All eyes are riveted upon the attenuated figure. New thought is injected into a dull debate. The future of Georgia is foreshadowed with prophetic ken. For more than an hour he charms the assembled legislators. It is a task for Hercules which this youth of twenty-four has attempted. But the tide is turned. The road is built-one of the first in either hemisphere of the globe. It runs from the Chattahoochee to the Tennessee; and Georgia today owns the Western and Atlantic Railroad. It is a property worth millions of dollars; and to the common schools of Georgia its annual rental is a revenue of gold. I next see him in Congress. For sixteen years he is there -a watchman upon the walls of Zion. Strangest of enigmas! What is there in a frame so weak to feed so powerful a brain-where are its mighty forces hidden? It is the marvel of Washington. On entering Congress, he weighs but ninety-six pounds. Each speech which he makes is felt to be his last. When overcome with exhaustion, he takes his seat, one thinks of the death-bed scene of the Earl of Chatham in the House of Peers. Three times his demise is prematurely announced-his obituary is written the newspapers of the state are in mourning. But the little giant is still needed in Georgia and "man is immortal till his work is done." On the floor of the great Convention at Milledgeville, in 1861, with marvelous prescience, he again reads the future -to him an open book; and in one of the mightiest arguments ever heard in Georgia he opposes the ordinance of Secession. But he accepts the result. When a government for the South is organized at Montgomery, he becomes VicePresident of the Confederate States of America. The war ends. He is elected to the Federal Senate; but a Republican majority refuses to accept his credentials. Then he writes his "War Between the States." Later, he takes his seat once more in the House. Eight years elapse; and then, from the executive chair of Georgia, at the ripe age of three score years and ten, this strange figure-this Hamlet of our history bows farewell. On his tomb at Crawfordville is chiseled this inscription: "I am afraid of nothing on earth, or above the earth or under the earth, except to do wrong. The path of duty I shall ever endeavor to travel, fearing no evil and dreading no consequences." This glorious old statesman comes back to us tonight— without his crutch-no pallor on his cheek and no wrinkle on his brow. In Phi Kappa's name, let us greet the grand old Commoner and welcome to her courts once more the illustrious sage of Liberty Hall-Alexander H. Stephens. Out of all the State, two Georgians have been chosen by our Legislature for the nation's Hall of Fame in Washington. One of these is the Great Commoner. The other, by a singular coincidence, is his old room-mate at Athens, a Demosthenian, with whom he often crossed swords-a Georgia doctor of the old school, who lifted surgery from its couch of pain and registered a new era in the history of medicine, who robbed the knife of its terror and delayed the grave of its tenant, who brought to earth the twilight sleep of the gods, and whose claims to the ethereal honors are now recognized and uncontested by the world-the great discoverer of anaesthesia-Dr. Crawford W. Long. Nor can I think of the Great Commoner, without calling to mind that kingly Georgian, to whom for half a century his soul was knit, as a David's soul to Jonathan. He, too, was a Demosthenian. Whenever he rises up before me, a prodigy of strength, I think of Hercules slaying the Nemean lion or of Samson lifting the gates of Gaza. Said Mr. Stephens: "His is the greatest mind I ever came in contact with, and its operations, even in its errors, remind me of some mighty waste of waters." Tonight, then, let us remember that glorious Mirabeau of secession-that Robin Hood of Georgia outlaws-that unpardoned scion of a race of rebels-Robert Toombs. But, in the clouds which canopy this scene, I behold the spirit of another matchless Georgian-a Prometheus, with whose very name we associate the celestial fire of the gods. He left us when a pall of darkness hung heavily upon the state-at an hour when his going made it all the darker. Long have we missed his face amongst us, but his name still lingers lovingly upon our lips, his memory is still green in the hearts of all Athenians. Georgia has not forgotten him; and when iniquity in public life has called for exposure and rebuke; when right has gone down in defeat and wrong has triumphed for a time; when virtue has failed of its reward and wicked men have risen to power-often, in such anxious hours, has she sighed for her beloved Boanerges and longed for her glorious Son of Thunder. His eloquence was a flaming sword—the dread and terror of all who trifled with liberty-his, too, the mantle of that elder Jackson, who called down the fire of Heaven to consume the iniquitous records of the Yazoo Fraud. It was in the days of Reconstruction, when the accursed carpet-bagger was in power and the infamous scallawag was an encumberer of the earth; when the State which you and I love was a subjugated province, with a government forced upon her by bayonets; when this noble old State of ours, whose veins are rippled by the purest of Anglo-Saxon blood, was a slave in the thrall of an Ethiopian bondage; when military despots, drunk with an unbridled license of authority, were reveling in the citadel of law and when Georgians there were who fraternized with them and fawned at their feet; it was then that, in a prayer to Heaven, this grand old patriot cried out: "O, for some blistering word that I might write infamy upon the foreheads of these men!" Elijah, the Tishbite, on Mount Carmel, was not grander, when, with the fire of God, he consumed the iniquities of Baal. |