Such is the world which our times have given so largely into our keeping. This world demands a leadership such as gave our country unity under the Constitution of 1787. The giants of those days--a full dozen strong, loom large over the succeeding generations, and like Titans of old, their deeds illuminate our whole history. Much accursed as we are to-day by petty minds and selfish hearts in high places, we read the history of our heroic period with deepest yearning that the mighty dead might rise up and speak to us the living words we need to hear. We feel so helpless, so lost, and gone astray. What mind and character we may still have has ceased to function normally. From now on we may expect a steady drift toward monarchy. In a decadent republic monarchicalism is a natural growth. First comes a great class of the rich on the one hand and a great class of poor on the other. Both tend, because of their conditions, toward corruption. Both corrupt the state. The one will barter the ten commandments to keep what it has; the other to get what it wants. For a time the proletariat is oppressed with free corn and the circus, with organized charities, baseball and the movies. No republic can long endure on that regimen. Gold has already paved the way that leads to the United States Senate. All that is needed is more gold and the way will be smoothly paved to the throne of Caesar or Belshazzar. It has always seemed to me that our stupendous national sacrifices during the War Between the States have never been recovered. We lost a million of the sturdiest and best men who ever grew to manhood in the world. So did that generation lose a million homes. We have to-day, instead of the ten millions of their descendants, equally divided between the city and country, some twenty millions of unskilled foreign workers crowded into the cities alone. With the close of the War Between the States we ceased, in every section, to produce first class national leaders. To-day Charles Murphy has replaced Alexander Hamilton. In Illinois, Lincoln the Great gives way to William Hale Thompson the Little. The passing of Woodrow Wilson from the public life leaves the South searching, perhaps in vain, for a leader to present to the service of the republic. Into our Southern political life, as into that of the North a generation ago, there is creeping the hireling of special interests. Only the ignorant can say that we have not fallen on times that are weak and evil and failing at every point.