Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence, it is doomed and deserves its doom.  As President Cleveland has well said, it is not the business of a government to support its people, but of the people to support their government; and once to lose sight of this vital truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy narcotic poison.  Of the two opposite perils which have perpetually threatened the welfare of political society—­anarchy on the one hand, loss of self-government on the other—­Jefferson was right in maintaining that the latter is really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings are so terribly insidious.  Many will understand what is meant by a threat of secession, where few take heed of the baneful principle involved in a Texas Seed-bill.

That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of these considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government.  From the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to the days of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been engaged in this struggle, not without some toughening of our political fibre, not without some refining of our moral sense.  Not among our English forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and modern Europe has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive results.  In all parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by Teutonic tribes, self-government attempted to spring up.  What may have been the origin of the idea of representation we do not know; like most origins, it seems lost in the prehistoric darkness.  Wherever we find Teutonic tribes settling down over a wide area, we find them holding their primary assemblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like those in which Mr. Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured.  Everywhere, too, we find some attempt at representative assemblies, based on the principle of the three estates, clergy, nobles, and commons.  But nowhere save in England does the representative principle become firmly established, at first in county-meetings, afterward in a national parliament limiting the powers of the national monarch as the primary tribal assembly had limited the powers of the tribal chief.  It is for this reason that we must call the method of nation-making by means of a representative assembly the English method.  While the idea of representation was perhaps the common property of the Teutonic tribes, it was only in England that it was successfully put into practice and became the dominant political idea.  We may therefore agree with Dr. Stubbs that in its political development England is the most Teutonic of all European countries,—­the country which in becoming a great nation has most fully preserved the local independence so characteristic