our common respect for labor, and the accounts in our sav- ings banks. It is the unparalleled opportunities, in every direction, which are offered to rectitude and to endeavor, no matter how humble the roof under which they were born. It is our publishing houses, our newspaper press, our libraries and museums and art galleries.

It is our improved house making, and the innumerable new conveniences which enter into our home making. It is more than that: it is the spirit of the American home, the equality of right in it, the exalted position of woman, and the dominating influence of the mother in the household.

It is our free public school at every door, and our centers of the higher learning pushing the scientific advance in every possible direction and promoting every conceivable phase of intellectual activity. It is our churches and our Sunday schools, the complete toleration of religious opinion, and the common respect for religious worship. It is our private benevolences, and our steadily improving treatment of the troublesome and dependent classes.

It is the individualism and the balanced sense of the nation, the love of freedom which is so strong that no one is afraid of losing the object of it. It is the regard for laws which are fundamental, the indifference to laws which are seen to be only advisory, the jealousy of laws which tend to favor special interests or seem to set at naught the common thought.

The old Pilgrim at Plymouth, the minute-man at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, were in our Constitution at the beginning: the citizen soldier of the Civil War, the Oregon upon her fifteen thousand miles journey around the Horn and then at once the decisive factor in

the most sanguinary naval battle in all history, the college boys and farmers' lads and millionaires' sons fighting their way together up the flame-swept hill at San Juan, the veterans of the Ninth Regular Infantry pushing their way through the August heat and the sand and filth of China and battering down the gates of the Forbidden City to relieve the American legation from the horrors of Peking, are all in the Constitution now.

The spirit of the nation, that spirit which moved out of the old world into the new, that chastened and tolerant, that sober and yet aggressive spirit which separated from an established church, and so learned how to separate from an autocratic state; which centered at Plymouth Rock, and then tempered the heroic but intolerant sentiment at the Bay; which moved out into the valley of the Connecticut, and then crossed the Berkshires into the valleys of the Hudson and the Mohawk and the Susquehanna; which crossed the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge; which took possession of the prairies with confident and resolute step; which scaled the Rockies and claimed the Pacific shores; which passed through the Golden Gate and into the beyond. This spirit is the very life of the Constitution. The spirit that has fattened for a hundred years upon what it has fed, that chafes more and more at the long continued exactions of the kings, and that would extend free government, its helps and its opportunities, is in the Constitution in yet larger measure now than in the days of our fathers.

More, far more, than any one can tell is in the American Constitution. May the God of nations give us larger reverence for the inspirations that are in our history, whether inscribed in the law books of state, or written upon the hearts of men and women. May the written

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law be construed in the light of the traditions, the heroisms, the opportunities, and the aspirations of the unwritMay the Supreme Court never lack in discretion, or in courage. And under its guidance may the Constitution march on. May it advance without greed, and, if possible, without war. May it go forward with the consciousness of moral right to widen the area of civilization and enlarge the liberty of the human race. Never fear. Vastness may prove to be the ark of our safety. May all the fundamental principles of human liberty be upheld and, within the lines which they have laid down, may the Constitution and the flag of the great Republic MARCH ON.

STATE OF WISCONSIN.

In Wisconsin Marshall Day was observed by proceedings under the auspices of the Milwaukee Bar Association in Plymouth Church, in the City of Milwaukee, and by a banquet held at the Plankinton House in the evening. A large assemblage of lawyers and citizens attended the celebration in Plymouth Church. F. C. Winkler, President of the Bar Association of Milwaukee, introduced as the orator of the day Neal Brown of Wausau, whose address, omitting biographical details and other matters already given in preceding addresses, is as follows:

Address of Neal Brown.

The art of biography has never been able to spoil the fame of John Marshall, and the multitude of biographers have never cheapened or vulgarized any act of his. Whether in school-boy garb poring over Milton and Shakespeare, or as a soldier of the infant colonies at Brandywine, or in the blood-stained snows of Valley Forge, or serving their councils when peace came, or as the master-mind of our great tribunal for many years, he was every inch a man. It is not given to any other profession in this country to have one universally accorded, pre-eminent name. We could not agree on the greatest soldier, poet, philosopher, novelist, or the greatest statesman or preacher; but I think we would all name Marshall as our greatest jurist.

But it is a fine quality in the character of Marshall that whether we come to him early or late, he always has

for us the same unchanging manhood and serenity, the same moral elevation.

The bar did much for Marshall. Before him came the great lawyers of his day. There came Martin and Harper, Ingersoll and Dexter, and the lawyer-poet Key; there came from the west the great Kentuckian, Henry Clay, and with him Marshall the younger; there also was the exiled Emmet, who fled.from his native land after his brother gave up his life to English justice; to that court also came Rawle and Dallas, Binney and Sergeant, the eloquent Pinkney, Stockton, Wirt and Adams. Early in the century Webster appeared there, rugged and somber as his own New England mountains, a figure of heroic port, fit to hold a world in awe. Some of these lawyers of Marshall's court, like Swann and the Lees, who argued scores of causes before him, had not fame enough to accord them a place in the cyclopædias,- those dusty crypts of the immortals. So often it is that the fame of the great lawyer is written in the running water; you may search and you shall find but his name, or a handful of dust, in I know not what forgotten graveyard. It was an age of saddle-bags and circuit-riding,- the golden age of the American Bar. Not golden in fat fees for the lawyer, but golden in its wealth of high ambitions and aspirations, in its leisure for study and reflection. The lawyer was not ruffled or discomposed by the roar and clang of a hurrying civilization. Calmly he could welcome the pale midnight lamp and the day of toil succeeding. The great lawyers who came to Marshall's court had the primal vigor of a new race.

It is over the primal traits in Marshall's character that we may wish to linger longest, and not over the dry chronology of the encyclopædias,- those gigantic tumuli,