Now I have already thrown the searchlight upon enough problems for you to realize I have given you an incongruous picture.  You must be impressed with the conflicting forces at work upon our republic.  Never have we had so many advocates of peaceful arbitration for differences between nations and never such armament for war; never such an accumulation of comforts, never such a multiplication of wants; never so much done to make men honest, never so many thieves.  In 1850 seven thousand in our penitentiaries; in 1860 twenty thousand; in 1870 thirty-two thousand; in 1880 fifty-eight thousand; in 1890 eighty-two thousand, and in 1900 one hundred thousand.  In London, England, last year with over seven millions of people, twenty-four murders; in Chicago, one hundred and eighteen.  There are more murders in this republic than in any civilized land beneath the sky.  Yet in face of all these unsettled questions, with advancement along all social, moral, intellectual and religious lines I have faith to believe this twentieth century American citizenship will prove itself sufficiently thoughtful, testful and tactful to deal with all national issues as one by one they come within reach of practical politics, and that this country is big enough, brave enough, wise enough and just enough to solve every problem vexing us today.

Some have not this faith.  They see an army of three hundred thousand tramps eating bread by the sweat of other men’s brows; the slums of great cities, cradles of infamy where children are trained to sin; the “fire-damp of combination trusts” stifling the working world; gambling brokers cornering the markets in the necessaries of life; the wages of working girls being such as to lead many from life’s Eden of purity; a great battle on between labor and capital and in this combination of threatening dangers they see the overthrow of free government.

If these pessimists would take a view from the nether standpoint and see what we have come through as a country their fears would be dispelled.

Look backward fifty years from today and see the republic wrapped in the throes of civil strife; the soil of our Southland soaked with blood and tears; the nation overwhelmed with debt; four million negroes turned loose penniless in the South to beg bread at the white man’s door, and he already on “Poverty row;” Abraham Lincoln dead in the White House, shot down by an assassin; the Secretary of War bleeding from three stab wounds the same night; and Columbia reeling on her throne.

Now see the harmonious association of all sections; a firmer establishment of this “government of the people, by the people and for the people” than was ever known.  Look over the ocean and see Turkey’s massacre of the Armenians, Russia with her Siberian horrors, Spain with her cruelty to the Moors and Jews; or look closer home over the Mexican border and see the government torn to tatters and public men shot down like dogs.  Then turn and note our