In chemistry there are things known as incompatibles, which it is impossible to blend and at the same time preserve their original characteristics.  It is impossible to have as good a dinner as we have had served to-night, and preserve the intellectual faculties of your guests so that they may be seen at their best.  I am not unmindful that in the menu the courses grew shorter until they culminated in the pungent and brief episode of cheese, and so I take it that as to the oratory here on tap, you desire it to become gradually more brief and more pungent.

Now, the task of condensing into a five-minute speech two hundred and seventy years of the history of America, is something that has been assigned to me, and I propose to address myself to it without further delay. [Laughter]

John Smith was at one time President of Virginia, and afterward Admiral of New England, and ever since then, until lately, New England and Virginia have been trying to pull loose from each other, so as not to be under the same ruler. [Laughter and applause.] John Smith was a godsend to the American settlers, because he was a plain man in a company of titled nonentities, and after they had tried and failed in every effort to make or perpetuate an American colony, plain John Smith, a democrat, without a title, took the helm and made it a success. [Laughter.]

Then and there, and ever since, we laid aside the Reginald-Trebizond-Percys of nobility, and stuck to the plain John Smiths, honest citizens, of capacity and character.  By his example we learned that “Kind hearts are more than coronets,” and simple men of worth are infinitely better than titled vagabonds of Norman blood. [Applause.] It is almost three centuries since a tiny vessel, not larger than a modern fishing-smack, turned her head to the sunset across an unknown sea, for the land of conjecture.  The ship’s company, composed of passengers from England, that wonderful nest of human wanderers, that splendid source of the best civilization of the world, cast anchor by chance in a noble bay for which they had not sailed, and settled a colony; not with any particularly high or noble object, but really in pursuit of gold, and searching for a South Sea which they never found.  The voyage had been projected without any other object than the accumulation of wealth, which wealth was to be carried back to the old country and enjoyed in that England which they loved, and to which their eyes ever turned backward with affection, reverence, and the hope of return.  This band of younger sons and penniless nobility, attempted to make a settlement under the charter known as the London charter of Virginia; and while we find to-day men sneering at John Smith, the fact remains that he alone was enabled by his strong personality, by his sterling, individual worth, to resist the savages, to make the lazy work, to furnish food for the weak and sickly, to re-inspire those who had lost hope, and to firmly establish a settlement in Virginia.  His reward