The thinkers are the leaders. In every crisis hour their potent influence turns the scale. In every time of tempest their silent potent influence swings the helm. When the Constitution that our fathers gave their life to win was threatened with overthrow, when the family of the states which had been compacted with much precious blood seemed hastening to a bitter and irreparable dismemberment, the men of thought saved the commonwealth from wreck. Whittier and Wendell Phillips sounded the silver trumpets for the advance of the sacramental hosts of right.. Emerson filled the air with Delphic utterances which proved to be the oracles of truth. Longfellow and Lowell smote the harp of poesy until its strings rang with as strong a note as those which in the olden time were struck from the prophetic lyre. Beecher, brave and brilliant, on this side of the sea and beyond it, by the sheer force and splendor of his thought, vindicated the right of his pulpit to take its name from Plymouth Rock. Masters of the forces of the mind, these men, and men like these, liberated energies which wrought undying and trimphant, through blood, and tears, and storm, and night, until our national glory was vindicated, our national unity achieved, and all the world had learned that there was not "air enough on this broad continent to float two flags."

The thinkers are the leaders. The pathway of the nation is mapped not by the rant of the demagogue and the noise of the rabble, but by the utterance and the influence of the quiet, well-poised, brain-steady man, who has learned to read the lesson book of experience, and who dares to repeat aloud its teachings. Intellect is not always in numerical majority, but it has more avoirdupois than ignorance. Intellect does not always win by a count of ballots on election day, but it channels the after course of the people's policy. Intellect holds the reins of national power, whoever temporarily occupies the offices. The student of his country's story can afford to be calm, patient, heroic and confident. Let him bide his time, though sympathy seems dead, and approval dumb. Listening to the sweet and solemn voices of the past, looking up into the serene and radiant face of the time to come, he never can forget that the very hands which scourge him with a lash of nettles to-day, will to-morrow weave for him a wreath of laurel.

III. The Minute Man stands for the Nobility of Sacrifice.

Prudence forbade our fathers to draw the sword. Patriotism was not the best policy. Hessians who fronted them fought for hire. Pov

erty was their only paymaster. Tories among them basked in the sunshine of royal favor. Derision canopied them as with a cloud, and shame buffeted them like a whirlwind. Unrecognized upon the registers of earthly nobility, they showed themselves more regal than the King, for they wore "duty's iron crown." Beggared of all the world calls wealth, they have dowered their nation with an heritage of priceless character. They have proclaimed that the true secret of a nation's greatness lies not in the subtle reaches of its thought, not in the glamor of its lofty traditions, far less in the inventory of its material resources. The talisman of national grandeur is the character of its citizenship. Rome was most imperial when its rulers came from following the plow. The virus of death entered into the life of Spain, when she was mistress of half the planet, and the gold mines of the earth were pouring with a torrent like the Amazon into the treasuries of Madrid, but the national conscience was stricken with paralysis, and the voices of truth, of liberty, of justice, fell upon cold ears. Napoleon to the contrary, the battalions that defend a nation must be weighed, not counted. It was suggested to Farragut that his ships should be armored. "Put iron into the men," said the doughty old Admiral, "put iron into the men, and I'll take care of the ships." Recent events are the commentary on his sagacity. All have learned that the value of armament is not to be determined by the metal in the guns, but by the sterling stuff in the gunners. National glory is a moral not a commercial consideration. Dazzled by the miracles of invention and by the outcropping of fabulous wealth, of coal, of timber, of precious metals; producing the food supply of the world, and raising within our frontiers the fruits of every meridian; masters of a business enterprise and intensity that distances all competition, and asserts its princely power in every market place of the earth; sovereigns of a continent which belts a hemisphere, we are in peril of forgetting that all these things do not make a nation great. Public purity, unselfish devotion to the service of the State, promotion of high ideals of art, of literature and of learning, straightforward dealing, sensitiveness of conscience, forgetfulness of self-interest, the desire to be right rather than to be President, the reckoning of the white heart as more to be desired than the White House, these are the roots which feed the fibre of an enduring national grandeur. These are not the principles of "lunar politics." They are not the elements of a Sundayschool diplomacy. They are not the whim and dream of an ethical visionary. If they be folly, they are that folly which is wiser than men -the folly of Nathan Hale, who mourned that he had but one death

