spirit of all the other speakers.  Oxford and Cambridge have long furnished the country with a learned clergy, a learned Bar, and (but this is past) a learned House of Commons.  The tradition of learning lingers still; nay, they are centres of learning beyond comparison with any other universities in the world.  Harvard also, I suppose, provides a learned clergy; but its principal function, as its rulers seemed to think, is to send out into the world every year a great body of young men fully equipped to be leaders in the country.  This is its chief glory; to do this effectively, I take it, is the chief desire of the president and the society.

It cannot be denied that this is a very important duty, much more important, for a special reason, in the States than it is in Great Britain.  I used to marvel, before making these observations, at the constant flying of the stars and stripes everywhere; at the continual reminding as to freedom.  ‘Are there,’ one asks, ’no other countries in the world which are free?  In what single point is the freedom of the American greater than the freedom of the Briton, the Canadian, of the Australian?’ In none, certainly.  Yet we are not forever waving the Union Jack everywhere and calling each other brothers in our glorious liberty.  Well:  but let us think.  In so vast a population, spread over so many States, each State being a different country, there will always be ignorant men, men ready to give up everything for a selfish advantage:  there must always be a danger, unless it be continually met and beaten down, that the United may become the dis-United States.  Why, European statesmen used to look forward confidently to the disruption of the States from the Declaration of Independence down to the Civil War.  It was a commonplace that the country must inevitably fall to pieces.  The very possibility of a disruption is now not even thought of:  the thing is never mentioned.  Why is this?  Surely, because the idea of federation is not only taught and ground in at the elementary schools, but because the flag of federation is always displayed as the chief glory of the nation at every place where two or three Americans are gathered together.  The symbol you see is unmistakable:  it means Union, once for all; the word, the idea, the symbol, it must be always kept before the eyes of the people; it is in the wisdom of the rulers that the stars and stripes are forever flaunted before the eyes of the people.

And it is not only the ignorant and the selfish among Americans themselves; it is the vast number of immigrants, increasing by half a million every year, who have to be taught what citizenship means.  The outward symbol is the readiest teacher; let them never forget that they live under the stars and stripes; let them learn—­German, Norwegian, Italian, Irish—­what it means to belong to the Great Republic.  Is this all that a two months’ visitor can bring away from America?  It is the most important part