THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 THE COLLECTION OF 
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 1907B 
 
UNrVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
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The Fifty Years Bctivcen 1857 and 
 1907, and Beyond 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 At the University of North Carolina, June 3, 1907, on the 
 
 FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the Graduation 
 
 OF THE CLASS OF 1857. 
 
 By col. BINGHAM, 
 
 Class Orator. 
 
 Col. Bingham vvas introduced by Col. Thomas S. Kenan, Class President, in 
 the following language: 
 
 Col. Robert Bingham, tlie youngest survivor of the class of 1857, has been 
 chosen to represent the class today. The School which the Binghams, from 
 grandfather to grandson, have administered since 1793, conducted in Middle 
 North Carolina for ninety-nine years and located on the Asheville Plateau since 
 1891, is the oldest one in the South, and is the only school in the United States 
 which has been conducted by the same family so as to touch three centuries. 
 It touched the waning years of the eighteenth century, it continued through the 
 waxing and waning years of the nineteenth century and has attained its greatest 
 vigor and expansion in the waxing years of the twentieth century. 
 
 The continuous connection of the Binghams with this University is longer 
 than that of any other family in the United States with any other university in 
 the United States, except that of the .-Xdamses v\'ith Harvard. It began with the 
 grandfather of the present Headmaster, who was Professor of ancient languages 
 in the University in 1800. It continued witli his son, William James Bingham, 
 the SchooVs second Headmaster, who graduated with first distinction in 1825 
 and declined to accept a professorship in the University because he considered 
 the School his vocation. It continued with William Bingham, the School's third 
 Headmaster, who graduated in 1S56 with first distinction, and died in 1873. 
 Robert Bingham, its fourth Headmaster, graduated with first distinction in 1857, 
 and has administered the School as its fourth Headmaster since 1873, having 
 declined a professorship in the University because, like his fatlier, he considered 
 the School his vocation. 
 
 \Vhen the War between the Sections broke out, he went to the front and sur- 
 rendered with General Lee's 7,892 armed men at Appomattox Court House. 
 After the war ended he resumed his place in the school, his partnership and his 
 share of the school's income, after paying a substitute, having been kept intact 
 for him by his father and brother during his whole absence. 
 
His son Robert, who was in the University in 1889-90-91, taught in the 
 School for four years, and may feel it his duty to leave the Law and become its 
 fifth Headmaster if there shall be need. Robert's son Robert, the third of the 
 name, and of tlie fifth generation from the School's founder, is already in 
 strenuous training as the School's sixth Headmaster, and the three Robert 
 Binghams, father, son and grandson, are with us here today. It is most fitting, 
 therefore, that Robert Bingham should represent the class of 1857 at the fiftieth 
 anniversary of our graduation. 
 
 Colonel Bingham, who on rising, was received with loud applause, spoke 
 as follows: 
 
 It would be interesting and instructive on an occasion like this to deal in 
 reminiscences; but with things more vital to say, I shall confine myself to but 
 one reminiscence, which I refer to because it contrasts tlie educational condi- 
 tions of to-day and of SO years ago very sharply. 
 
 In 1853, when the class of 1857 matriculated, there was not a single Uni- 
 versity West or South of the University of North Carolina. Now there are 
 about 30 Universities, and Universities so-called in the state of Tennessee, more 
 than 30 in the state of Texas, and according to the statistics of the late Prof. 
 Baskerville of Vanderbilt University, tliere are more Universities and Univer- 
 sities so-called in the Southern states than in all the rest of the English speak- 
 ing world. 
 
 Up to 1875, 80 years after its foundation, this University had never created 
 a President for itself, and in 1853, when we matriculated, only one of the full 
 Professors was an alumnus of the University, and only one was of Southern 
 birth. All the others were Northern men from Northern colleges, except one, 
 and he was an Englishman. In 1853 the University had only about 200 North 
 Carolina students; Davidson only 100 in all; "Wake Forest about the same num- 
 ber, and Trinity was founded only in 1853. Now this University has 680 North 
 Carolina students, and our Denominational Colleges aggregate more than 1,000 
 North Carolina students, an increase of about 300 per cent for the University 
 and of more than 500 per cent for the Denominational Colleges, and the State's 
 A. & M. College, presided over by an alumnus and ex-president of the University, 
 an impossible conception in 1853, has about 500 North Carolina students. 
 
