An impressive example of the survival of this instinct in modern times is afforded by the Japanese, who daily, at innumerable household shrines and public temples erected to Shintō, worship their ancestors as the gods of the home and of the nation. When, twenty-years ago, Japan so easily defeated the Chinese Empire with ten times the population of Japan, the surprise and marvel of the world impelled one of the most brilliant writers of our generation to seek the source of the fortitude, the indomitable spirit and the military valor of the Japanese. He did not expect to find it in their form of government or in their laws, for he realized the great truth that mere forms of government and laws possess no magical or supernatural virtue and are of little moment in nations in comparison with the moral character of their leaders and their people. He discovered, as he believed, that the secret of the civil and martial power of the Japanese and the source of their moral energy and virtue--I use virtue in the Latin sense of valor--lay in the vital and all-pervading worship of their ancestors, based upon the deep-rooted belief that all things are determined by the dead. He found that this homage excited at once the deepest emotion and the most powerful inspiration of the race, shaping their national character, directing their national life, teaching them reverence, obedience, self-restraint, temperance, loyalty, courage, devotion and sacrifice, and making them ever conscious of the prodigious debt the present owes to the past, as well as keenly sensible of the duty of love and gratitude to the departed for their labors and suffering. "They," the dead, he eloquently wrote, "created all that we call civilization,--trusting us to correct such mistakes as they could not help making. The sum of their toil is incalculable; and all that they have given us ought surely to be very sacred, very precious, if only by reason of the infinite pain and thought which it cost." And then he added, "Yet what Occidental dreams of saying daily, like the Shintō believer: '_Ye forefathers of the generations, and of our families, and of our kindred,--unto you, the founders of our homes, we utter the gladness of our thanks_'?"[6] In the reverential spirit so beautifully expressed by this Japanese prayer, I venture upon a necessarily brief and imperfect review of a subject of transcendent and enduring interest to Americans--the debt that American constitutional government, under which we enjoy the blessings of civil and religious liberty and of just and equal laws, owes to your ancestors of the Mayflower.