Just as there are men sacrificing comfort and earthly prosperity to the cause, and men who are willing to give life itself to defend God's work from the attacks of its enemies; so there are people who will sell their own sacred heritage and the freedom of the community, for wealth, popularity or personal safety. And more than this--the people are surrounded by men placed here to represent the government who are false to every trust, and whose opposition can be estimated in dollars or coerced by bigotry. We have some traitors to ourselves within our homes; we have more traitors to truth and justice outside our walls. Less than two thousand years ago the great Roman republic was at the zenith of its power. Some of the free and enterprising citizens of that mighty land emigrated into the cold, mountainous regions of the north and established a colony which they called Beville. They set up the Roman standard, and claimed the territory in the name of their country. After overcoming untold difficulties, they sent messengers to Rome asking for recognition; and saying that, inasmuch as they had given a grand, rich domain to their beloved mother land, they should be placed upon an equal footing with their free-born fellow-citizens. But the politicians at Rome would not listen to this request; and Beville was kept in the vassalage of a conquered province. All the governors, judges and many of the local officers were sent from some other part of the republic; and they treated the people of Beville with the most dreadful severity, while they dispatched to Rome the most vicious and cruelly false reports concerning the honest citizens of the province or colony unto which they had been sent to govern and to judge. Many of them were most contemptible knaves and traitors. They once had a governor who traitorously violated his oath to give a certificate of election to a man who had one vote in a dozen, and whose only claim to consideration was his wealth and willingness to make loans on desperate political titles; a governor who deprived a good public unsectarian university of its needed support and then declared that the people of Beville opposed education; a governor who broke his plighted word in order that he might leave upon the fair land the espionage of an unjust and unaccountable commission; a governor who basely betrayed the consul that maintained him in office by saying with egotism which is bleached white with concentrated lye: "I wrote all of such and such portions of the consul's message;" a governor who was called a thief upon the floor of the Senate; a governor who had a list of wildcat, highway-robbery mining stocks which bore his name and title--all for sale under the glare and glamor of his civil position; a governor whose brains were rattling chestnuts, whose heart was infinitesimal, bearing proof that a single atom can exist, and whose beauty--his only virtue--was that of the painted harlot and the whitened sepulchre.