"Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends." This is what Senator Foraker has done for the Black Battalion and for the principles of law and liberty which underlie their case. He has given his political life, his seat in the Senate, all the honor and power which were his had he chosen to defend the order of the President, discharging those one hundred and sixty-seven men without trial of any kind from the Army which their valor had helped to make glorious--instead of the soldiers whom he did not know but whose pitiful case, whose unjust and cruel punishment, enlisted the sympathy of his great heart and the masterly labors of his tireless brain. Yes, I repeat, and do not let it ever be forgotten by us as a race, that Senator Foraker might to-day be his own successor in the United States Senate had he chosen to play in the "Brownsville" affair the part of defender of President Roosevelt's wanton abuse and usurpation of executive power, instead of taking the side of the Black Battalion and the fundamental principle of our law and Constitution that each man accused of crime is entitled to trial before he is condemned and punished. He chose the side of the weak, of justice, and the Constitution in this great struggle, and not that of power and the Administration. This was the sin which brought upon him all the wrath of that power and of that Administration, but of which all good men and true absolve and for which they honor him, and for which, besides, a grateful race enshrines him in its heart of hearts. For he preferred to suffer affliction with the Black Battalion and to suffer defeat for the Senatorship rather than enjoy power and office as the price of his desertion of the cause of those helpless men. No man can give as much as Senator Foraker has given to a just cause, give as generously, as unselfishly, gloriously as he has given of his very self in this "Brownsville" case and lose that which is best striving for in life. He may lose place in the Government and power as a political leader. But what are these but the ephemera of man's fevered existence and strivings here below? "What shadows we are," Burke said on a memorable occasion in his contest for a seat in Parliament, "and what shadows we pursue." Office, power, popularity; what are they but shadows of passing clouds which a breath blows to us and a breath blows from us again. No man loses anything in reality when he loses such fleeting, such shadowy possessions. But if for the sake of them he loses truth, justice, goodness, his love of the right and his hatred of the wrong, his sympathy for the oppressed, his passion to help God's little ones, such a man has bartered away his soul, the immortal part of him for a rood of grass, which to-day flourisheth and to-morrow withereth and is cast into the oven of all transitory and perishable possessions.