give place to that freedom which is essential to individual advancement as the basis of national power. Trained as our ancestors had been to consider these distinctions divinely appointed, it was no easy task for them to abrogate so aged and apparently sacred a system, and nothing but the material evidence before their eyes in the experience of their own society, convincing them that such a course was an actual necessity of their future well-being, could have induced them so to depart from the teachings of their progenitors. Nor was it less difficult to determine how far these safeguards of the olden time might safely be dispensed with, or where or how deeply the knife should be applied which, in the fallibility of human judgment, might possibly cut away some main root of their social organization. Here was required the exercise of the profoundest wisdom and the most careful discretion--wisdom unassisted by any experience in the past history of the world other than that of the utter failure of all past experiments in any way similar to their own. To us of to-day, viewed in the light of intervening experience and of the increased knowledge of human affairs, this may seem a little thing; but to them it was not so, for the path was new and untried, and they were surrounded by the thickest of darkness. Thus it will be seen that in the founding of our system there were great difficulties, which only the loftiest aims and the utmost firmness and determination in the cause of the good and the true, with the liveliest sense of the necessities and the yearnings of human nature, and the true end of all human existence, could have overcome,--difficulties which, with all the cultivation of their past, rendered their task not less arduous than that of the founders of any community recorded in history even among the rudest and most savage of peoples. And for all their energy and perseverance the world has not yet given them the credit which is their due, although the yearly developing results of their labors are gradually restoring them to their proper position in the appreciation of humanity. And the time will come when their memory will be cherished all over the earth as that of the greatest benefactors of the human kind. As the Alpine glacier year after year heaves out to its surface the bodies of those who many decades ago were buried beneath the everlasting snows, so time in its revolutions heaves up to the view of the world, one by one, the great facts of the buried past, to be carefully laid away in the graveyard of memory, with a towering monument above them to mark to all succeeding ages the spot where they have wrought in the interest of humanity.