When Professor Tyndall, in one of his lectures
here, made an allusion which he meant to be solemn and impressive,
to Plymouth Rock, its triteness drew a titter from the audience
which for a moment confounded him.
Unluckily, history cannot be made to order. It is the product of
ages. The proper substitute for it, as well as for the spectacular
effects of monarchy, in new democratic societies, is perfection.
There is no way in which we can here kindle the imaginations of the
large body of men and women to whom we are every year giving an
increasingly high education so well as by finish in the things we
undertake to do. Nothing does so much to produce despondency about
the republic, or alienation from republican institutions, among the
young of the present day, as the condition of the civil service, the
poor working of the post-office and the treasury or the courts, or
the helplessness of legislators in dealing with the ordinary every-
day problems. The largeness of the country, and the rapidity of its
growth, and the comparatively low condition of foreign nations in
respect to freedom, which roused people in Fourth-of-July orations
forty years ago, have, like the historical reminiscences, lost their
magic, and the material prosperity is now associated in people's
minds with so much moral corruption that the mention of it produces
in some of the best of us a feeling not far removed from nausea.
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