cerely, or even seriously, advanced it. But the conception of a nation as a living organism, distinct, not only from each individual dwelling under its rule, but from the aggregate of individuals who may so dwell at any particular moment, is no less true than profound: the American nation is not one to-day and another to-morrow, although within every twenty-four hours thousands of Americans are born and other thousands die, many foreigners become Americans and some Americans become foreigners; any more than I am another man at this instant from what I was five minutes since, although some atoms of matter have certainly entered into and some have no less certainly left my body while I spoke to you: the same nation whose baptismal certificate was signed on that summer morning one hundred and thirty-four years ago now overshadows the new world, just as surely as your president this evening is the same man who first drew breath-we will not say how many years since. A nation is, in brief, a person, not a multitude of persons who, for certain purposes, are enabled in imagination or permitted by positive law to act and be dealt with as one; a real, living being, not a fiction of jurists or a conscious creature of the mind; and from the instinctive recognition of the truth and significance of its personality arises the sentiment which we call "patriotism". For the great being, with and under whom we live, and of whom we, in some sense, form part, towers over each one of us as a source of incalculable good, a picture of extraordinary beauty. Almost everything which makes for happiness in our days and nights, material comfort, personal security, opportunities for fruitful toil and untroubled rest, possibilities of increased enlightenment, systematic beneficence, orderly freedom, all these things and, in fact, all that makes a civilized man better and more fortunate than a savage, I had well-nigh said than a brute, depend for existence, in last resort, on the sword of sovereignty, which is wielded by the strong arm of the nation. This rises between the spoiler and his prey, shelters the weak, gives a sanction to promises, makes justice real and peace more than another name for bondage; no man has ever owed or can owe to any purely human institution the debt which every man in a civilized Christian nation owes to his country. But I am not sure that this debt has so much to do as one might suppose it had with his love for his country; after all, we do not greatly love our creditors, and selfLove of Country interest is the weakest of all inducements to self-sacrifice; as I have said, nobody cares to be killed to secure an extra dividend. An ardent patriot is a man who has fallen in love with his country, and one does not fall in love as a matter of calculation or reasoning no matter how sound. It is, however, in every way natural and to be expected that his country should gain his love, for this grand, majestic figure which we name the nation is emphatically a thing of beauty. We do not see it as a composite photograph of all the countless human beings, past, present and to come, who are or have been or will be included within it; with a true artistic instinct, the national memory has rejected as excreta all that was ugly, mean, weak, selfish in our fathers, and the national hope veils the failures, deceptions, miseries which await our children. As they live in our nation's life the men of the Revolution are not the same men who were actors in it; their foibles and sins and vices remain for historians, but for the American nation all in them that was unworthy and transient has ceased to exist as completely as Benedict Arnold has ceased to be an American. With an apparent injustice to ourselves and our times, which is really a proof of our better nature, of our longing for true and high ideals in thought and life, we are the blemish, our days the age of bronze in the great perpetual panorama of the nation's birth, growth and destiny, our past shadowed by the memories of Washington and his comrades in counsel and in arms, our future illumined by the radiance of a golden age. That the glorious traditions and the imposing greatness of their country had profoundly impressed the imagination and engaged the affections of Americans was shown on a great scale in 1861, on a small scale, or at least on a scale small by comparison, but yet with unmistakable significance, in 1898; no one truly doubts that we are a patriotic people; what ought such a people to think, with due regard to consistency and common sense, of selfish and unscrupulous political intriguers who may perhaps themselves impudently pose as "patriots", but would make every public office and every func tion of our government, national, state and municipal, a source of illicit and disgraceful private gain? Public Office a The conception of a nation as a vast endless chain of humanity, coiled over the ages, with unnumbered links in heaven and other myriads among those yet to live, implies of necessity that public office is a trust in a wider, a more imperative, a more sacred sense than the word usually bears. The magistrate is a trustee, not merely for his countrymen of to-day, they are but a small fraction of his cetteur que trustent; authority is placed in his hands that he make fruitful the merits and sacrifices of the dead, that he safeguard the virtue and happiness of the unborn; nay, the whole people, in a free country, make up one great corporate trustee, holding for the moment all the vast heritage of the future from the past, a trustee with those powers and those duties which the Bismarck of 1849 ascribed to the king, and, like his king, a trustee chosen and commissioned of God. For one who thus looks upon the dignity and duty of the people and of their officers the maxim: "To the victors belong the spoils," is monstrous to the verge of blasphemy; an abuse of public authority to promote paltry, selfish interests of the moment is a crime against mankind approaching to a sacrilege; he who would drug the people's conscience by inflaming partisan prejudices and awakening popular passions, to the end that he and his like may profit from the people's breach of sacred trust and forgetfulness of divinely imposed duty, is an enemy to humanity a thousandfold worse than a poisoner. If we suffer such as he to guide and rule us, it is nothing to the purpose that we may have free institutions; a government, like every other contrivance of man or production of nature, must be judged by its fruits; however we may talk about it, the worth of American democracy will be gauged, in the irreversible judgment of history, by a true answer to one question, namely, To what manner of men does it entrust political power? The one thing essential to good government is good men to govern; where, as here, every citizen forms part of the government, if the government be bad, the citizens are unworthy. Let us study then the government of our city and state and country; let us recognize the shameful abuses that too often infest almost every branch of administration; let us make ourselves feel the degradation of our politics and the meanness and selfishness of our public men, and then let us see to it that all these wrongs are righted, by making sure that those who shall deal with them know and love the right. Conservation in Municipalities. By HON. WILLIAM DUDley foulkE, RICHMOND, INDIANA. My subject to-night is Conservation, a subject which during the last two or three years has attracted the special attention of the American people. We had been before that time, perhaps we still are, a very wasteful people, both individually and collectively. The American housewife always sent a good many more things to the garbage pile than the French housewife would have done. The American farmer cultivated his acres, in many regions of our country, with very little reference to maintaining the fertility of the soil by proper fertilization. Our forests were often stripped, with very little regard for their preservation, until some of us began to wonder whether we were following in the footsteps of Spain. If any of you have been to the plains of Castile, or to the tablelands of Mexico, you can see there vast regions, fertile in the past and capable of sustaining an enormous population, which have become comparatively a desert, from the lack of the preservation of their forests, through the improvidence of the Spaniards. Collectively we were even more improvident in giving away the bulk of our national domain. Vast tracts of our most fertile Natural land were granted to railroad companies for the purpose of “developing the country," as it was then said. A very large portion of our domain. was also sold at the comparatively low price of $1.25 an acre to speculators who used it for their own purposes. But at last the day of awakening came. Then we found that although a great part of the national domain had been thus disposed of, there was a good deal that remained. In the first place, there was the great water-power on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras by the Pacific; there were the great coal beds of Alaska; there were many virgin forests which were now placed under scientific care so that trees should be restored and replaced as fast as they were destroyed, and to-day the people |