rowed her soil from Virginia to Texas. The blood which ripples her veins has reddened the tilt-yards of chivalry both in England and in France. Her sky overhead is an inverted chalice of gold. Every tree on her hillsides is a choir-loft of music, every stretch of her landscape a garden of Gul. Gallantry at the South has lisped in numbers from the very cradle; and love-making amongst us-God save the mark!-though shy of type, has never lacked for meter. Not in the market-place of books but in the bower of Rosalind and underneath the balcony of Juliet, we have literally plumed Shakespeares without number-besides which we have produced a Petrarch for every Laura and a Burns for every Highland Mary.

But so prodigal has been the South's dowry of genius that she has treated her treasures with neglect. In the ante-bellum days, "our harpers were at the feast, but no one called for the song." We allowed to perish underneath our feet many an uncut diamond which New England would have polished. We permitted to die upon the air many an anthem which Old England would have nurtured on her breast until it journeyed with Tennyson's immortal "Brook." We sentenced to obscurity many a name which Rome would have ennobled and left undecorated many a brow which Athens would have wreathed. Our sons and daughters so often picnicked with the Muses and poetry was so native to our soil that we never stopped to realize our riches and left our gold ungarnered in our harvest fields.

Away with the sophism that the tropical sun takes the poetic fire out of Anglo-Saxon veins. Most of the world's great masterpieces of art have been produced in the warmer latitudes. Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Paridiso, Bocaccio's Decameron, Cellini's Perseus, Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, Raphael's Transfiguration, Greece's Temples, Egypt's pyramids and David's psalmsthese have all bloomed in the ardent airs which sweep the harp-strung shores of the Mediterranean. Too hot! Was

there ever penned such an unscientific statement? The truth of the matter is, "Lord Angus, thou hast lied!"

I repeat what every school-boy in America knows by heart when I remind you that the keel of our national ship of state was laid by Southern men. When the iniquities of the Stamp Act were perpetrated upon us and we needed a voice of articulate fire to denounce these usurpations, it was our forest-born Demosthenes who stepped into the breach. Aye, it was the South whose Patrick Henry kindled the fires of the Revolution-whose Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence-whose Washington commanded the Continental armies-whose Madison framed the Constitution-whose Marshall interpreted the organic law-whose Andrew Jackson fought the battle of New Orleans, and whose Winfield Scott planted Old Glory upon the walls of Mexico. Aye, it was the South to whom the Union was indebted for existence; and, if from 1861 to 1865, she drew her sword against the Union's flag, it was in defence of the Union's constitution.

Nor was it African slavery for which the South contended but Anglo-Saxon freedom.

From the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1787 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the South, in an almost unbroken chain of succession, occupied the presidential chair of the nation. She made the treaties with foreign countries. She named the judges of the Supreme Court. She controlled both houses of Congress. She fought with little help from New England the war of 1812 and the war with Mexico. Almost the entire Northwest Territory belonged originally to Virginia. It was hers by charter, by exploration and by conquest. Louisiana was purchased by Jefferson. Florida was acquired by Monroe. Texas was annexed to the Union under Tyler. California and New Mexico were acquired by Polk; and, if exception be made of the single territory of Alaska, almost the entire continental domain of the United States bears testimony to the fact that the all-conquering blood

of the Aryan race, instead of degenerating in the veins of the Southern people, has brought to our statesmanship and to our patriotism the purest crimson of the mother-strain.

With the single exception of Washington, the only other American who founded an empire was Sam Houston, of Texas.

Much is today heard of the Monroe Doctrine. Its author sleeps beside the James, on the silent hills of Hollywood.

To the persistent hammering of an Alabama SenatorJohn T. Morgan-we owe the Panama Canal.

Tippecanoe and Tyler, too, were both Virginians. So also was the hero of Buena Vista: Zachary Taylor. Two of the great triumvirate of American statesmen were from the South: the mill-boy of the slashes (Henry Clay), and the shaggy-haired old Nullifier of the Senate (John C. Calhoun). It was two of the South's pioneer explorers who discovered the Missouri River and opened to commerce the great empire of the West. It was Missouri's matchless Benton who foreshadowed a highway of steel across the prairies when pointing to the far Pacific he exclaimed: "There is the East. There lies the road to India." It was Maryland's brave Admiral Schley who, in 1898, submerged the Spanish fleet at Santiago and crowned the work commenced by Oglethorpe at Bloody Marsh, in 1742, when he confirmed America to the Anglo Saxon.

