the causes and events of which history is the record are being
continuously re-enacted from a moral standpoint is of easy observation.
History, as the narration of the actions of men, with attendant results,
is but a repetition. Different minds and other hands may be the
instruments, but the effects from any given course involving fundamental
principles are the same. This was taught by philosophers 2,000 years
ago, some insisting that not only was this repetition observable in the
moral world, but that the physical world was repeated in detail--that
every person, every blade of grass, all nature, animate and inanimate,
reappeared upon the earth, engaged in the same pursuits, and fulfilling
the same ends formerly accomplished.

However skeptical we may be as to this theory of the ancients, the
student of modern history has accomplished little if he fails to be
impressed with the important truth standing out on every page in letters
of living light--that this great world of ours is governed by a system
of moral and physical laws that are as unerring in the bestowal of
rewards as certain in the infliction of penalties. The history of our
own country is one that will ever be an exemplification of this
pre-eminent truth. The protests of the victims of oppression in the old
world resulted in a moral upheaval and the establishment by force of
arms of a Republic in America. The Revolutionary Congress, of which, in
adopting the Federal Constitution, closed with this solemn injunction:
"Let it be remembered that it has been the pride and boast of America
that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human
nature." And it was reserved for the founders of this nation to
establish in the words of an illustrious benefactor, "a Government of
the people, for the people, and by the people"--a Government deriving
all its powers from the consent of the governed, where freedom of
opinion, whether relating to Church or State, was to have the widest
scope and fullest expression consistent with private rights and public
good---where the largest individuality could be developed and the
patrician and plebeian meet on a common level and aspire to the highest
honor within the gift of the people.

This was its character, this its mission. How it has sustained the
character, how fulfilled the mission upon which it entered, the
impartial historian has indited, every page of which is redolent with
precept and example that point a moral.