great deeds of their own to commemorate, and the recollection of common sacrifices and a common glory to bind them together. And scarcely had this great change been completed when the French Revolution came; and then for a time the splendor of the American Revolution seemed to have been eclipsed by the variety and magnitude of the events which followed it. Men forgot, as is their wont, what their fathers had done, that they might magnify their own achievements. Their eyes were too much dazzled by the meteors that were flashing before them, to feel the full force of the clear and steady light that was shining on them from the past. But History forgets not. In her vast treasurehouse are garnered all the fruits and all the seeds of civilization. At her awful tribunal men await in silent expectation, face to face with their deeds. She assigns to each his place, apportions to each his reward; and when the solemn moment arrives wherein it is permitted to lift the veil from human errors and frailties, and give to man and to circumstances their due part in the production of events, the wondrous chain of causes and effects stretches out before us into the deepest recesses of the past, uniting by indissoluble links the proud aspiration of to-day with the hope that was breathed, half formed and almost indefinite, three thousand years ago.

In this light the American Revolution has, at last, taken its place in history, both a cause and an

effect; receiving its impulse from the pas transmitting it with a constantly increasing to a future yet unrevealed.

What now was the cause of this rapid cha the opinions and affections of three millions o -a change so complete as almost to justi opinion, that it was the work of design fro beginning? How was confidence transforme suspicion, loyalty into aversion, submission am into defiance and hatred? How could stat be so ignorant of the common laws of our n as to suppose that the industry which had fostered by security could survive the sense curity? How could philosophers so far forg force of general principles, as to suppose th descendants of men who, when few in numb hard pressed by poverty, had preferred a v ness for their home to a yoke for their consci should so far belie their blood as tamely to ren their birthright when they were become a p ful people, and had made that wilderness a ga

And here, at the threshold of our inquir must pause a moment to remember that noth so fatal to a correct understanding of history blending and confounding of the two class causes which underlie all human events. For every occurrence may be traced back to som mediate antecedent, it belongs also as a p those great classes of events, which, gatherin themselves the results of whole periods, ena

to assign to nations and epochs, as well as to incidents and individuals, their appropriate place in the progress of humanity.

Keeping, therefore, this distinction in view, we find the first cause of alienation in the colonial system itself. This system had grown up gradually and almost imperceptibly; beginning with a few feeble colonists scattered over a vast extent of territory, or clustering here and there in towns which, in Europe, would hardly have passed for villages. These colonists had no wish to dissolve their legal connection with England. Reverence for law and precedent, as I have already hinted, was a national characteristic ; an inborn sense which they had inherited from their fathers, and could not eradicate without changing their whole nature. They still trod and loved to tread in the footsteps which they knew. The beaten track was a safe and a plain track, full of pleasant associations, familiar to their eyes and dear to their hearts. With this under their feet they walked firmly, like men who know what is behind them and what is before.

They had brought with them the common law, and, as far as the difference of circumstances permitted, followed its precepts. They had brought their municipal forms with them, and adapted them to the wants of their new home. And above all, they had brought with them the animating principle, the vital spirit of those laws and forms, the

spirit of English liberty. They had forsaken one home for it, and without it no place would have looked to them like home. It was their inspiration, their guide, and their comforter, interwoven with all their habits and thoughts and feelings, and inseparable from their conception of duty to themselves, to their children, and to their Maker.

The spirit of English liberty is not an abstract conception, logically deduced from fundamental principles, and applied to the practice and purposes of life. Neither is it a sentiment, reaching the feelings through the imagination, and giving its coloring to thought because it had already been speculatively combined with action. It is an instinctive conviction, confirmed by reason, deep, ever present and ever active. You find it first in the forests of Germany, an absolute individuality, unlike anything that the Greek or Roman world had ever seen; strong-willed, self-dependent, spurning involuntary control, yet submitting cheerfully to the consequences of its own acts. Thence it crosses the seas as a conqueror, and suffering, as conquerors generally do, from the completeness of its own triumph, it relaxes somewhat of its vigor, passes through many vicissitudes, and, having survived the associations both of its origin and its transmigration, comes out, with all the freshness of its youth about it, in the meadow of Runnymede.

Here it entered upon a new phase of existence; a phase which gradually developed all its character

istic traits, strengthening and purifying it till it became the most perfect conciliation which the world had yet seen of the rights of the individual with the rights of society. And this was the form which it had assumed when our fathers first brought it to these shores, where for forty years it was allowed to grow at will, and had already penetrated every part of the new society, before the guardians of the old bethought them of taking it under their protection.

The first fruit of this protection was the Act of Navigation, so long celebrated as the masterpiece of statesmanship, and so tenaciously clung to as the bulwark of England's commercial prosperity. The foundation, indeed, had been laid by the Long Parliament, and confirmed by the courts of Westminster. But it was not until Charles II. had entered upon his career of profligacy and corruption, that the Colonists began to feel the chains gradually tightening around their commerce, and contracting the sphere of their industry. First came a five per cent duty upon exports and imports; then the great Act itself, closing their ports to every flag but that of England, restricting the pursuit of commerce to native or naturalized subjects, and prohibiting the exportation of certain "enumerated articles, such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, ginger, or dye-woods," produced in the Colonies, to any country but England. Still the Colonies grew and prospered, and still the jealous