re made by ex-speakers
Carlisle, Keifer, and myself.

My address was as follows:

"We have assembled upon historic ground. We celebrate to-day a
masterful historic event. Other anniversaries, sacredly observed,
have their deep meaning; no one, however, is fraught with profounder
significance than this.

"The management of the great Exposition did well to set apart this
thirtieth of July to commemorate the coming together at Jamestown of
the first legislative assembly in the New World. The assembling
of the representatives of the people upon the eventful day two
hundred and eighty-six years ago--of which this is the anniversary
--marked an epoch which, in far-reaching consequences, scarcely
finds a parallel in history. It was the initial step in the series
of stupendous events which found their culmination in the Bill
of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the formulation of
the Federal Constitution.

"From my home, a thousand miles to the westward, in the great valley
of the Mississippi, I come at your bidding to bear part in the
exercises of this day. Not as a stranger, an alien to your blood,
but as your countryman, your fellow-citizen, I gladly lift my voice
in this great assemblage. And when were the words, 'fellow-citizens,'
of deeper significance as suggestive of a more glorious past
then to-day, as we gather upon this hallowed spot to commemorate
one of the grandest events of which history has any record?

"The magical words, 'fellow-citizens,' never fail to touch a
responsive chord in the patriotic heart. Was it the gifted Prentiss
who at a critical moment of our history exclaimed, 'For whether
upon the Sabine or the St. Johns; standing in the shadow of Bunker
Hill, or amid the ruins of Jamestown; near the great northern chain
of lakes, or within the sound of the Father of Waters, flowing
unvexed to the sea; in the crowded mart of the great metropolis,
or upon the western verge of the continent, where the restless tide
of emigration is stayed only by the ocean--everywhere upon this
broad domain, thank God, I can still say, "fellow-citizens"'?

"And truly, an Illinoisan is no stranger within the confines of
'the Old Dominion.' You have not forgotten, we cannot forget, that
the territory now embraced in five magnificent commonwealths
bordering upon the Ohio and the Mississippi, was at a crucial period
of our history the generous gift of Virginia to the general
Government,--a gift that in s