heir just
obedience, and the magistrates honorable for their just
administration."

And with these ideas, "with reverence to God and good conscience to
men," the first General Assembly in 1682 enacted a common code of
sixty-one laws, in which the foundation-stones of the civil and
criminal jurisprudence of this broad commonwealth were laid, and a
style of government ordained so reasonable, moderate, just, and equal
in its provisions that no one yet has found just cause to deny the
wisdom and beneficence of its structure, whilst Montesquieu pronounces
it "an instance unparalleled in the world's history of the foundation
of a great state laid in peace, justice, and equality."

THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

Two hundred years have gone by since this completed organization of
our noble commonwealth. Her free and liberal principles then still
remained in large measure to be learned by some of the other American
colonies. From the very start she was the chief conservator of what
was to be the model for all this grand Union of free States--a
character which she has never lost in all the history of our national
existence. Six generations of stalwart freemen has she reared beneath
her shielding care to people her own vast territory and that of many
other States, no one of which has ever failed in truthfulness to the
great principles in which she was born. Always more solid than noisy,
and more reserved than obtrusive, she has ever served as the great
balance-wheel in the mighty engine of our national organization. Her
life, commingled with other lives attempered to her own, now pulsates
from ocean to ocean and from the frozen lakes to the warm Gulf waters,
all glad and glorious in the unity and sunshine of constitutional
government in the hands of a free people. With her population drawn
from all nationalities to learn from her lips the sacred lessons of
independent self-rule, she has sent it forth as freely to the westward
to build co-equal States in the beauty of her own image, whilst four
millions of her children still abide in growing happiness under her
maternal care. Verily, it was the spirit of prophecy which said, two
hundred years ago, "_God will bless that ground_."

That blessing we have lived to see. May it continue for yet many
centennials, and grow as it endures! May the faith and spirit of the
men through whose piety and wisdom it has come still warm and animate
the hearts of their successors to the latest ge