integrity and moral character is beyond suspicion. Men so overrate the past and cover its achievements with such a sheen of glory, and place among the by-gone ages all the great and good of earth, are so distrustful of the present and of each other, that such a government as ours could hardly be established and perpetuated except upon the crumbling and dying debris of the older forms, hoary, and borne down with the oppression of centuries.

Experience is the torch that lights the pathway of the race, and it is quite probable our experiments would have ended in defeat and overthrow, had we not had great advantages of location, an unsurpassed country in climate and resources, and the experiences of centuries before us, from which to glean the causes of a rise and fall of the nations of the past, profiting by their wisdom and escaping their follies.

The Jewish, Egyptian and Chaldean dynasties, with the Turkish and Spanish, and perhaps others of the earlier nationalities, had but one element of strength, and that was reverence for the King, and a certain awe for his immediate representatives, and though they possessed at times considerable development in material wealth, and some degree of culture in the Arts and Sciences, yet we look in vain among them for the evidences of true national greatness, and for the forces in their life competent to perpetuate their existence among the foremost nations of the earth.

A little later we find better elements of national power and life in Greece and Rome-wonderful nations, bright morning stars in the horizon of the past, shedding a halo of light and glory down through the darkened centuries, that dazzle and bewilder us even at the present time. Their marvelous military prowess and heroism, that subdued the world; their poetry and sculpture, that have been the study and admiration of every age; their literature and their painting and their works of art, have ever distinguished them above all others in the world's history; and yet it was clear cut intellect and cold power that made them renowned. There was no warm, throbbing, brotherly love for mankind standing conspicuous in their life, and the elements of perpetuity were not among them. Their great cities have gone to decay, and the wild beasts haunt their halls of art and gardens of pleasure. Their mighty and invincible legions have long since bit the dust, and their eagles soar aloft

and strike terror to their opponents no more. Their life and their government were better than that of their predecessors. They had learned well some of the lessons of the race, and distributed the governing forces over a wider range. Yet they live only in their history, poetry and wondrous works of art, which still defy the destroying forces of time.

China, Japan and India are still living in the twilight of the middle ages, and are just waking up from their medieval sleep of centuries. Their future may be full of great possibilities; but their past has not developed a desirable national life. Some of the governments of Continental Europe are progressive in their character; but are hindered by cumbersome systems, and by kingly and priestly power. While having some features in common with us, they differ essentially in the objects of government. With them government is in the interest of the ruling powers. The laws of trade and commerce, of interest and social rank, all tend to favor the dominant class, and bear hardest upon the people. But with us the forces of the government are in the interest of the masses of the people, and the power of choosing all rulers is in their hands. All other systems tend to elevate the ruling class; while with us, our rulers are our servants, and can govern only as long as their reign is satisfactory. We have found the elixir of national life. We have gleaned from history her noblest lessons, and have demonstrated to the world by our experiences that a popular representative government of the people is at once stronger than a Kingdom; wiser and more prudent than an Empire or an Aristocracy, and far more flexible than either.

The morning drum beat of England, as it rolls round the world, wakes the sleepy soldier and arouses the downtrodden nations to fresh servitude; but it kindles not a throb of interest or gratitude from a liberated or an enfranchised people in its long march. She never liberates or enfranchises until the grasp of her power is broken and necessity compels her to recede. The dominant principle of kingly and monarchial governments is power in the line of their rulers, and this always begets reverence and superstition in the subjects, which is the death of all thought, aspiration and hope of place and power, so essential to the vigorous life of a people. The less intelligence and the more superstitious reverence there is among the people, the stronger is the king and his

kingdom. Intelligence among the people is fatal to royalty. It lessens the sources of its revenue and the amounts collected. It brings the people too near the throne and makes them too well acquainted with the occupant to insure faithful obedience.

Kingly and priestly power-for they are in fact the same thing, both claiming to rule by divine right-have reduced the once powerful nation of Spain to a throneless anarchy, and as a people, to bull-fighters and guitar-players. And Italy, the birthplace of Galileo, the founder of modern science, and once the home of literature and the arts, to a nation of roving and lawless banditti and organ-grinders. While poor Ireland, whose people are full of genius, wit and native power, it holds, and has held for ages, in ignorance, exile and squalid poverty.

