I hardly like to say how deeply my heart is moved by coming back here among you. Among the earliest recollections I have as a child is hearing from my mother and my aunt (Miss Annie Bulloch, she then was) about Roswell; of how the Pratts, and Kings, and Dunwoodys, and Bullochs came here first to settle; about the old homestead, the house on the hill; about the Chattahoochee; about all kinds and sorts of incidents that would not interest you, but interested me a great deal when I was a child. I wish I could spend hours here to look all through and see the different places about which I have heard all kinds of incidents. All those anecdotes, looking back now, I can see taught me an enormous amount, perhaps all the more because they were not intended to teach anything. I think we are very apt to learn most when neither we nor the people talking to us intend to teach anything. All those stories of the life of those days taught me what a real home life, a real neighbor life, was and should be. Looking back now at what I learned through those stories of the childhood of my mother, my aunts, my uncles, I can understand why the boys and girls of the Roswell of that time grew up to be men and women who were good servants of the community, who were good husbands, good fathers, good wives and mothers; how it was that they learned to do their duty aright in peace and in war also. It is my very great good fortune to have the right to claim that my blood is half Southern and half Northern; and I would deny the right of any man here to feel a greater pride in the deeds of every Southerner than I feel. Of the children, the brothers and sisters of my mother who were born and brought up in that house on the hill over there, my two uncles afterward entered the Confederate service, and served in the Confederate Navy. One, the younger man, served on the “Alabama” as the youngest officer aboard her. He was captain of one of her broadside 32-pounders in her final fight, and when at the very end the “Alabama” was sinking, and the “Kearsarge” passed under her stern and came up along the side that had not been engaged hitherto, my uncle, Irving Bulloch, shifted his gun from one side to the other and fired the last two shots fired from the “Alabama.” The other, the elder, James Dunwoody Bulloch, was an admiral in the Confederate service. Of all the people whom I have ever met he was the one that came nearest to that beautiful creation of Thackeray—Colonel Newcome. Men and women, don’t you think that I have the ancestral right to claim a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty as they saw the duty, whether they wore the gray or whether they wore the blue? All Americans who are worthy the name feel an equal pride in the valor of those who fought on one side or the other, provided only that each did with all his strength and soul and mind his duty as it was given him to see his duty. AT PIEDMONT PARK, ATLANTA, GA., OCTOBER 20, 1905