I speak of Thirteen lands; and thirteen is as it were a magic number in the history of federations. It is a memorable number alike in the League of Achaia and in the Old League of High Germany. But in none of the three was Thirteen to be the fated stint and bound among the sharers in the common freedom. Thirteen stars, thirteen stripes, were wrought on the banner of the United States of America in their first day of independence, the day of their second birth as truly and fully a second English nation. Look at that banner now; tell the number of those stars and call them by their names, each of them the name of a free commonwealth of the English folk. See we not there the expansion of England in its greatest form? See we not there the work of Hengest and Cerdic carried out on a scale on which it could never have been carried out in the island which they won for us? The dependent provinces of England stretched but in name to the banks of the Father of Waters; from the border ridge of Alleghany, as from the height of Pisgah, they did but take a glance at the wider land beyond. The independent colonies of England have found those bounds too strait for them. They have gone on and taken possession; they have carried the common speech and the common law, beyond the mountains, beyond the rivers, beyond the vaster mountains, beyond the Eastern Ocean itself, till America marches upon Asia. Such has been the might of independence; such has been the strength of a folk which drew a new life from the axe which did not hew it down, but by a health-giving stroke parted it asunder. It may be, it is only in human nature that so it should be, that the fact that independence was won by the sword drew forth a keener life, a more conscious energy, a firmer and fiercer purpose to grow and to march on. The growth of a land free from the beginning might perchance have been slower; let it be so; a slight check on the forward march would not have been dearly purchased by unbroken friendship between parent and child from the beginning.