162 NINTH ANNUAL REPORT OF 



uniformity of governments with stronger controlling central powers. 

 Usages which appertain to the North Briton are unknown to the South 

 Briton — the man of Kent, or Cornwall, or Wales. The cities and 

 towns have a variety of municipal power and privilege resting on the 

 authority of immemorial usage. 



The origin of all this diversity, in which there has been developed 

 so much of practical power, is to be traced to the same cause which 

 has transmitted it to America — the mode in which the land was occu- 

 pied by the successive races who came to its shores. The Roman 

 conquerors and colonists, the continued migrations of the Saxons, the 

 abiding incursions of the Danes, the conquest by the Norman, each 

 brought and left an influence, a set of laws or customs at the least ; and 

 in the after ages, no tyranny was strong enough or senseless enough, 

 no revolution was rash enough, to attempt that worst of all revolution- 

 ary havoc, total obhteration of the past, the absolute subjugation of 

 local variety and independence. 



Such diversity may possibly offend the merely speculative mind, 

 which is apt to crave that which is squared and levelled to a more 

 theoretic exactness and completeness ; but it is the power which has 

 been disciplined by such diversity, and the freedom that accompanies 

 it, which has spread the race over the earth, and has engendered our 

 Union. It is well known that in material nature, in the lower orders 

 of creation, considerable miij'ormky is met with ; but that the higher we 

 ascend, the more diversity is found. A great modern historical philoso- 

 pher adopted, as a leading principle in his science, this truth, that " as 

 in organic beings the most perfect life is that which animates the 

 greatest variety of numbers, so among States that is the most perfect 

 in which a number of institutions originally distinct, being organized 

 each alter its kind into centres of national life, form a complete 

 whole." 



Now I believe that it is possible to show that during the whole of 

 our colonial era, during what may be called the primitive period of our 

 political institutions, the whole course of events tended to the establish- 

 ment of this principle thus philosophically stated by Niebuhr. I mean 

 to say explicitly, that the providential government of the doings of men 

 on this portion of the world, and with reference to this portion of the 

 world, iVoni the discovery of it onwards to the adoption of the Constitu- 

 tion of the United States, has led on to what has i)een described as the 

 highest form of political life, a repubhcan system including the principle 

 of distributed local government, in the parlance familiar to us, " a Federal 

 Republic," or in the philosophical language of the historian whom I just 

 quoted, " a complete whole, formed of a number of institutions," origi- 

 nally distinct, organized each after its kind into centres of life. I am 

 aware that it may sound presumptuous to speak confidently of the pur- 

 poses of the providential government over the world, or over portions 

 of it, or over the movements of this or that race. But when the princi- 

 ple of a providential government of the human race is recognised, as it 

 must be by every mind whose belief has advanced beyond the confines 

 of absolute atheism, and also, during a long course of years, near three 

 hundred years in the case to which I wish to apply the principle, you 

 can trace a correspondence between the events on such a period and a 



