en variously stated in your different newspapers as
"Current National Questions," or "The Present National Question," or
"General Expositions; Not on Anything in Particular." When your
President honored me with his invitation to a duty so high and so
sudden that it might almost be dignified by the name of a draft, he
gave me nearly equal license. I was to speak "on anything growing out
of the late war with Spain."

How that war resembles the grippe! You remember the medical definition
by an authority no less high than our present distinguished Secretary
of State. "The grippe," said Colonel Hay, "is that disease in which,
after you have been cured, you get steadily worse every day of your
convalescence"! There are people of so little faith as to say that this
exactly describes the late war with Spain.

If one is to speak at all of its present aspects, on this high-day of
your University year, he should do so only as a patriot, not as a
partizan. But he cannot avoid treading on ground where the ashes are
yet warm, and discussing questions which, in spite of the present
intermingling of party lines and confusion of party ideas, will
presently be found the very battle-ground of campaign oratory and
hostile hosts. You will credit me, I hope, with sufficient respect for
the proprieties of this platform to avoid partizan arguments, under the
warrant of your distinguished President to discuss national questions
from any point of view that a patriot can take. It is profoundly to be
regretted that on these questions, which pure patriotism alone should
weigh and decide, mere partizanship is already grasping the scales. One
thing at least I may venture to promise before this audience of
scholars and gentlemen on this Charter Day of your great University: I
shall ask the Democrat of the present day to agree with me no farther
than Thomas Jefferson went, and the Republican of the day no farther
than Abraham Lincoln went. To adapt from a kindred situation a phrase
by the greatest popular orator of my native State, and, I still like to
think, one of the greatest of the country in this century,--a phrase
applied by him to the compromise measures of 1848, but equally fitting
to-day,--"If we are forced to part company with some here whom it has
been our pleasure and pride to follow in the past, let us console
ourselves by the reflection that we are following in the footsteps of
the fathers and saviors of the Republic, their garments dyed