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.

In a very short while the last page of this war will have been written,
except for the effect it will have on the future. Our flag now floats
over Porto Rico, a part of Cuba, and Manila. It must soon bespeak our
sovereignty over the island of Luzon, or possibly over the whole
Philippine group. It will, ere long, from the staff on Havana's Morro,
cast its shadow on the sunken and twisted frame of the Maine--a grim
reminder of the vengeance that awaits any nation that lays unholy hands
on an American citizen or violates any sacred American right. It has
drawn from an admiring world unstinted applause for the invincible army,
that under tropic suns, despite privations and disease, untrained but
undismayed, has swept out of their own trenches and routed from their
own battlements, like chaff before the wind, the trained forces of a
formidable power. It has bodily stripped the past of lustre and
defiantly challenged the possibilities of the future in the
accomplishment of a matchless navy, whose deeds have struck the universe
with consternation and with wonder.

But speaking as a Southerner and an American, I say that this has been
as naught compared to the greatest good this war has accomplished.
Drawing alike from all sections of the Union for her heroes and her
martyrs, depending alike upon north, south, east and west for her
glorious victories, and weeping with sympathy with the widows and the
stricken mothers wherever they may be, America, incarnated spirit of
liberty, stands again to-day the holy emblem of a household in which the
children abide in unity, equality, love and peace. The iron sledge of
war that rent asunder the links of loyalty and love has welded them
together again. Ears that were deaf to lovi