gone the other way, if the region of the Plata had become British, and a large British immigration had followed.  Do not think me guilty of the heinous crime of forgetting the Monroe Doctrine.  That momentous declaration was not made for a good many years after our Gen. Whitelocke was repulsed at Buenos Ayres, tho Mr. Sumner and other people have always held that it was Canning who really first started the Monroe Doctrine, when he invited the United States to join him against European intervention in South American affairs.

The day is at hand, we are told, when four-fifths of the human race will trace their pedigree to English forefathers, as four-fifths of the white people in the United States trace their pedigree to-day.  By the end of this century, they say, such nations as France and Germany, assuming that they stand apart from fresh consolidations, will only be able to claim the same relative position in the political world as Holland and Switzerland.  These musings of the moon do not take us far.  The important thing, as we all know, is not the exact fraction of the human race that will speak English.  The important thing is that those who speak English, whether in old lands or new, shall strive in lofty, generous and never-ceasing emulation with peoples of other tongues and other stock for the political, social, and intellectual primacy among mankind.  In this noble strife for the service of our race we need never fear that claimants for the prize will be too large a multitude.

As an able scholar of your own has said, Jefferson was here using the old vernacular of English aspirations after a free, manly, and well-ordered political life—­a vernacular rich in stately tradition and noble phrase, to be found in a score of a thousand of champions in many camps—­in Buchanan, Milton, Hooker, Locke, Jeremy Taylor, Roger Williams, and many another humbler but not less strenuous pioneer and confessor of freedom.  Ah, do not fail to count up, and count up often, what a different world it would have been but for that island in the distant northern sea!  These were the tributary fountains, that, as time went on, swelled into the broad confluence of modern time.  What was new in 1776 was the transformation of thought into actual polity.

What is progress?  It is best to be slow in the complex arts of politics in their widest sense, and not to hurry to define.  If you want a platitude, there is nothing for supplying it like a definition.  Or shall we say that most definitions hang between platitude and paradox?  There are said, tho I have never counted, to be 10,000 definitions of religion.  There must be about as many of poetry.  There can hardly be fewer of liberty, or even of happiness.