Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/261

Rh and high destiny, to discover and to pursue the pathway which leads to the companionship of angelic natures in his spiritual home.

“Ask we too the ages what they have done to develope the true theory of political organisation, to improve the mechanism of the social system, to impart practical wisdom to its ministrations, in order that the State may discharge its high duty to the citizen, for whose sake it exists, and whose allegiance it claims. They point us, in reply, to the council of the Amphictyons, to the laws of Lycurgus and of Solon, to the tables of the Roman law-givers, to the body of the civil law, to Magna Charta, to the Bill of Eights, and to the American Constitution—those precious records of mind, which stand up as pillared inscriptions in the shadowy past, along the lengthened line of civil progress. They exhibit in contrast the wild war of anarchy, with the beneficent reign of social order—the unmitigated despotism of the earlier governments, with the checks and balances of the constitutional monarchies of the day—the wild, unformed democracies of the past, those first experiments of young freedom, with the written constitutions, the perfect action, of the the modern representative republics.

“How manifest it is then that our age is an age of ‘results,’ the causes of which lie far behind us in the stream of time.” I have given so much of this speech, because I think that it affords a good specimen of the tendency and impulse of speeches in this country, and especially in the Western country, where society evidently feels itself to belong in a high degree to the citizenship of the world; to be universal, because it is composed of people of all nations flowing in hither by emigration; and perhaps also because the immense stretch of landscape in these States of the prairies, leads the soul to take an extensive flight. After his great railway tour round the world,