehension. He was a man inured to
trials; practised in self-abnegation; educated in the severe school of
adversity; and that little band which set out from Holland to take up
its career in the New World was well calculated to undertake the work
which Providence had marked out for them. Those men had had breathed
into their nostrils at their very birth the true spirit of liberty.
Somehow or other liberty seemed to be indigenous in that land. They
imbibed that true spirit of liberty which does not mean unbridled
license of the individual, but that spirit of liberty which can turn
blind submission into rational obedience; that spirit of liberty which
Hall says stifles the voices of kings, dissipates the mists of
superstition, kindles the flames of art, and pours happiness into the
laps of the people. Those men started out boldly upon the ocean; they
paused not until they dipped the fringes of their banners in the waters
of the western seas. They built up this great metropolis. They bore
their full share in building up this great nation and in planting in it
their pure principles. They builded even better than they knew.

In the past year I think our people have been more inclined than ever
before to pause and contemplate how big with events is the history of
this land. It was developed by people who believed not in the "divine
right of kings," but in the divine right of human liberty. If we may
judge the future progress of this land by its progress in the past, it
does not require that one should be endowed with prophetic vision to
predict that in the near future this young but giant Republic will
dominate the policy of the world. America was not born amidst the
mysteries of barbaric ages; and it is about the only nation whic