With his lineage unknown, his birthplace unestablished, his advent unheralded, and his history but sparsely written, no man can speak with certainty of the race from which he sprung. But if there be aught distinctive in racial characteristics; or aught indicative in that accent of human speech which makes the Irish brogue sound as music on the ear, Daniel Morgan was of that race which has ennobled Celtic history, and the lullaby which first soothed him into sleeping was the crooning of a mother’s voice that spake the Irish tongue. But, my countrymen, whatever his lineage and wherever the place of his birth, tonight, on the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of his greatest battle, when we have assembled in New York’s banquet hall to honor his memory and to make better known a renown which should be as firmly established as the liberties of his country, we may well pause to trace the course of those wonderful activities which have no parallel in Revolutionary lore. The earliest, and perhaps his sole biographer, James Graham, declares he was of Welsh extraction, and that he went to Virginia from the banks of the Delaware. This declaration is based on a manuscript prepared for the biographer by Dr. William Hall, of Winchester, who knew General Morgan in his lifetime and attended his bedside during his last illness. The uniform refusal of Morgan to discuss his parentage and the resultant uncertainty which surrounds his racial extraction, entitle such a statement on the part of a person who was his friend in life to consideration and respect. But I submit a statement of another person who knew him during life to substantiate the belief which exists in Virginia that he was of Irish blood.