the vulgar phrase I quoted to you involves a fact? that the celebration of the Fourth of July is merely a piece of stage pageantry, a play of which the actors and audience are alike thoroughly weary? When George the Fourth was crowned, the pageant of the Coronation gave such general delight, that it was put as a spectacle on the stage of Drury Lane theatre. Here it was copied with such accurate magnificence that Elliston, who performed the King, was always so intoxicated with his part as to bless his assembled people with tearful solemnity, and it would have been hard for the most cautious observer of palace and theatre in 1821 to say which was the real, and which was the stage King. But nations are waking up to the belief that such spectacles are fit for the stage alone; that when we go out from the doors of the theatre to real life, we must stop all plays, and purge everything in the nature of a pageant from actual government. Can it then be, that we, who wonder why England is so patient with her monarch and her peers, have been in reality prolonging to a decrepit old age a mimic enthusiasm for certain old-world events, whose real significance was exhausted a generation ago? I propose to give this hour to a consideration of the question; and if our answer is "yes then let this be the last speech that

ends the fifth act of the hundred years' pageantry, and the fireworks to-night close the transformation scene of the empty spectacle.

One hundred years! Let us try to realize, fellowcitizens, the immense distance there is between the thoughts that might fairly occupy an orator in 1771, and those that now rise instinctively to his mind. The orations for the first thirteen years were delivered in commemoration of the Boston Massacre of 1770. That singular event was much in the minds of all men in both Europe and America. It was the first armed collision between the colonies and the mother country; has been considered by many to contain the germ of the Declaration of Independence; and was well calculated to make such careful observers as Horace Walpole tremble for its effect on national feelings. No more striking event for an orator a hundred years ago than the danger of separation between East and West.

A hundred years pass, and is there a more striking event for an orator than the marvellous union of east and west by the Ocean Telegraph and the Pacific Railroads? Suppose another collision between English and Americans in the streets of Boston to-day. They could get word across the ocean, and we across the continent, each in an instant of

time; but our succors would be at hand from San Francisco long before theirs could arrive from London. I look upon this absolute trampling down the barriers of material nature as an event worthy to close the American century which appeared to begin with the breaking of the ties of blood and nationality.

But I can bring before you the lapse of a century perhaps more vividly in another way. There is no better way of noting this lapse than by the lives of men. Towards the end of the year 1770 died George Grenville, the first British minister who ever conceived the idea of taxing the American colonies. It was but about eight years since he had first been the responsible author of any measures of state. But as the inventor of the stamp act, he had succeeded in making himself utterly odious to the colonies, and when, not very long before the first of these orations, the news of his death would be fully understood all over America, many a man would say, "But for him, we might have been as good friends as ever with England."

And now, fellow-citizens, our newspapers have hardly got done with commemoration of the death of that son of England whose name is best known to Americans of all the hordes that acknowledge her sway. It may be that in truth we hold to the opinion

of Carlyle, who wrote many years ago that "the British islands were inhabited by something like 20,000,000 of men, women and children, mostly fools." But as long as Charles Dickens lived, we could not, for his sake, hate England altogether. The expressions of sorrow for his death, which, beginning from the palace, were echoed throughout the length and breadth of England, were as much exceeded here as our land is larger than hers. The few fanatical hands that sought to fling a nettle instead of a rose on his bier were indignantly and contemptuously beaten down. Nay more, those jests and criticisms on America, which in other Englishmen are an offence, we positively refuse to take in ill-part from him, and so as the hundred years close, we felt that all the hated names of generations, Grenvilles and Gages and Burgoynes - Tarletons and Brokes and Pakenhams - the cold friend and the noisy foe, the Lords of the Council, and the Lairds of the Dockyard, have not done so much by their united efforts to keep the countries apart, as Dickens and Longfellow to keep them together. Nor am I claiming too much for our revolution and the progress it has caused in the world, when I say this, that but for the resistance inaugurated here, in favor of a new order of things, as against the old tradi

tions of England,-a new order hardly better comprehended by our friends like Burke and Chatham, than by our enemies like Grenville and North-but for the revolution, I say, of America in 1770, it, would not have been physically possible, not morally con ceivable that in England, in 1870, the tears of Queen, Lords and Commons should have been min gled over the grave of such a writer as Charles Dickens.

For this century -the century between the Boston Massacre and the Pacific Railroad between George Grenville and Charles Dickensis but the history of the development of that idea which first seemed to flash into men's minds with the snap of the British firelocks on the Fifth of March, and first took authoritative form on the Fourth of July - the nationality of America. In these hundred years, this great conception has not been gathering growth uniformly, but by successive stages or crises. And I wish to call your attention to these culminating points in the nation's progress, and if possible, to deduce from ' their history three important truths.

1st. That the Declaration of Independence contains the hint, at least, of all the successive developments of our nationality.

2d. That at every stage something has been left

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