 In 1853 very, few, if any, men of North Carolina training were sought as 
 teachers anywhere, and we ourselves imported Northern men from Northern 
 colleges as presidents and professors in our University and in our institutions 
 of learning, both for our young men and our young women, very much as we 
 imported our dry goods and notions from the North. 
 
 ■When a North Carolinian was called for in 1833 to succeed President Cald- 
 well, of New Jersey and a graduate of Princeton, the politicians determined to 
 "shelve" David L. Swain, their most dangerous rival for the United States senate, 
 
by makiiif! liim Pri-sidint of tlie University. He was a man of Rrcat natural 
 gifts, and had risen more rapidly than any other politician had ever done in the 
 state before, or than any one has ever done since, though he had but little train- 
 ing of any school and but two months' training of any college, and the United 
 States Senate, his greatest ambition, seemed easily within his grasp. But a 
 combination of the other less successful politicians against him sent one of his 
 rivals to the Senate and made him President of the University. 
 
 One of the humorists of those days said of the new President, that North 
 Carolina had been very kind to her "favorite son." She had sent him to the 
 House of Commons; she had sent him to the State Senate; she had made him 
 Solicitor ; she had made him a Judge ; she had sent him to Congress ; she had 
 made him Governor, all in twelve years, and now she had sent him to the Uni- 
 versity to be educated. Think of making a University President on such a 
 basis now. 
 
 But of late universities and colleges conferring degrees in 27 states of the 
 Union and in three foreign countries have come to North Carolina for presi- 
 dents and professors. This University has created three Presidents for itself, 
 one for the University of Texas, one for Tulane and one for the University of 
 Virginia. This University has furnished 157 presidents and professors to uni- 
 versities and colleges; Davidson since its foundation in 1837, has furnished 80; 
 Wake Forest, since its foundation in 1838, has furnished 104; Trinity, since its 
 foundation in 1853, has furnished 75; and these North Carolina-bred Presi- 
 dents and Professors, 416 in all, and enough not recorded to carry the number 
 to 450, have carried our North Carolina standard of culture to Alabama, Ar- 
 kansas, California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Ken- 
 tucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Michigan, Mississippi, 
 New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South 
 Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and across the seas to Brazil, 
 China and Japan. 
 
 II. 
 
 On the 4th of June, just 50 years ago, the Class of 1857 entered life in a 
 period of profound peace; but it was the ominous stillness which precedes the 
 earthquake. By June, 1861, seventy-five thousand (75,000) men had been 
 ordered out to quell an insurrection in the Southern States in "Ninety Days." 
 By June, 1865, three million four hundred thousand (3,400,000) men had met 
 in deadly conflict on more than 2,200 stricken fields, and a radiant, but unstable 
 civilization had been swept away. 
 
 Every member of the class of 1857 was in the Confederate Army. 
 
 How few of them are here today ! How few of the absent ones are still in 
 the land of life ! How many have gone the way of all the earth ! Of the 69 men 
 
with the dew of youth upon them who took their diplomas here 50 years ago, 
 only IS remain ; all the others "have passed over to the silent majority through 
 the gates which open onlv outward," and now, 
 
 '■Tlicir plucL- in all the pomp that fills 
 The circuit of the summer hills 
 Is that their graves are green ;" 
 for, 
 "The moss-clad marbles rest 
 On the friends we loved the best, 
 
 In their bloom ; 
 
 And the names we loved to hear 
 
 Have been carved for many a year 
 
 On the tomb." 
 
 And, alas! no friendly marble marks the nameless graves of some who fell 
 in battle. Of more than one it might be said: 
 
 "We buried him darkly at the dead of night. 
 The sods with our bayonets turning 
 By the struggling moonbeams' misty light. 
 And the lantern dimly burning. 
 
 "No useless coffin enclosed his breast ; 
 
 Not in sheet nor shroud we wound him ; 
 But he lay like a warrior taking his rest. 
 With his martial cloak around him. 
 
