experience, the American national ty is an unparalleled 

 and unrivalled surprise, and a» such holds its place in 

 history, not as an eccentric phenomenon, not as a doubt- 

 ful curiosity. Its settlement was by no means imposing. 

 A few bands of unsuccessful adventurers, a chartered 

 land-company, a feeble and flying body of dissenters, 

 compose the fundamental elements of our national birth 

 to the casual observer. The planting of the great uni- 

 versal principle of our republic was unobserved, its exist- 

 ence was almost unknown and unheeded for a century. 

 The passage of the May Flower to these shores was an 

 event of so little importance at the period of its occur- 

 rence that it hardly received the notice equivalent in our 

 day to a paragraph in a weekly newspaper. Jamestown 

 furnished but small attractions as an event to the thought- 

 ful men of its times. He would have been looked upon 

 as wild and visionary, who had congratulated John Carver 

 and John Smith, and John Winthrop, and John Endicott 

 that they were laying the foundations of a great over- 

 shadowing empire whose majesty should be upheld by 

 the might and dignity of a free and educated people. 

 The century however which followed this simple and ob- 

 scure work, witnessed the most remarkable growth of all 

 the fundamental and preliminary work of national estab- 

 lishment and development which the world has ever wit- 

 nessed. In these rapidly rolling hundred years the scat- 

 tered and struggling people of the American colonies, 

 accomplished what had before been done only in almost 

 as many centuries. The long period of preliminary life 

 during which England was toiling on to a position worthy 

 of national recognition — a period whose beginning is lost 

 to us in darkness and gloom — was as familiar to our fath- 

 ers as their own contemporaneous history. They knew 

 that during a hundred generations of men, the nations of 



