tant changes among them have been the increased strength of Prussia, and the emerging into substantive existence of the kingdom of Italy. The progress of free thought within their boundaries has not dissolved but has only developed them. The progress of invention, overleaping those boundaries and making neighbors of distant peoples, has not obliterated or even obscured the historic lines that stand between them. The centripetal force within each has the mastery; and in its more intimate self-centered coherence each stands more clearly apart from the rest. The public life incorporated in it,—from whatsoever ancestry derived, by whatsoever influences trained, through whatsoever experience developed, and in whatsoever legislations, letters, or arts revealed,―maintains its identity, and only perfects its force, and is prepared always for a larger impression upon the progress and culture of the world.

Yet while this development within each is going on, the equilibrium of all is only thereby more firmly established, and the relations between them become vital and constant. Diplomatic alliances only tardily and partly represent the progress of their moral sympathies. Because it is separate, each acts on the others with which it is allied, with more freedom, directness, and positive force. It acts and reacts. It gives and it gathers. It makes its own peculiar contributions, of art, thought, commercial exchange, moral power; and it receives those which are brought to it in return. And through this continual reciprocity, more vital than treaties, more effective than international congresses, each assists the progress of every other, and all work together, whether consciously or not, toward general results.

Into the ultimate power of Christendom goes therefore a force derived in part from every people. The influence of each is made cosmopolitan. And it becomes more evident constantly that not by individuals, but by these nations, so separate yet associated, always more unlike, but always also more intimately allied,—is gradually to be reared the world-wide structure of a universal civilization; that as the great Persons of the continents and the ages, they are to elaborate the welfare of mankind, and accomplish His plans who is the ruler and architect of all.

There is nothing that more clearly sets God before us in the scope of his designs, that more vividly unfolds the significance of history, that more sublimely impresses on our thoughts the grandeur of the times in which we live, than this view of nations, as the ever-renewed and cooperative workers, whose power and patience are to build up the future. The earth is illustrious through their presence upon it. The future is secure through the mighty concurrence with which they march toward it. And the brain that swings yonder suns into systems is not so unsearchable as that which orders this mighty plan.

And now among these vast, historic, almost personal Powers, it is not presumptuous or idle to feel that this of which we ourselves are part, is to have a special and an eminent place. We feel it instinctively. An audible undertone in European society shows the world aware of it.

Placed on a continent where it stands by itself, and from which its influence passes continually, across both oceans, to affect all peoples whom commerce reaches, all tribes indeed whose languages are known; founded

at the beginning, as Chatham said, "upon ideas of liberty," and prepared by the very blood that went into it, as well as by its subsequent training, to illustrate the capacity of Christianized men to organize and maintain a democratic autonomy; with a vast force of thought, will, feeling, faith, of all that makes the intensest moral life of a nation, inherited by it, and continually nourished by schools, presses, churches, homes, by all the labors it has had to perform, and all the hopes that have strengthened its heart,-it cannot be but that this nation shall affect with still increasing power the other civilized peoples of the earth. In a degree it does this already; and when its energies shall cease to be concentrated, as they hitherto have been, on the preparation of the country itself for its habitation, and the swift and mighty mastery of its riches, and on the fashioning and the upbuilding of its own institutions,-when the educational influences that mould it shall have come to their fruition, and the spirit of the nation shall be finally formed and declared, -it must pour abroad, through constant channels, an infinite influence.

Either with distrust, then, anxiety, fear, or with confidence, affection, expectation, the thoughtful minds throughout the world must look upon the people here established: whose existence is so recent, its development so rapid, its history so remarkable, and whose future hitherto has seemed so uncertain. It is not one fact, or another, by itself, that secures this interest of the civilized world in our Republic. The whole drift of civilization makes it inevitable. For good or for evil there is here a power that must affect the entire system of associated nations, to make or mar the

future they are building. And yonder ocean may as easily be withdrawn from the sight of our eyes, the continent itself may as easily be obliterated from the map of the world, as the sense of the connection of the development of this people with the destinies of the race be stricken from our minds, or from the general judgment of Christendom.

When, then, a terrific crisis suddenly appeared in our public experience—when a wide-sweeping and passionate rebellion threatened to become a complete revolution, to split the nation into fragments, and to change the course of its development forever-it was not wonderful, it was only inevitable, that more than by any other event of modern times the thoughts of mankind should be occupied with it; that here not only but all abroad it should be felt that the palpable leaves of destiny were turning; that forces were evolved than which none others more portentous had broken upon the world since the modern nations of Europe were born. It was inevitable that with diverse hopes and opposite predictions not Americans only but the peoples of Christendom should look to see what the issue was to be.

No man on this continent, therefore, since Washington's day, has had such room as was given to him whose death we mourn, to manifest all of power and character which he possessed; to manifest this to the eyes of the nation, to the eyes of mankind. No other man has had the chance to so utterly wreck himself and bury his name in an absolute ignominy amid the sinking fortunes of his country. And, on the other hand, to no other man has been given the opportunity to make for himself a place forever in the inmost heart

of the nation which he saved; to make for himself a world-wide fame; to touch the centuries still to come, and gild their skies with higher splendor. And it is because he proved himself equal to the critical, providential, unparalleled position,-because he so bore himself in his grand office that all men saw him a man to be loved, a statesman to be trusted, a patriot to be followed through darkest perils without dismay,-therefore it is that eulogies now make the continents vocal; that those eulogies take the poetic form which only intensity of feeling produces; and that one of the grandest names of the world is to be henceforth, while history continues, the plain, untitled, and recent name of Abraham Lincoln.

So much for his Position. Observe now the personal Character and Power which he brought to his office and the Work which he wrought in it.

Of course the full exhibition of these would take volumes, not paragraphs, and be the occupation of months of leisure instead of a few hurrying hours. Yet we may notice the leading traits, and recognize briefly the more prominent powers of mind and will, by which he became so apt for his work; and may glance, at least, at the principal features of the great work itself.

It is an impulse of the heart with every one who speaks of him to delineate first his moral properties; and though these may be dwelt upon so exclusively as to seem to involve an injurious forgetfulness of the great intellectual abilities he possessed, yet the course of discussion thus suggested is the one which every one still must take if he would not violently constrain and divert his own mental processes; if he would not