8 



stability of law, enterprise is next to impossible. Such 

 enterprise is un suited either to a fickle people or a people 

 chained to a single industry that is largely dependent upon 

 natural conditions of soil or climate or location. The 

 merchant and manufacturer must largely create the condi- 

 tions of their success. The existence of a class of citizens 

 devoted to law and order and tranquillity, perhaps, Avas not 

 of so much importance in the earlier days of the republic, 

 when the population was sparse and homogeneous, but 

 when that population has become more dense, and made up 

 of different nationalities, a considerable portion of which 

 is new to the theory and practical working of our govern- 

 ment, when the spirit of unrest is abroad, and the disposi- 

 tion becomes manifest to bring about needed or fanciful 

 reforms otherwise than under the forms of law, such a 

 class of citizens becomes the reliance of established insti- 

 tutions and the enduring hope of liberty. They constitute 

 a conservative element that is opposed to tearing down 

 what we have in the hope of getting something better, 

 that believes it is better to endure the ills we have than to 

 open the door to those that are unknown. Devoted to lib- 

 erty, they recognize that civilization has a pre-eminent 

 claim to their support, and that the liberty of the anarchist 

 or the commune is the most hateful form of oppression. 



A manufacturing and commercial people have always 

 been arrayed upon the side of freedom, from the time of 

 the overthrow of the feudal system, through the growing 

 power of cities, to the present day. Not freedom in the 

 abstract, or as a dream of some impossible social organiza- 

 tion, but freedom reduced to practice, and made effective 

 through wise laws and a strong government, as forming 

 the basis for material achievement and welfare, and the 

 orderly development and growth of property and values- 

 Such a people learn to prize the means by which freedom 

 is applied and made effective to life and affairs as tlieir 

 chief possessions, and as men are moved by their material 

 interests more strongly than by any other motive, law and 



