It was the north of France that produced and yet produces those men who have harnessed the forces of nature, who have made the earth tremble to the pulse-beat of their factories, who took the ore from the earth and the coal from the hillsides, and with them wrought out the great steel industries of that country; but it was out of the south of France that there came its marvelous fiction writers and minstrel-bards, its greatest poets and its greatest dreamers; and out of that same south once upon a time there came, too, a fiery outpouring of shock-headed men and women who wore wooden shoes on their feet and red caps on their heads and who marched to the words of a song which has become the fighting song of every nation, craving liberty and daring to march and to die for it--the “Marseillaise Hymn.” (Applause.) The names of the Poid Milanaise and the Lombards and the Venetians of northern Italy are synonymous with frugality in domestic affairs and energy in commercial pursuits, but it is down in the tip of the toe of the Latin boot that we find the Italian who loves the hardest and sings the loudest and fights for the very love of the fighting. The north of Ireland, as we all know, has fathered the great business men of that little island, and the great manufacturers and the great theologians, many of them; and, regretful to say, it has also produced a spawn of human beings who, in the face of the fact that in every other land where men have equal opportunities, the Irishman has won his way to the front and has held his own with prince and potentate, yet cling to the theory that in Ireland, of all the spots of the world, the Irishman is not capable of governing himself. But it was to the south of Ireland, and it is to the south of Ireland to-day, that one must turn to find the dreamer and the writer, the idealist and the poet. It is to the south of Ireland also that one must turn to seek for a people whose literature and whose traditions are saddened by the memory of the wrongs they have withstood and the persecutions they have endured and still endure, and yet whose spirits and whose characters are uplifted and sanctified by that happy optimism which seems everywhere on this footstool to be the heritage of the true southerner. (Applause.) In a measure these same things are true of our own country. The north excels in business, but the south leads in romance. The north opens wide the door of opportunity to every man who comes to its borders with willing hands and eager brain, and commands him to get busy. The south opens a door, too, but it is the door of hospitality, and it bids the stranger enter in, not so much for what he can give, but for what he can take in the way of welcome. I think there is a reason, aside from topography and geography and climate and environment, for these differences between the common divisions of our great country. And I am going to come to that reason in a minute.