In 1776 there were nine colleges in the country. Today there are five hundred. Some of these hardly deserve the name, but they all serve, at least, to show the popular desire for a higher education.

If, notwithstanding our schools and colleges, statistics show that our country has still a large amount of illiteracy, it is due to causes outside of our educational system, causes, too, which must operate much less powerfully in the future. Our system may have failed to secure the highest education, but it has made good education possible for all. Much indeed remains to be done. Growth is the law of life. The wisest students best know how far short of an ideal standard our national education still is; but the past has been so full of progress and the present is so rich in promise, that there is no just cause for any feeling but hope respecting the educational future of our country.

And now what of the political future? I have spoken of the hardy settlers by whom our country was colonized, of the heroes by whom our independence was achieved, and of the statesmen by whom our government was established. They are not so far removed from us that the ties of personal sympathy are entirely sundered. Some of us have heard in our younger years, from the lips of an aged veteran, the story of the struggle for independence; or, in the thrice-told tale received from his fathers, have felt the joys and the sorrows of a half-civilized life in the wilderness. But between our early experience and that of our children, there has come a great gulf of blood. The patriotism and heroism of '76, eclipsed and yet glorified by the patriotism and heroism of '61, can never be to the coming generation what

they were to us. From the records of this later struggle our children will draw their inspiration. Talk to them of heroism, of manliness, of self-devotion; they will point you not alone to Bunker Hill and Valley Forge, but to Gettysburg, to Fredericksburg, to Vicksburg, to Antietam, to Sherman's march, to the battles of the Wilderness, to the long and final struggle for Richmond. Talk to them of the patient suffering of woman. They will tell you, not of the mothers of the Revolution, but of those mothers in these later times, who in the midst of plenty and a mature civilization, voluntarily sent forth from the luxury and love of home the bravest and the best to die for liberty and law. Talk to them of generals, whose deeds make the pages of our history radiant with glory, and they will sound the praises not alone of Greene and Putnam, or Warren and Schuyler, but of Grant and Sherman, Sheridan and Thomas. Talk to them of Christian statesmen adorning by their lives the country which they governed, and they will speak reverently the names of Washington and his honored associates, while they pronounce with tenderness and tears the name of the patriot and martyr, Abraham Lincoln.

But in our just reverence for the noble living and dead of our own day, in our enthusiasm over the grand achievements of these few years, the salvation of the Union and the inauguration of universal liberty, we must not forget the past, we must not ignore the future. We have emerged from a terrible civil war. The passions of the conflict are somewhat allayed. It may be harder for the South, conquered, wounded, bloody, its favorite institution prostrated forever, its slaves freemen, to lay aside

its resentments than for the victorious North. But as we remember the fidelity and patriotism of Southern statesmen in the olden time, let us say to our Southern brethren: Meet us to-day; on this centennial anniversary of our common independence meet us, as your fathers met ours on the Fourth of July, 1776, in the interest of liberty and union. Meet us on the platform then and there framed by your own great statesman-the platform of "Liberty and Equal Rights." Let the differences of the past be forgotten in a common zeal for the highest interests of our common country. Let the courage so heroically exhibited on many a battlefield, when we were fighting each other, henceforth be reserved only for contests with the foes of our common country. We are brethren. Let there be peace and love between us. Let this day, with its memories sacred to you and to us alike, be the hour of complete and eternal reconciliation.

Then, indeed, shall this centennial year witness, not the birth of a new nation, but a nation born again, born into a higher and nobler life; in which honor shall govern in politics as well as in business; in which patriotism shall be kindled into a new fervor; in which the manliness, the courage, and the piety of the fathers shall find a new expression in the sons; in which the permanence of our republic shall be assured, by the higher tone of public and private morals, and the universal adoption of that grand old sentiment, "Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable."

ELOQUENCE AND THE LAW*

I am to address to-night, as I suppose, an audience composed largely of young men who are engaged in studying law and of others, ladies and gentlemen, who individually or collectively feel a deep interest in these law students. The young men are fitting themselves not merely for a place in the profession, but, as I trust, for a place in the front ranks of the profession, where, as you have often been told, there is more room than anywhere else. They can succeed in their purpose only by becoming both a lawyer and an orator. Good sense and a knowledge of law will carry them safely through a multitude of cases-if they are so fortunate as to have a multitude but there will surely come some occasions when facts and law will need to be transfigured as they can be only by the soul of the orator. Yet many lawyers who are faithful and successful students, never attain to real freedom in the practice of the highest part of their profession, because they are restrained by native timidity and distrust, which they might overcome but do not. Where is the man worth listening to who does not always feel more or less of this same timidity and distrust? Of course the man who has no sensibilities feels no reluctance

*Delivered before a society of law students and their guests at the Yale Law School, February, 1881.