 "Sadly and slovvly we laid him down, 
 
 From the field of his fame fresh and gory ; 
 We carved not a line, we raised not a stone. 
 But left him alone in his glory." 
 
 And some did not have even this much of a soldier's burial, but, "with the 
 dew on their brows and the rust on their mail," they lay unburied where they 
 fell, with no eye to look on them save the pitiless sun by day and the pitiful 
 moon and stars by night, and there they remained till, 
 
 "Lost all human trace, each went away 
 To mix forever with the elements, 
 To be a brother to the insensible rock 
 And to the sluggish clod which the rude swain 
 Turns with his share and treads upon." 
 
 We who remain "to meet with and greet with" each other are like the sailors 
 of Aeneas's ships after the storm, raised "by the vindictive hate of cruel Juno." 
 "Rari nantes in gurgite vasto," a few survivors still afloat on the great deep which 
 has engulfed so many. 
 
 For us who survive it is a great pleasure and a great privilege to meet here 
 again to-day. We look out on a world almost as new as the New World Co- 
 lumbus saw from the deck of the Pinta 500 years ago. Old things have passed 
 
away. The old theories, the old methods, the old ideiils, the old means of com- 
 munication, of lighting, of heatinp;, of trans[)ortation, and, most of all, the Old 
 South of our childhood, youth and earliest manhood, are all "gone like yester- 
 day." And much that is Rone we are not unwilling to have buried out of our 
 sight, as we arc not unwilling to have the dead body of a friend, however dear, 
 buried out of sight when his time has come to pass from mortal vision. But it 
 is a wonderful privilege to have lived during the half century since 1857, the half 
 century of greater wars, of greater inventions, of greater scientific and material 
 progress, of greater industrial expansion, of greater conquest of nature by man 
 than in all the centuries combined from the Christian era to the day we grad- 
 uated 50 years ago. 
 
 III. 
 
 And in these 50 years, during which we have seen so much, have shared in 
 so much, have suffered so much, have done each his part in achieving so much 
 the POLITICAL changes have been as notable, as unexpected, and in some things 
 as inconceivable from any past experience as the material changes have been. 
 We, ourselves, have seen four of the six acts of secession in which the United 
 States Government has been involved by land and sea, five of them with armed 
 men. 
 
 The first and second ACTS of secession, the secession of the Colonies from 
 Great Britain and the secession form "The Articles of Confederation and Per- 
 petual Union, (which lasted only 13 years), into THE constitution, as we know 
 it, were before ourt time; but the United States was born of the first secession, 
 maintained by a war lasting seven years. The second secession occured without 
 armed men. 
 
 The third secession, (which was sustained by the armies and navies of the 
 United States), was the secession of Texas from Mexico; and as the existence 
 of the United States was won by arms through the first secession, the Pacific 
 slope was won by arms through the tliird secession, and this made us an inter- 
 oceanic power, the indispensable prerequisite to our ever becoming a great world 
 power. As our interoceanic position was won through the third secession, our 
 insular possessions in the Atlantic and in the Pacific were won by arms through 
 a fifth secession, that of Cuba from Spain; and through the sixth secession, 
 that of Panama from the United States of South America, which was supported 
 by the presence of our armed men, the possession of the Isthmian Canal was 
 achieved, an acquisition going hand in hand with the possession of the Pacific 
 coast in importance. All these acts of secession, except the second, which was 
 bloodless, were carried to successful terminations for the sessionists by the armed 
 support of the United States. 
 
 Washington, who led the first secession, was branded a rebel and a traitor 
 by the anti-sessionists of that day; and if the secession of 1776 had failed, he 
 would doubtless have been executed as a traitor. But the revolutionary patriots 
 "hung together lest they should hang separately," as Dr. Franklin put it, till they 
 succeeded through the intervention of France, as the secession of Texas, of 
 Cuba, and of Panama succeeded through the intervention of the United States. 
 
 Looking backward we must be filled with wonder that the fourth secession, 
 that of the Southern from the Northern States, could ever have occurred at all. 
 
