And yet its conquests have been grander than those of Peru or Mexico, its victories more glorious than those of Marengo, of Friedland, or of Austerlitz.  It has subdued an empire richer than the Indies without inflicting the cruelties of Clive, or the exactions of Hastings, and that empire is to-day, Mr. President, a part of your heritage and mine. [Applause.] For more than thirty years past the region in which most of those I see around me first saw the light has lain prostrate, borne down by a Titanic struggle whose blighting force fell wholly upon her.  For more than a generation her enterprise has seemed exhausted, her strength wasted, and her glory departed.  And yet she has not failed to furnish her full quota to the grand army of conquest to carry to completion the great work which Boone, Crockett, and Houston, all her sons—­began, and which her genius alone made possible. [Applause.]

Turn back with me the pages of time to the beginning of this imposing march and glance for a moment at its resplendent progress.  Its beginning was in Virginia.  Virginians led by that first of Southerners whose natal day we celebrate to-night and whose fame grows brighter in the lengthening perspective of the years, conquered the savage and his little less than savage European ally, and saved for the Nation then unborn the whole Northwest.  The Pinckneys, the Rutledges, and the Gwinetts forced the hand of Spain from the throat of the Mississippi, and left the current of trade free to flow to the Gulf unvexed by foreign influence.

Another Virginian, illustrious through all time as the great vindicator of humanity, doubled the area of the national possession of his time by the Louisiana purchase, and Lewis and Clarke, both sons of the Old Dominion, in 1804 first trod the vast uninhabited wilds of the far Northwest to find a land richer in all the precious products of the East than mortal eyes had yet beheld.  So were our borders extended from the Gulf and the Rio Grande to the 49th parallel and from the Atlantic to the Pacific—­but for Southern enterprise they might have stopped at Ohio, the Monongahela, and the Niagara. [Applause.]

The empire thus secured remained to be subdued.  From the States in which you and I, gentlemen, were born has come a noble wing of the grand army of subjugation, all of whose battles have been victories and all of whose victories have been victories of civilization.  Moving first from the old States of the South it took possession of territory along the Gulf and of Tennessee and of Kentucky’s “dark and bloody ground.”  Fame crowned the heroes of these campaigns with the patriot’s name, and glorified them as pioneers.  As their advance guards swept across the Mississippi and took possession of Missouri, Arkansas, and territory farther north, envy called it invasion, and when their scouts appeared in Nebraska and Kansas they were repelled amid the passion of the hour.  Meanwhile, a new element, whose quickening power is scarcely yet appreciated,