to die for his country; of Ossawatomie Brown, who suffered martyrdom upon the gallows, but whose great undying soul goes marching on; of Lincoln, who at his life's close sealed with his heart's blood the unfaltering resolve of his life's outset, "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end do our duty as we understand it." The loyal citizen will stand against all odds as the patriot squad stood on Lexington green. He will uphold the right at any cost. By voice and by vote he will maintain the ugly and unpopular truth. He will stand for impartial justice, and untempered light, and universal and immutable equality of rights, whether personal interests be sacrificed, whether parties rise or fall, whether sections approve or partisans anathemize, and thus shall he help to uplift his country to higher honor, and aid to carry his country onward in its work of ministering to the welfare of the world.

In 1852, Kossuth visited Lexington. Stirred by the eloquence of the scene he declared, "Here was shed the sacrificial blood in which is written the preface of your nation's history. Lexington, the opening scene of the Revolution, is destined to change the character of human governments, and the condition of the human race." Events are reading into his words a marvellous depth of meaning. By the guiding of an unlooked for hand, the nation is treading in an unmapped pathway. The gates into untried and mysterious regions have swung suddenly open. Before us appear opportunities which thrill, responsibilities which awe, problems which vex and menace. The air is murky with battle and quivers with the clamors of conflict. Enthusiasm buckles on her sandals of rashness. Conservatism refuses to put off her blue glass goggles. Opinion is divided. But the spirit of the older time is still the same, the same but educated into firmer strength, girt with the mightier thews of a century and a quarter's growth. The gristle is bone. The men whose fathers voyaged the storm-swept Atlantic in the Mayflower need not fear to cruise over the Pacific in their steel-clad ships of the line. The sons of the men who taught Britain how colonies hould not be governed, needs not shrink from the task of bestowing the benefits of American civilization upon the far-off and the far-down, peoples of the earth. A nation whose life pulsates with the blood of the Minute Men, which is dowered with a belief in the equality of human rights, which sacrifices at the shrine of intellectual and moral light, which has mastered the supreme art of self-mastery, and is in bondage to the sublime principle of self-sacrifice for the general good, may well

covet, instead of cowering before the challenge of the present hour. So long as the memory of the Minute Men is kept green, and so long as the pattern of their character goes not out of fashion, whatever clouds may lower, whatever thunders mutter, the future of our country is secure. While America stands, as in the morning hour of her story, in front of the old meeting-house at Lexington, her hero children stood, ready to suffer at the call of God, for the good of man, America faces an everbrightening cday.

NEW YORK.

HOWARD Duffield.

THE WASHINGTON'S OF SULGRAVE AND BRINGTON

HE village, or more particularly the Manor House of Sulgrave has for many years been a place attractive to American tourists on account of it having been at one time the residence of the ancestors of George Washington, the first President of the United States; and the acquisition by the Anglo-American Centenary Committee, of the Manor House as a national memorial of the century of peace between Great Britain and the United States will undoubtedly be the means of attracting American visitors to Sulgrave, in numbers far in excess of those of past years. Visitors to the Washington shrine are invariably anxious to obtain reliable information concerning the English ancestry of America's national hero, but such information as they have hitherto been able to obtain on the spot has been meagre in quantity and unreliable in quality. The writer puts these facts forward as an excuse for the production of the following pages, and trusts that this short account of the Washington genealogy will supply a longfelt want.

During the past forty-five years the Washington genealogy has excited a considerable amount of interest on both sides of the Atlantic, and many articles have appeared in English and American periodicals, some of which have treated the question of the immediate ancestry of the Virginian emigrants as a mystery, and have left it as such, while others have attempted to elucidate the mystery. Many genealogical investigators have added their quota to the mass of tangled and contradictory evidence which has accumulated around this complicated and much discussed subject. Foremost amongst those investigators stand the late Colonel Chester and Mr. H. F. Waters, the eminent American genealogist, and it is owing to the indefatigable efforts of these gentlemen that the Washington genealogy has now been placed upon a firm footing.

The writer begs to acknowledge his indebtedness to the contributors of the articles which he has consulted in the English and American journals devoted to genealogical and kindred subjects, his especial indebtedness being due to those articles contributed by Colonel Chester and Mr. Waters.

In 1791 Sir Isaac Heard, Garter King-of-Arms, became interested in the genealogy of President Washington, and he eventually compiled a