Weat tee Age owes to America. 
355 
tained to the unending line of our posterity, and so long as the 
earth itself shall endure. 
In the great procession of nations, in the great n^arch of human¬ 
ity, we hold our place. Peace is our duty, peace is our policy. In 
its arts, its labors, and its victories, then, we find scope for all our 
energies, rewards for all our ambitions, renown enough for all our 
love and fame. In the august presence of so many nations, which, 
by their representatives, have done us the honor to be witnesses of 
our commemorative joy and gratulation, and in sight of the collect¬ 
ed evidences of the greatness of their own civilization with which 
they grace our celebration, we may well confess how much we fall 
short, how much we have to make up, in the emulative competitions 
of the times. Yet, even in this presence, and with a just deference 
to the age, the power, the greatness of the other nations of the 
earth, we do not fear to appeal to the opinion of mankind whether, 
as we point to our land, our people, and our laws, the contempla¬ 
tion should not inspire us with a lover’s enthusiasm for our country. 
Time makes no pauses in his march. Even while I speak the 
last hour of the receding is replaced by the first hour of the coming 
century, and reverence for the past gives way to the joys and hopes, 
the activities and the responsibilities of the future. A hundred 
years hence the piety of that generation will recall the ancestral 
glory which we celebrate to-day, and crown it with the plaudits of 
a vast population which no man can number. By the mere circum¬ 
stance of this periodicity, our generation will be in the minds, in 
the hearts, on the lips of our countrymen at the next Centennial 
commemoration in comparison with their own character and condi¬ 
tion and with the great founders of the nation. What shall they 
say of us? How shall they estimate the part we bear in the un¬ 
broken line of the nation’s progress? And so on, in the long reach 
of time, forever and forever, our place in the secular roll of the ages 
must always bring us into observation and criticism. Under this 
double trust, then, from the past and for the future, let us take heed 
to our ways, and while it is called to-day, resolve that the great 
heritage we have received shall be handed down through the long 
line of the advancing generations, the home of liberty, the abode 
of justice, the stronghold of faith among men, “ which holds the 
moral elements of the world together,” and of faith in God, which 
binds that world to His throne. 
