The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1886-08-14
THE CELEBRATION IN E1GHrY-NINE.

THE CELEBRATION IN EIGHTY-NINE.
1t is proposed to celebrate at Wash
ington, in 1889, the one-hundredth an
niversary of the establishment of our
Government under the constitution.
The celebration should be one COM
mensurate with the dignity of the occa-
sion, for the year 'S9 will ever be asso-
ciated with many events which must
have bearing on the future of human
ity. Eighty-nine is the figure of revolu
tion.
Before the summer of 1889 had set in
two nations had embarked on govern
mental expeditions, one consciously,
the other without appreciating to what
its policy was carrying it. The United
States began to build and organize,
France to discs tablish and disorganize.
The results of those experiments have
been in some degree similar, though
reached through experiences most di-
verse. Each has organized freedom,
though in different degrees France
started out to attain constitutional re-
form, and went through revolution to
anarchy, and from anarchy to despot-
ism. To this succeeded constitutional
monarchy, followed by democracy, sue
ceeded by imperialism, which in turn
gave way to republicanism. But the
United States has ever remained the
organized democracy it set out to be.
The fortune of the United States has
been to survive many governments
whic, were old when it was the infant
among nations. The republic of Venice,
after career of centuries, was extin-
guished ere the republic of the United
States was ten years old. Before the
United States had reached its twen-
tieth year as an organized government,
the German empire, under the Haps-
burg rule, had been knocked to pieces
by the man of genius, who was an I'M
known French lieutenant when George
Washington took the oath of office.
The French Bourbon king, our old
friend and ally, had lost his throne and
his head before the United States was
four years old. Spain, to which the en-
ergy of Charles III. had brought back
the promise of some of her old power,
had sunk into her long lethargy before
the United States had finished the first
quarter century of its existence. The
kingdom of Poland disappeared in our
first decade, and Holland came to be
a French dependency ere our fourth
President was chosen. So, though a
young nation, the United States has
seen many old governments and prin-
ciples go out, and many new ones tried
and abandoned.
Republicanism once seemed likely
to comprehend the Old World at the
time it had established itself in the
New. But after wrecking thrones and
uiNiuAhS hoshOio; WObACbCO Wy ltS oWh
exertions it fell, leaving behind it a
recollection which has tempered sue
ceeding monarchy, and prepared the
Old World for the resurrection of the
principles that reaction thought it had
forever extinguished. The cause of the
different experiences of the two exper-
iments is plain. Our forefathers stood
on their principles as free men. To be-
come democratic republic in name as
they had long been in fact required
no sharp transition. Their rights under
the great charter of English freedom,
their history as English colonists, were
all the scrolls they needed. But the
people of France, having no such rec
objections, turned to the democracy of
antiquity for their guide, and sought to
bring it bodily into world to which it
was foreign and for which it was unfit
ted. Modern French Republicans have
had the wisdom to conserve, and to
adjust their government to the age.
There is therefore hope that the French,
like the American republic, has before
it long career of usefulness, realizing
that, as the great German has said, out
side the circle of the law there is no
liberty Boston Transcript.