Besides the furious strife and convulsion that have rent other lands, how inconsiderable seem the disturbances that disfigure our home annals, how peaceful the changes in our constitutional system, brought about orderly in due form of law, how purely domestic the saddest events of our internal history! We wept with our Sovereign in her early widowhood, a bereavement to the people as well as to the Queen; we trembled with her when the shadow of death hung over her eldest son, rejoicing with her when it passed away; we shared her grief for two other of her children, inheritors of the noble qualities of their father, and for the doom which took from us one whom we had loved to call "our future king"; we deplored the other bereavements which darkened her advancing years; we have lamented great men taken from us, some, like the conqueror of Waterloo, "the great world-victor's victor," in the fulness of age and honour, others with their glorious work seemingly half done, their career of usefulness mysteriously cut short; we have shuddered when the hateful terrorism, traditional pest of Ireland through centuries of wrong and outrage, has once and again lifted its head among ourselves; we have suffered--though far less severely than other lands, even than some under our own rule--from plague, pestilence, and famine, from dearth of work and food. But what are these woes compared to those that other peoples have endured, when it has been said to the sword, "Sword, go through the land," and the dread word has been obeyed; when war has slain its thousands, and want its tens of thousands; or when terrible convulsions of nature have shaken down cities, and turned the fruitful land into a wilderness? Events have moved fast since the already distant day when the Colonial and Industrial Exhibition was ministering exultation to many a British heart by its wonderful display of the various wealth of our distant domains and their great industrial resources. We were even then tempted--as have been nations that are no more--to pride ourselves on having reached an unassailable height of grandeur. Since then our territory has expanded and our wealth increased; but with them have increased the evils and the dangers inseparable from great possessions, and the responsibilities involved in them. We can only "rejoice with trembling" in this our second year of Jubilee. Remembering with all gratitude how we have been spared hitherto, and mindful of the perils that wait on power and prosperity, let it be ours to offer such sacrifices of thanksgiving as can be pleasing to the almighty Ruler of the ways of men, whom too often in pride of power, in selfish satisfaction with our own achievements, we forget.