THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. 157 



and ended, at last, like an unsubstantial pageant, leaving no influence 

 behind it ; but, in another point of view, it becomes a more intelligible 

 memorial of the life of a nation that had a destiny to fulfil, an appointed 

 work to do — to build up a system of law which should enter into mod- 

 ern European and American jurisprudence, and with its strong Pagan 

 power to pave a path for Christianity to travel into the vast regions 

 which at one time were included within Roman dominion. 



Now, turning to American history, and especially that portion of it 

 which is devoted to the Union, it is possible, I believe, to place the 

 events in such combinations, to discover in them such a concurrent 

 tendency, as to leave no room to question that those events were con- 

 trolled as the secondary causes of the results to which form was given 

 in our system of government. From the latter part of the last cen- 

 tury — from the year of the adoption of the Constitution of the United 

 States of America, with its primar}^ purpose of forming a more iierfcct 

 union, back into the century of English colonization, back still earlier 

 to the years of discovery, and even earlier yet to those remote centu- 

 ries in which, many generations before Columbus or Cabot, European 

 eyes, we may beJieve, beheld this continent for the first time — through- 

 out tliat long tract of lime there is, I do not fear to say, a tendency 

 more or less visible towards the future results, and not least among 

 those results towards this Union. That tendency may be traced both 

 in what was frustrated and in what has been achieved ; so that all things 

 seem to lead to this result, the predominance in North America of one 

 European race, and that race the race which speaks the English tongue. 

 I thus entitle it for the want of a better and briefer name. The title 

 ^'^ Anglo-Saxon''' is hardly adequate or expressive enough for a breed of 

 men in whose veins there runs the mingled current of Saxon and Nor- 

 man blood, perhaps of ancient British, Celtic, Roman, and Danish 

 blood. From the earliest time in which intercourse began between the 

 eastern and western hemispheres down to our own day, the great move- 

 ment has been the extension of what may be called Saxondom — a part 

 of that larger movement, not confined t© N#i;th America, bat extending 

 to southern Africa, to India from Ceylon to its northern mountains, 

 and to Australia and the islands in the distant seas — the movement 

 which is carrying the language and the laws of our race widely over 

 the earth. 



My present purpose is to look at this movement as it has a connexion 

 with American history, and especially with the Union; and, without 

 attempting in any way to make historical facts bend to hypothesis, to 

 show that the history of discovery, the history of colonization and of 

 colonial government, all establish this historical truth, that the work of 

 laying the foundation of a great political system in North America was 

 reserved for the race that speaks the English language, by whatever 

 name we may choose to call that race ; further, that, in order to de- 

 velop so essential a part of that system as the union of a federal repub- 

 lic, the work was reserved for liie English race at a particular period 

 of their history in the mother country. Thus it is to remote causes 

 that we are to trace that political power which animates a government 

 extending from the lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic 

 to the Pacific. 