It was as illogical to contend for a unity on the basis of disunity at will after- 
 wards as for a marriage on the basis of divorce at will afterwards. Moreover 
 it was a case of Shakespeare's "Very Midsummer Madness," for one man with- 
 out money, without credit, without arms, without ships, without machine shops, 
 without the skilled labor to produce any of these indispensable appliances of 
 war, to undertake to fight five men supplied with all the appliances of war 
 themselves, and able to command them from the whole world, and with twenty- 
 five hundred miles of coast line from the capes of Virginia to Brownsville, 
 Texas, but without a ship, without a fort, without a sailor and with only one 
 foundry where a gun could be cast! 
 
 And yet this fourth secession was legal and constitutional, according to the 
 compact of 1 789 ; it was in accordance with the instruction given at West Point 
 to General Lee and President Davis and the other Confederate leaders from 
 Rawle's View of the Constitution. This United States government textbook 
 taught that the Union was dissoluble and that if it should be dissolved, alle- 
 giance to it ceased and reverted to the States which created it. Our withdrawal 
 from the Union was in accordance with the claim made repeatedly and con- 
 tinuously by New England up to 1850 that the right to withdraw from the 
 Union was an inalienable right of a state. And it is one of the strangest ano- 
 malies of history that the people of the South, who seceded most unwisely, we 
 admit, but nevertheless in strict accordance with the original compact, should be 
 vilified as rebels and traitors for doing what the people of the North had been 
 claiming steadily as an inalienable right till after the Mexican War; and that 
 their secession, plainly within their constitutional rights should have been sup- 
 pressed by a government which, itself born of our first secession, had sustained 
 a second and third secession before 1861 and which has sustained two secessions 
 since 186S. We protest against our legal withdrawal from the Union being called 
 rebellion. 
 
 "Rebellion, foul, dishonoring word. 
 
 Whose wrongful blight so oft has stained 
 The noblest cause that tongue or sword 
 Of mortal ever lost or gained." 
 
 We protest against having our children and grandchildren taught from his- 
 tories, written by our military antagonists and by our sectional and our political 
 enemies, that their fathers were rebels and traitors, when our National Capital 
 bears the name and perpetuates the fame of the "secessionist," "rebel" and 
 "traitor," George Washington, and when Abraham Lincoln, in his famous 
 Thanksgiving proclamation of November, 1863, which ranks among the greatest 
 state papers among men, spoke of the War between the Sections, not as a re- 
 bellion, but as "the lamentable civil stripe in which we are unavoidably 
 ENGAGED." It is an historical fact that Jefferson Davis was not tried for treason, 
 because, under several States' Rights decisions by Chief Justice Chase before he 
 became Chief Justice, and under the States' Rights instruction received at West 
 
Point from Rawlc on the Constitution, which was to be put in evidence if the 
 trial had occurred, he could not have been convicted. 
 
 And when at the bcRinning of a great war Robert E. Lee subordinated his 
 loyalty to the flag under which he had served so long and with such distinction 
 to his sense of duty to his native state, when he stopped his cars to the call of 
 ambition from the strong and opened them to the cry of help from the weak; 
 when he refused to accept the command of the United States armies, the highest 
 possible ambition of a professional soldier, and took a subordinate and pre- 
 carious position offered to him by the state of Virginia, he set an example of 
 self-sacrifice and devotion to duty for duty's sake unequalcd in the history of 
 soldiers and of armies since time began. 
 
 And in these 50 years since 1857 we have lived under many governments, 
 each inconceivable to those who administered its predecessor. Before 1861 we 
 lived under the government of the United States, a condition inconceivable to 
 the colonists before their secession from the mother country, and so for all the 
 other changes of government during this astounding half century just behind us. 
 After North Carolina seceded, we lived in the independent republic of North 
 Carolina, one of tlie thirteen republics acknowledged by Great Britain in 1783. 
 Then we lived in the Southern Confederacy. When the sword decided that we, 
 and the fathers, and New England up to 1850 were all wrong, that the teachings 
 of the United States government at West Point were false and that the Union 
 had never been dissolved and could never be dissolved, the victors dissolved a 
 union which they had themselves declared indissoluble; a third of the states of 
 this inseparable union were declared to be out of the union, were treated as con- 
 quered provinces and we lived under a military despotism, contrary of the de- 
 cision of the sword of 1865, contrary to the constitution and contrary to all the 
 traditions and antecedents of the English-speaking race since the military des- 
 potism of William the Bastard; and we are still out of the union as far as any 
 effective share in the administration of the National Government is concerned. 
 
