power and prosperity and liberty and enlightenment are the wonder and admiration of the world.

All hail, Columbus, discoverer, dreamer, hero, and apostle! We, here, of every race and country, recognize the horizon which bounded his vision and the infinite scope of his genius. The voice of gratitude and praise for all of the blessings which have been showered upon mankind by his adventure is limited to no language, but is uttered in every tongue. Neither marble nor brass can fitly form his statue. Continents are his monument, and unnumbered millions present and to come, who enjoy in their liberties and their happiness the fruits of his faith, will reverently guard and preserve, from century to century, his name and fame.

WILLIAM MAXWELL EVARTS

WHAT THE AGE OWES TO AMERICA

William M. Evarts was born in Boston, Mass., 1818. He graduated at Yale in 1837, took a law course in Cambridge, and settled in New York. Here he began and here he carried on his practice through a long life, the events of which are chiefly the records of his successful conduct of important cases. From July 15, 1868, until the end of Johnson's term he served at Attorney General of the United States. In 1872 he was one of the counsel for the United States before the General Board of Arbitration to pass on the Alabama claims preferred by the United States against Great Britain for damage inflicted on American commerce during the Civil War.

He became Secretary of State in the Hayes Cabinet in 1877, after serving as the advocate of the Republican party before the electoral commission in determining the results of that election. His last public office was as senator from New York from 1885 to 1891. He died in 1901. The speech given here was delivered in Philadelphia, July 4, 1876, at the Centennial Exposition, held in celebration of the one hundredth year of our Independence; other addresses are printed in Volume II.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:-The event which to-day we commemorate supplies its own reflections and enthusiasms and brings its own plaudits. They do not all hang on the voice of the speaker nor do they greatly depend upon the contacts and associations of the place. The Declaration of American Independence was when it occurred a capital transaction in human affairs; as such it has kept its place in history; as such it will maintain itself while human interest in human institutions shall endure. The scene and the actors, for their profound impression upon the world at the time and ever since, have owed nothing to dramatic effects, nothing to epical exaggerations.

To the eye there was nothing wonderful, nor vast, or splen

did, or pathetic in the movement or the display. Imagination or act can give no sensible grace or decoration to the persons, the place, or the performance which made up the business of that day. The worth and the force that belong to the agents and the action rest wholly on the wisdom, the courage, and the faith that formed and executed the great design, and the potency and permanence of its operation upon the affairs of the world, which, as foreseen and legitimate consequences, followed. The dignity of the act is the deliberate, circumspect, open, and serene performance by these men in the clear light of day, and by a concurrent purpose, of a civic duty, which embraced the greatest hazards to themselves and to all the people from whom they held this disputed discretion, but which to their sober judgments promised benefits to that people and their posterity from generation to generation exceeding these hazards and commensurate with its own fitness.

The question of their conduct is to be measured by the actual weight and pressure of the manifold considerations which surrounded the subject before them and the abundant evidence that they comprehended their vastness and variety. By a voluntary and responsible choice they willed to do what was done and what without their will would not have been done.

Thus estimated, the illustrious act covers all who participated in it with its own renown and makes them forever conspicuous among men, as it is forever famous among events. And thus the signers of the Declaration of our Independence "wrote their names where all nations should behold them and all time should not efface them." It was "in the course of human events" entrusted to them to determine whether the fullness of time had come when a nation should be born in a day. They declared the independence of the new nation in the sense in which men declare emancipation or declare war; the Declaration created what was declared.

Famous always among men are the founders of states, and fortunate above all others in such fame are these, our fathers, whose combined wisdom and courage began the great structure of our national existence, and laid sure the foundations of liberty and justice on which it rests. Fortunate, first, in the clearness of their title and in the world's acceptance of their

rightful claim. Fortunate, next, in the enduring magnitude of the state they founded and the beneficence of its protection of the vast interests of human life and happiness, which have here had their home. Fortunate, again, in the admiring imitation of their work, which the institutions of the most powerful and most advanced nations more and more exhibit; and, last of all, fortunate in the full demonstration of our later time, that their work is adequate to withstand the most disastrous storms of human fortunes, and survives unwrecked, unshaken, and unharmed.

This day has now been celebrated by a great people at each recurrence of its anniversary for a hundred years, with every form of ostentatious joy, with every demonstration of respect and gratitude for the ancestral virtue which gave it its glory, and with the firmest faith that growing time should neither obscure its luster nor reduce the ardor nor discredit the sincerity of its observance. A reverent spirit has explored the lives of the men who took part in the great transaction; has unfolded their characters and exhibited to an admiring posterity the purity of their motives; the sagacity, the bravery, the fortitude, and the perseverance which marked their conduct, and which secured the prosperity and permanence of their work.

Philosophy has divided the secrets of all this power and eloquence emblazoned the magnificence of its results. The heroic war which fought out the acquiescence of the Old World in the independence of the New; the manifold and masterly forms of noble character, and the patient and serene wisdom which the great influences of the times begat; the large and splendid scale on which these elevated purposes were wrought out and the majestic proportions to which they have been filled up; the unended line of eventful progress, casting ever backward a flood of light upon the sources of the original energy, and ever forward a promise and a prophecy of unexhausted power all these have been made familiar to our people by the genius and the devotion of historians and orators.

The greatest statesmen of the Old World for this same period of one hundred years have traced the initial step in these events, looked into the nature of the institutions thus

founded, weighed by the Old World wisdom and measured by recorded experience the probable fortunes of this new adventure on an unknown sea. This circumspect and searching survey of our wide field of political and social experiment no doubt has brought them a diversity of judgment as to the past and of expectation as to the future. But of the magnitude and the novelty and the power of the forces set at work by the event we commemorate no competent authorities have ever greatly differed. The contemporary judgment of Burke is scarcely an over-statement of the European opinion of the immense import of American independence. He declared: "A great revolution has happened—a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of power in any of the existing states, but by the appearance of a new state, of a new species, in a new part of the globe. It has made as great a change in all the relations and balances and gravitations of power as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world."

It is easy to understand that the rupture between the colonies and the mother country might have worked a result of political independence that would have involved no such mighty consequences as are here so strongly announced by the most philosophic statesman of his age. The resistance of the colonies, which came to a head in the revolt, was led in the name and for the maintenance of the liberties of Englishmen against parliamentary usurpation and a subversion of the British constitution.

A triumph of those liberties might have ended in an emancipation from the rule of the English Parliament and a continued submission to the scheme and system of the British monarchy, with an American parliament adjusted thereto upon the true principles of the English constitution. Whether this new political establishment should have maintained loyalty to the British sovereign or should have been organized under a crown and throne of its own the transaction would then have had no other importance than such as belongs to a dismemberment of existing empire, but with preservation of existing institutions. There would have been, to be sure, a "new state," but not "of a new species," and that it was "in a new part of the globe" would have gone far to make the dismemberment