purpose to revise the whole policy of the government, and even to obliterate its highest judicial judgments.

This was the mission of Republicanism. It did not declare war, but if war followed, it was ready to accept it; and when war came, it at once cast all the laws and precedents of peace behind it, and gave all the supreme laws of war to the conflict. Look at the records it has written! It defied all the teachings of history in crushing the rebellion. It settled by the sword, and sealed by fundamental amendment, all the issues for which the insurgents fought. It struck the shackles from four millions of slaves, and clothed the bondman with the habiliments of citizenship. It lavished countless treasure to maintain the terrible struggle and preserved the credit of the Republic. Its warriors came up from the ranks of the unknown to the highest achievements of the century; and its galaxy of statesmen will be among the most memorable of which our future history will boast. Reconstruction had to be fashioned in the tide of passion that ever survives fraternal war, and when the conquered Confederate interposed, suffrage was flung upon the emancipated slave to weigh down the balance and give absolute political control to the party of power. And it rivaled Democracy in its diplomacy. It held conspiring nations in check, until intervention would have been but burning ashes to the lips of the South. It revolutionized our whole financial system, and gave the country, in the throes of revolution, the best currency we have ever known. In all things declared by its leaders to be within the scope of its mission, it was successful; and its purposes were carried inflexibly to their great consummation.

Such is the record of its grander achievements. How wise or how unwise it was in its policy, I do not now discuss but it will be told to all who come after us, that it created a school of civil leaders, whose success is exceptional in our annals of greatness. We contrast them with

the school of Clay and Webster, and Calhoun and Benton; but we forget that the giants of the last generation became great because the different duties were adapted to their different aims and attributes. The new men who were charged with the direction of the political departure of 1860 would have been dwarfed by their convictions in the days of Webster and Calhoun, for there would have been no response to their efforts from either people or power; but judged by their enduring triumphs, as history judges all mankind, they filled the highest measure of statesmanship. Of all the contemporaries of the old school of statesmen, Crittenden alone was an actor in the new order of things, and he withered in the study of its strange lessons.

I have shown that our country in a century of continued growth in all the elements of greatness has created but two political parties, and but two political epochs are to be found in the history we have written in behalf of free government. One of these parties guided the Republic from infancy to manhood, and held its sway as the chosen guardian of our sacred institutions for more than half the whole period of our national existence. Its mission was fulfilled only when a sweeping political revolution became an inexorable necessity, and then, like the statesmen of the old school, it was unequal to the acceptance of inevitable destiny. The other party has ruled less than half a generation; but it reigned in the tempest, and its work was speedily done. In a single decade, its mission and all its noblest purposes were fulfilled. The one watered the tender plant of self-government with genial showers and gentle dews, until it grew into a giant's stature; the other came with the storm and the thunderbolt to purify the atmosphere that had become charged with deadly poison to freedom, and it swept mercilessly in its work. Old landmarks of liberty were uprooted, and sturdy oaks of shelter were riven by the lightning-stroke, as the tide

of revolution went on. When war came, it was master. It brought with it its passions, its resentments, its intolerance, its scarcely refined attributes of barbarism. It made party autocratic in its policy-hence history tells of no concessions to, or triumphs of, the opposition. To remonstrate was to invite the distrust of power; to oppose was to provoke its anathemas; to resist was to feel the vengeful arm of authority. Such a mission, with such necessary agencies, could not be long in fulfilling its purpose, for it crowded the measured results of years into days, and what could not yield before its progress, was broken. And when its great work was done, it left ghastly scars and deep wounds to be healed, and dismantled altars to be restored. In all governments, and especially in free governments, arrogance and degeneracy are the logical fruits of war; and in civil war, the highest tide of remorseless power is ever invoked. And when the necessity or excuse for arbitrary authority has ended, who is to stay the hand that has been mailed in omnipotence? We may search history in vain for the rule that voluntarily limited its own power to command, and in our varied history we may scan all the political records we have made, and find no political party that ever corrected its own vital errors, or reversed its own fundamental mistakes. How, then, are the lingering evils of civil war to be corrected? How and by whom are they to be healed?

Here we tread upon the present, with its manifold interests, is cherished prejudices, and its widespread ambition. But it is of the present that we all should speak; it is of the present that you should learn, for you must have a large share in the destiny of the noblest political system the world has ever witnessed. I have drawn upon the lessons of the past, to guide us in the future; and if we would hope to be honest with a country for which such immeasurable sacrifice has been made, we must look the present manfully in the face. It is to be assumed that

we cannot consider our gravest civil duties without falling into the sloughs and brambles of parties and partisans? In the noontide of the nineteenth century, and in the midst of the most progressive era the world has ever known, are men to be the mere playthings of some phase of partisanship that has degenerated into insatiate cupidity, or selfish advancement? Rather let the citizen speak as candor and intelligence dictate, and let him speak here in the seat of learning, and at the altar, and at his home, as well as at the hustings and through the ballot-box. Let the partisan money-changers, no matter of what political profession, be silenced in the temple of free government, that the words of truth and soberness may be uttered and heard. If truth offends, then there is need of offence, and if the partisan complains, he confesses the weakness of his cause.

You hear almost daily the complaints of intelligent and upright citizens of the unexampled degeneracy of the times, and thousands now utter their despair of the Republic. Be not misled into this crowning wrong against the noblest people and the best government ever blessed by heaven. You point to the sweep of corruption that folds power in its loathsome embrace; to a degenerate type of rulers, often incompetent and generally insensible to the honest claims of public duties; to a feeble Cabinet and a discordant and apparently aimless Congress; to the high carnival of polluted partisanship that often mocks the community; to the growing epidemic of defalcations; to the reign of desolation in the South, and to the absence of manly political virtues throughout the land, and you ask: "Can all these evils be remedied?" I answer that they can, and will be corrected, and that the effort to correct them will not be without example in our own history. Civil war has made a larger measure of political wrongs possible now than we have ever suffered before. It has intensified

political prejudices and enlarged political necessities, and thus opened the way for the venal and unscrupulous to climb into place. It has made even good men choose to tolerate official crime rather than destroy it at the cost of destroying party; and, thus invited, what bad man would not seize upon partisan machinery and fling the stain of his promotion upon the country? And do not forget that we have had seasons of degeneracy before. There is no complaint now that has not been heard under every political rule of the past; and there is not an utterance of despair of our free institutions that is not the echo of every time, from Washington to Grant. Let it be borne in mind that we are not now the feeble nation of 1800, nor the tradition-guided people of 1860. We were whirled along a full half-century in the line of advancement during one brief decade. Our progress was revolutionary. In schools, in newspapers, in railroads, in telegraphs; in all things pertaining to intellectual and material development, the rebellion gave us a new order of things. If we are colossal in our public crimes, so are we colossal in the elements which can be engaged to crush them. We are as grand in good deeds as we are great in bad deeds. Never was charity more munificent, or religion more zealously supported, or education more accessible than now and private virtue and personal integrity are as mighty to-day when called to the conflict, as ever before.

We are inclined, in times like the present, to undervalue the better qualities of the people, and to overlook the vast reserve of virtue and its innumerable agencies for asserting its omnipotence. And we magnify the evils visible or felt in our day, and forget how they are but repeating themselves. Do we complain of the violence and the arbitrary recklessness of power? Turn to the dying throes of Federalism, in a period of profound peace. The partisan measures of that day, conceived and