on the site of Fort
Duquesne; if he could have heard of 5,000,000,000 of passengers carried
in the United States by electric motor power in a year; if he could have
realized all the rest of the magician's tale of our time.

Still more would he have been astounded and elated could he have
foreseen, beyond all advances in material production, the unbroken
strength of that political structure which he had so grand a share in
rearing. Into this very region where we are this afternoon, swept wave
after wave of immigration; English from Virginia flowed over the border,
bringing English traits, literature, habits of mind; Scots, or
Scots-Irish, originally from Ulster, flowed in from Central
Pennsylvania; Catholics from Southern Ireland; new hosts from Southern
and East Central Europe. This is not the Fourth of July. But people of
every school would agree that it is no exuberance of rhetoric, it is
only sober truth to say that the persevering absorption and
incorporation of all this ceaseless torrent of heterogenous elements
into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State is an
achievement that neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church, neither
Byzantine Empire nor Russian, not Charles the Great nor Charles the
Fifth nor Napoleon ever rivaled or approached.

We are usually apt to excuse the slower rate of liberal progress in our
Old World by contrasting the obstructive barriers of prejudice,
survival, solecism, anachronism, convention, institution, all so
obstinately rooted, even when the branches seem bare and broken, in an
old world, with the open and disengaged ground of the new. Yet in fact
your difficulties were at least as formidable as those of the older
civilizations into whose fruitful heritage you have entered. Unique was
the necessity of this gigantic task of incorporation, the assimilation
of people of divers faiths and race. A second difficulty was more
formidable still--how to erect and work a powerful and wealthy State on
such a system as to combine the centralized concert of a federal system
with local independence, and to unite collective energy with the
encouragement of individual freedom.

This last difficulty that you have so successfully up to now surmounted,
at the present hour confronts the mother country and deeply perplexes
her statesmen. Liberty and union have been called the twin ideas of
America. So, too, they are the twin ideals of all responsible men in
Great Britain; altho responsi