I shall not be misunderstood, then, if I say that there is no such thing as human history. Nothing can be more profoundly, sadly true. The annals of mankind have never been written, never can be written; nor would it be within human capacity to read them if they were written. We have a leaf or two torn from the great book of human fate as it flutters in the storm-winds ever sweeping across the earth. We decipher them as we best can with purblind eyes, and endeavor to learn their mystery as we float along to the abyss; but it is all confused babble, hieroglyphics of which the key is lost. Consider but a moment. The island on which this city stands is as perfect a site as man could desire for a great, commercial, imperial city. Byzantium,* which the lords of the ancient world built for the capital of the earth; which the temperate and vigorous Turk in the days of his stern military discipline plucked from the decrepit hands which held the scepter of Cæsar and Constantine, and for the succession to which the present lords of Europe are wrangling, not Byzantium, nor hundred-gated Thebes,† nor London nor Liverpool, Paris nor Moscow, can surpass the future certainties of this thirteen-mile-long Manhattan.

for what are two centuries and a

And yet it was but yesterday. half in the boundless vista of the past?· that the Mohawk and the Mohican were tomahawking and scalping each other throughout these regions, and had been doing so for centuries; while the whole surface of this island, now groaning under millions of wealth which oppress the imagination, hardly furnished a respectable hunting-ground for a single sachem, in his war-paint and moccasins, who imagined himself proprietor of the soil.

But yesterday Cimmerian darkness, primeval night. To-day, grandeur, luxury, wealth, power. I come not here to-night to draw pictures or pour forth dithyrambics that I may gratify your vanity or my own, whether municipal or national. To appreciate the unexampled advantages bestowed by the Omnipotent upon this favored Republic, this youngest child of civilization, is rather to oppress the thoughtful mind with an overwhelming sense of responsibility; to

* BYZANTIUM. The original name of Constantinople, the present capital of the Turkish Empire. The beauty and convenience of its situation were observed by Constantine the Great, who made it the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire A. D. 328, and called it Constantinopolis, i. e. the City of Constantine.

THEBES. A great city of Egypt which was formerly the capital of that country. It is now in ruins, its remains extending for seven miles along both banks of the Nile.

sadden with quick-coming fears; to torture with reasonable doubts. The world's great hope is here. The future of humanity - at least for that cycle in which we are now revolving-depends mainly upon the manner in which we deal with our great trust.

says the great master of morals and humanity.

But neither fools nor sages, neither individuals nor nations, have any other light to guide them along the track which all must tread, save that long glimmering vista of yesterdays which grows so swiftly fainter and fainter as the present fades into the past.

And I believe it possible to discover a law out of all this apparently chaotic whirl and bustle, this tangled skein of human affairs, as it spins itself through the centuries. That law is Progress, slow, confused, contradictory, but ceaseless development, intellectual and moral, of the human race.

It is of Human Progress that I speak to-night. It is of Progress that I find a startling result when I survey the spectacle which the American Present displays.

This nation stands on the point towards which other people are moving, the starting-point, not the goal. It has put itself-or rather Destiny has placed it more immediately than other nations in subordination to the law governing all bodies political as inexorably as Kepler's law controls the motions of the planets.

The law is Progress; the result, Democracy.

Sydney Smith once alluded, if I remember rightly, to a person who allowed himself to speak disrespectfully of the equator. I have a strong objection to be suspected of flattering the equator. Yet were it not for that little angle of 23° 27′ 26′′, which it is good enough to make with the plane of the ecliptic, the history of this earth and of all which it inherit " would have been essentially modified, even if it had not been altogether a blank.

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Out of the obliquity of the equator has come forth our civilization. It was long ago observed by one of the most thoughtful writers that ever dealt with human history, John von Herder, that it was to the

gradual shading away of zones and alternation of seasons that the vigor and variety of mankind were attributable.

I have asked where and when were the good old times? This earth of ours has been spinning about in space, great philosophers tell us, some few hundred millions of years. We are not very familiar with our predecessors on this continent. For the present, the oldest inhabitant must be represented here by the man of Natchez, whose bones were unearthed not long ago under the Mississippi bluffs in strata which were said to argue him to be at least one hundred thousand years old. Yet he is a mere modern, a parvenu on this planet, if we are to trust illustrious teachers of science, compared with the men whose bones and whose implements have been found in high mountain-valleys and gravel-pits of Europe; while these again are thought by the same authorities to be descendants of races which flourished many thousands of years before, and whose relics science is confidently expecting to discover, although the icy sea had once ingulfed them and their dwelling-places.

We of to-day have no filial interest in the man of Natchez. He was no ancestor of ours, nor have he and his descendants left traces along the dreary track of their existence to induce a desire to claim relationship with them.

Nether

We are Americans ; but yesterday we were Europeans, landers, Saxons, Normans, Swabians, Celts; and the day before yesterday, Asiatics, Mongolians, what you will.

The orbit of civilization, so far as our perishing records enable us to trace it, seems preordained from East to West. China, India, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Rome, are successively lighted up as the majestic orb of day moves over them; and as he advances still farther through his storied and mysterious zodiac, we behold the shadows of evening as surely falling on th. lands which he leaves behind him.

