antagonisms, and reliance on force have failed. If the world has made any progress, it has been the result of the development of other ideals. If we are to maintain and perfect our own civilization, if we are to be of any benefit to the rest of mankind, we must turn aside from the thoughts of destruction and cultivate the thoughts of construction. We cannot place our main reliance upon material forces. We must reaffirm and reinforce our ancient faith in truth and justice, in charitableness and tolerance. We must make our supreme commitment to the everlasting spiritual forces of life. We must mobilize the conscience of mankind.

Your gatherings are a living testimony of a determination to support these principles. It would be impossible to come into this presence, which is a symbol of more than 300 years of our advancing civilization, which represents to such a degree the hope of our consecrated living and the prayers of our hallowed dead, without a firmer conviction of the deep and abiding purpose of our country to live in accordance with this vision. There have been and will be lapses and discouragement, surface storms and disturbances. The shallows will murmur, but the deep is still. We shall be made aware of the boisterous and turbulent forces of evil about us seeking the things which are temporal. But we shall also be made aware of the still small voice arising from the fireside of every devoted home in the land seeking the things which are eternal. To such a country, to such a cause, the American Legion has dedicated itself. Upon this rock you stand for the service of humanity. Against it no power can prevail.

CHAUNCEY MITCHELL DEPEW

THE COLUMBIAN ORATION

Chauncey Mitchell Depew possesses the gift of oratory in its widest sense. He is equally at home in the legislative hall, on the platform, or in the lighter graces and amenities of the afterdinner speech. He has in his veins a mingling of Huguenot, Dutch, and Irish blood, which perhaps suggests an explanation of his versatility. He was born in Peekskill, N. Y., April 23, 1834; and has delighted public audiences with his wit and eloquence for sixty years. A number of his addresses are to be found in earlier volumes of "Modern Eloquence," and a biographical sketch is provided in Volume IV. The following oration was delivered at the World's Fair in Chicago, in 1892.

THIS day belongs not to America, but to the world. The results of the event it commemorates are the heritage of the peoples of every race and clime. We celebrate the emancipation of man. The preparation was the work of almost countless centuries; the realization was the revelation of one. The Cross on Calvary was hope; the cross raised on San Salvador was opportunity. But for the first, Columbus would never have sailed; but for the second, there would have been no place for the planting, the nurture, and the expansion of civil and religious liberty. Ancient history is a dreary record of unstable civilizations. Each reached its zenith of material splendor, and perished. The Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman empires were proofs of the possibilities and limitations of man for conquest and intellectual development. Their destruction involved a sum of misery and relapse which made their creation rather a curse than a blessing. Force was the factor in the government of the world when Christ was born, and force was the source and exercise of authority both by Church and State when Columbus sailed from Palos. The Wise

men traveled from the East toward the West under the guidance of the Star of Bethlehem. The spirit of the equality of all men before God and the law moved westward from Calvary with its revolutionary influence upon old institutions, to the Atlantic Ocean. Columbus carried it westward across the seas. The emigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, from Germany and Holland, from Sweden and Denmark, from France and Italy, from Spain and Portugal, under its guidance and inspiration, moved west, and again west building states and founding cities until the Pacific limited their march. The exhibition of arts and sciences, of industries and inventions, of education and civilization, which the Republic of the United States will here present, and to which, through its Chief Magistrate, it invites all nations, condenses and displays the flower and fruitage of this transcendent miracle.

The anarchy and chaos which followed the breaking up of the Roman Empire necessarily produced the feudal system. The people, preferring slavery to annihilation by robber chiefs, became the vassals of territorial lords. The reign of physical force is one of perpetual struggle for the mastery. Power which rests upon the sword neither shares nor limits its authority. The king destroyed the lords, and the monarchy succeeded feudalism. Neither of these institutions considered or consulted the people. They had no part but to suffer or die in this mighty strife of masters for the mastery. But the throne, by its broader view and greater resources, made possible the construction of the highways of freedom. Under its banner, races could unite, and petty principalities be merged, law substituted for brute force, and right for might. It founded and endowed universities, and encouraged commerce. It conceded no political privileges, but unconsciously prepared its subjects to demand them.

