One of the strongest instincts of the English character is the instinct of permanence. It acts involuntarily, it pervades the national life, and, as Pope said of the universal soul, it operates unspent. Institutions seem to have grown out of human nature in this country, and are as much its expression as blossoms, leaves, and flowers are the expression of inevitable law. A custom, in England, once established, is seldom or never changed. The brilliant career, the memorable achievement, the great character, once fulfilled, takes a permanent shape in some kind of outward and visible memorial, some absolute and palpable fact, which thenceforth is an accepted part of the history of the land and the experience of its people. England means stability--the fireside and the altar, home here and heaven hereafter; and this is the secret of the power that she wields in the affairs of the world, and the charm that she diffuses over the domain of thought. Such a temple as St. Paul's cathedral, such a palace as Hampton Court, such a castle as that of Windsor or that of Warwick, is the natural, spontaneous expression of the English instinct of permanence; and it is in memorials like these that England has written her history, with symbols that can perish only with time itself. At intervals her latent animal ferocity breaks loose--as it did under Henry the Eighth, under Mary, under Cromwell, and under James the Second,--and for a brief time ramps and bellows, striving to deface and deform the surrounding structure of beauty that has been slowly and painfully reared out of her deep heart and her sane civilisation. But the tears of human pity soon quench the fire of Smithfield, and it is only for a little while that the Puritan soldiers play at nine-pins in the nave of St. Paul's. This fever of animal impulse, this wild revolt of petulant impatience, is soon cooled; and then the great work goes on again, as calmly and surely as before--that great work of educating mankind to the level of constitutional liberty, in which England has been engaged for well-nigh a thousand years, and in which the American Republic, though sometimes at variance with her methods and her spirit, is, nevertheless, her follower and the consequence of her example. Our Declaration was made in 1776: the Declaration to the Prince of Orange is dated 1689, and the Bill of Rights 1628, while Magna Charta was secured in 1215.