y, it never had a twentieth part of the influence on our life that
the same institution had in Spanish lands. The result is history. The
industrial civilization which had beaten militarism on its own ground in
the old world, outstripped it with ridiculous ease in the new. Spain had a
century's start, yet to-day two-thirds of the white people on the Western
continent speak the English language and live within the borders of the
United States.

A TRIBUTE TO VIRGINIA.

Here is to Virginia, "The Old Dominion" State. At last with the young
Confederacy linked her fate. Go search the annals of history back to the
days of Abraham; trace Jewish civilization; compare Greek and Roman
progress; weigh the Crusaders of the Middle Ages and the Reformers of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Then look to the English people who
first wrested the great Magna Charta--the Bill of Civil Rights--and human
freedom from King John, and implanted these principles first in Virginia
with the best blood of England, producing a Washington, a Jefferson, a
Patrick Henry, a Madison, a Monroe, a Marshall, a Tyler, a Wise, a Robert
E. Lee, a Stonewall Jackson--with thousands as high-toned and patriotic.
There she stands superb! With her honor, her chivalry, her patriotism and
valor. Her high standard of civilization, unequaled and unexcelled by any
people in any age, in any land. In the most trying crisis of any age she
bore herself grandly, nobly. As Mother of Presidents and Mother of States.
It was her lot to suffer most of all. For four years invaded by hostile
armies and burdened by her own defenders, in the great struggles that
swayed back and forth. Her homes despoiled, her fields trampled, her sons
slain, and her soil drenched in blood. She was steadfast, generous and
hospitable to the last. She fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and cared
for the sick and bound up the wounded. And not a word of complaint ever
came from a Confederate soldier that she ever failed to do what she could
for him.

Virginia was all this, notwithstanding she was handicapped by negro
slavery, insidiously introduced by Dutch traders. And when it was known
that Africans had sense enough to set plants and worm tobacco, New England
sagacity and enterprise were quick to supply the demand for slaves and to
stock the market until Virginia cried, Hold! Enough! Negro slavery held
her on the low plane of an agricultural State--a producer of cheap raw
products. Yet history s