flesh. They fought against centralized power in the hands of an individual, we shall fight it in the hands of a majority. Our Constitution guarantees to us a central government with certain delegated powers and a Sovereign State government in which inheres all other powers. They are trying to rob us of it. The fight is on. Let us highly resolve that we will not surrender, that we will not betray the palladium of our liberties, And let us inscribe upon our banner where all the world may see:

"The Constitution, it must and shall be preserved."

SAM DAVIS

BY

MALCOLM R. PATTERSON

Malcolm Rice Patterson was governor of Tennessee from 1907 to 1911. When the statue of Sam Davis which stands on the Capitol grounds was dedicated, Governor Patterson received it with the following address:

How sweet it is to live. How hard it is to die. What efforts do we make to ward off the end? How we struggle with heart and brain for existence. How we ply the oar blades in those frail barks that hold mortality, and resist as long as we can, the onward sweep of those strange waters which the poet calls "The river of death!" But whether we will or not our boats sail out on the mystic sea and from out of the darkness never a light is seen.

Did this young man want to die as he stood there like a god of day and saw the dangling noose, the mark of infamy, civilization's badge of barbarism? His mind was clear, the blood of youth was leaping and coursing through his veins, life was before him and the world was around him with its unknown sorrows and untasted joys. Mother and home and loved ones were not far away, but he gave them all for his honor and looked death square in the face without a murmur and without a tremor.

How can I speak of this young man and his death?

What power can come to me to tell of the pathos, the deep meaning of it all? It is above and beyond the power of words. It rises from earth and reaches heaven. As looking upon the restless billows of the ocean, or the blue of the sky, the mind cannot formulate its musings or express the thoughts that are stirred, but falls back weary, dejected, mystified, and all the philosophers of the world, all the cults, all our faith cannot help us to understand. But the sea and the sky are so familiar that only once and anon do their mysteries come upon us with profound and conscious force, accentuating our smallness in the divine plan, leaving us like children in the dark without a hand to guide.

So it is with the life and death of Sam Davis. They are familiar to every school boy in Tennessee, the theme of orators and the subjects of verse. But at last when the mind, chaste of all fugitive thoughts and purged of all grossness, views the scaffold and the rope, we see at our very doors a scene which for human grandeur and sublimity reaches the ultimate of human conception, and which in the sweep of years will grow to yet more splendid proportions.

No one with brush, or chisel, or pen, with thought, or tongue of eloquence, is able to reach the heights which this boy trod when he gave his innocent young life that day. Blind Homer, who sang the story of Troy, Milton, who told of the loss of Paradise, Shakespeare, who sounded every depth and touched every shore at humanity, Dante, and all the other masters can nothing add and nothing take from the simple majesty that clothed the death of Davis.

On Calvary, the Son of God died with cruel nails

driven through his quivering flesh, and a crown of thorns pressing down upon his agonized brow. Since then the cross has been the Christian's sign in every land; and which of us has the right to say of Him who created the earth and sky and every living thing on land and sea, whose mysteries baffle, but whose Providence is over all, that He could give the Son of Mary to teach men how to live, but could not give this son of Tennessee to teach men how to die?

This spot will be sacred evermore to those who love the pure, the true, the brave, for it is dedicated to the knightly tenants of the soul. Let mothers bring their children here to learn the story of his young life and truimphant death, to know that brave men really never die, that truth is worth more than gold, that honor is more precious than life. Let those of us who have put on armor, met in the shock of life's conflict, dealt and received wounds, now gather at this shrine, forget the petty rivalries which gnaw at the soul and fetter the pinions of noble aspirations, and at the feet of Sam Davis remember that we too are Tennesseans, that here we meet on common ground, and from this holy precinct let us go to forgive and forget. With his memory and its pervading inspiration let us face the future and bring to the service of our state and country a higher measure of responsibility, deeper and truer conceptions of duty.

In the name of Tennessee, illustrious in peace and in war, whose star has shone resplendently in the glorious canopy of the Union for more than a century of time, and whose luster is undimmed by the passing of years, I receive the statue of her Soldier Boy.

I speak for every living man who wore the gray, whose sands of life are running swift and low, and to whose ears soon the last command will come to pitch his tent on the silent fields and wait for the resurrection morning; I speak for the dead that lie and molder in their graves from the Potomac to the southern seas, whose names may be forgotten, but whose deeds will live in song and story until the waves of time shall break upon the deathless shore.

But when I speak of these, let me recall-for we should never forget those rare women of elder days who bore the bravest sons the world has ever seen, typified by this sainted mother who brought this, her first-born, into the world, who heard his first weak cry, who nourished him at her breast and crooned the lullaby which hushed him to slumberland, whose spirit long ago joined her boy in Paradise and rests with him in eternal bowers of bliss and shares with him the smile of the living God.