The day on which we are met is the day that is honoured by a mighty commonwealth of our own blood and speech as the birthday of its founder. It is a day of rejoicing in every home throughout the vastest of English lands, the land where the tongue and laws of England have won for themselves a wider dominion than the Empire of Justinian or of Trajan. From the western brink of that giant stream of Ocean of which the Greek of old heard with wonder to the eastern brink of that further Ocean of which Ptolemy and Strabo never dreamed, the name of a man of English blood, of English speech, bearing the simple name of an English village, is uttered, as on this day, with the same feelings with which the men of elder commonwealths uttered the names of Brutus and Timoleôn. The Teutonic clan which, in some unrecorded settlement of our folk, planted on a spot of Northern English soil the obscure name of the Wascingas, dreamed not that the name of their little mark, unrecorded in the annals of the elder England, should become the first of names in a younger and a vaster England, the meeting-place of a wider federation than that which met at Aigion or that which meets at Bern. Still less could they have dreamed that the city which was after twelve hundred years and more to take the name of their new-born township was to take its name because that name had passed as the name of an English house from the banks of the Wear to the banks of the Potomac, to be borne in due succession by that one member of that house who was to make it a name of glory for all ages. From Washington in the bishopric of Durham to Washington in the district of Columbia, the bound is greater, the contrast is more startling, than when we pass from Boston in Holland to Boston in Massachusetts, or even when we pass from Melbourne with her three towers in the old land of the Five Boroughs to that Melbourne in the greatest of islands where even the younger Washington may seem ancient. Happy indeed was the luck that the man whose birth we celebrate this day bore by descent from his fathers the good Teutonic name of an English _gens_ and an English township. Under no system of nomenclature but that of our fathers could the name of the township have so simply and naturally become the name of the man, and the name of the man have so simply and naturally become the name of the city. The result would have been less happy if the city had been fated to bear the names of not a few of the comrades and fellow-workers of its own _epônymos_. The name of the Bernician village and of the man who bore it is at least more in place than the names of some other spots in the same land, spots condemned to bear the name of a Greek island or a Greek poet, of an Egyptian city or a Roman oligarch. The federal capital of the younger England bears a name more truly English than the kingly capital of the elder. London is a name which has no meaning save in a tongue other than our own; it is the