And on the thought of time I come finally to a parable which has to do with the vital part which such lives and public service as we now honor must ever have in the welfare of our people. It is a parable which comes to my mind whenever I see youth in training for usefulness, and when I ponder the end of lives devoted to good works.

I stood alone in the presence of the oldest living thing on all the earth, a towering sequoia tree in the midst of the California mountains. It was evening, and the shadows were those of a cathedral. For that tree age was not reckoned by years, nor only by centuries. Thousands of yearly cycles had passed over it in sunshine and in storm. Since it had come into being, the pyramids had arisen out of vast dreams of glory and the toil of slaves, and become the sepultures of forgotten kings. Persia, Babylon, and Greece had known glory and decay. The eagles of Rome had screamed at the gates of Jerusalem, and the Son of Man had died there on the cross that all men might have eternal life. The epoch of Roman power had passed like a shadow over the wheat. The ancient had given way to the medieval. The medieval had merged into that more modern day when a bold, inspired adventurer breasted unknown oceans and found a new world in which that great tree, already grown immeasurably old, arose in silence and majesty, still hidden on a distant and undiscovered coast.

Yet the giant sequoia lived on, and in its later years the day came when it, symbol of eternity

as it was, became embraced in the outstretched boundaries of the youngest of great nations, founded upon principles of justice and liberty even more eternal.

No other tree than the sequoia has more than a brief fraction of such a span of life. For ordinary trees a century or less brings the disintegration age. Their very sap comes to be the conveyer of disease. Fungus and rot attack them, and the winds lay them low. But overpassing them all, spanning the death of countless generations of lesser trees, that great sequoia has stood secure. Lightning could scar but never overthrow. Fire could but leave the mark of its passing, but not destroy.

So I sought the secret of its deathless age, and I recalled that in the place of such sap as flows in the veins of common trees the everlasting sequoia contains within itself an essence of such power that it is its own preservative.

It is so with our Republic. The wisdom of its founders; the justice of its institutions; the devotion of its people, young and old; the divinity of its purpose; and, not least of all, the service, the character, the guiding example of such public men as these nineteen of hallowed memory-all these constitute that essence of preservation which, in the providence of God, shall forever flow in the living veins of our beloved country.

So we bid our colleagues who have gone on before us, farewell-in sorrow but with uplifted

hearts. We mourn with their loved ones; and in bereavement we recall that, while all men must meet death somewhere on the way, these our colleagues were privileged to meet it on the open road, in the day of their service, with their honors full upon them. Generous, true friends every one, and very gallant gentlemen, who at the last were able to join voices with that other valiant spirit who sang:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Mr. Leonard Davis sang "Farewell."

ADDRESS BY HON. WILLIAM B. BANKHEAD Representative from Alabama

Mr. SPEAKER: Since the selection of the Seventysecond Congress three Senators and sixteen Representatives have been summoned by a very grim sergeant-at-arms to take their departure for another forum. We are here to pay our immemorial homage to our comrades who have gone away. Of necessity our eulogy must be composite and not individual.

If we were content to accept Cardinal Wolsey's unhappy lament, this ceremonial might well begin and end with his words:

This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do.

To accept that bitter philosophy as a summary of life's achievements would make this an hour of despair it would have us kneel at an altar devoid of the solace of assuring sacrament, whereas in its accepted spiritual significance it is an hour of triumph and reconsecration. We are here to honor men who honored themselves and the institutions of the Republic.

It appears to have become the popular fashion of late for Congress to be the target at which is aimed the bitter, if not vindictive, shaft of every calumny-the victim of every comedian's artless wit, the jibe and jest, indeed, of all that company of scribes who seem to have forgotten every kindly word in the vocabulary of praise.

We do not need to appeal to the living to vindicate the type of men who serve in the Congress of the United States. That this is, and has been, the training ground for many of our country's immortals is attested by the fact that twenty-five of the figures in yonder hall of fame are effigies of

former Members of Congress. We are content to abide the judgment of posterity on a roll call of the dead.

Let us for a moment take the measure of these men. Let us appraise the average background and environment that nurtured their youth, the ambitions which fired their manhood, the qualities of heart and mind which in the esteem of their fellow countrymen made them worthy to take station in that place where Clay and Calhoun and Webster and Lincoln had schooled their polemic genius "in a time remote."

The majority of them no doubt had their origin in plain places; out of a frugal and wholesome environment they grew. The common schools, the modest academies, the State university sheltered and inspired their younger ambitions to know more of this vast old world, of its men and measures, of its political philosophy and social institutions.

In maturer years the ambition for public service entered into their dreams, and it was given them to know that under our benign system of government, in the real lottery of life, there are no marked cards. That neither rank, nor pedigree, nor prerogative casts its sinister shadow across the thoroughfare of aspiration, and that the courageous man had a fair chance to cleave his way through all obstructions. Then the hard apprenticeship in the minor honors the legislature, the