aw--and to the statesman who advocated and established
the democratic principle and sentiment which essentially modified and
moulded the political character and career of the Republic, and he was
the author of that memorable Declaration of Independence which became
the charter of free nationality. From 1606, when three small vessels,
with a hundred or more men, sailed for the shores of Virginia under the
command of Christopher Newport, and Smith planned Jamestown, to the last
pronunciamento of the rebel congress of Richmond, the documentary
history of Virginia includes in charter, code, report, chronicle, plea,
and protest, almost every possible element and form of political
speculation, civic justice, and seditious arrogance: and therein the
philosopher may find all that endears and hallows and all that
disintegrates and degrades the State as a social experiment and a moral
fact: so that of all the States of the Union her antecedents, both noble
and infamous, indicate Virginia as the most appropriate arena for the
last bitter conflict between the great antagonistic forces of civil
order with those of social peace and progress. There where Washington, a
young surveyor, became familiar with toil, exposure, and responsibility,
he passed the crowning years of his spotless career; where he was born,
he died and is buried; where Patrick Henry roamed and mused until the
hour struck for him to rouse, with invincible eloquence, the instinct of
free citizenship; where Marshall drilled his yeoman for battle, and
disciplined his judicial mind by study; where Jefferson wrote his
political philosophy and notes of a naturalist; where Burr was tried,
Clay was born, Wirt pleaded, Nat Turner instigated the Southampton
massacre, Lord Fairfax hunted, and John Brown was hung, Randolph
bitterly jested, and Pocahontas won a holy fame--there treason reared
its hydra head and profaned the consecrated soil with vulgar insults and
savage cruelty; there was the last battle scene of the Revolution and
the first of the Civil War; there is Mount Vernon, Monticello, and
Yorktown, and there also are Manassas, Bull Run, and Fredericksburg;
there is the old graveyard of Jamestown and the modern Golgotha of Fair
Oaks; there is the noblest tribute art has reared to Washington, and the
most loathsome prisons wherein despotism wreaked vengeance on
patriotism; and on that soil countless martyrs have offered up their
lives for the national existence, whose birt