Man still reeled on, falling, rising again, staggering forward with hue and cry at his heels, a wounded felon daring to escape from the prison to which the grace of God had inexorably doomed him. And still there was progress. Besides the sword, two other instruments grew every day more potent, the pen and the The power of the pen soon created a stupendous monopoly. Clerks obtained privilege of murder because of their learning; a Norman king gloried in the appellation of "fine clerk," because he could spell; the sons of serfs and washerwomen became high pontiffs, put their

purse.

feet on the necks of emperors, through the might of education, and appalled the souls of tyrants with their weird anathemas. Naturally, the priests kept the talisman of learning to themselves. How should education help them to power and pelf, if the people could participate in the mystic spell? The icy Deadhand of the Church, ever extended, was filled to overflowing by trembling baron and superstitious hind. But there was another power steadily augmenting, the magic purse of Fortunatus with its clink of perennial gold. Commerce changed clusters of hovels, cowering for protection under feudal castles, into powerful cities. Burghers wrested or purchased liberties from their lords and masters.

And still man struggled on. An experimenting friar, fond of chemistry, in one corner of Europe, put niter, sulphur, and charcoal together; * a sexton or doctor, in another obscure nook, carved letters on blocks of wood; † and lo! there were explosions shaking the solid earth, and causing the iron-clad man on horseback to reel in his saddle.

It was no wonder that Dr. Faustus was supposed to have sold his soul to the fiend. Whence but from devilish alliance could he have derived such power to strike down the grace of God?

Speech, the alphabet, Mount Sinai, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Nazareth, the wandering of the nations, the feudal system, Magna Charta, gunpowder, printing, the Reformation, the mariner's compass, America, here are some of the great landmarks of human motion.

As we pause for a moment's rest, after our rapid sweep through the eons and the centuries, have we not the right to record proof of man's progress since the days of the rhinoceros-eaters of Bedfordshire, of the man of Natchez ?

* The discovery of gunpowder by Bertholdus, a German monk, in 1320.

+ GUTENBERG, born in Germany about 1400, is generally called the inventor of printing. He was the first to print from letters cut on blocks of wood and metal. He was associated with Dr. Faustus, mentioned below. Having printed off numbers of copies of the Bible, to imitate those which were commonly sold in manuscript, Hayden says Dr. Faustus undertook the sale of them at Paris where printing was then unknown. As he sold his copies for sixty crowns, while the scribes demanded five hundred, he created universal astonishment; but when he produced copies as fast as they were wanted, and lowered the price to thirty crowns, all Paris was agitated. The uniformity of the copies increased the wonder: informations were given to the police against him as a magician, and his lodgings being searched and a great number of copies being found, they were seized. The red ink with which they were embellished was supposed to be his blood, and it was seriously adjudged that he was in league with the Devil; and if he had not fled, he would have shared the fate of those whom superstitious judges condemned in those days for witchcraft, A. D. 1460. The career of Dr. Faustus has formed the subject of numerous dramas, romances, and poems, the most notable of which are Goethe's Faust, and the celebrated opera of that name.

*

And for details and detached scenes in the general phantasmagoria, which has been ever shifting before us, we may seek for illustration, instruction, or comfort in any age or land where authentic record can be found. We may take a calm survey of passionate, democratic Greece in her great civil war through the terse, judicial narrative of Thucydides; we may learn to loathe despotism in that marvelous portrait-gallery of crime which the somber and terrible Tacitus† has bequeathed; we may cross the yawning abysses and dreary deserts which lie between two civilizations over that stately viaduct of a thousand arches which the great hand of Gibbon has constructed; we may penetrate to the inmost political and social heart of England, during a period of nine years, by help of the magic wand of Macaulay; we may linger in the stately portico to the unbuilt dome which the daring genius of Buckle consumed his life in devising; we may yield to the sweet fascinations which ever dwell in the picturesque pages of Prescott; we may investigate rules, apply and ponder examples: but the detail of history is essentially a blank, and nothing could be more dismal than its pursuit, unless the mind be filled by a broad view of its general scheme.

THE RELIEF OF LEYDEN.‡

THE besieged city was at its last gasp. The burghers had been in a state of uncertainty for many days; being aware that the fleet had set forth for their relief, but knowing full well the thousand obstacles which it had to surmount. They had guessed its progress by the illumination from the blazing villages, they had heard its salvos of artillery on its arrival at North Aa; but since then all had been dark and mournful again, — hope and fear, in sickening alternation,

* THUCYDIDES. One of the most illustrious of the Greek historians, born 471 B. c. His celebrity rests upon his unfinished History of the Peloponnesian War. (See Grote's History of Greece.)

+ TACITUS. A celebrated Roman historian, born about 55 A. D. His reputation is chiefly founded on his Annals, in sixteen books, which record the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus A. D. 14 to the death of Nero A. D. 68. Excepting the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth books, the work still exists.

The extract is from Mr. Motley's brilliant history, The Rise of the Dutch Republic. LEYDEN, now a flourishing manufacturing town of South Holland. It was besieged by the Spaniards in 1574, when they tried to subdue the Netherlands under their yoke. The siege began on 31st October, 1573, and ended on 3d October, 1574. It was relieved by the dikes being cut, and the sea let in on the Spanish works. Fifteen hundred Spaniards were slain or drowned. The University of Leyden was erected as a memorial of this gallant defense and happy deliverance. The relief of Leyden was a fatal blow to Spanish power in the Netherlands.