Our fathers were wise and faithful men, and their theory of government was the best ever enunciated. But they made a sad mistake in their Declaration of Independence. In an instrument designed to be so influential upon the destinies of the nation and the world, it was all important that it should embrace all that was necessary to set forth fully their grievances and the grounds of their revolutionary act. It was also the germ thought of the Constitution, that soon followed, embodying in enlarged and statutory form, the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Any mistake in this instrument would be perpetuated through all the governments that followed, and could only be rectified by some subsequent national declaration on the same subject matter. The question was brought directly before them by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. On the 7th of June, 1776, he submitted a resolution that the United Colonies ought to be free and independent States.

On the 10th day of June, 1776, the Colonial Congress, sitting in the City of Philadelphia, resolved to appoint a committee to draft a Declaration of Independence of the American Colonies of the British Government. The committee consisted of Thomas Jefferson, a young man of thirtythree years of age, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston. Thomas Jefferson drew up a Declaration which the committee unanimously approved and presented to Congress for their adoption. But the Declaration that was adopted was a very different instrument from the one drawn up by Jefferson and approved by

his committee. That was a consistent, harmonious instrument. The one adopted was mutilated and shorn of some of its essential parts. In the Declaration reported by Jefferson, just before the solemn formula with which it closes, the British king is charged with the last and greatest list of wrongs done his Colonists. This list of wrongs was carefully enumerated and sent forth to the world as the cause which led the Colonists to refuse longer to remain under British rule, and as a justification of their act of revolution. The charges referred to appear in the following words: "He (the king) has waged a most cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of the life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in transportation thither. The piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to open a market where men should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no distinguished die he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase the liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off the crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." With this clause the Declaration appears a harmonious, consistent whole, and a fit ending for such a beginning as characterizes that instrument. It begins by declaring, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It closes with a solemn denunciation of the slave trade, and charges the king with committing crime, not only against the people whom he dooms to capture and sale, but also with prostituting his veto power to suppress the voice of the people, uttered through legislation in behalf of these slaves. This was a noble beginning, and a fit ending of such a declaration as the Jefferson committee presented the Colonial Congress for adoption. The doctrines announced were resistance to oppression, equality of mankind, and belief in man's capacity for self-government.

On the 2d of July, 1776, the House, while in committee of the whole, took from the table the draft of the Declaration of Independence as reported by Jefferson, the chairman of the committee appointed June 10th. It was read and debated all that day, and all the next day, and until the going down. of the sun on the 4th of July, when the clause recited above, referring to slavery, was stricken out, and it was adopted in its present form. On the 2d of August all the members save one signed the Declaration, fifty-six in all. The debate hinged upon the clause referring to African slavery, and at the instigation of Georgia and South Carolina all reference to that subject, save indirectly in the beginning of the instrument, was stricken out, and the opportunity of removing that monster crime in its comparative infancy was forever lost to the Colonial Congress, and the battle was transferred to our Congress, where it raged with varying success for eighty-five years, until in 1861 it culminated in civil war. Had our fathers stood firm for those three days, and could they have adopted the original Declaration as reported, we should probably have been spared the horrors of the last war. But at the demand of South Carolina and Georgia, in a spirit of concession, the convention yielded as a mere incident in the government, that which these two States were the first to demand in 1861, should be recognized as a fundamental principle of the government, and it is noticeable that these two States, at whose demand the concession was made, were the first two to secede in 1861 because the government would not recognize slavery as its chief corner stone.

This concession left only the doctrine of resistance to oppression of the colonies and self-government, as the causes of the revolt of the Colonists, as set forth in their bill of complaints against the king. The other doctrine against slavery was thrown over on to their posterity, and it has poisoned the life of our government in every department from that day to its final overthrow, as a military necessity by the Emancipation Proclamation. It had so thoroughly permeated every branch of legislation and every channel of national life, that it was finally lifted out of the halls of legislation, out of the sphere of discussion, into the stern and awful arbitrament of battle, when a million of men, a mighty sacrificial host, marched out to the wail of the horns and the throbbing of the drums, to wash the foul stains forever from our nation's