m
following after thee. For where thou goest I will go, and
where thou stayest, I will stay also. And they people shall
be my people, and thy God my God.'"

In July, 1898, I was invited to deliver an address before
the Virginia Bar Association. I was received by that company
of distinguished gentlemen with a hospitality like that I
had found in Charleston the year before. Certainly the old
estrangements are gone. I took occasion in my address to
appeal to the Virginia bar to give the weight of their great
influence in sustaining the dignity and authority of the Supreme
Court, in spite of their disappointment at some of its decisions
of Constitutional questions. They received what I had to
say, although they knew I differed from them on some of the
gravest matters which concerned the State, and had been an
anti-slavery man from my youth, with a respect and courtesy
which left nothing to be desired. At the banquet which followed
the address, this toast was given by William Wirt Henry, a
grandson of Patrick Henry, himself one of the foremost lawyers
and historians of the South. I prize very highly the original
which I have in his handwriting.

"Massachusetts and Virginia.
"Foremost in planting the English Colonies in America;
"Foremost in resisting British tyranny;
"Foremost in the Revolution which won our Independence
and established our free institutions;
"May the memories of the past be the bond of the future."

My own endeavor, during my long public life, has been to
maintain the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence,
which declares the right of every man to political equality
by virtue of his manhood, and of every people to self-government
by virtue of its character as a people. This our fathers
meant to lay down as the fundamental law of States and of
the United States, having its steadfast and immovable foundation
in the law of God. It was never their purpose to declare
that ignorance or vice or want of experience of the institutions
of a country should not disqualify men from a share in the
Government. Those things they meant to leave to the discretion
of the power, whether State or National, which was to prescribe
the qualifications of suffrage. But they did not mean that
the accident of birthplace, or the accident of race, or the
accident of color, should enter into the question at all.
To this doctrine I have, in my humble way, endeavored to adhere.
In dealing with the Chin