For these reasons, we may say that the work of the Declaration is not exhausted; that its celebration is not played out. But there is one more great truth I alluded to, namely, that at least one more stage must come in its legitimate development, before its work is over. I have hinted it before it is for America to understand and assume her true position as a member of the commonwealth of nations. Almost simultaneous with the completion of the Pacific railroad is the doubling of our telegraphic communication with Europe, and its extension to India; and soon we shall see a belt of telegraph entirely around the world. As we are thus brought physically nearer the other nations, I trust we shall be brought morally nearer to them, that we shall give up the selfish, exclusive, repellent feeling which we call independent and American, and know that all nations form one brotherhood.

It cannot, I think, be denied, that such a feeling does very largely exist, - a feeling that as we are on another continent, so we are on another world. It is easy to see its origin. As colonies we knew Europe only through England. America's greatest friends and lovers, men like Chatham and Burke, who attacked the measures of the Ministry as legally or morally wrong, always seemed to maintain that

through England alone the colonies ought to communicate with the world. Naturally, then, Americans came to believe that the Declaration separated them, cut them adrift, cast them off from England, Europe, the world, and left them to work out the problem of national duty in isolation.

Hence arises that strange feeling which makes so many Americans visit the whole of Europe as they visit the buried cities near Naples; as a sort of enormous Pompeii, where a kindly interposition of Providence has entirely destroyed all real life, and left a variety of national and social relics as in a museum, where we can see how a set of unreal people live as they lived in the dark ages, bearing no kind of relation to ourselves. Or if they advance a step beyond this, they still have a sort of Pompeian idea of Europe and Asia; for they look on them as containing many objects suitable for models of beauty and luxury in art or architecture, but hardly a thing which deserves to be copied in our real practical life; a life in which they are fairly convinced no European can teach them anything. Nay, can it be doubted, that there exists among us a still deeper, darker spirit of doubt, distrust, almost of hatred to Europe, which looks on the Atlantic as typical merely of the great gulf forever fixed between us? If this feeling,

which I grant is very vague, were brought to an accurate definition, it would be that all but the lowest class in Europe were hopelessly opposed to us in principle; and that without a convulsion, to which the French Revolution offers no parallel, after which all that was left alive should at once model itself on our example,—we never can be in sympathy.

Now, fellow-citizens, such feelings may have a certain lofty pride and freedom about them; but they are wholly ungenerous, wholly unchristian, and certainly derive no countenance from the Declaration. That wonderful document does not isolate us from the nations, it sets us among them; - it recognizes a decent respect for the opinions of mankind; it tells us not to regard England and the rest of the world with distrust, suspicion and hatred, but as "enemies in war, in peace, friends." It is time for us to remember these maxims, -it is time for us to cease looking at the old world from the wrong side. When we burst away a hundred years ago, we looked back at Europe with a scowl, and turned our faces steadily westward-we broke down the hard ground, and climbed the hills; we spread over the rich plains, we toiled through the desert. and up the eternal peaks; and rushing down the golden valleys, at last we stand on the shore of ocean; and as we still fix our

gaze westward, we find that the world is not an endless plane, but a bounded sphere, and that the onward look from the new West only brings us back to the other side of the old East. Then, if we gaze clearly, without prejudice or prepossession, we find that after all, as both religion and science tell, we too spring from that mystic eastern world, whence every race of man has come. Then we shall learn that our fathers did well in setting us among the nations. We shall learn that the old world is no congeries of buried cities, no mere museum of antediluvian curiosities, but the real home of live menmen who know how to live: we shall find models there worthy of our imitation, not merely in the luxuries of life, not merely in its pretty matters and playthings, but in real solid concerns of strength, progress, happiness; and finally we shall know that the great heart of Europe, from king to serf, beats with us and not against us.

Fellow-citizens, this problem of the true relations of the United States to the rest of the world is at this moment forcing itself upon us. At this very moment we are in danger of refusing a gift which old Asia, the ever patient mother of the world, is offering to the youngest of her children. When we placed flowers the other day on the graves of our

brethren in gratitude for their noble sacrifice, we could not help thinking what a terrible gap they left among us, and how all our difficulties at present are derived from the one want of men-men with arms, heads, hands -to fill, however imperfectly, the place of our lost thousands. The plenty that has come with peace is of no use. Our corn stands unreaped, our timber rots in the forest, our iron moulders in the mountain, for the want of men, men to do the work. At this moment a people of the old world -the most ancient, the most industrious, the most thrifty, the most ingenious, the best convinced of the value of education are crowding from their overstocked land to our doors, not as sturdy beggars, but as honest laborers, asking for work. Will you turn them away? Will you persist in refusing their help to make the national burdens lighter? Have you so poorly learnt the Declaration that you are going at this hour to take up the old cries of "race," and "America for the Americans "? Good Heavens! Ten years ago the North rose against the oppressions of the African swore there should

be no distinction of color, steadily refused to consider the question, "What will you do with the Negro?" and persisted, at the risk of national existence, in establishing that the black man was