On August 20, Huerta
declined the proposal of the United States government that he should
cease to be a candidate for the Presidency.

UNDERSTANDING AMERICA

[Delivered at Philadelphia, Pa., on the occasion of the rededication of
Congress Hall, Oct. 25, 1913. The United States Congress met in this
hall till 1800. Here Washington was inaugurated the second time, and
here he made his farewell address to the American people. Here John
Adams took the oath of office when he succeeded Washington. The hall,
after being long disused, was now restored and reopened. Before Mr.
Wilson spoke, Mr. Frank Miles Day, representing the committee of
architects, had referred to the "delightful silence, order, gravity, and
personal dignity of manner" observed by the Senators of the first
Congress, and had said, "They all appeared every morning full powdered,
and dressed, as age or fancy might suggest, in the richest material."]

YOUR HONOR, MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN:

No American could stand in this place to-day and think of the
circumstances which we are come together to celebrate without being most
profoundly stirred. There has come over me since I sat down here a sense
of deep solemnity, because it has seemed to me that I saw ghosts
crowding--a great assemblage of spirits, no longer visible, but whose
influence we still feel as we feel the molding power of history itself.
The men who sat in this hall, to whom we now look back with a touch of
deep sentiment, were men of flesh and blood, face to face with extremely
difficult problems. The population of the United States then was hardly
three times the present population of the city of Philadelphia, and yet
that was a Nation as this is a Nation, and the men who spoke for it were
setting their hands to a work which was to last, not only that their
people might be happy, but that an example might be lifted up for the
instruction of the rest of the world.

I like to read the quaint old accounts such as Mr. Day has read to us
this afternoon. Strangers came then to America to see what the young
people that had sprung up here were like, and they found men in counsel
who knew how to construct governments. They found men deliberating here
who had none of the appearance of novices, none of the hesitation of men
who did not know whether the work they were doing was going to last or
not; men who addressed themselves to a problem of construction as
familiarly as we attempt to car