Excerpt from The Practical Limitations of Historics Precedents: An Address Delivered at the Annual Commencement of the University of Michigan, Thursday, July 1, 1886
In 1857 a class of thirty-five young men was graduated from this University into the great school of life, and one of that class stands here to tell a few things that the years have taught him.
There was then little indication that the future would be perturbed by any extraordinary agitations. It promised to be an era of repose. Political controversies there were, but that they bore in their depths the tempests of revolution and battle no one imagined.
A generation in time has since passed, and how the world has changed. Italy, "the Niobe of nations," has found her lost nationality, and has ceased to mourn. Spain has been a republic. The harlequin emperor of the French vanished at Sedan, and a republic grew upon the ruins of his empire. The map of Germany has been remade. A portentous revolution has been at work in Russian society; a vast ferment which aliens cannot understand, and which seems like one of those mysterious agitations of other times, which impelled whole nations to slowly traverse many degrees of longitude, and to bring low the most stable political institutions. We then thought our own country to be an edifice nearly completed, but we now know that we were admiring only its foundations. Time has builded it beyond any conception then entertained. Slavery, the most powerful and crushing social and political conception since feudalism, vanished like Armida"s palace, with all its grandeurs, sins and seductions.
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