great sea and are forgotten, but the Nation abides the same. So all the thought, and feeling, and conviction of the Nation to-day, on questions of human life and duty, it brings from the far-away past, from the gray mists of the distant hills where it took its rise.

Just think! The life of every great, strong man and woman, who has lived, thought, worked in the Nation, has it not entered into the Nation's life? Is not here yet, a part of the Nation's influence? Every great, distinct type of human nature grown in the Nation becomes forever a mould in which to cast men. Every great deed done, every strong thought uttered, every noble life lived, is committed to the stream of this national tradition. Every great victory won, every terrible defeat suffered, every grand word spoken, every noble song sung, is alive to the last. The living Nation drops nothing, loses nothing out of its life. The Saxon Alfred, the Norman William, Scandinavian viking, moss trooper of the border, they have all gone into our circulation, they all help to shape Americans. And we have added Washington, the stainless gentleman, and Jefferson, the unselfish statesman, and Franklin, the patient conqueror of circumstance, and a thousand others, as types by which to form the children of this people for a thousand years.

Think, too, how the national tradition rejects all bad models, all mean types, how it refuses to touch them at any price, how it will only carry down the grand models, the noble types. Arnold never enters as an influence into national training. The Arnolds and their treason are whelmed and sunk, as the Davises and their treason will be. The Washingtons do live as types. Their deeds sweep on, like stately barks, borne proudly on the rolling waves of the Nation's life, with triumphal music on their snowy decks, the land's glory for evermore! Only the noble, only the good, the true in some shape, never the utterly false or vile, will this national tradition hold and keep, as an influence and a power for time.

Unseen, unfelt, but strong like God's hand, this power surrounds the cradle of the child. He finds it waiting for him. He does not know about it or reason about it. It takes him, soft and plastic as it finds him, and calls out his powers, and fashions them after its own forms. Before he is twenty-one he is made up for good and all, an American, an Englishman, or a Frenchman, for life. The creating influence was like the air. He breathed it into his circulation.

There are people who think it very wise to quarrel with this state of things. They think it philosophic to sneer at national prejudices, as they call them, to call national pride and national feeling narrow and bigoted. It is simply very silly to quarrel with any divine and unalterable order of life. Better work under it and with it. Does not love of country exalt and ennoble, and all the more because of its prejudices? Does not the very meanest feel himself higher, more worthy, more self-respecting, because he is one of a strong, great, free people, with a grand inheritance of heroism from the past, and grand possibilities for the future? Who will quarrel with the Frenchman, the Englishman, or the Japanese, for holding his land the fairest land, his nation the noblest nation the sun shines on? Is it not my fixed faith that he is utterly deluded? Do I not know that my own land is the garden of the Lord? Do I not see that its valleys are the holiest, and its mountains the loftiest, its rivers the most majestic, and its seas the broadest, its men the bravest, and its women the purest and fairest on the broad earth's face? Even Fourth of July orations have their uses.

No! thank Heaven for this virtue of patriotism! It lifts a man out of his lower nature, and makes his heart beat with the hearts of heroes. There are two or three things in the world men will die for. The Nation is one. They will die for the land where their fathers sleep. They will fling fortune, hope, peace, family bliss, life itself, all into the gulf, to save its hearths from shame, its roof trees from dishonor. They will follow the tattered rag they have made the symbol of its right, through bursting shells and hissing hail of rifle shot, and serried ranks of gleaming bayonets, 'into the jaws of death, into the mouth of Hell,' when they are called. They will do this in thousands, the poorest better than the richest often, the humblest just as heroically as the leaders of the people. And therefore, we say, thank God for the elevating power of Patriotism, for national Pride, for national prejudice, if you will, that can, by this great love of country, so conquer selfishness, meanness, cowardice, and all lower loves, and make the very lowest by its power a hero, while the mortal man dies for the immortal Nation! Let a man commit himself boldly to the tendencies and influences of his race then. Let him work with them, not against them. He cannot be too much an American, too thoroughly penetrated with the convictions and the spirit of his country. And he need fear no contracting narrowness. The Nation's aims are wiser far and loftier far than the wisest and the loftiest of any one man, or any one generation.

We have faintly shadowed out here something of the meaning of The Nation. If we are right, we can pay no price that shall come near its value. For ourselves, for our children, for the ages coming, it is verily the Ark of the Covenant. We have seen that we are here to build it. Because God needed these United States, He kept a continent till the time was ripe, and then sent His workmen to the work. We are all, in our degree, builders on those walls. We are building fast, these days. Some rotten stones have entered into the structure, and it is hard work to get them out, but we shall succeed. We shall see that no more of that kind get in. Let us build on the broad foundation of the fathers a stately palace, of marble, pure and white, whose towers shall flash back in glory the sunlight of centuries, towers of refuge against falsehood and wrong and cruelty forevermore.

We are all builders, we say. The humblest does his share. There's fear in that thought, but more of hope. Nothing perishes. The private, who falls, bravely fighting, does his part like the general. The ploughman's honest life gives its contribution to the Nation's greatness as the life of Webster does. All is telling in 'the long results of time,' helping to decide what style of manhood shall be fashioned in America for generations.

For the great Nation grows slowly upward to its perfect proportions, as the parent and teacher of men. And all things and all men in it help to decide and develop that capacity. Not dazzling battle-bursts alone, not alone victorious charges on the trampled plain, not splendid triumphs, when laurelled legions march home from conquered provinces and humbled lands, not the mighty deeds of mighty men in camps, nor the mighty words of mighty men in senates, though all these do their part, and a grand part too—not these alone give the great land its character and might. These come from a thousand little things, we seldom think of. By the workman's axe that fells the forest as by the soldier's bayonet, by the gleaming ploughshare in the furrow as by the black Columbiad couchant on the rampart, by the schoolhouse in the valley as by the grim battery on the bay, by the church spire rising from the grove, by the humble cottage in the glen, by the Bible on the stand at eve, by the prayer from the peaceful hearth, by the bell that calls to worship through the hallowed air; by the merchant at his desk, and by the farmer in the harvest field, by the judge upon the bench, and the workman in his shop, by the student in his silent room, and by the sailor on the voiceful sea, by the honest speaker's tongue, by the honest writer's pen, and by the free press that gives the words of both a thousand pair of