and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is causing the Old
Continentals to turn over in their graves. The self-exploiting spectacle
and bizarre teaching of this school passes the wit of man to fathom.
Professing the ideal and proposing to recreate the Universe, the New
Freedom, as it calls itself, would standardize it. The effect of that
would be to desiccate the human species in human conceit. It would
cheapen the very harps and halos in Heaven and convert the Day of
Judgment into a moving picture show.

I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point of fact, its platitudes
"stick in my gizzard." I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones--

"Who love their land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Who'd shake hands with a king upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his majesty."

I have many rights--birthrights--to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian,
beside that of more than fifty years' service upon what may be fairly
called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground.

My grandmother's father, William Mitchell Morrison, had raised a company
of riflemen in the War of the Revolution, and, after the War, marched it
westward. He commanded the troops in the old fort at Harrodsburg, where
my grandmother was born in 1784. He died a general. My grandfather,
James Black's father, the Rev. James Black, was chaplain of the fort. He
remembered the birth of the baby girl who was to become his wife. He was
a noble stalwart--a perfect type of the hunters of Kentucky--who could
bring down a squirrel from the highest bough and hit a bull's eye at a
hundred yards after he was three score and ten.

It was he who delighted my childhood with bear stories and properly
lurid narrations of the braves in buckskin and the bucks in paint and
feathers, with now and then a red-coat to give pungency and variety to
the tale. He would sing me to sleep with hunting songs. He would take
me with him afield to carry the game bag, and I was the only one of many
grandchildren to be named in his will. In my thoughts and in my dreams
he has been with me all my life, a memory and an example, and an ever
glorious inspiration.

Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton were among my earliest heroes.

II

Born in a Democratic camp, and growing to manhood on the Democratic
side of a political battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to
realize, the transcendent personal merit and public service of Henry
Clay. B