I am not bold enough to try a definition.  I will not try to gauge how far the advance of moral forces has kept pace with that extension of material forces in the world of which this continent, conspicuous before all others, bears such astounding evidence.  This, of course, is the question of questions, because as an illustrious English writer—­to whom, by the way, I owe my friendship with your founder many long years ago—­as Matthew Arnold said in America here, it is moral ideas that at bottom decide the standing or falling of states and nations.  Without opening this vast discussion at large, many a sign of progress is beyond mistake.  The practise of associated action—­one of the master keys of progress—­is a new force in a hundred fields, and with immeasurable diversity of forms.  There is less acquiescence in triumphant wrong.  Toleration in religion has been called the best fruit of the last four centuries, and in spite of a few bigoted survivals, even in our United Kingdom, and some savage outbreaks of hatred, half religious, half racial, on the Continent of Europe, this glorious gain of time may now be taken as secured.  Perhaps of all the contributions of America to human civilization this is greatest.  The reign of force is not yet over, and at intervals it has its triumphant hours, but reason, justice, humanity fight with success their long and steady battle for a wider sway.

Of all the points of social advance, in my country at least, during the last generation none is more marked than the change in the position of women, in respect of rights of property, of education, of access to new callings.  As for the improvement of material well-being, and its diffusion among those whose labor is a prime factor in its creation, we might grow sated with the jubilant monotony of its figures, if we did not take good care to remember, in the excellent words of the President of Harvard, that those gains, like the prosperous working of your institutions and the principles by which they are sustained, are in essence moral contributions, “being principles of reason, enterprise, courage, faith, and justice, over passion, selfishness, inertness, timidity, and distrust.”  It is the moral impulses that matter.  Where they are safe, all is safe.

When this and the like is said, nobody supposes that the last word has been spoken as to the condition of the people either in America or Europe.  Republicanism is not itself a panacea for economic difficulties.  Of self it can neither stifle nor appease the accents of social discontent.  So long as it has no root in surveyed envy, this discontent itself is a token of progress.

What, cries the skeptic, what has become of all the hopes of the time when France stood upon the top of golden hours?  Do not let us fear the challenge.  Much has come of them.  And over the old hopes time has brought a stratum of new.