envoys
extraordinary in foreign lands. But McKinley's doing was the crowning
stroke of union and peace.

There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdy
plant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancient
history. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite of
extremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South rallied
equally with the North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine went
down in the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at
Santiago and Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into
the Chief Magistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the
maternal side he came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal
applause, declared that no Southerner could be prouder than he of Robert
E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's
brother, who had stood at the head of the Confederate naval
establishment in Europe and had fitted out the Confederate cruisers,
as the noblest and purest man he had ever known, a composite of Colonel
Newcome and Henry Esmond.

Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy
of Jefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an
American battleship. This told the Mississippi's guests, wherever
and whenever they might meet round her hospitable board, of national
unification and peace, giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the
most famous and conspicuous of the national cemeteries now stands the
monument of a Confederate general not only placed there by consent of
the Government, but dedicated with fitting ceremonies supervised by the
Department of War, which sent as its official representative the son of
Grant, himself an army officer of rank and distinction.

The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country
has risen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with
increasing enthusiasm.

I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation
and then the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far
away. It was an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and
Seventies, and now he who would thwart the unification of the country
on the lines of oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws
himself across the highway of his country's future, and is a traitor
equally to the essential principles of free government and the spirit of
the age.

If sectionali