that which they anxiously believe to be the hem of the Imperial Robe, my mind, for its inspiration for steady belief in the Republic, flies swiftly back to Old Virginia, my boyhood home. There rise before me the Blue Mountains of the Great Valley, crowned with the autumn sunlight and reflecting from their broad shoulders their kaleidoscopic glory of orange and green and flame over hill, river, and town.

Sir, it is God's own footstool. Amidst its mountains and in its valleys live a high-spirited people who have always prized liberty above other blessings. They are God-fearing, and from the mountain cliffs and the shades of the valley the evening prayer arises from happy homes, and only Freedom's call to arms can stop their songs of praise. It is a land of fatness, of rich meadow, of noble homes, with schools and colleges to crown the work.

Yet, on this beautiful day, there is no fatness in the land. The sun falls lovingly on the broad, winding river and beautiful valley, but the homes are blackened desolations, and from their sightless windows and broken walls stare want and grisly despair. The torch has marked its fiery way across the broad valley, and the smoking ruins are the sentinels standing guard over the desolate fields. The schoolhouses and colleges have disappeared with the homes, and the government is in the hands of aliens. The widow's weeds cast a shadow over every household, and the cry of the fatherless is as frequent as the whispering of the winds.

The little mounds are in every valley and on every hillside, and the Gods of the Household, with sighs and sobbings, covering their sorrowing eyes, have taken flight to happier scenes.

On this far away autumn day in the South, after the war, was the real danger time to the Republic. If the South, in despair and insidious hate, more dangerous to the Republic than its armed legions, had permanently fallen away from its love of its traditions of the Republic, and had instilled this feeling in the hearts of the coming generation, surely within time we would have seen the disintegration of this government. Sir, it did not. On the day when in the little town nestling in the mountains we buried Robert E. Lee, we turned our faces towards the open day and gave our lives and our souls towards re-creating the broken homes, building up the desolated places, and tying together with hearts of love this great republican government. Then, Mr. Chairman, if the South can forget her woes and sorrows and desolation, and if the North and South, casting behind them the old days and the old enmities, can, in one short life, heal up the last trace of the greatest conflict the world ever witnessed, how idle does it appear to me, how infinitely idle, to see the destruction of free government and the ruin of the nation in the enlarging of our commerce and the extending of the civilization of our Republic!

The times are changing, must change. The isolation which is not alone the result of the policy inaugurated

by the Fathers, but caused rather by the close local attention demanded by the development of our own country, cannot continue to be the policy most beneficial to our people. There has been heretofore no need to look over the sea into foreign lands for employment for our busy hands. Our rich mines heretofore have waited only for the touch of the pick to pour their golden flood into the lap of him who took for the finding. The rich and bounteous lands of the South and West are no longer waiting for the coming of the husbandman to bless him with their fatness and crown him with their glory of waving grain kissed into ripeness by the soft sun of our blessed land. Where but a generation ago there was the solitude of the prairie land, to-day the household gods watch over the fortunes of myriads of happy people. The prattle of children at play and the laugh of the contented workman as he drives the flying shuttle to and fro, weaving into the web and woof of his life his love of country, is heard where but the span of a short life was the lair of the wild beast and the sporting place of the wilder man. At the ocean side, on the rich plain, by the river, and under the mountain, are all the tremendous forces of the Republic at their mighty work. New conditions are arising, and necessarily should arise, under the powerful demands of a virile people, strengthened by the potent influence of the most progressive civilization which has been known to mankind. The policy of isolation, political and mercantile, died with the

white sails of the ship, the filling of the prairie with homes, and by the production created by the energy of nearly a hundred millions of people at work. It died when the South turned the quiet fields into the manufactory and its villages into bustling cities. Its requiem was sung by the hurrying locomotive, the whispering telephone, the whirling propeller of the steamship, by the crowded manufactory which in six months' work can furnish sufficient for the needs of the whole year, by the grand contest between the civilizations of the East and the West, and above all by the Macedonian cry of the peoples of the earth, come over and help us."

To those who see Roman triumphs and the flowing purple of the Imperial Robe in the widening of our commercial power to other lands and the extension of our civilization to broader fields, we simply answer that the immortal Virginian who penned the code of free government, when he added to our domain the mighty Louisiana land, was impeached in high places for casting the shadow of the Imperial Eagle over the land and giving the liberties of the people to its cruel beak. The little fringe along the Atlantic has added the flood of the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Oregon to its domain. The will-o'-the-wisp and the glowworm light our flag at night under the palms of Florida, and by day its folds are touched by the sweet airs ladened with the incense of the orange and magnolia. Our Constitution is the highest law to the

people of the Pacific, and from the banks of the Potomac they receive its highest interpretation. Yet, notwithstanding this glory of added domain, the Constitution has not been wrenched, nor has its rich inheritance of freedom been invaded. The glory of the Lord has surely been about and around this people. Here are the most exalted civilization, the purest Christianity, the most advanced science, the most absolute civil freedom which the world ever saw. The conditions are happier for us than they are for any other people. Justice is not bought or sold, nor held by the strong, but is for the rich and the poor. The citizen, enlightened and upheld by the genius of his country, is his own ruler, and in that no man can gainsay him. The workman, however humble, is a king in his own house, and only to the law of the land does he owe any allegiance.

But are these great blessings for us alone? Shall Ethiopia in vain stretch out her arms to us, and shall we turn away from the people in the shadows of the forests? Shall we not give as well as receive? Shall we remain at home and invite the rigid conditions, social and industrial, which inevitably come to a people living within itself? The most convincing argument that the great Instrument was made for broad conditions is that, although the domain under its provisions has widened and increased beyond the dreams of those who sat at its birth, yet still it has easily met every condition, and under its power seventy millions of