I

THE BEGINNING OF THE REPUBLIC.

T is in the nature of men to honor and love their rulers; and from this impulse of their nature the people of all nations have not only magnified their rulers while they lived; but preserved their histories, and, in the olden time, deified them after they were dead.

No nation has had greater occasion to profoundly respect their rulers than the people of the United States, for no nation has ever had greater capacity and worth, nobler character and manhood in high places than this. From the beginning, the people have in the main selected great and true men for their public servants. Almost with instinctive knowledge have they put worth into power and honored with constant devotion the public service which deserved it. There is scarcely an instance in our national history which warrants the old slander that republics are ungrateful. On the contrary, this republic has gloried in its great and good men and sought them for places of public trust and honor. And as their names fall deeper into the shadows of the past, the more sacred do they become in the gratitude of the new generations. Even the new comers to our shores join in the grateful memories of the noble dead who served the republic in its early days and put something of their worth and

power into its laws and institutions. The history of the respec that has been given to them through the successive generations since their departure is a quickening incentive to all aspirants for public favor to imitate their virtues and copy their devotion to the public good. Vigor of mind, high virtue, generous sympathy, manliness, private purity, domestic honor and unselfish devotion to the public good in men in high places, always have, and do now, command the deepest respect of the American people; they have been trained to this; it is in their blood. They came of good Anglo-Saxon stock. Our early English ancestors venerated great names and worth among the ruling classes. They profoundly honored the king and all royalty. They were slow to see any wrong in the king. His authority had sanctity in it in their mind. When, by the selfish greed of power and love of royalty, George III. disenchanted their minds. of the glamour of royalty, they turned away from hereditary royalty with disgust, but soon learned to fix their loyal affections on royalty of mind in the noble rulers of their own choice, who answered infinitely better to their ideals of men in authority. From royal loyalists they changed to democratic loyalists. The seed of respect for "the powers that be," planted in the blood of their race by long obedience to "constituted authority," brought forth a full harvest in a republican government. The trained and christianized respect for rulers grew in due time into respect for the masses of men which republican rulers represent. In their minds their chosen rulers stood for the whole people. The president represented the whole people of the country, and was to be respected not only for his own worth as the head of the nation; but as the symbol of all the people and their rights and interests. He was more than a king; he was the chosen ruler of the people; chosen not to rule in any right of his own, but to rule as their voice and hand; not to enforce his own will, but to execute their laws, to enforce their will. By the change from a monarchical to a republican form of government, respect for rulers as persons was changed to respect for rulers as the embodiment of the people's will and worth. The president stood for the nation; not for states, but for the confederated embodiment

of the whole people. In this new aspect of rulers they became objects of higher and deeper interest. They stood for the people who had chosen them; for the nation as an organized commonwealth, as well as in their own worth. This new dignity of rulership our forefathers realized in its full force.

The seeds of the republic were planted in a distrust of the king. As that grew, the necessity for self-government became more apparent. Slowly, but absolutely, at last, their loyalty and affection for the king died, and self-government was the one only form of national existence to adopt. They adopted it in solemn recognition of all that it meant, and so adopting it they realized the momentous significance and responsibility of the ruler of a free people who lived and acted for them, in the heart of a new continent, growing rapidly in every element of power and greatness, with the eyes of the world turned upon them, and in an age ripe for great revolutions. Their peculiar, and as they thought providential, history deepened the solemnity of what they did.

Then, their first president was as a man and a magistrate so almost infinitely above the king they once loved but now loathed, and had done so much, and with such singular devotion to the public good and every high obligation in securing their liberties, that all their old respect for rulers returned to their hearts with increased tenderness and force. The president became more to them than the king ever was. In his person there centered all the profound regard they had learned to cherish for the people, for republican institutions, and the humanity of which they formed a part. The baptism of suffering and sorrow through which they passed in the change from the king to the president gave them one of the great lessons that went deepest into their hearts, and started in the new nation a tide of profound respect for the chief magistrate who was the people's authority.

No other nation ever had so fortunate a beginning, or so rich a pupilage through an infancy abounding in lessons of wisdom and worth, or so grand an entrance into the manhood of national life. Such a beginning prophesied all the greatness, worth and power which have followed.