That the elevated standard thus set up by our early diplomacy has been preserved with but little exception is a simple matter of history.  We have been almost uniformly fortunate in the choice of our ministers abroad, especially those to Great Britain.  It is rightly regarded as a distinction hardly inferior to any in the State, to occupy the post of Plenipotentiary to St. James’s or Versailles,—­and this no less because the incumbent has generally been one of our most honored statesmen than because of the essential dignity and importance of the office.

If we consider, in connection with this fact, the persistency with which the Government has asserted the rights of an equal power, the promptness with which it has resented every indignity offered to our flag, and the vigor with which it has enforced in our favor the principles of international law, it can be no matter of surprise that we should stand, as we assuredly have stood, second to none in the estimate of our physical and moral power.

Starting on a totally new system,—­a system which, if successful, would disprove the universally received dogmas of the political philosophers of Europe,—­running counter to every prejudice and every conclusion of the Old-World statesmen,—­the United States had to work their way through difficulties innumerable to their present rank, and were forced to prove their institutions by experience, before they could assume the dignity of a first-class power.

When the present Rebellion arose, America had thus far proved the success of democratic institutions.  In military and naval power, in education, in the administration of justice, in commercial thrift, in mechanical and agricultural enterprise, in the development of the national resources, the progress had been steady and rapid.  The politicians of Europe had been amazed to find that their unanimous prediction of the frailty of our political system had totally failed.  The idea of a political centre combined with separate State organizations was as firmly fixed as ever.  The General Government wielded an undiminished power in aid of the general good; the local Legislatures controlled, within the original limits, local interests.  The people had suffered no curtailment of their liberties from the delegation of political power; the executive had not been weakened either by the accession of new States or the disaffection of old ones.  The most philosophic of the English statesmen had predicted again and again that one of these alternatives must occur,—­but they had begun to doubt their own theories, and wellnigh confessed that our institutions were a success.  It was difficult for them to conceive that an entirely novel frame of government, deriving its genius from an idea, and regardless of precedent, could live to shame a system which had received the sanction of centuries of success, which was seemingly Providential in its stability, which had everywhere superseded every other form, which had absorbed into