As a boy, down south, there were two songs that stirred me as no other songs could--one was a song that I loved and one a song that I hated, and one of these songs was the battle hymn of the south, “Dixieland,” and the other was “Marching Through Georgia.” But once upon a time when I was half-grown, a wandering piper came to the town where I lived, a man who spoke with a brogue and played with one. And he carried under his arm a weird contraption which to me seemed to be a compound of two fishing poles stuck in a hot-water bottle, and he snuggled it to his breast and it squawked out its ecstasy, and then he played on it a tune called “Garryowen.” And as he played it, I found that my toes tingled inside my shoes, and my heart throbbed as I thought it could only throb to the air of “Dixie.” And I took counsel with myself and I said, “Why is it that I who call myself a pure Anglo-Saxon should be thrilled by an Irish air?” So I set out to determine the reason for it. And this is the kind of Anglo-Saxon I found out I was: My mother was of the strain, the breed of Black Douglas of Scotland, as Scotch as haggis, and rebels, all of them, descendants of men who followed the fortunes of Bonnie Prince Charles, and her mother lived in a county in North Carolina, one of five counties where up to 1820, Gaelic was not only the language of the people in the street, but was the official language of the courts. It was in that selfsame part of North Carolina that there lived some of the men who, nearly a year before our Declaration of Independence was drawn up, wrote and signed the Mecklenburg Declaration, which was the first battle-cry raised for American independence. On the other side, I found, by investigation, that my father’s line ran back straight and unbroken to a thatched cottage on the green side of a hill in the Wicklow Mountains, and his people likewise had some kinsmen in Galway, and some in Dublin with whom, following the quaint custom of their land, they were accustomed to take tea and fight afterwards. (Applause and laughter.) I found I had a collateral ancestor who was out with the pikes in the ’98 and he was taken prisoner and tried for high crimes and misdemeanors against the British Government, and was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until he was dead and might God have mercy on his soul! And he was hanged by the neck until he was dead, and I am sure God did have mercy on his soul, for that soul of his went marching on, transmitting to his people, of whom I am proud to be one, the desire to rebel against oppression and tyranny. (Applause.) I had three great grandfathers, two of them Irish and one of them Scotch, who were Revolutionary soldiers, and I had a father who was a Confederate soldier. And of these facts, too, I am quite proud, for I find that my strain, being Irish, is always intent either on trying to run the government or trying to pull it down.