Absolutism in the State and intolerance in the Church shackled popular unrest, and imprisoned thought and enterprise in the fifteenth century. The divine right of kings stamped out the faintest glimmer of revolt against tyranny, and the problems of science, whether of the skies or of the earth, whether of astronomy or geography, were solved or submerged by ecclesiastical decrees. The dungeon was ready for the phi

losopher who proclaimed the truths of the solar system, or the navigator who would prove the sphericity of the earth. An English Gladstone, or a French Gambetta, or a German Bismarck, or an Italian Garibaldi, or a Spanish Castelar, would have been thought a monster, and his death at the stake, or on the scaffold, and under the anathemas of the Church, would have received the praise and approval of kings and nobles, of priests and peoples. Reason had no seat in spiritual or temporal realms. Punishment was the incentive to patriotism, and piety was held possible by torture. Confessions of faith extorted from the writhing victim on the rack were believed efficacious in saving his soul from fires eternal beyond the grave. For all that humanity to-day cherishes as its best heritage and choicest gifts, there was neither thought nor hope.

Fifty years before Columbus sailed from Palos, Guttenberg and Faust had forged the hammer which was to break the bonds of superstition and open the prison doors of the mind. They had invented the printing-press and movable types. The prior adoption of a cheap process for the manufacture of paper at once utilized the press. Its first service, like all its succeeding efforts, was for the people. The universities and the schoolmen, the privileged and the learned few of that age, were longing for the revelation and preservation of the classic treasures of antiquity, hidden, and yet insecure in monastic cells and libraries. But the first-born of the marvelous creation of these primitive printers of Mayence was the printed Bible. The priceless contributions of Greece and Rome to the intellectual training and development of the modern world came afterwards, through the same wondrous machine. The force, however, which made possible America and its reflex influence upon Europe was the open Bible by the family fireside. And yet neither the enlightenment of the new learning, nor the dynamic power of the spiritual awakening, could break through the crust of caste which had been forming for centuries. Church and State had so firmly and dexterously interwoven the bars of privilege and authority that liberty was impossible from within. Its piercing light and fervent heat must penetrate from without.

Civil and religious freedom are founded upon the individual

and his independence, his worth, his rights, and his equal status and opportunity. For his planting and development a new land must be found where, with limitless areas for expansion, the avenues of progress would have no bars of custom or heredity, of social orders or privileged classes. The time had come for the emancipation of the mind and soul of humanity. The factors wanting for its fulfillment were the New World and its discoverer.

God always has in training some commanding genius for the control of great crises in the affairs of nations and peoples. The number of these leaders is less than the centuries, but their lives are the history of human progress. Though Cæsar and Charlemagne and Hildebrand and Luther and William the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell and all the epoch-makers prepared Europe for the event, and contributed to the result, the lights which illumine our firmament to-day are Columbus the discoverer, Washington the founder, and Lincoln the savior.

Neither realism nor romance furnishes a more striking and picturesque figure than that of Christopher Columbus. The mystery about his origin heightens the charm of his story. That he came from among the toilers of his time is in harmony with the struggles of our period. Forty-four authentic portraits of him have descended to us, and no two of them are the counterfeits of the same person. Each represents a character as distinct as its canvas. Strength and weakness, intellectuality and stupidity, high moral purpose and brutal ferocity, purity and licentiousness, the dreamer and the miser, the pirate and the Puritan, are the types from which we may select our hero. We dismiss the painter, and piercing with the clarified vision of the dawn of the twentieth century the veil of four hundred years, we construct our Columbus.

The perils of the sea in his youth upon the rich argosies of Genoa, or in the service of the licensed rovers who made them their prey, had developed a skillful navigator and intrepid mariner. They had given him a glimpse of the possibilities of the unknown beyond the highways of travel, which roused an unquenchable thirst for adventure and research. The study of the narratives of previous explorers, and diligent questionings of the daring spirits who had ventured far toward the fabled