upon this question, that nowhere shall the law be overturned in the interests of anybody. If it fails of beneficent purpose, which should be the object of all law, then let us modify it, but while it is a law let us insist that it shall be obeyed. When we turn from that and allow any other standard of living to be set up, where is your security, where is mine, when some one else makes convenience more sacred, more powerful than the law of the land? I believe to-day that the great rock of our security is this deeply imbedded thought in the American heart that does not, as in many of our Spanish-American countries, give its devotion to the man, but to the law, the Constitution, and to the flag. So that in that hour of gloom, when that richest contribution of all gems that Illinois has ever set in our Nation's diadem, Abraham Lincoln, and in that hour of the consummation of his work, dies by the hand of the assassin, Garfield, who was to meet a like fate, might say to the trembling and dismayed people: "Lincoln is dead, but the Government at Washington still lives." My fellow-citizens, to all those who, through your Mayor, have extended me their greeting, to all who are here assembled, I return my most sincere thanks. I do not look upon such assemblages without profound emotion. They touch me, and I believe they teach me, and I am sure that the lessons are wholesome lessons. We have had here to-day this procession of veterans, aged and feeble many of them. That is retrospective. That is part of the great story of the past, written in glorious letters on the firmament that is spread above the world. And in these sweet children who have followed we read the future. How sweet it was to see them bearing in their infant hands these same banners that those veterans carried amid the shot and battle and dying of men! I had occasion at the centennial celebration of the inauguration of Washington in New York, being impressed by the great display of national colors, to make a suggestion that the flag should be taken into the schoolhouses, and I am glad to know that in that State there is daily a little drill of the children that pays honor to the flag. But, my friends, the Constitution provides that I shall annually give information to Congress of the state of the Union and make such recommendations as I may think wise, and it has generally been understood, I think, that this affirmative provision contains a negative and implies that the President is to give no one except Congress any information as to the state of the Union, and that he shall especially make no suggestions that can be in any shape misconstrued.