through and through, with all defects, with all shortcomings, with all difficulties, and all dangers, even a New England judgment, censorious though it is apt to be, could but pronounce a land of which the sternest of our New England ancestors would have been proud to-day. If, then, we look at this nation in its relations to the rest of the world, these few outcasts of fortune, cast upon the New England shore in a December night, being the beginnings and the foundations of the nation, this nation, it is not too much to say, finds every other nation ready to respect its power and confess its justice; so much so that in the preservation of the peace of the world this nation has the readiest and the safest part that ever a nation had. Nobody that is powerful desires to quarrel with it and nobody that is powerless is it possible for us to quarrel with.

Thus all our energies, all our duties, all our labors, dangers, and difficulties are within our own borders; and the New England of to-day, placing itself in present relations to things as they are, must determine what line of duty, what path of honor, what purposes, and what results it proposes to follow in the current questions of the day. Its duty, its temper, are not necessarily the same as they have been heretofore. The same principles are to guide, but the action may be different. We have finished a struggle that has made permanent and general in the constitution, in the laws, in the arrangements of society, a complete admission of the equality of man, of the safety of citizenship, and of the duty of mutual love. Now, after a great civil war, greater than any nation has ever endured separately without disintegration or injury to its integrity, there are duties that do not belong to the condition either preparatory to the strife or when the strife was in progress. We have found out what

bayonets mean in this country; and you remember what Hosea Biglow says on that subject:

"Lord! didn't I feel streaked,

The first time I found out why bayonets were peaked."

And you will observe that their utility is of a somewhat demonstrative character. But I think it is Bismarck who is credited with the mot that bayonets are not an institution to sit down on. And so the American people, as averse as any people could be to the use or the administration of bayonets, is the last nation of the world that would wish to sit down on that institution.

When, therefore, we have come to a time when, having secured every purpose of war; when, having enlisted the law and the institutions of society in furtherance of New England virtues, that justice and duty and right should prevail throughout this land, let us accept at once what we shall be recreant and faithless to our inheritance if we do not aecept, that New England opinions, New England ideas, and New England results are to make their way in this country by moral and intellectual methods. And when we talk of reactionary influences and tendencies let us understand that if we are not willing to be patient and faithful laborers in building up the wastes of this land, if we are impatient to precipitate, that we are those that will be the leaders in reaction from the moral and intellectual processes to the finished methods of force. Whenever those methods shall become necessary, whenever justice and right shall require that defence, New England will resume her arms. But New England will not resort to animosities or jealousies in order to reach the ruder and grosser methods of hostility when moral suasion cannot prevail. I say, then, that New England will practise in patience and in faith these methods; and if they

be slow it is because the moral position of the country, the pervasion of the whole community by character, sentiments, the diffusion of manners, of habits, of systems, is a gradual and a slow process; and the moral government and the moral forces of this world are not to be changed even in honor of our New England ancestry.

Now, there are three questions before the people of the country to-day and they are all public, all unselfish, all patriotic, all elevated, and all ennobling as subjects of contemplation and of action. They are the public peace in this large and general sense that I have indicated. They are the public faith, without which there is no such thing as honorable national life; and the public service, which unless pure and strong and noble makes all the peans of free government but doggerel in our ears.

Now, in regard to the public faith, the same principles which I have indicated as showing that we have passed the stage of antagonism, of hostility, and must reach the stage of co-operation, of sympathy, and of succor, apply to all these great questions of the public debt and of the nation's burdens. They are great burdens; they do impose great difficulties; they do include perhaps great dangers. We need no hostilities between North and South, none between East and West, none between debtor and creditor; we need all our resources, all our wealth, all our gold, all our silver, all our industry, and all our thrift. Bear, then, with such differences of opinion as grow out of differences of situation; make the most of brotherhood and the least of dissension; see that great and common burdens rest unequally and are to be borne unequally; see to it that there shall be no failures in that perfect disposition on the part of the wealthy and powerful States of New England and their wealthy distribu

tive share of the country in bearing the burdens that rest more heavily upon others than upon ourselves. Let us remember that generous and wise maxim of Mr. Webster, who in the bitterest of the strifes of his declining years used no words of harshness against disputants, and was ready to say of them, as he did say, "They are not bad men, but bad

reasoners."

And now about the public service. Well, on that subject it may be said that one good example teaches more than many precepts, and perhaps in an after-dinner speech the least said is the soonest mended. But nevertheless there should be no step backward in magistrates, in statesmen, in preachers, in teachers, in editors, in the people. We must go on. We do understand as a people the difficulties that we are in; we do understand as a people the methods by which we have reached them; and we do understand, I think, the way out of them. It may be hedged with difficulties and opposed with dangers. It touches the very life of free government; it touches the very sincerity of the public methods of the nation. For such is human nature that, as Mr. Burke has said (and I hope I do not too much misquote his words), "By whatever paths the great places in a State are to be reached by its public men that path will be trod; and if the path be devious, and slimy, and wicked, and horrid with calumnies and jealousies, nevertheless, if that be the only path upward, the statesman will take it." It is for you to say you as a people to say-whether or no the paths of your public life shall be clean and bright and noble and ever tending upward. I believe there is great good fortune in this people that, to start with, you have a president who has never pursued any devious paths and does not propose to encourage their pursuit by others.

JA

FROUDE

AMES ANTHONY FROUDE, a distinguished English historian, was born at Dartington, Devonshire, April 23, 1818, and was educated at Westminster and at Oriel College, Oxford. In 1842 he was elected to a fellowship at Exeter, and two years later received deacon's orders; but having to a certain extent changed his views he wrote the "Nemesis of Faith," which was regarded as so heretical that he lost his fellowship and a prospective appointment in Tasmania. In 1856 he published the first two volumes of his "History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada," which was completed in twelve volumes in 1869, and met with the highest praise for its literary style, and the severest criticism for its historical accuracy, especially for its paradoxical estimate of King Henry VIII as a hero. In 1869 he was appointed rector of St. Andrew's University, and received the degree of LL. D. In 1874, and again in 1875, he was sent on a governmental mission to South Africa and published his impressions in "Two Lectures " (1880); and in "Oceana" (1886). He was Carlyle's literary executor and edited several volumes of letters and reminiscences and finally his "Life" (1882-84). In 1892 he succeeded E. A. Freeman as professor of modern history. He died October 20, 1894, at Salcombe, Devonshire. Among his other works are four volumes of "Short Studies on Great Subjects (1867-82); The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1871-74); "Cæsar: a Sketch (1879); The English in the West Indies" (1888); "The Two Chiefs of Dunboy," an Irish historical romance (1889); "The Divorce of Katherine of Aragon" (1891); "Life and Letters of Erasmus " (1894).

66

INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON SCOTTISH

CHARACTER

DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER, 1865

HAVE undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen once said to me of our