Two great nations are peculiarly entitled to be considered modern in their general character, though each is living under ancient institutions.  They are the United States and Russia.  Neither of these nations is a century old, regarded as a power that largely affects affairs by its action, and into the composition of each there enters a great variety of elements.  The United States may be said to date from 1761, just one hundred years ago, when the American debate began on the question of granting Writs of Assistance to the revenue-officers of the crown.  The struggle between England and America was then commenced in the chief court of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, and the Declaration of Independence was but the logical conclusion of the argument of James Otis; but that conclusion would not have established anything, had it not been confirmed by the inexorable logic of cannon.  The last resort of kings was then on the side of the people, and gave them the victory.  The fifteen years that passed between the time when James Otis spoke in Boston and the time when John Adams spoke in Philadelphia belong properly to our national history, and should be so regarded.  The grandson and biographer of John Adams says that Mr. Adams “was attending the court as a member of the bar, and heard, with enthusiastic admiration, the argument of Otis, the effect of which was to place him at the head of that race of orators, statesmen, and patriots, by whose exertions the Revolution of American Independence was achieved.  This cause was unquestionably the incipient struggle for that independence.  It was to Mr. Adams like the oath of Hamilcar administered to Hannibal.  It is doubtful whether Otis himself, or any person of his auditory, perceived or imagined the consequences which were to flow from the principles developed in that argument.  For although, in substance, it was nothing more than the question upon the legality of general warrants,—­a question by which, when afterward raised in England, in Wilkes’s case, Lord Camden himself was taken by surprise, and gave at first an incorrect decision,—­yet, in the hands of James Otis, this question involved the whole system of the relations of authority and subjection between the British government and their colonies in America.  It involved the principles of the British Constitution, and the whole theory of the social compact and the natural rights of mankind.”

In the summer of 1762, about seventeen months after Otis had made his argument, the existence of modern Russia began.  Catharine II. then commenced her wonderful reign, having dethroned and murdered her husband, Peter III., the last of the sovereigns of Russia who could make any pretensions to possession of the blood of the Romanoffs.  A minor German princess, who originally had no more prospect of becoming Empress-Regnant of Russia than she had of becoming Queen-Regnant of France, Sophia-Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst was elevated to the throne of the Czars on the 9th