What tee Age owes to Amerija, 
331 
faith that growing time should neither obscure its luster nor reduce 
the ardor or discredit the sincerity of its observance. A reverent 
spirit has explored the lives of the men who took part in the great 
transaction; has unfolded their characters and exhibited to an ad¬ 
miring posterity the purity of their motives; the sagacity, the 
bravery, the fortitude, the perseverance which marked their con¬ 
duct, and which secured the prosperity and permanence of their 
work. 
GRANDEUR OF THE WORK OF 1876. 
Philosophy has divined the secrets of all this power, and elo¬ 
quence emblazoned the magnificence of all its results. The heroic 
war which fought out the acquiesence of the Old World in the in¬ 
dependence of the New; the manifold and masterly forms of noble 
character and of patient and serene wisdom which the great influ¬ 
ences of the times begat; the large and splendid scale on which 
these elevated purposes were wrought out, and the majestic propor¬ 
tions to which they have been filled up; the unended line of event¬ 
ful progress, casting ever backward a flood of light upon the sources 
of the original energy, and ever forward a promise and a prophecy 
of unexhausted power — all these have been made familiar to our 
people by the genius and the devotion of historians and orators. 
The greatest statesmen of the Old World for this same period of 
one hundred years have traced the initial steps in these events, 
looked into the nature of the institutions thus founded, weighed by 
the Old World wisdom, and measured by recorded experience, the 
probable fortunes of this new adventure on an unknown sea. This 
circumspect and searching survey of our wide field of political and 
social experiment, no doubt, has brought them a diversity of judg¬ 
ment as to the past, and of expectation as to the future. But of 
the magnitude and the novelty and the power of the forces set at 
work by the event we commemorate, no competent authorities have 
ever greatly differed. The contemporary judgment of Burke is 
scarcely an overstatement of the European opinion of the immense 
import of American independence. He declared: “ A great revo¬ 
lution has happened — a revolution made, not by chopping and 
changing of power in any of the existing states, but by the appear¬ 
ance of a new state, of a new species, in a new part of the globe. 
It has made as great a change in all the relations and balances and 
