In April, 1783, Liberty Bell rang the proclamation of Peace, and on July 4th, 1826, it ushered in the year of Jubilee. The last tolling of the bell was in July, 1835, when, while slowly tolling, and without any apparent reason, the bell, which had played such an important part in the War of Independence, and in the securing of liberty for the people of this great country, parted through its side, making a large rent, which can still be clearly seen. It was as though the bell realized that its great task was accomplished, and that it could leave to other and younger bells, the minor duties which remained to be performed. This is not a history of the United States, but is rather a description of some of the most interesting and remarkable features to be found in various parts of it. It is difficult, however, to describe scenes and buildings without at least brief historical reference, and as we present an excellent illustration of the apartment in which the Declaration of Independence was signed, we are compelled to make a brief reference to the circumstances and events which preceded that most important event in the world's history. As we have seen, the conflict between the home country and the colonies commenced long before there was any actual outbreak. As Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson so graphically expresses it, the surrender of Canada to England by France in 1763 suddenly opened men's eyes to the fact that British America had become a country so large as to make England seem ridiculously small. Even the cool-headed Dr. Franklin, writing that same year to Mary Stevenson in London, spoke of England as "that stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one's shoes dry." A far-seeing French statesman of the period looked at the matter in the same way. Choiseul, the Prime Minister who ceded Canada, claimed afterwards that he had done it in order to destroy the British nation by creating for it a rival. This assertion was not made till ten years later, and may very likely have been an afterthought, but it was destined to be confirmed by the facts. We have now to deal with the outbreak of a contest which was, according to the greatest of the English statesmen of the period, "a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical war." No American writer ever employed to describe it a combination of adjectives so vigorous as those brought together by the elder Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham. The rights for which Americans fought seemed to him to be the common rights of Englishmen, and many Englishmen thought the same.