 Then we lived in the Africanized South, the most inconceivable government 
 among men, according to all the precedents of all the past, when for the first 
 time since the beginning of time a white race undertook to put the feet of a 
 colored race on the necks of the men and women of their own blood and breed. 
 
 With the clearer vision and better perspective of a foreigner, the celebrated 
 English historian, Lecky, in his "Democracy and Liberty," characterizes this 
 reconstruction period as a "grotesque parody of government, a hideous orgy of 
 anarchy, violence, unrestrained corruption, undisguised, ostentatious, insulting 
 robbery, such as the world had scarcely ever seen." Then we lived in the de- 
 Africanized South, and each man of the class of 1857, who survived the war, did 
 
his part to de-Africanize the South. Then we lived in the re-Uniting States. 
 After the Spanish war we began to hve in the United States, and since the 
 acquisition of the Panama belt, we have lived in National America. There 
 is no parallel among civilized men to these rapid and continuous changes of 
 government under which the people of the South have lived since 1857, except 
 in the 25 different governments of France during the last 125 years. 
 
 V. 
 
 But among all these changes of government during these 50 most eventful 
 years, our intense instinct of Locu, selp-government has never changed. As 
 long as the South had any share in national politics, American statesmen were 
 pure and patriotic, American politics were clean, graft was practically unknown, 
 and the government was a government op the people, BY the people and FOR the 
 people. 
 
 But since the people of the Southern States have been excluded from all share 
 in National politics, the great republic of the west has drifted away more and 
 more from the basic principles of local self-goveriunent. By tariff legislation for 
 the Classes and pension legislation for the Masses (from which the South has 
 been mercifully delivered), the fallacy that the government must support the peo- 
 ple has been enthroned and the sound Democratic doctrine of the fathers of the 
 republic that the people must support the government has been df throned; and 
 instead of a democracy, the United States Government, as administered by leaders 
 from the Northern states since 1865, has become the most pronounced plutocracy 
 on earth, in which a few men, protected by legislation in their own interests, 
 have heaped up fortunes in comparison with which Croesus and Crassus were 
 paupers. Moreover, this vicious tendency is fostered in the Northern states by 
 the fact that with the very large infusion of foreign blood, the intense instinct of 
 local self-government has been largely bred out. In the Central West, according 
 to the Census of 1900, one inhabitant in every five is of foreign birth. In the 
 South as a whole, only one in one hundred and twenty-five is of foreign birth; 
 and so with the phenomenal increase of wealth and luxury, which in all ages has 
 been accompanied by a decline of civic virtue and righteousness, a government 
 OF the plutocrat, by the plutocrat, and FOR the plutocrat has displaced a govern- 
 ment of tlie people, by the people and for the people, and graft stalks rampant. 
 
 Of all the changes during the last 50 years, this is perhaps the most notable, 
 and it is the most malign and the most ominous. But there are not only seven 
 thousand, but seven million, in the South who have not bowed their knees to this 
 Baal. We fought a terrific war, not for slavery, not for secession, but for the 
 right of LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT, and this intensest instinct of the man of Anglo- 
 Saxon blood and breed is more emphasized and intensified in the South today 
 than anywhere else where God's sun shines. In the face of the fearful com- 
 pression, suppression, repression, depression and OPPRESSION of the recon- 
 struction period, in the face of the hostile army kept on a war footing against us 
 for years after 1865, in the face of hostile North outnumbering us five to one, in 
 the face of the enfranchised negroes at home, instigated by hostile carpetbaggers, 
 
in the face of our abject poverty at the end of the war, every state in the South 
 has roBuined its local autonomy; we have cjuadrupled tlic cotton crop and have 
 entered upon a period of financial and industrial wealth, expansion and power 
 inconceivable in 18S7, and never before attained by any conquered people in so 
 short a time. 
 
