AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE. 243 



service is black with incompetency and dishonesty ; it is indeed 

 time that political science should organize a State more worthy 

 of a free ^and enlightened people. If, under any system, the 

 capital of our country has been scattered, and the labor of our 

 country has been beggared and oppressed, let political science 

 proclaim its reform at once. But let us, at any rate, look at 

 things as they are. 



For one I accept American facts as the foundation of 

 American theories of public policy. A century of American 

 nationality has its useful and encouraging lesson, of which 

 we all may be proud, and from which we cannot turn in hopes 

 of being taught a better. We have arrived at a system 

 of government in which human equality is recognized ; and 

 in which industry, intelligence and morality are considered 

 the attributes of good citizenship. We have reached a degree 

 of prosperity, and wealth, and social comfort, and elasticity, 

 and vigor, in which all may share, unknown in all its char- 

 acteristics elsewhere on the face of the earth. Making this a 

 standard of political science, I am ready to accept it, both as a 

 guide for the future, and as the law of American nationality 

 laid down by the fathers, who believed in American citizenship 

 as an opportunity for human development, and in American 

 industry as the vital force of our own country, an example for 

 others to follow, and in no way to be guided and controlled by 

 inferior, and as we think, less humane systems. We have 

 learned much by our own experience as a nation ; more than 

 by the experience of others. Let this, then, be the foundation 

 of American political science. 



To that scientific thought which never tires in its explo- 

 rations, and which may find its problems in every sphere in 

 life, we submit our material welfare, relying upon the wisdom 

 and integrity which now lie at the foundation of all its true 

 success. And wherever the fraternity of philosophers inspired 

 by this thought may turn their vision, whether to the heavens 

 above, or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth, to 

 our firesides or our public councils, there may they learn those 

 laws of nature and of society, a knowledge of which may 

 ennoble and purify the work committed by the Father to his 

 children here below. 



The Board then adjourned sine die. 



