Time has verified the genial doctor's prediction. The career of the new nation thus formed has hitherto been a rising and not a setting sun. He had in his sixty years of conspicuously useful citizenship--and perhaps no nation ever had a more untiring and unselfish servant--done more than any American to develop the American Commonwealth, but like Moses, he was destined to see the promised land only from afar, for the new Government had hardly been inaugurated, before Franklin died, as full of years as honours. Prophetic as was his vision, he could never have anticipated the reality of to-day, for this nation, thus deliberately formed in the light of reason and without blood or passion, is to-day, by common consent, one of the greatest and, I trust I may add, one of the noblest republics of all time. _III. The Political Philosophy of the Constitution_ In my last address I left Doctor Franklin predicting to the discouraged remnant of the constitutional convention that the nation then formed would be a "rising sun" in the constellation of the nations. The sun, however, was destined to rise through a bank of dark and murky clouds, for the Constitution could not take effect until it was ratified by nine of the thirteen States; and when it was submitted to the people, who selected State conventions for the purpose of ratifying or rejecting the proposed plan of government, a bitter controversy at once ensued between two political parties, then in process of formation, one called the Constitution ratified without controversy. In the remaining ten the struggle was long and arduous, and nearly a year passed before the requisite nine States gave their assent. Two of the States refused to become parts of the new nation, even after it began, and three years passed before the thirteen States were re-united under the Constitution. It could not have been ratified had there not been an assurance that there would be immediate amendments to provide a Bill of Rights to safeguard the individual. Thus came into existence the first ten amendments to the Constitution, with their perpetual guaranty of the fundamental rights of religion, freedom of speech and of the Press, the right of assemblage, the immunity from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right of trial by jury, and similar guarantees of fundamental individual rights.