 And when the time comes for the plutocrats and the autocratic bosses to be 
 dethroned and for a government of the people, by the people and for the people 
 to be enthroned again, as come it must, unless the American Republic is to go 
 the way of all the republics of the past, the conservative men of both sections, who 
 esteem patriotism above greed and democracy above plutocracy, will work cor- 
 dially together again, shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart, hand to hand as of 
 yore; but the lion-like leaders of this reformation, if it can be a reformation, and 
 of this REVOLUTION, if it must be a revolution, must come from the South again, 
 as in the days of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Marshall, who 
 made the nation at first ; for it is in the South where the lion-like leaders of 
 local self-government have been bom, bred and nourished, and where the con- 
 ditions since 1865 have kept them in the most strenuous training. And then the 
 sceptre will return to the South again, and the law-giver will be between our feet 
 again as of yore; for all things come to those who wait and who keep pure and 
 grow strong while they wait. 
 
 The "Clan Alpine Fiery Cross" of local self-government was handed down to 
 the fathers of our fathers' fathers from the forest of Gennany. It summoned our 
 ancestors to arms against the Plantaganets at Runnymede, against a foreign 
 ecclesiastic master in the days of the Armada and Queen Elizabeth, against the 
 Stuarts in the days of Cromwell, against the House of Brunswick in 1776. This 
 same fiery cross of local self-government summoned the people of the Southern 
 States to arms in 1861, and we bore it aloft in defense of our local rights till we 
 were overwhelmed by numbers in "the imminent, deadly breach." 
 
 But the fiery cross was still all aflame, and against odds seemingly much 
 more overwhelming than when 
 
 "Caimon to right of us. 
 Cannon to left of us, 
 Cannon in front of us 
 Volleyed and thundered," 
 
 we bore it aloft again till we regained what we had lost in the "imminent, deadly 
 breach," and every Southern state again governs itself locally. 
 
 And it becomes us to hand down the Clan Alpine Fiery Cross of Local Self- 
 Government, all aflame, to our children, to their children and to the children of 
 their children's children. 
 
 "The muster place is Lanric mead. 
 Speed forth the signal, Clansman, speed." 
 
VI. 
 
 But, before closing, I wish to deliver a brief and most urgent message from 
 the outgoing to the incoming generation of University men, and to lay a most 
 imperative duty upon you. Our faces are turned toward the West and the even- 
 ing star ; youks toward the morning star and the sunrise. The last 50 years were 
 committed to us; the next SO years are committed to you. We regained our lost 
 local autonomy against overwhelming odds, and that is basic; but the blood and 
 pressure left us too narrow, and too sectional. You must maintain what we have 
 attained, for the State as a State, for the South as the South ; but you must regain 
 the NATIONAL spirit which sectionalism at the North and sectionalism at the 
 South has obscured, and which it has destroyed in many cases ; and sectionalism, 
 whether at the North or at the South, has always been, and as long as it exists 
 will continue to be a menace to the greatness, power and glory of National 
 America; for National America is the only America of the future. Southern 
 men created the Nation at first. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence; Washington won that independence; Madison, more than any other man, 
 created the constitution and secured its adoption; INIarshall interpreted it, and 
 these were all Virginians. Of the fifteen presidents before 1861, nine were from 
 the South ; they occupied the presidential chair 48 years, two-thirds of the time, 
 and five of them were re-elected. Northern presidents occupied the chair but 24 
 years, only one-third of the time, and no one of them was re-elected. But it was 
 left to two sons of this University to produce a greater national and international 
 effect than ever has been produced by any graduate of any other university in 
 the United States. President Polk, who graduated here in 1818, added the 
 Pacific coast to our domain and made us an interoceanic power, a thing of in- 
 calculable importance to our national and international life. William A. Gra- 
 ham, who graduated here in 1824, with the consent of President Fillmore and 
 Daniel Webster, Secretary of State (which was refused at first and afterwards 
 very reluctantly granted), as Secretary of the Navy, opened Japan, a thing, with 
 its actual and possible results, of incalculable national and international im- 
 portance. Why shall not a broad and national spirit expel the narrow and sec- 
 tional spirit which prevails, too much, in the South, a spirit, which has dwarfed 
 our statesmen so that the Nation, as a Nation, has no need for them because the 
 Nation thinks them unfit? What Southern man is there whom the whole Nation 
 would think fit to be President or Vice-President unless he should leave the 
 South and make name and fame in a Northern State? The evil spirit of sec- 
 tional America whether in the North or in the South, must be exorcised. The 
 national spirit of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Marshall of Virginia, Polk 
 and Graham of North Carolina, must be restored; and young men, why may not 
 some of you aspire to those highest National positions so often occupied by the 
 Southern men in the past? Why shall not each of you do his part to weld a New 
 South, a New North, a New West, a New East into the NEvif National 
 America of the future, which is becoming so great, so strong and so glorious in 
 the present, and which will become still greater and still stronger and still more 
 glorious in the degree in which we all become more unitedly animated with the 
 spirit of National Americans? 
 
