existing also in the constitution of England.  Our American liberty, allow me to say, therefore, has an ancestry, a pedigree, a history.  Our ancestors brought to this continent all that was valuable, in their judgment, in the political institutions of England, and left behind them all that was without value, or that was objectionable.  During the colonial period they were closely connected of course with the colonial system; but they were Englishmen, as well as colonists, and took an interest in whatever concerned the mother country, especially in all great questions of public liberty in that country.  They accordingly took a deep concern in the Revolution of 1688.  The American colonists had suffered from the tyranny of James the Second.  Their charters had been wrested from them by mockeries of law, and by the corruption of judges in the city of London; and in no part of England was there more gratification, or a more resolute feeling, when James abdicated and William came over, than in the American colonies.  All know that Massachusetts immediately overthrew what had been done under the reign of James, and took possession of the colonial fort in the harbor of Boston in the name of the new king.

When the United States separated from England, by the Declaration of 1776, they departed from the political maxims and examples of the mother country, and entered upon a course more exclusively American.  From that day down, our institutions and our history relate to ourselves.  Through the period of the Declaration of Independence, of the Confederation, of the Convention, and the adoption of the Constitution, all our public acts are records out of which a knowledge of our system of American liberty is to be drawn.

From the Declaration of Independence, the governments of what had been colonies before were adapted to their new condition.  They no longer owed allegiance to crowned heads.  No tie bound them to England.  The whole system became entirely popular, and all legislative and constitutional provisions had regard to this new, peculiar, American character, which they had assumed.  Where the form of government was already well enough, they let it alone.  Where reform was necessary, they reformed it.  What was valuable, they retained; what was essential, they added, and no more.  Through the whole proceeding, from 1776 to the latest period, the whole course of American public acts, the whole progress of this American system, was marked by a peculiar conservatism.  The object was to do what was necessary, and no more; and to do that with the utmost temperance and prudence.

Now, without going into historical details at length, let me state what I understand the American principles to be, on which this system rests.