We shall do well to ascertain the causes which have led us gradually to stray from the political principles laid down by our forefathers for all the world to see.  Some of us do not even know what those principles were.  I have met many intelligent men, in different states of the Union, who could not even repeat the names of the senators who sat for them in Congress.  Macaulay said, in 1852, “We now know, by the clearest of all proof, that universal suffrage, even united with secret voting, is no security, against the establishment of arbitrary power.”  To quote James Russell Lowell, writing a little later:  “We have begun obscurely to recognize that . . . popular government is not in itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so.”

As Americans, we cannot but believe that our political creed goes down in its foundations to the solid rock of truth.  One of the best reasons for our belief lies in the fact that, since 1776, government after government has imitated our example.  We have, by our very existence and rise to power, made any decided retrogression from these doctrines impossible.  So many people have tried to rule themselves, and are still trying, that one begins to believe that the time is not far distant when the United States, once the most radical, will become the most conservative of nations.

Thus the duty rests to-day, more heavily than ever, upon each American citizen to make good to the world those principles upon which his government was built.  To use a figure suggested by the calamity which has lately befallen one of the most beloved of our cities, there is a theory that earthquakes are caused by a necessary movement on the part of the globe to regain its axis.  Whether or not the theory be true, it has its political application.  In America to-day we are trying—­whatever the cost—­to regain the true axis established for us by the founders of our Republic.

HARLAKENDEN house, May 7, 1906.