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WlSCOJ^Sm STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
English to establish a democracy,” and divined the true cause of 
its failure. The supreme place, no longer sacred by the divinity 
that doth hedge about a king, irritated the ambitious to which 
it was inaccessible, except by faction and violence. “ The gov¬ 
ernment was incessantly changed, and the astonished people sought 
for democracy and found it nowhere. After much violence, and 
many shocks and blows, they were fain to fall back upon the same 
government they had overthrown.” 
The English experiment to make a commonwealth without sink¬ 
ing its foundations into the firm bed of popular sovereignty, neces¬ 
sarily failed. Its example and its lesson, unquestionably, were of 
the greatest service in sobering the spirit of English reform in gov¬ 
ernment, to the solid establishment of constitutional monarchy, on 
the expulsion of the Stuarts, and in giving courage to the states¬ 
men of the American revolution to push on to the solid establish¬ 
ment of republican government, with the consent of the people as 
its every-day working force. 
But if the English experiment stumbled in its logic by not going- 
far enough, the French philosophers came to greater disaster by 
overpassing the lines which mark the limits of human authority and 
human liberty, when they undertook to redress the disordered bal¬ 
ance between people and rulers, and renovate the government of 
France. To the wrath of the people against kings and priests they 
gave free course, not only to the overthrow of the establishment of 
the church and state, but to the destruction of religion and society. 
They defied man, and thought to raise a tower of man’s building, 
as of old on the plain of Shinar, which should overtop the battle¬ 
ments of heaven, and frame a constitution of human affairs that 
should displace the providence of God. A confusion of tongues 
put an end to this ambition. And now, out of all its evil, have 
come the salutary checks and discipline in freedom, which have 
brought passionate and fervid France to the scheme and frame of 
a sober and firm republic like our own, and, we may hope, as dur¬ 
able. 
OUR DEBT TO THE MEN OF 1776. 
How much, then, hung upon the decision of the great day we 
celebrate, and upon the wisdom and the will of the men who fixed 
the immediate, and if so, the present fortunes of this people. If 
the body, the spirit, the texture of our political life had not been 
