human devices; and all hearts and all understandings, most of all the
opinions and influences of the unwilling, are wonderfully attracted
and compelled to bear forward the change, which becomes more an
obedience to the law of universal nature than submission to the
arbitrament of man.

In the fulness of time a republic rose up in the wilderness of
America. Thousands of years had passed away before this child of the
ages could be born. From whatever there was of good in the systems of
former centuries she drew her nourishment; the wrecks of the past were
her warnings. With the deepest sentiment of faith fixed in her inmost
nature, she disenthralled religion from bondage to temporal power,
that her worship might be worship only in spirit and in truth. The
wisdom which had passed from India through Greece, with what Greece
had added of her own; the jurisprudence of Rome; the mediaeval
municipalities; the Teutonic method of representation; the political
experience of England; the benignant wisdom of the expositors of the
law of nature and of nations in France and Holland, all shed on her
their selectest influence. She washed the gold of political wisdom
from the sands wherever it was found; she cleft it from the rocks; she
gleaned it among ruins. Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and
sages, out of all the experience of past human life, she compiled a
perennial political philosophy, the primordial principles of national
ethics. The wise men of Europe sought the best government in a mixture
of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; America went behind these
names to extract from them the vital elements of social forms, and
blend them harmoniously in the free commonwealth, which comes nearest
to the illustration of the natural equality of all men. She intrusted
the guardianship of established rights to law, the movements of reform
to the spirit of the people, and drew her force from the happy
reconciliation of both.

Republics had heretofore been limited to small cantons, or cities and
their dependencies; America, doing that of which the like had not
before been known upon the earth, or believed by kings and statesmen
to be possible, extended her republic across a continent. Under her
auspices the vine of liberty took deep root and filled the land; the
hills were covered with its shadow, its boughs were like the goodly
cedars, and reached unto both oceans. The fame of this only daughter
of freedom went out into all the