in old England should be granted them in this

country.

The times were propitious for the growth of civil liberty, and surely patriotism should twine itself about the fair lands into which these strangers had come. The forcing of the written Charter of 1621 for local liberty by Sir Edwin Sandys and his compatriots, in England, confirming by general grant the Assembly's acts of 1619, was but the evidence in Virginia of the great contest in their native England. England was changing. Henry and Elizabeth, with the glamour which power and personal beauty and strength of character always engender in the people, were asleep in Westminster Abbey. A tyrannical bigot not respected for strength or character and hated for his course against the liberty of the people was in their place. The England which confronted Elizabeth in the days of her power was even more insistent upon its rights. The supremacy of Parliament, freedom of conscience, liberty of the judges, exclusive right of taxation and absolute control of the revenues by Parliament, and representation by the people, were the watchwords of the England which witnessed the dawning of governmental life in America.

"That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England; and that the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the King, State, and defence of the Realm, and of the

Church of England, and the making and maintenance of laws, and redress of grievances, which daily happen within this Realm, are proper subjects and matter of Council and debate in Parliament. And that in the handling and proceeding of those businesses every member of the House hath, and of right ought to have, freedom of speech to propound, treat, reason, and bring to conclusion the same," was the demand of the Commons.

Silhouetted upon the canvas were the dread figures of Pym, and Elliott, and Hampden, and England was listening even then for the heavy step of Oliver Cromwell.

It was England of the Remonstrance, of the Petition of Right, of the Revolution, of the Supremacy of Parliament; and Scotland of the Covenant, and France of the Reformation, which furnished the swaddling clothes for our constitutional liberty.

Patriotism does not mean the mere love of the concrete portion, the mountains, the rivers, and the fertile lands, of a country. It means far more than this. It means love of country, crowned with pure and free and good government, liberty of conscience and religion, justice, government by those who bear the government's burdens, and the high ideals reverenced by the people.

Patriotism supposes a country and traditions, and the struggle of years for the great principles demanded by the life of the people. It was seven hundred years

after the foundation of Rome before patriotism prompted the Grachii to revolt. It was a thousand years of English conflict before love of England forced the people to a war with the king, in which conflict the control of the government was the wager of battle. It was an equal stretch of weary struggle before the white banner of Joan of Arc was unfurled in France. So it has been heretofore with every historic country which has witnessed the evolution and completion of the ideals of patriotism.

In our land the struggle for the attainment of these high ideals lasted only a short time. Here in five generations of men was the accomplishment of the ideals of patriotism in this their loftiest meaning. We again insist that the patriotism which has crowned this marvellous work in our country did not have its birth on these shores. It was in the struggling for life at Runnymede. It was in the Scotch Revolution. It was in the Utopia of Sir John Moore. It was with Wycliff, John Ball, Knox, and John Calvin. The patriotism of which I speak was being born in the breasts of the peoples who formed the South. Consider these peoples. They are bone of your bone and blood of your blood. The glory of a country is the perpetuation of the great characteristics of its citizens. The people from whom you sprung have been peculiar in the perpetuation and procreation of the principles which made them great. Here in the South there has been little admixture of foreign blood. In almost every case you are the sons

of those who were at Valley Forge, King's Mountain, Cowpens, and Yorktown. That the characteristics of the fathers ring clear in their children is the prayer of those who love their country.

Let us consider for a moment the texture of the life and the salient principles of those who largely controlled and composed Southern life, and, who, in a great degree, directed in the formative period. They have been cruelly neglected in the written history and the spoken word of our common country.

What was the moving cause of their coming to this land? Excepting the Latins in Louisiana and Florida and the early adventurers, migration to this land is but an index to governmental crime in Europe against local right, religious and personal freedom. With relatively few exceptions it was the expatriation of people who above everything loved freedom of thought and conscience, and governmental justice. It was the expatriation of people worn with ceaseless struggle for principle and whose hands were red with blood shed for the right to live under the laws of their country according to the dictates of their conscience. The decks of every ship whose sails were swelled with the western breeze were filled with those who looked back upon the receding shores of their native land, whose hills were crowned with the altars erected for the immolation of the ideals which they loved, and whose valleys were filled with their trampled fields and ruined homes.

Theretofore in all the history of time there had never been an expatriation of a people solely for the high ideals of life. Here in the South is the building of a people whose fundamental elements are composed, be they French, English, or Scotch, of peoples who loved these lofty ideals, rather than life or worldly possessions, and who always stood ready to give life and possessions for those ideals. However diverse these may have been, whether reverencing, as the loftiest ideal, church and state with the Cavalier, or toleration with the Scotchman and the Huguenot, or clinging to local self-government with the Englishman, yet all were patriotic idealists. In every other instance since the pages of history were opened, the betterment of the material condition has been the sole and underlying cause of the movement of a people.

The great Aryan change was at the command of an instinct for more fertile fields and wider lands. The Hebrew movement was under the commands of the Almighty, guided by the cloud and fiery pillar. The Greek migrated into Greater Greece that he might build city, and gymnasium, and temple, and cultivate fertile fields denied to him by the narrow confines of his own land. The Roman went into Africa, Spain, Greece, Gaul, and Germany that the Roman colonist might hold with his strong hands the lands conquered with the sword. The Goth and Visi-Goth immigration was for pure lust of conquest. The Mohammedan moved under the influence of a religion dictated by the physical