open rocks of dismemberment.

Whence was the proof to come, to ourselves as well as to the world, that
we were being moved once again by a common impulse, and by the same
heart that inspired and gave strength to the hands that smote the
British in the days of the Revolution, and again at New Orleans; that
made our ships the masters of the seas; that placed our flag on
Chapultepec, and widened our domain from ocean to ocean? How was the
world to know that the burning fires of patriotism, so essential to
national glory and achievement, had not been quenched by the blood
spilled by the heroes of both sides of the most desperate struggle known
in the history of civil wars? How was the doubt that stood, all
unwilling, between outstretched hands and sympathetic hearts, to be, in
fact, dispelled?

If from out the caldron of conflict there arose this doubt, only from
the crucible of war could come the answer. And, thank God, that answer
has been made in the record of the war, the peaceful termination of
which we celebrate to-night. Read it in every page of its history; read
it in the obliteration of party and sectional lines in the congressional
action which called the nation to arms in the defense of prostrate
liberty, and for the extension of the sphere of human freedom; read it
in the conduct of the distinguished Federal soldier who, as the chief
executive of this great republic,[5] honors this occasion by his
presence to-night, and whose appointments in the first commissions
issued after war had been declared made manifest the sincerity of his
often repeated utterances of complete sectional reconciliation and the
elimination of sectional lines in the affairs of government. Differing
with him, as I do, on party issues, utterly at variance with the views
of his party on economic problems, I sanction with all my heart the
obligation that rests on every patriotic citizen to make party second to
country, and in the measure that he has been actuated by this broad and
patriotic policy he will receive the plaudits of the whole people: "Well
done, good and faithful servant."

Portentous indeed have been the developments of the past six months; the
national domain has been extended far into the Caribbean Sea on the
south, and to the west it is so near the mainland of Asia that we can
hear grating of the process which is grinding the ancient celestial
empire into pulp for the machinery of civilization and of progress.

But speakin