sm be not dead it should have no place in popular
consideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. The
South, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographic
expression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the
states of the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges
of every sort exist.

These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and business
fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strife
thus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayer
of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance
to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end,
therefore, except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension,
could a revival of old sectional and partisan passions--if it were
possible--be expected to reach?

V

Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry
Sellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and
enunciated the principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He
did not claim the formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of
Senator Dillworthy, his patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian
statesmanship.

The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as
Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called,
whose oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves
with equal facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of
rebels, to prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the
Satirist of the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress.
He was a ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and
resembled Cruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff.

There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that
matter Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the
chosen people of God did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and
in far-away Judea, but were reserved to a later time, and a region then
undiscovered of men, and that the American republic was ordained of God
to illustrate upon the theater of the New World the possibilities
of free government in contrast with the failures and tyrannies and
corruptions of the Old, I do truly believe. That is the first article in
my confession of faith. And the second is like unto it, that Washington
was raised up by God to create it, and that Lincoln w