shall come forth sweetness." He left England a Puritan iconoclast; he
has developed in Church and State into a constitutional reformer. He
came hither a knotted club; he has been transformed into a Damascus
blade. He seized and tamed a continent with a hand of iron; he civilizes
and controls it with a touch of velvet. No music is so sweet to his ear
as the sound of the common-school bell; no principle so dear to his
heart as the equal rights of all men; no vision so entrancing to his
hope as those rights universally secured.

This is the Yankee; this is the younger branch; but a branch of no base
or brittle fiber, but of the tough old English oak, which has weathered
triumphantly the tempest of a thousand years. It is a noble contention
whether the younger or the elder branch has further advanced the
frontiers of liberty, but it is unquestionable that liberty, as we
understand it on both sides of the sea, is an English tradition; we
inherit it, we possess it, we transmit it, under forms peculiar to the
English race. It is as Mr. Chamberlain has said, liberty under law. It
is liberty, not license; civilization, not barbarism; it is liberty clad
in the celestial robe of law, because law is the only authoritative
expression of the will of the people, representative government, trial
by jury, habeas corpus, freedom of speech and of the press--why, Mr.
Chairman, they are the family heirlooms, the family diamonds, and they
go wherever in the wide world go the family name and language and
tradition.

Sir, with all my heart, and, I am sure, with the hearty assent of this
great and representative company, I respond to the final aspiration of
your toast: "May this great family in all its branches ever work
together for the world's welfare." Certainly its division and alienation
would be the world's misfortune. That England and America have had sharp