e, with walls that were 350 feet high, eighty-five feet thick, with
a hundred brazen gates, the city filled with greater wealth than had
ever been brought before within walls. But out in the country a few
hardy mountaineers had been digging ditches for some time. Nobody took
much account of them, yet even that night, in the midst of Belshazzar's
luxury and feasting, the veteran troops of Cyrus were marching silently
under the dripping walls, down the bed of the lowered Euphrates, so that
that which had been the very passageway of Babylon's wealth became the
pathway of her ruin.

Unless we preserve the character and the institutions our fathers gave
us we will go down as other nations have gone. We may talk and theorize
as much as we please, but this is the law of nature--the stronger pushes
the weaker to the wall and takes its place.

In the history of civilization first one nation rises and becomes the
torch-bearer, and then another takes the torch as it becomes stronger,
the stronger always pushing the weaker aside and becoming in its turn
the leader. So it has been with the Assyrian, and Babylonian, and
Median, and, coming on down, with the Greek, the Roman, the Frank, and
then came that great race, the Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic race, which seems to
me to-day to be the great torch-bearer for this and for the next coming
time. Each nation that has borne the torch of civilization has followed
some path peculiarly its own. Egyptian, Syrian, Persian, Greek, Roman,
Frank, all had their ideal of power--order and progress directed under
Supreme authority, maintained by armed organization. We bear the torch
of civilization because we possess the principles of civil liberty, and
we have the character, or should have the character, which our fathers
have transmitted to us with which to uphold it. If we have it not, then
be sure that with the certainty of a law of nature some nation--it may
be one or it may be another--it may be Grecian or it may be Slav,
already knocking at our doors, will push us from the way, and take the
torch and bear it onward, and we shall go down.

But I have no fear of the future. I think, looking around upon the
country at present, that even if it would seem to us at times that there
are gravest perils which confront us, that even though there may be
evidence of weakening in our character, notwithstanding this I say, I
believe the great Anglo-Saxon race, not only on the other side of the
water, but on th