The Carolinas-our nearest neighbors have been specially named in this bill of indictment. But it was North Carolina's Scotch-Irish patriots who voiced America's earliest protest against the oppressions of England. It was her gallant ensign, Worth Bagley, who, in the late SpanishAmerican War, laid the first red rubies upon Freedom's altar; and not while her history tells of Mecklenburg and of Alamance can any lover of liberty point at her the finger of derision. Nor will South Carolina be forgotten while the genius of the great Calhoun is revered; while the Pinckneys and the Rutledges, the Legares and the McDuffies, the Sumters and the Marions, are enshrined in the republic's heart; or while, folded to her bosom, in old St.

Michael's churchyard, sleeps he (Robert Y. Hayne), who smote the mane of the great Webster and roused the New England lion to his loudest roar.

If there are planters in this audience, they do not need to be informed that to the productive value of American farming lands the reaper has added millions upon millions of dollars. It was the invention of a native Virginian, Cyrus H. McCormick. The gigantic tunnel of the Pennsylvania Railroad underneath the Hudson River has changed the whole commerce of the City of New York. It was the achievement of a native Georgian-our present Secretary of the Treasury-William G. McAdoo.

The first sewing-machine was invented, not by Howe or Thermonier, but by Francis R. Goulding, a Georgian.

The first steamboat was constructed, not by Fulton or Rumsey or Fitch, but by William Longstreet, a Georgian; and in my office at the State Capitol is the record of a patent issued to Longstreet and Briggs for a steamboat, dated February 1, 1788-fifteen months before Washington was inaugurated and nineteen years before the Clermont plowed the Hudson.

The first vessel propelled by steam to cross the Atlantic ocean sailed, in 1819, from the port of Savannah.

The greatest boon ever conferred upon suffering humanity by scientific research was the discovery of anesthesia. It put an end to the terrors of the knife, made surgery a painless art, and prolonged the average length of human days, all by deadening our sensibilities in "the twilight sleep of the gods." For the honor of this achievement there were four competitors; but the palm has at last been incontestably awarded to a country doctor of Georgia, whose grave is on the hill-sides of Athens: Crawford W. Long.

Yet we are only mere cyphers. We have literally accomplished nothing. We are simply satellites of New England. Was a fouler falsehood ever fathered? Blot from American history the achievements of the South and you blot American history from the chronicles of time.

If further proof be needed of the South's marvelous vitality, we find it in the little episode of American history. from 1861 to 1865. There were only eleven States in the Southern Confederacy. We were confronted on every side. by superior numbers and resources. We were unrecognized by the European powers. Our ports were blockaded and the ratio of battle was four to one. But it took an army of 2,800,000 men just four years to march one hundred miles. over level ground from Washington to Richmond.

To my mind it is one of the anomalies of history that the South, besides supplying her own ranks, also reinforced her foes. She gave to the Union Navy, Admiral Farragut, the greatest of the Federal sea captains. She gave to the Union Army, George H. Thomas, the Rock of Chickmauga. She gave to the White House in Washington the martyred Lincoln, who presided over the government with which she was at war, and when he fell by the assassin's bullet she named his successor in office,Andrew Johnson.

If either section of the Union has shone with light borrowed from the other it must be the North; and when, in defiance of the truth of history, we are told that ours is the reflected light of New England, they might as well go the whole length of the tether and, in spite of the teachings of Galileo and Copernicus, tell us that the mid day sun in heaven is but the reflected glory of the moon.

But let us pass to the picture which this accomplished artist draws of the Southern planter. We are told that he was indolent, that he was brutal, and that, paralyzed by his own self importance, he was absolutely dead to art. Great Caesar's ghost! If there was ever a Sir Philip Sidney-if, in all the tides of time, there ever trod this earth a character of whom it might be said, as was said of Hamlet's father: "we shall not look upon his like again" -who represented in his person the exquisite polish which. comes from well employed leisure--who possessed the most. intimate acquaintance with books-who exemplified the very perfection of manners-who was a Chesterfield in courtesy and a Prince Rupert in courage-who wore his heart upon his sleeve, in tender compassion for his slaves