From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and sketching the
progress of the century in its wider aspect, a natural transition is
to the part played in illustrating the period by the people from whose
political birth it dates, and who have made the task of honoring it
their own. They have reached their first resting-place, and pardonably
enjoy the opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed.
They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous
precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that often
interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the consciousness
of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has broadened and
brightened into a highway of nations.

So numerous and various were the influences, formative and impellent,
which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point
of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its
proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp
and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event
should have come when it did, and not before or after, is as obvious
as any of history's predictions after the fact. Looking through the
glasses of to-day, we find it hard to realize that the Continental
Congress renewed its expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks
after the battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the
completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for its
capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through the past.

Thirteen years--one for each State--were occupied in the topping-off.
The Seven Years' War, that created the new central power of modern
Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power.
It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand