peace by a full acknowledgment of the independence of the United States, and negotiations were soon entered into for that purpose.

But America was bound by its league with the Bourbon courts to make no peace save one common to its allies, and from its allies peace was hard to win without concessions which would have stripped from England all that remained of her older greatness. With the revolt of Ireland and the surrender of Cornwallis the hopes of her enemies rose high. Spain refused to suspend hostilities at any other price than the surrender of Gibraltar; while France proposed that England should give up all her Indian conquests save Bengal. The triumph of the Bourbons, indeed, seemed secure. If terms like these were accepted the world empire of Britain was at an end. Stripped of her colonies in America, stripped of her rule in India, matched on the very ocean by rival fleets, England sank back into a European state, into the England of the first Georges. And yet there seemed little chance of her holding out against the demands of such a league as fronted her at a moment when her military power was paralyzed by the attitude of Ireland. But the true basis of her world power lay on the sea. It was by her command of the sea that such an empire could alone be possible; nor was it possible so long as she commanded the sea for all the armies of the Bourbon powers to rob her of it. And at this moment the command of the seas again became her own. On the 16th of January, 1780, Admiral Rodney, the greatest of English seamen save Nelson and Blake, encountered the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, and only four of its vessels escaped to Cadiz. At the opening of 1782, the triumphs of the French admiral, De Grasse, called him to the West Indies; and on the 12th of April a maneuver, which he was the first to introduce, broke his opponent's line, and drove the French fleet shattered from the Atlantic. With Rodney's last victory the struggle of the Bourbons was really over, for no means remained of attacking their enemy save at Gibraltar, and here a last attack of the joint force gathered against it was repulsed by the heroism of Elliott. Nor would America wait any longer for the satisfaction of her allies. In November her commissioners signed the preliminaries of a peace in which Britain reserved to herself on the American continent only Canada and the Island of Newfoundland, and acknowledged without reserve the independence of the United States.

The action of America ended the war; and the treaty of peace with the United States was a prelude to treaties of peace with the Bourbon powers. Their actual gains were insignificant. France, indeed, won nothing in the treaties with which the war ended; Spain gained only Florida and Minorca. Nor could they feel, even in this hour of their triumph, that the end at which they aimed had been fully reached. In half their great effort against the world power of Britain they had utterly failed. She had even won ground in India. In America itself she still retained the northern dominion of Canada. Her West Indian islands remained intact. Above all, she had asserted more nobly than ever her command of the sea, and with it the possibility of building up a fresh power in such lands as Cook had called her to. But at the close of the war there was less thought of what she had retained than of what she had lost. She was parted from her American colonies; and at the moment such a parting seemed to be the knell of her greatness. In wealth, in population, the American colonies far surpassed all that remained of her empire; and the American colonies were irrecoverably gone. It is no wonder that in the first shock of such a loss England looked on herself as on the verge of ruin, or that the Bourbon courts believed her position as a world power to be practically at an end. How utterly groundless such a conception was the coming years were to show.

The energies of England were, in fact, spurred to new efforts by the crisis in her fortunes. The industrial development which followed the war gave her a material supremacy such as she had never known before, and the rapid growth of wealth which this industry brought with it raised her again into a mother of nations as her settlers built up in the waters of the Pacific colonies as great as those which she had lost on the coast of America. But if the Bourbons overrated their triumph in one way, they immensely underrated it in another. Whatever might be the importance of American independence in the history of England, it was of unequaled moment in the history of the world. If it crippled for a while the supremacy of the English nation, it founded a supremacy of the English race. From the hour of American independence the life of the English people has flowed not in one current, but in two; and while the older has shown little signs of lessening, the younger has fast risen to a greatness which has changed the face of the world. In 1783 America was a nation of 3,000,000 of inhabit

ants, scattered thinly along the coast of the Atlantic ocean. It is now a nation of 40,000,000, stretching over the whole continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In wealth and material energy, as in numbers, it far surpasses the mother country from which it sprang. It is already the main branch of the English people; and in the days that are at hand the main current of that people's history must run along the channel, not of the Thames or the Mersey, but of the Hudson and the Mississippi. But, distinct as these currents are, every year proves more clearly that in spirit the English people is one. The distance that parted England from America lessens every day. The ties that unite them grow every day stronger. The social and political differences that threatened a hundred years ago to form an impassable barrier between them grow every day less. Against this silent and inevitable drift of things the spirit of narrow isolation on either side of the Atlantic struggles in vain. It is possible that the two branches of the English people will remain forever separate political existences. It is likely enough that the older of them may again break in twain, and that the English people in the Pacific may assert as distinct a national life as the two English peoples on either side the Atlantic. But the spirit, the influence, of all these branches will remain one. And in thus remaining one, before half a century is over, it will change the face of the world. As 200,000,000 of Englishmen fill the valley of the Mississippi, as 50,000,000 of Englishmen assert their lordship over Australasia, this vast power will tell through Britain on the old world of Europe, whose nations will have shrunk into insignificance before it. What the issues of such a world-wide change may be, not even the wildest dreamer would dare to dream. But one issue is inevitable. In the centuries that lie before us, the primacy of the world will lie with the English people. English institutions, English speech, English thought, will become the main features of the political, the social, and the intellectual life of mankind.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

[THOMAS JEFFERSON, the eminent American statesman and third President of the United States, was born at Shadwell, Albemarle County, Va., April 2, 1743. He attended William and Mary College, became a successful lawyer, and as a delegate to the first Continental Congress identified himself with the Revolutionary party. In 1776 he drew up the Declaration of Independence; was governor of Virginia (1779–1781); minister to France (1784-1789); and upon his return was appointed Secretary of State by Washington. About this time he became the leader of the new party, called at first Anti-Federalists, then Republicans, and finally Democrats. Jefferson was Vice President (1797); was elected President (1801), and reëlected (1804). The chief events of his two administrations were the war with Tripoli, the Louisiana Purchase, the reduction of the national debt, and the exploration of the West. Jefferson spent the latter part of his life at his beautiful residence, in Monticello, Va., where he died July 4, 1826, while the nation was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which he had drawn up. The death of John Adams also occurred on the same day.]

A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled.

WHEN, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long