It will be many generations before we become so fused as to have a common past, and the conciliation and forbearance which Mr. Choate recommends to related sections of country will be more than equally necessary to unrelated races.  But while we are waiting for a past in which we can all agree, Mr. Choate sees danger in the disrespect which he accuses certain anonymi of entertaining for the past in general.  But for what past?  Does Mr. Choate mean our own American past?  Does he refer us to that for lessons of forbearance, submission, and waiting for God’s good time?  Is the contemplation of their own history and respect for their own traditions the lenitive he prescribes for a people whose only history is a revolution, whose only tradition is rebellion?  To what past and to what tradition did the Pilgrim Fathers appeal, except to that past, older than all history, that tradition, sacred from all decay, which, derived from an antiquity behind and beyond all the hoary generations, points the human soul to the God from whom it derived life, and with it the privilege of freedom and the duty of obedience?  To what historical past did Jefferson go for the preamble of the Declaration, unless to the reveries of a half-dozen innovating enthusiasts, men of the closet,—­of that class which Mr. Choate disparages by implication, though it has done more to shape the course of the world than any number of statesmen, whose highest office is, commonly, to deal prudently with the circumstances of the moment?

Mr. Choate does a great injustice to the Republican Party when he lays this irreverence for the past to their charge.  As he seems to think that he alone has read books and studied the lessons of antiquity, he will be pleased to learn that there are persons also in that party who have not neglected all their opportunities in that kind.  The object of the Republicans is to bring back the policy and practice of the Republic to some nearer agreement with the traditions of the fathers.  They also have a National Idea,—­for some of them are capable of distinguishing “a phrase from an idea,” or Mr. Choate would find it easier to convert them.  They propose to create a National Sentiment, in the only way that is possible under conditions like ours, by clearing the way for the development of a nation which shall be, not only in Fourth-of-July orations, but on every day in the year, and in the mouths of all peoples, great and wise, just and brave, and whose idea, always august and venerable, by turns lovely and terrible, shall bind us all in a common nationality by our loyalty to what is true, our reverence for what is good, our love for what is beautiful, and our sense of security in what is mighty.  That is the America which the Fathers conceived, and it is that to which the children look forward,—­an America which shall displace Ireland and Germany, Massachusetts and Carolina, in the hearts of those who call them mother, with an image of maternity at once more tender and more majestic.