VII. 
 
 Survivors of the class of 1857, I know of no better description of our past 
 since our graduation fifty years ago, and of no better inspiration for so much of 
 the future as many remain to us than in Tennyson's Ulysees, of which Carlisle 
 said when he read it, "Heboid a great poet has come with a great poem." Ulysees 
 had returned to his kingdom of "rockbound Ithica" in safety after all his wan- 
 derings and hardships and dangers by land and sea, and had won the right to 
 pass the evening of his days in peace and rest. But he craved life and action. 
 Peace and rest palled on him. He must needs seek the sea again. He says : 
 
 "It little profits that an idle king. 
 By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 
 I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race, 
 That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 
 I cannot rest from travel ; I will drink 
 Life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed 
 Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those 
 That loved me and alone ; on shore and when 
 Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
 Vext the dim sea. I am become a name; 
 [And so have wc become a name]. 
 For always roaming with a hungry heart. 
 Much have I seen and known — cities of men. 
 And manners, climates, councils, governments, 
 Myself not least, but honored of them all — 
 And drunk delight of battle with my peers. 
 Far on the ringing plains of lofty Troy. 
 [And so have we drunk delight of battle], 
 I am a part of all that I have met ; 
 Yet all e-X-perience is an arch where through 
 Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades 
 Forever and forever as I move. 
 How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
 To rust unbumished, not to shine in use ! 
 As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life, 
 Were all too little; and of life to me 
 Little remains; but every hour is saved 
 From that eternal silence; something more; 
 A bringer of new things. And vile it were 
 For some few suns to store and hoard myself. 
 And this gray spirit yearning in desire 
 To follow knowledge like a sinking star. 
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 
 
My son Telemachus, to whom I leave 
 
 The sceptre and the isle, will pay meet adoration to 
 
 My household gods when I am gone. He works 
 
 His work ! I mine ; and I must put to sea. 
 
 There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; 
 
 There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, 
 
 Souls that have toiled and wrought and thought with me — 
 
 That ever with a frolic welcome took 
 
 The thunder and the sunshine and opposed 
 
 Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old; 
 
 Old age has yet his honor and his toil. 
 
 Death closes all ; but something ere the end, 
 
 Some work of noble note may yet be done 
 
 Not unbecoming men who strove with gods. 
 
 The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; 
 
 The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the Deep 
 
 Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 
 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
 
 Push off and sitting well in order, 
 
 Smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 
 
 To sail beyond the sunset and the baths 
 
 Of all the western stars until I die. 
 
 It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 
 
 It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles 
 
 And see the great Achiles whom we knew. 
 
 [And we would say. 
 
 And see great Robert Lee whom we all knew]. 
 
 Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 
 
 We have not now that strength which in old days 
 
 Moved Earth and Heaven, yet what we are, we are, 
 
 One equal temper of heroic hearts 
 
 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. 
 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 
 
 Comrades of the class of 1857, "Rari nantes in gurgite vasto," 
 
 Survivors still afloat on the great deep which has engulfed so many, why shall 
 we not 
 "Sail beyond the sunset and the baths 
 
 Of all the western stars" into that longest day 
 
 Where shines the midnight sun, and there abide. 
 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 
 
 Until that longest day shall wane ; until that long abiding sun 
 
 Shall sink beneath those winter seas; 
 
 Until the quiet night envelopes all. 
 
i