Imagine a group of relatives and friends sitting down to break bread together. They differ in age, in appearance, in understanding, and in almost every purpose of life. Some will reject soup, and others fish. As the dinner proceeds sharp differences of opinion lend interest to the conversation. In our present day society any two members of this group may well belong to two different political parties and two different religious organizations. Yet if there is to be a true companionship in this place, how dominating must be the things that unify! This group, to get on well, must speak the same language and abide by the same established forms of social manners. In all the deepest things there must be the same regard for essentials, the same attitude toward life. In the mind of each, unity with all the others must be truly desired as a spiritual attainment. How seldom do we pause to reflect upon how many such principles and forms are taken for granted, every day and all day, in ordinary business and social intercourse. If people are to live together happily they must not only tolerate one another. They must enjoy companionship, one with the other. On the same soil you can not have, permanently, two systems of law. Two basic forms of moral conduct can not function side by side. If there are two groups of people in any society, one of which totally rejects the other, trouble is sure to come. Given two groups of people with such a gulf fixed between as is never crossed, for instance, by intermarriages, and it is time to hoist the danger signal. Civil strife lurks in the offing. That generation of Americans which grew up under the shadow of the Civil War, and in the terrible period of Reconstruction, has had occasion to have burned in its inmost consciousness, as by intense religious conviction, this necessity of national unity. Such a complete sense of unity, such a practice of solidarity, I have visualized for my country. It is the disunity of the present which, with "Hope deferred, maketh the heart sick." About us on every hand are discordant voices, clashing interests, screaming recriminations and blazing hatreds. Our republic cannot continue unless we re-establish, and that very soon, a status of civil peace in the minds and hearts of all our people.