the portals of his heart flew open to a comrade's approach, "like the Gates of Peter's prison at the Angel's touch."

There are conditions in our country alarming enough to attract the attention and consideration of every man who pretends to a concern in the public welfare. No man can deny that we have ground for apprehension and anxiety.

Great financial interests embodied in corporations and trusts have unlawfully lived, prospered, and ruthlessly ruled in our national life. They have sought power merely for power's sake. Their code of morals in corporation conduct and high finance has been infamous. They have paralyzed, they have destroyed the industry and labor of honest effort. Worse than this, they have poisoned the morality of business conduct.

But there is a public mood, aroused by our fearless and patriotic President, come forth to meet this situation. As a man of great affairs lately said, "We are going to have in this republic a standard of corporate and financial morals that will square with the moral sense of the American people, in their private conduct, and we are going to have it at any cost." This may come at a terrible financial and industrial cost, but come it must.

The great danger is that in coming it may bring with it mistaken and unjust methods. That officers of the law, without sufficient strength of character and purpose to abide safely by the law, and for their own ambitious purposes, may follow an outraged public opinion, which is often far from discriminating, and pursue costly and reckless methods, and arouse public opinion against corporations and financial interests, that are wholly innocent and within the law.

I know of no greater danger to the efficacy of these reform laws than to seek to apply, them so as to seriously impair, if not destroy, honest business affairs. The condition of public opinion is such, brought about by unlawful corporate and high financial methods, that it takes a high degree of sterling honest purpose to decide a controversy in favor of a large

corporation, no matter how absolutely honest that decision may be..

Let the public assure its servants that he who intelligently and honestly decides in favor of a corporation shall have the same approval and support as when he intelligently and honestly decides against it.

We must in this respect differentiate, for side by side with you who believe in honest methods, who believe in fair dealing, are nine-tenths of the corporations of the country. The other one-tenth, possessing the large part of the great wealth of the land, pursuing methods in defiance of law, has been the curse of the country.

But another cloud has appeared above the horizon. There has come forth from the land a voice that is a menace to our national welfare, preaching again that sermon of states rights that brought forth the tragedy of the nation.

State conventions and state legislatures have adopted resolutions, proposing to abridge and limit the power of the general government. I warn you that this tendency, so far as it impregnates the public mind, is dangerously near the sentiment for states rights, that resulted in the ordinances of secession in the early '60s.

Limit the power of this national government and the hope of the liberty of mankind is gone. Limit the power of this government, given through the wisdom of our fathers, supported and maintained since by the blood of millions, and you will loosen the cords that bind these state entities into one, sheaves reaped and bound together in the harvest of death. Limit the national power and the permanency of Union will have departed forever.

If this monument could speak today, with the inspiration derived from a patriotic life, we would hear these sentiments: "In my life, love of country was a passion; to me the Union of the states was my country. I can not see, outside the perpetuity and strength of the Union, anything worthy in the future of the Republic."

General Thayer believed with the faith that makes heroes and martyrs, that in the maintenance of the Union, with all its power, and the ascendency of its Constitution and laws, were bound up, not only our welfare, but the birthright of millions yet unborn. The effulgent blaze of this great truth lighted up his intellect.

President Lincoln said, "My paramount object is to save the Union," but I ask you, what would Lincoln have thought at that time if he knew that free states of the North in the near future would seek to deprive that Union of the power of self-preservation?

Let us maintain, not disintegrate; let us preserve, not weaken; preserve, unimpaired in power, the Union forever.

There is no menace from imperialism. There can be no imperialism without the support of the army and navy. But the history of this country shows that the surest safeguards against imperialism, the safest bulwarks for the protection of the liberty of the people, have been the soldiers and sailors. During the Civil War, speaking of the North and the South, Garfield said, "Our army is equally brave, but our government and congress are far behind in earnestness and energy," and he might have added, in patriotism. In the darkest hour of that dread time, when men of all political associations thought the war for the Union a failure, and advocated peace by separation, it was the soldier and the sailor that never doubted. It was the soldier and the sailor that had abiding faith. It was the soldier and the sailor that stood firm as the rock of Gibraltar, to the very end, and to victory. They were sure of the approach of the coming day. They had the faith and inspiration of the lark, singing his hallelujah to the coming

morn.

The great Lincoln, patriot, martyr, standing on the bloodstained field of Gettysburg, communing, as it were, with the souls of the patriot dead that went up from that consecrated spot, said, "Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation," and in the out-pouring of his heart exclaimed, "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in

make us more loyal to our God, more loyal to our flag, more

loyal to each other, and Thy name shall have the glory through time and all eternity. Amen.

Governor Sheldon :

Taps by Mr. O. C. Bell.

TAPS were here sounded.

PROCEEDINGS

OF THE

NEBRASKA STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL MEETING.

Lincoln, Nebraska, January 8, 1901.

In accordance with the call and the constitution of the Society, the Nebraska State Historical Society was called to order at 8:15 P.M. of this date by the Hon. R. W. Furnas, First Vice-President of the Society. After some expressions of sympathy for President Morton, his life-long friend, on the death of his son, Mr. Carl Morton, he declared the Society ready to transact business.

Mr. C. S. Lobingier then offered the following resolutions, which were unanimously adopted by a rising vote:

"WHEREAS, The President of this Society has suffered grievous and irreparable loss in the death of his youngest son, be it

"Resolved, That the Nebraska State Historical Society hereby tenders to its President and his bereaved family its. profound and sincere sympathy in their hour of sorrow and. affliction.

"Resolved, That this Society recognizes in the late Carl Morton a man of sterling character, and a worthy son of an honored father and one whose death is a serious loss to this commonwealth of which he was a native and with which he had been honorably identified during practically his entire life.

"Resolved, That these resolutions be spread upon the records of this Society and that a copy thereof be forwarded to the bereaved family."

In the absence of President Morton, his annual address was read by Mrs. A. J. Sawyer. The following resolutions were