and that the Government has such powers as they grant to it, and no others.

Doubt and debate are the compound safety valves of freedom, and Thomas Jefferson created both. He feared the loss of popular rights in centralization, and believed that the reserved powers of the States were the only guarantee of the liberties of the people. He stands supreme in our history as a political leader, and left no successor. He destroyed the party of Washington, Hamilton, and Adams, and built up an organization which was dominant in the country for half a century. The one question thus raised and overshadowing all others for a hundred years, half satisfied by compromises, half suppressed by threats, at times checking prosperity, at times paralyzing progress, at times producing panics, at times preventing the solution of fiscal and industrial problems vital to our expansion, was, Are we a Nation?

For nearly fifty years the prevailing sentiment favored the idea that the federal compact was a contract between sovereign States. Had the forces of disunion been ready for the arbitrament of arms, the results would have been fatal to the Union. That ablest observer of the American experiment, De Tocqueville, was so im pressed by this that he based upon it an absolute prediction of the destruction of the Republic. But, at the critical period, when the popularity, courage, and audacity of General Jackson were almost the sole hope of nationality, Webster delivered in the Senate a speech unequalled in the annals of eloquence for its immediate effects and lasting results. The appeals of Demosthenes to the Athenian democracy, the denunciation of Cicero against the conspiracies of Catiline, the passionate outcry of Mirabeau pending the French Revolution, the warnings of Chatham in the British Parliment, the fervor of Patrick Henry for Independence, were of temporary interest, and yielded feeble results, compared with the tremendous consequences of this mighty utterance.

It broke the spell of supreme loyalty to the State and created an unquenchable and resistless patriotism for the United States. It appeared in the school books, and,

by declaiming glowing extracts therefrom, the juvenile orators of that and succeeding generations won prizes at academic exhibitions and in mimic congresses.

Children educated parents, and the pride of the fathers and the kindled imaginations of the sons united them in a noble ideal of the great Republic. No subsequent patriotic oration met the requirements of any public occasion, great or small, which did not breathe the sentiment of "Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable." As the coldest clod, when first inspired by the grand passion of his life, becomes a chivalric knight, so, when at last the Union was assailed by arms, love of country burst the bonds of materialism and sacrificed everything for the preservation of the Nation's life. From the unassailable conviction of the power of the General Government to protect itself, to coerce a State, to enforce its laws everywhere, and to use all the resources of the people to put down rebellion, came not only patriotism, but public conscience. With conscience was the courage, so rare in commercial communities, which will peril business and apparent prosperity for an idea. This defeated the slave power, and is to-day the most potent factor in every reform.

The field for the growth and development of this sentiment, and for its practical application without fear of consequences, was the great West. Virginia's gift to the Union of the Northwest Territory, which now constitutes five great States, and its prompt dedication to freedom, and Jefferson's purchase from the first Napoleon of the vast area now known as Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and the Indian Territory, were the two acts of generosity and consummate statesmanship which definitely outlined the destiny of the Republic and its political mission.

In the genesis of nations there is no parallel with the growth of the West and its influence upon the world. The processes of its settlement reduce to comparative insignificance the romances and realities of the Statebuilders of the past. Movements of peoples which at other periods have been devastating migrations, or due

to the delirium of speculations, are here the wise founding and sober development of prosperous communities. The fabled Argo, sailing for the Golden Fleece, neither bore nor found the wealth carried and discovered by the emigrants' wagons on the prairies. The original conditions surrounding our hardy and adventurous pioneers; the riches in poverty, where hope inspired the efforts, and the self-denial to clear, or develop, or improve, or stock the farm, which was to be at once the family home and estate; the church and the schoolhouse growing simultaneously with the settlements; citizenship of the great Republic, which could only come through the admission of the Territory as a State into the grand confederacy of commonwealths, and only be lost by the dissolution of the Union; citizenship which meant not only political dignity and independence, but incalculable commercial and business advantages and opportunities-these were the elements which made the West, and these were the educators of the dominant power in the nation for the present and the future. Thus the West, the child of the Union, met the slave-power with determined resistance, and its threats with a defiant assertion of the inherent powers of the Nation, and with the pledge of its young and heroic life for their enforcement. This double sentiment found its oracle and representative in Abraham Lincoln. He consolidated the Northwest by declaring that the Mississippi should flow unvexed to the sea. In the great debate with Douglas, his challenge rang through the whole land, a summons to battle. "A house divided against itself," he said, "cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided." To enforce that expectation he called a million of men to arms, he emancipated four millions of slaves by presidential proclamation, and when the victory was won for liberty and unity, this most majestic figure of our time, clothed with the unlimited powers of a triumphant Government, stood between the passions of the strife, and commanded peace and forgiveness. When he fell by the

hand of the assassin the hundred years' struggle for national existence was ended. He throttled sectionalism and buried it. The Republic for which half a million men had died, and a million had been wounded, was so firmly bedded in the hearts, the minds, and the blood of its people, that the question of dissolution will never more form part of the schemes of its politicians or require the wisdom of its statesmen and the patriotism of its people.

DE PUY, WILLIAM H., an American teacher, minister, editor, and lexicographer, was born at Penn Yan, N. Y., October 31, 1821. He was of Huguenot parentage, and was educated at Lima, N. Y. At the age of sixteen he took charge of his first public school. At twenty he was elected Principal of the County Academy at Candeesport, Pa., and two years later Joint Principal of Genesee Classical Seminary, and Professor of Latin and Greek in that institution. In 1845 he entered the ministry in the Genesee Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was engaged in pastoral work until 1849, when he was appointed financial agent of Genesee College (now Syracuse University). In 1850 he was appointed Principal of the Teachers' Department of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, and a year later was elected Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and filled that chair for the ensuing four years. In 1855 he was appointed pastor of Grace Church, Buffalo, and successively and consecutively served for the full pastoral terms in all the four Methodist-Episcopal churches in that city, and during about four years of those pastorates was editor of the Buffalo Christian Advocate. He was also for two years the American Bible Society's District Secretary for Western New York. In 1865 he was appointed assistant editor