IV

That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of

self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs of

local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant

General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers--should

tear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising an

indisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should elect

to send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in the

nation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. It

merely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred by

partyism. Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting was

the order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore too

unpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and the

glory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess.

In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy to

repress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of

course it was not possible to dissuade or placate them.

All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people of

the United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so averse to

getting into that war. A very small group of extremists and doctrinaires

had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible. Enough of these

survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive.

It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it made

the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no end of

objurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered Northerner

and ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E. Lee and

Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not hesitate,

if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it some profit to

himself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas Iscariot.

The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at Washington made the occasion

for this.

It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses of

Congress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench of

the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys extraordinary

in foreign lands. But McKinley's doing was the crowning stroke of union and

peace.

There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdy

plant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancient

history. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite of

extremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South rallied

equally with the North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine went down

in the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at Santiago

and Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into the Chief

Magistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the maternal side

he came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal applause, declared

that no Southerner could be prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall

Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's brother, who had stood at the

head of the Confederate naval establishment in Europe and had fitted out

the Confederate cruisers, as the noblest and purest man he had ever known,

a composite of Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond.

Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy of

Jefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an American

battleship. This told the Mississippi's guests, wherever and whenever they

might meet round her hospitable board, of national unification and peace,

giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous and conspicuous

of the national cemeteries now stands the monument of a Confederate general

not only placed there by consent of the Government, but dedicated with

fitting ceremonies supervised by the Department of War, which sent as its

official representative the son of Grant, himself an army officer of rank

and distinction.

The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country has

risen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with increasing

enthusiasm.

I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation and

then the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. It

was an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and Seventies, and

now he who would thwart the unification of the country on the lines of

oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws himself across the

highway of his country's future, and is a traitor equally to the essential

principles of free government and the spirit of the age.

If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popular

consideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. The

South, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographic

expression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the states

of the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of every

sort exist.

These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and business

fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strife

thus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayer

of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance

to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore,

except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival of

old sectional and partisan passions--if it were possible--be expected to

reach?

V

Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry

Sellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated

the principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He did not claim the

formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his

patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship.

The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as

Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called, whose

oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equal

facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to

prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of

the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a

ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled

Cruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff.

There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that matter

Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people of

God did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, but

were reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, and

that the American republic was ordained of God to illustrate upon the

theater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrast

with the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do truly

believe. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And the

second is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by God to create it,

and that Lincoln was raised up by God to save it; else why the militia

colonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason that

was obvious at the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysterious

way his wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung over

the manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessed

Union.

Thus far it has weathered each historic danger which has gone before to

mark the decline and fall of nations; the struggle for existence; the

foreign invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed succession;

religious bigotry and racial conflict. One other peril confronts

it--the demoralization of wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; the

concentration and the abuse of power. Shall we survive the lures with which

the spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our wayward

footsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and perverted

religion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty running to

license, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a commodity of

glory--or under the process of a divine evolution shall we be able to mount

and ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, which engulfed the

phalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome, and which still beat the sides

and sweep the decks of Europe?

The one-party power we have escaped; the one-man power we have escaped. The

stars in their courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of the

people are still watchful and alert. Truth is mightier than ever, and

justice, mounting guard even in the Hall of Statues, walks everywhere the

battlements of freedom!