Ohio-poor, and where statements were made against their going to this wilderness.

Robert Livingston, after he had bought Louisiana, said: "I know we have paid a terrible price, but I can have the price back; I have told them that there will no man cross the Mississippi in the next century." So much for the wisdom of a wise man.

But the rank and file. -the men who were your grandfathers, and the women who were your grandmothers— these crossed the Alleghenies, and they made the new America. Always, since this country has come into being, the people have been in advance. It was the people who raised up and sustained John Quincy Adams, when the statesmen would have put him out of the Senate of the United States. It was the people who took the matter in their own hands and reconstructed the Union so it will stand forever as it is; and it is for you and me, in our congratulations of to-day, solemnly to pledge ourselves, before the altar which we call holiest, that this people shall be recognized always; that the rights promised shall be kept; that the people shall stand as the rulers of this great nation-given the absolute supremacy, under the law of God, through a government "of the people, for the people, by the people."

ADDRESS OF HENRY M. STORRS, D. D.

DELIVERED SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL EIGHTH.

Isaiah 35:1. "The wilderness shall be glad for them."

THE pioneers and founders have done their work and gone. They have left us material and tools. We are to enter into their labors and carry forward their work. I make no apology for naming as our subject that nation which they founded, as it was, and is, and shall be,

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, A SOURCE OF BLESSING. Your flint, dry and hard, is found to have its molecular activity. Granite is mobile. The ear held close to the dead earth in winter hears the million wheels on which spring is coming. A nation is never still. Your "unspeakable Turk" is no longer the Turk of Bajazet. "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar;" but your Russian peasant of to-day is less a Tartar than was Peter the Great in his time. The England of Victoria is not the England of Elizabeth; the America of A. D. 1888, not that of A. D. 1788. Constant interior activities, constant exterior changes have been going on to make this nation well nigh another people. Our early history, though so near, is already remote. Of all nationalities most fluent, we are ready to say, "Let the dead past bury its dead," and to relegate the seventeenth, eighteenth, and larger part of the nineteenth century to the care of any convenient undertaker. Have we not already entered upon a time when graver questions impend, and more gigantic forces are swiftly coming to the front?

Some men are anachronisms-coming before or after they are wanted. St. Paul describes himself as "one born out of due time." But these men seem born out of any time. Deaf when their names were called they woke up one or more centuries out of adjustment. Strangers and

foreigners to their own age, they flit through life-shadows of the Forgotten. Clinging to a dead Past they present right angles to living issues, and are ridden down by that Zeitgeist which drives nations forward. Like Niebuhr, they are more at home in some ancient Rome than in their own town and time.

It belongs to these memorial occasions to review that Past, when great foundations were laid, and to gather up its lessons of patriotic wisdom. We cannot afford to miss the animating inspirations which come upon us from a history like that belonging to the settlement of Marietta, A.D. 1788, and the unbroken movement of free and powerful empire from this point. They feed the fires of patriotic devotion. They create inextinguishable faith in the imperishable vigor of national life. The historical orations and addresses already delivered here have profoundly impressed this fact upon our minds. But now from the height of their great argument are we not summoned to make some study of that which is, and that which shall be?

Confessedly, there are difficulties in grasping this broad American Life; for, first of all, it is formative and not fixed. It has taken no final shape. There is a certain humor in listening to foreigners taking our gauge and announcing their judgment. They come over to "do America" in six weeks. When they report we are not surprised to find that they were "done" in most cases. "I confess," said a distinguished teacher in one of the larger Eastern universities -a ripe scholar and an author of distinction, native, to our manner born, and yet of wide foreign travel—“I confess I never felt the American throb until I came this side the Alleghanies and entered Ohio." What, then, of these "six-weeks" runners? But such a man as Chief Justice Coleridge, with the modesty of a judicial mind, and after much longer stay, says: "I do not feel that I understand America altogether. I have had glimpses into its life, and must speak with hesitation." And Herbert Spencer, with

some months of close study of this nation behind him, is forced to say substantially: "I have a very imperfect knowledge of America. I saw some things in your national life, and I have fixed some points from which I shall hope to observe and understand it better hereafter." But, besides this baffling vastness and elusive changefulness, there are manifold contradictory forces at work in it. The story was that the same Mayflower which brought the Pilgrims to the shores of New England afterwards brought slaves to the shores of Virginia. Were the story true, it would not unfitly represent what has been going on from the first-this commingling in rapid succession of "all sorts and conditions of men." True at the outset, it has been doubly true in our own day. Varieties of blood, varieties of thought, varieties of morals, religion, language, discrepant, discordant, divergent, have been finding equal home in the great body, and this immensely increases our difficulty in any effort to grasp the whole, or reach anything like a complete and determinate judgment of the American people.

But, while recognizing this diverse complexity, we still assert a certain clear individuality, a discernable and proper unity that in the end dominates all differences. It was objected, when German was proposed as an addition to the school curriculum in one of our cities, that "our people have the English tongue, and want no other taught in the public schools." "That is an open question;" replied the German element in the Board, "the nation, it is true, at first drew most largely from English loins and came with English tongue, but now it is drawing from other sources, and other tongues are coming. What we want is a language into which all tongues shall have brought their best, and which, when formed, shall be neither English, German, French, Scandinavian, nor Italian, but American!" That speaker, in ceasing to be a German, had not become, and did not intend to be "English," but "American." There is something real behind that. The local type is softening

its rigid and exclusive lines. The New Englander, forgetting that he was born east of the Hudson, merges into the greater whole. The Southerner-now that the war has rubbed out slavery's barbaric civilization-will soon forget his former self-isolation and suffer the capitalized North to melt into his wide pocket as snowstorms do into the gulfstreams off Hatteras. North and South, East and West, Atlantic shore and Pacific slope, are fast becoming vibrant with one common life-" the American throb."

It has been very happily said that "America was God's great charity to the human race." He gave it in the fulness of time to the suffering millions of older countries. First settled, it has ever since continued to be settled by "the poor." The birth-throe of this nation was the effort to make a home where the humbler classes might give to God a type of man grander and nobler than had ever been; its birth-motive, to create on a new continent, amidst unimpeded areas, a race better in opportunities, better in results, tenderer, truer and wider in sympathy, loftier in spirit a race showing at length God's ideal of man organized into a nation!

"Mankind has poured itself abroad here and is in its shirtsleeves at work; slovenly, down at the heel, without much polish, awkward, but with a sort of unbuttoned comfort in its look," says our poet-philosopher. But that idea of God is being wrought out. The amalgam here is of the finest. The nations have been sending us of their best. In these last forty years we have incorporated out of the Old World well nigh 15,000,000 citizens-mostly young, vigorous, thrifty, determined in purpose, positive in ideas, great-souled, looking forward to a brave future and resolved on it- and they have gone into the rich life of this people.

The ancient civilizations, one after another, died out for want of such fresh blood. Assyria dwelt unfed on the fat soil of the Euphrates and Tigris, and soon perished where she stood. Egypt incorporated nothing from abroad and soon fell prone along her Nile. Greece followed. Her