versary of the birth of this
remarkable man, the foremost figure of antiquity. The recurrence of what
no more than six centuries ago was a popular _fete_ day and even now is
seldom permitted to pass without recognition by those to whom liberty
means something more precious than opportunity for gain, excites a
peculiar emotion. It matters little whether or no tradition has correctly
fixed the time and place of Smith's birth. That he was born; that being
born he wrought nobly at the work that his hand found to do; that by the
mere force of his powerful intellect he established and perfected our
present benign form of government, under which civilization has attained
its highest and ripest development--these are facts beside which mere
questions of chronology and geography are trivial and without
significance.

That this extraordinary man originated the Smithocratic form of government
is, perhaps, open to intelligent doubt; possibly it had a _de facto_
existence in crude and uncertain shapes as early as the time of Edward
XVII,--an existence local, unorganized and intermittent. But that he
cleared it of its overlying errors and superstitions, gave it definite
form and shaped it into a coherent and practical scheme there is
unquestionable evidence in fragments of ancestral literature that have
come down to us, disfigured though they are with amazingly contradictory
statements regarding his birth, parentage and manner of life before he
strode out upon the political stage as the Liberator of Mankind. It is
said that Shakspar, a poet whose works had in their day a considerable
vogue, though it is difficult to say why, alludes to him as "the noblest
Roman of them all," our forefathers of the period being known as Romans or
Englishmen, indifferently. In the only authentic fragment of Shakspar
extant, however, this passage is not included.

Smith's military power is amply attested in an ancient manuscript of
undoubted authenticity which has recently been translated from the
Siamese. It is an account of the water battle of Loo, by an eye-witness
whose name, unfortunately, has not reached us. It is stated that in this
famous engagement Smith overthrew the great Neapolitan general, whom he
captured and conveyed in chains to the island of Chickenhurst.

In his "Political History of Europe" the late Professor Mimble has this
luminous sentence: "With the single exception of Ecuador there was no
European government that the Liberator