The first half of that stirring period of

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"Change, alarm, surprise,"

witnessed what is probably the most far-reaching and certainly the most romantic drama of history - the colonization of America. The landing at Jamestown had followed the dawn of the seventeenth century by only seven years, and the Pilgrims having landed in Massachusetts in 1620 and William Penn having landed in Pennsylvania in 1683, it is reasonably accurate to consider that the essential and formative labors of the first settlers extended over and were comprised within the hundred and fifty years preceding John Marshall's birth, and that a like period of a hundred and fifty years extends from his birth to the day on which we are assembled to do honor to his memory.

I know not how others may feel, but I have never been able to read a single page of the marvelous story of the settlement of America without an access of generous enthusiasm, and of seeming to be lifted into a purer and serener air. The men engaged in those transforming labors were fully conscious of the greatness of the work given them to do; and they addressed themselves to it as co-workers with God for the advantage, not only of themselves and their children, but of the future generations which were to rise up and call them blessed, as age after age entered upon its inheritance of the free institutions prepared for it, by the unceasing toil and the unwitnessed sacrifice, by the lonely vigil and the drear winter, by the fear of sudden massacre and the absence from all accustomed joys, by the unshed tears and by the shed blood of the first comers to these shores. It is too often forgotten that we are in almost all es

sential things only their lawful heirs, and such will be our children's children to the last syllable of recorded time. We sometimes talk with dull misapprehension of our inheritance, as if the mingling here of the different nationalities of the earth was a mere accident of our own time, and as if because some of our misfortunes are traceable to it, we are privileged to deny to any less fortunate brother such opportunity to seek a home upon this free and bountiful continent as our ancestors enjoyed. The truth is that the citizenship to which John Marshall was born, with all its far-reaching opportunities and inspirations, was due to just such mingling of the blood of different races as we are now witnessing. A Jesuit father is authority for the statement that eighteen different languages were spoken in what is now the city of New York two centuries ago, and probably no greater number is spoken there to-day; while as early as 1761 it was declared by a very competent authority that "the diversity of peoples, religions, nations, and languages in America is prodigious." Certainly the Dutch, the English, the French, the Germans, the Scotch, and the Swedes, Protestants and Catholics, were all self-asserting and aggressive agencies in the era of our colonization; and each stock and each creed made contributions of the greatest possible value to the foundations of the enduring structure of our nationality. Let us, therefore, always have the faith to believe that America is the heritage, not of ourselves alone, but of mankind, destined as well as fitted to receive all who come to her, and able to ameliorate their distresses, to diminish their differences, to cultivate their self-respect, and to fuse them, in the processes of the uncounted years, into one great and free and happy people.

This vast continent of America is also charged and will, I believe, always remain charged with another mission, impressed upon it by the men who settled it-that of being the refuge and the home of a true equality and of the republican form of government. It was settled and civilized and defended by men to whom the idea of privilege was abhorrent, and to whom the sense of substantial equality of opportunity was as the very breath of their lives. If in the changing circumstances of times and seasons any of the inequalities or privileges of the old world, from which they fled to the solitude of unbroken forests and the perils of savage foes, should unhappily reappear in the new world they founded, I beg you to believe they will not long find shelter here; for this entire continent has been, in counsels wiser than ours and which we could not hope to withstand if we wished, irrevocably dedicated to the common brotherhood of man in its truest and broadest sense. M. de Tocqueville long ago rightly described the controlling spirit of the youthful nation when he declared that it was "a manly and legitimate passion for equality." That noble passion is one of the most ancient and most constant forces in civilization, and it is necessarily the inexorable foe of inequality and of privilege in all their forms. It has often been checked, often thwarted, often even defeated and overthrown; but it has had, in the end, resistless power; and it has always advanced to new and more extensive conquests. Its last and greatest conquest is the continent on which we live.

To properly estimate the true grandeur of character of any great man it is always necessary to understand his environment and the spirit of the age in which he lived. The vibrant and electric atmosphere into which

John Marshall was born and in which his youth was passed was the inevitable consequence of the memories which the colonists had brought with them from the old world to the new, and of the elevating experiences of the life of adventure, of courage, of intellectual and religious fervor which they had lived. "Not many noble, not many mighty," were enrolled in their ranks. They were people of the middle class, such as we all have continued to be, and, however reluctant some of us may be to admit it, we all are likely to remain. They did not primarily seek wealth, but they avoided poverty and acquired property by hard and honest toil. They came indeed "out of great tribulation," but often also out of great joy and buoyancy of spirit; and the fruits of their experiences were visible in their daily lives, illuminated as those lives were by that sublime spirit of sacrifice for conscience sake, which in so many of their old homes had "wrought righteousness" for them and "out of weakness had made them strong."

The men who came from Sweden, from Holland, from England, from France, and from Germany, differing in many respects-in language, in habits, in dress, in manners, were agreed, as if of one blood and one creed, in the underlying principles of the Reformation, for which they and their fathers had suffered unspeakable afflictions; and they were agreed also in their common hatred of all tyranny, whether of church or king. They were an advance guard of a political Renaissance sent to take possession of the new world and to plant here that tree of liberty whose leaves should be "for the healing of the nations."

And as these different nationalities were commingled and were rapidly being fused into one people, the pro

fessors of all the different religious creeds gathered here were united in their devotion to the land which gave to each of them the right to freedom of religious worship; and when John Marshall was born the American colonists, thinly scattered along the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts Bay to Georgia, were as one people slowly marching inland to take possession of the continent, and to establish a great nation resting upon the sublime truth true yesterday, true to-day, and true forever — that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

What followed was as inevitable as a decree of fate, although to the courtiers of the old world, its nobles and its kings, the revolt of the new world seemed like a dislocation of the order of nature. To them, in their blindness, "the world was all so suddenly changed, so much that was vigorous was sunk decrepit, so much that was not was beginning to be. Borne over the Atlantic to the closing ear of Louis, king by the grace of God, what sounds were these, new in our centuries? Boston harbor was black with unexpected tea. Behold a Pennsylvanian congress gather; and ere long on Bunker Hill democracy, announcing in rifle volleys, death-winged, under her star banner, that she was born, and would envelop the whole world." In truth, nothing in the evolution of the material world is more orderly than the evolution in history of the American Revolution and the American Union. They were the natural and inevitable results of the memories, the sufferings, the faith, and the aspira tions of the early settlers. The British Crown lost its American colonies not because of the stamp act, or the