mpathy. My sympathy with you comes, as Mr. Choate has said, by "an
instinct unawares," and this was confirmed by any reasoning and any
deductions I might have had. From the imagination of my earliest youth,
from the sympathy of the most vivid time, and from the most logical look
at the situation in my mature life, I came to the conclusion that the
destiny of the present and the future world rests with great and
undivided empires. [Applause.] I had lived to see Italy, out of its
confusion of States, growing up into a great integrity, renewing the
promises of the wonderful classic times and the glory of Rome renovated
into a new and prosperous nation. I have lived to see, we have all lived
to see, the same process taking place in Germany. In Germany,
notwithstanding the greatest division, the most peculiar separation of
religion and even of races, yet nevertheless that great German empire is
coming forward as a monument of the civilization of the future world,
and as the centre of all Europe against any form of Oriental barbarism.
And I knew from the history of my own country that that was no new
principle, but one we had always maintained. England never at any moment
thought of giving up the principle of the integrity of its empire. You
yourselves are the evidences of the energy with which we sustained it.
[Prolonged applause.] And we had at our doors, we had within us, another
nation, in many points alien to ourselves; of a different race largely,
of a different religion almost generally; a nation which we had treated
sometimes with kindness, sometimes with harshness, sometimes with
justice, and many other times with injustice; but always on the
principle of the integrity of the empire. [Applause.] And I could not
see how an intelligent man could see what Italy was growing to, prophesy
what Germany would become, and, knowing the difficulties of the present
Ireland, how that man could wish to destroy the integrity of the United
States. Fact and history were against him, and in addition to that I
felt that--in favoring or in sustaining your separation, in allowing
special and local sympathy to act upon me, instead of the great logic of
historical truths--if I could have allowed myself to act in that line of
sympathy which would have bound me to my countrymen, I should have felt
I had belied the truth of history as well as, I believe, the foundation
of general morality. [Great applause.]

Therefore, gentlemen, I have little