to regulate their home affairs through laws of their own making. To them the new powers or pretensions of the great Imperial Parliament were intolerable; they held it had no right to invade the jurisdictions of their colonial assemblies in order to legislate upon their domestic concern. Therefore, out of the conflict that arose between the old theory of the colonists, that they were self-governing communities, and the new conception established by the English revolution of the practical omnipotence of the great Parliament, grew our own Revolution, the creation and the independence of the United States of America. It was a regular and logical proceeding though both sides were strangely blind for the time to the progressive causes that produced it, as well as to the actual significance of the controversy.
Since the seats of culture are forever changing, it is clear that new institutions require new soil. In the old seats new ideas can find root but slowly, if at all. The rock of habit and custom and characteristic, impervious in most places, affords but a few crevices wherein new plants may be rooted. For proof of this we need to refer only to the difficulties which Christian missionary effort meets among Oriental nations. Where old forms preoccupy the ground, new ones can scarcely be planted. This difficulty appears in all its force in the political development of mankind. The great ideas of America are not wholly our own; they were born in the other hemisphere; they existed as sentiments thousands of years ago, and as ideas hundreds of years ago; but the old institutions lay there in the way and hindered these new ideas from becoming facts. After the old crop was off the ground, the old stubble still choked the rising corn. See how difficult it is to establish a republic in France; not from lack of ideas, nor of men who welcome the ideas, but on account of the old theocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, that are still in the
