one person, so that it is not the special business of any one to get at him. In consequence, if he can keep the forces of justice at bay long enough—if he can secure one or two mistrials—gradually the popular interest evaporates and the criminal gets off. As the Judge has so well said, the minute a man becomes President he ceases being the President of a party and is the President of every man, woman, and child within the confines of the Nation. But I permit myself one particular bit of party discrimination. I am just a trifle more intent on punishing the Republican offender than the Democrat; because he is my own scoundrel, and I feel a certain sense of responsibility for him, and I intend to discharge that responsibility if I can. Of course, as we all know, offences must come; but I have endeavored to carry out the Scriptural injunction and to make it a matter of woe unto him by whom they come. I am happy to say that we have a reasonable proportion of the offenders in question with stripes on; but not up to the fifty per cent average that I would like; and I want to go a little further than we have yet gone. If the law is reasonably speedy and reasonably sure it takes away one great excuse for lawlessness. If some horrible crime is committed and the people feel that under the best circumstances there will be an indefinite delay in the punishment of the criminal, and that the punishment will be uncertain even when the time for administering it comes, then a premium is put upon that kind of law-breaking which more than any other is a menace to the law. Long delays of justice, abuses of the pardoning power, the sluggishness with which either court or attorney moves; all of those things count in bringing about the condition of affairs which produces lynch law. Now, a layman can do but little more than to give utterance to the feeling that so many laymen have. I earnestly hope that the bench and the bar of the United States will in all proper ways see to it that the customs—for some of these things of which I complain are merely customs and not laws—inherited from the past when conditions were totally different, shall not be perverted so as to wrong the whole public by giving the criminal an advantage to which he is not entitled, and that some substantial improvement shall be made in the direction of securing greater expedition and greater certainty in the administration of justice, and especially in the administration of criminal justice. TO A DELEGATION OF THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC, AT NEW ORLEANS, LA., OCTOBER 26, 1905 _Comrades_: I want to thank you for coming here to greet me. I can not say how much it means to me to be greeted as I have been greeted by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray in this trip through the Southland. At Little Rock my escort was composed of Union and Confederate soldiers, riding side by side, in pairs.