ing a cause, which, to him, was never lost. He was surgeon in the Third Georgia regiment of cavalry, a regiment captured at New Haven, just before the battle of Perryville. The maiden name of Mrs. Collier's mother was Margaret Marion Hendrix. The author was married on December 9, 1897, to Rev. Bryan Wells Collier, whose family is likewise an old and distinguished one in Georgia. Their two sons are Bryan Wells, aged twenty, who, when a lad of only sixteen, had won three medals for history and oratory; and Thomas Wootten, aged seventeen, who will follow the profession of his two grandfathers, both of whom were surgeons in the Confederate Army, and ornaments to a great and noble profession. The Confederate woman! Imagination cannot dwell too tenderly upon a theme so inspiring. Reverence cannot linger too fondly at so pure an altar. The historian's pen, which tells us of a Rome and of a Sparta-aye, the pen of inspiration, which tells us of an Israel-has not portrayed her superior, if, indeed, her equal; nor may we expect to find her in all the hidden future. It took the civilization of an Old South to produce her-a civilization whose exquisite but fallen fabric now belongs to the dust of dreams. But we have not lost the blood royal of the ancient line; and in the veins of an infant Southland still ripples the heroic strain. The Confederate woman, in her silent influence, in her eternal vigil, still abides. Her gentle spirit is the priceless heritage of her daughters. The old queen passes, but the young queen lives; and radiant, like the morning, on her brow, is Dixie's diadem. THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER OF THE ELKS. [Speech delivered before the Atlanta Lodge, B. P. O. E., at the Atlanta Opera House, June 14, 1923, Judge L. F. McClelland, Exalted Ruler, presiding.] Dear to Elkdom and to Elks is the Star-Spangled Banner. On this birthday of the nation's flag, I greet you beneath the expanded folds of that emblem whose stripes have blazed an unbroken path to victory and whose stars have never set on the field of battle. To the lovers of liberty it is a beacon of hope-a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Its sentiment is as sweet, its associations as fragrant, its caresses as tender, and its symbolism as sacred as the dews of heaven on the towers of Zion. But to the enemies of freedom, it is a fiery besom and a flaming sword. From the tip of its staff to the hem of its sheet, it is an oriflamme of defiance; and, like the ramparts of Sinai, when Israel was estranged, it is wreathed with the consuming wrath of an omnipotent God. "Sic semper tyrannis" is emblazoned upon its folds. To Sultans in Constantinople, to Czars in Petrograd, and to Kaisers in Berlin, it is an ominous flash of the divine lightnings, and behind it are Jehovah's leaden thunderbolts. To the disconsolate of other lands-to the down-trodden and to the oppressed, who are weary of despotism and of slavery-who are willing to embrace our ideals of government, to obey our laws, to uphold our institutions and to venerate our traditions-it says to them, "there's an asylum for you beneath the banner of Washington." But to the riff-raff of Europe to its decayed scions of an effete and rotten aristocracy-to its apostles of king-craft and of kaiser-cult to its disseminators of bolshevism, of nihilism, of strife and of anarchy, it says with lightning in its gleam and with thunder in its message: "Stay where you are on the other side of the ocean. For such as you, we have an electric chair, an open penitentiary and a hangman's noose, but not the franchise of an American citizen!" That flag is too saturated with the blood of our fatherstoo holy with the pure faith of our mothers-too costly with the sacrifice made by our boys in the trenches of Northern France, to be polluted by alien and unhallowed hands. It is respected on every sea and in every port, because we have not let it trail in the mud and in the mire, but have kept it waving to the sky. Please God we intend to keep it in the stainless ethers. High above the pines on the Blue Ridge we intend to keep it, as unsullied as a vestal's robe, as immaculate as a drop of dew, and as pure as a pearl in the crystal chalice of its ocean home. To be a Roman, in the days of the Empire, was to be a king; but to be an American, in this twentieth century of the Christian era, is to be a sovereign in whose presence kings are but the painted pawns of a chess-board. Citizenship in America is not for every ignorant and vicious rag-amuffin which an east wind wafts to our shores. Two Presidents of the United States have fallen at the hands of foreign fanatics. Let two suffice for a nation's sacrifice to this inhuman moloch. We welcome the purer strains of the mother-lands. Our own rich heritage of blood takes us back to the Thames and to the Rhine. We welcome the Dane, the Norwegian and the Swede-descendants of the old Vikings who smoked their pipes amid the hurricanes. We welcome the worthy sons of sunny Italy for we honor the countrymen of Garibaldi. We welcome the true men of glorious Greece-that classic clime, over-hung by the Acropolis and washed by the Aegean sea. Beloved of all Americans are the ancient lands of Cicero and of Horace, of Demosthenes and of Homer. But we abhor-nay, we forbid-that floating miasma, that con taminating effluvia, that deadly virus which is poison to our pure Anglo-Saxon veins and which breeds the pestilence that wasteth at noon-day. In the providence of God, we have a continent for our heritage and a Declaration of Independence for our birthright; and we are encompassed by the inviolate deep. Never was there a goodlier land or a happier people. The inheritance which has come down to us from our fathers, we intend to transmit, unstained and unimpaired, to our children. We have built wisely upon secure and solid foundations, and we are today invincibly established upon the enduring rocks. We need fear no invader who comes from abroad in open conflict, beneath hostile banners. We are distrustful only of those sycophants who sneak into our camp, under false pretensions, to propagate their diabolical heresies within our walls. Insidious poison, injected into the body politic may do us harm, but we dread no invading cohorts. In the language of the immortal Lincoln: "All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with a Monte Cristo's treasure to back them and with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force of arms take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge mountains." "Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle" together make a team, from which God himself can't save the king! That flag is ours; and here, on the banks of the Chattahoochee, in the sunny land of Dixie, it finds as much love for the Union, as much fidelity to the Constitution, and as much response to the sentiment of a common America, as it does on the shores of Lake Michigan or beneath the shaft of Bunker Hill monument. "She's up there, Old Glory, no tyrant-dealt scars, With only a few slight variations, it's the same flag which Betsy Ross wove for the Continental armies. It's the same flag under which our forefathers tracked the snows at Valley Forge and followed Washington across the Delaware to Monmouth and to Trenton. It's the same flag which Nancy Hart ennobled when, at the end of her blunderbus, she held six British officers at bay. In this neck of the woods we reverence Nancy Hart. She was afflicted with what the doctors call astigmatism. But, in plain vernacular, she was cross-eyed. Each of the red coats imagined that she was aiming her buckshot at him, and realizing that discretion was the better part of valor he decided to hold his ground. Thanks to those crooked eyes which glared behind the triggers of her gun, like coals of fire from Dante's inferno, all six of them were taken; and to-night, on the grave of Nancy Hart, I drop a sympathetic tear. It was said of Cleopatra that if her nose had been slightly tilted it would have changed the countenance of medieval times. Certainly Mark Antony would not have knelt at the feet of an ill-favored sorceress of the Nile, nor for a crosseyed Queen of Egypt would he have flung a Roman world away. But equally is it true that unless Nancy Hart had been cross-eyed, she could never have brought the Tories to her feet. So what if her eyes were crossed, they were true enough to sentinel the Georgia forest, in an hour of danger; and, like twin stars upon the morning sky, they were beautiful enough to light the dawn of liberty. We of the South have always loved that old rainbow of battle. We loved it in 1776 when it fluttered in defiance to the despotism of Great Britain. We loved it in 1812 when it symbolized the freedom of our argosies of commerce to sail the unobstructed seas. We loved it in 1845, when Winfield Scott and Jefferson Davis bore it proudly westward to plant it upon the walls of the Montezumas. We |