ken as secured. Perhaps of all the contributions of America to
human civilization this is greatest. The reign of force is not yet over,
and at intervals it has its triumphant hours, but reason, justice,
humanity fight with success their long and steady battle for a wider
sway.

Of all the points of social advance, in my country at least, during the
last generation none is more marked than the change in the position of
women, in respect of rights of property, of education, of access to new
callings. As for the improvement of material well-being, and its
diffusion among those whose labor is a prime factor in its creation, we
might grow sated with the jubilant monotony of its figures, if we did
not take good care to remember, in the excellent words of the President
of Harvard, that those gains, like the prosperous working of your
institutions and the principles by which they are sustained, are in
essence moral contributions, "being principles of reason, enterprise,
courage, faith, and justice, over passion, selfishness, inertness,
timidity, and distrust." It is the moral impulses that matter. Where
they are safe, all is safe.

When this and the like is said, nobody supposes that the last word has
been spoken as to the condition of the people either in America or
Europe. Republicanism is not itself a panacea for economic difficulties.
Of self it can neither stifle nor appease the accents of social
discontent. So long as it has no root in surveyed envy, this discontent
itself is a token of progress.

What, cries the skeptic, what has become of all the hopes of the time
when France stood upon the top of golden hours? Do not let us fear the
challenge. Much has come of them. And over the old hopes time has
brought a stratum of new.

Liberalism is sometimes suspected of being cold to these new hopes, and
you may often hear it said that Liberalism is already superseded by
Socialism. That a change is passing over party names in Europe is plain,
but you may be sure that no change in name will extinguish these
principles of society which are rooted in the nature of things, and are
accredited by their success. Twice America has saved liberalism in Great
Britain. The War for Independence in the eighteenth century was the
defeat of usurping power no less in England than here. The War for Union
in the nineteenth century gave the decisive impulse to a critical
extension of suffrage, and an era of popular reform in the mother
country