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.

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

    Books she had known from her earliest infancy
    But I wanted to be happy as long as I could
    Curiosity as a factor has never been given its proper weight
    Even old people may have an ideal
    Every novel is, to some extent, a compound of truth and fiction
    Fond of her, although she was no more than an episode in his life
    Giant pines that gave many a mast to King George’s navy
    Had exhausted the resources of the little school
    He hain’t be’n eddicated a great deal
    Life had made a woman of her long ago
    Not that I’ve anything against her personally—­
    Pious belief in democracy, with a firmer determination to get on top
    Riddle he could not solve—­one that was best left alone
    Stray from the political principles laid down by our forefathers
    That which is the worst cruelty