granite, it has the form of an obelisk, and rests upon a heavy base, approached from every side by a flight of stairs. The base bears but one inscription—a bit of advice of the London Company:

"Lastly and chiefly the way to prosper and achieve good success is to make yourselves all of one mind for the good of your country and your own, and to serve and fear God, the giver of all goodness, for every plantation which our Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted out.”—Advice of London Council for Virginia to the Colony-1906.

Low down on the obelisk, near the base on the four sides is an eagle carved in the granite, with wings outspread standing on a pedestal between two torches. Beneath is a scroll which on the south side, reads:

Jamestown

The First Permanent

Colony of the

English People

The Birthplace of

Virginia

and of

The United States

May 13, 1607.

In similar form are the other inscriptions: Virginia Colony of London, Chartered April 10, 1607, founded Jamestown and sustained Virginia 1607-1624. Another: Representative Government in America began in the First House of Burgesses assembled here July 30, 1619.

Finally, the commemoration inscription: This monument was erected by the United States, A. D. 1907, to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the settlement here.

The shaft is about 103 feet high above the base and is surmounted by an aluminum cap.

EXPOSITION ORATION.

We have met today to celebrate the opening of the Exposition which itself commemorates the first permanent settlement of men of our stock in Virginia, the first beginning of what

has since become this mighty Republic. Three hundred years ago a handful of English adventurers, who had crossed the ocean in what we should now call cockle boats, as clumsy as they were frail, landed in the great wooded wilderness, the Indian-haunted waste, which then stretched down to the water's edge along the entire Atlantic coast. They were not the first men of European race to settle in what is now the United States, for there were already Spanish settlements in Florida and on the head waters of the Rio Grande; and the French, who at almost the same time were struggling up the St. Lawrence, were likewise destined to form permanent settlements on the Great Lakes and in the valley of the mighty Mississippi before the people of English stock went westward of the Alleghenies. Moreover, both the Dutch and the Swedes were shortly to found colonies between the two sets of English colonies, those that grew up around the Potomac, and those that grew up on what is now the New England coast. Nevertheless, this landing at Jamestown possesses for us of the United States an altogether peculiar significance and this without regard to our several origins. The men who landed at Jamestown and those who, thirteen years later, landed at Plymouth, all of English stock, and their fellow-settlers who during the next few decades streamed in after them, were those who took the lead in shaping the life history of this people in the Colonial and Revolutionary days. It was they who bent into definite shape our nation while it was still young enough most easily, most readily, to take on the characteristics which were to become part of its permanent life habit.

Yet let us remember that while this early English Colonial stock has left deeper than all others upon our national life the mark of its strong twin individualities, the mark of the Cavalier and of the Puritan, nevertheless this stock, not only from its environment but also from the presence with it of other stocks, almost from the beginning began to be differentiated strongly from any English people. As I have already said, about the time the first English settlers landed here the Frenchman and the Spaniard, the Swede and the Dutchman, also came hither as permanent dwellers, who left their seed behind them to help shape and partially to inherit our national life. The German, the Irishman, and the Scotchman came

later, but still in Colonial times. Before the outbreak of the Revolution the American people, not only because of their surroundings, physical and spiritual, but because of the mixture of blood that had already begun to take place, represented a new and distinct ethnic type. This type has never been fixed in blood. All through the Colonial days new waves of immigration from time to time swept hither across the ocean, now from one country, now from another. The same thing has gone on ever since our birth as a nation; and for the last sixty years the tide of immigration has been at the full. The newcomers are soon absorbed into our eager national life, and are radically and profoundly changed thereby, the rapidity of their assimilation being marvellous. But each group of newcomers, as it adds to the life, also changes somewhat, and this change and growth and development have gone on steadily, generation by generation, throughout three centuries.

The pioneers of our people who first landed on these shores on that eventful day three centuries ago had before them a task which, during the early years, was of heartbreaking danger and difficulty. The conquest of a new continent is iron work. People who dwell in old civilizations and find that therein so much of humanity's lot is hard are apt to complain against the conditions as being solely due to man and to speak as if life could be made easy and simple if there were but a virgin continent in which to work. It is true that the pioneer life was simpler, but it was certainly not easier. As a matter of fact, the first work of the pioneers in taking possession of a lonely wilderness is so rough, so hard, so dangerous, that all but the strongest spirits fail. The early iron days of such a conquest search out alike the weak in body and the weak in soul. In the warfare against the rugged sternness of primeval nature only those can conquer who are themselves unconquerable. It is not until the first bitter years have passed that the life becomes easy enough to invite a mass of newcomers, and so great are the risk, hardship, and toil of the early years that there always exists a threat of lapsing back from civilization.

The history of the pioneers of Jamestown, of the founders of Virginia, illustrates the truth of all this. Famine and pesti

lence and war menaced the little band of daring men who had planted themselves alone on the edge of a frowning continent. Moreover, as men ever find, whether in the tiniest frontier community or in the vastest and most highly organized and complex civilized society, their worst foes were in their own bosoms. Dissension, distrust, the inability of some to work and the unwillingness of others, jealousy, arrogance and envy, folly and laziness; in short, all the shortcomings with which we have to grapple now were faced by those pioneers, and at moments threatened their whole enterprise with absolute ruin. It was some time before the ground on which they had landed supported them, in spite of its potential fertility, and they looked across the sea for supplies. At one moment so hopeless did they become, that the whole colony embarked, and was only saved from abandoning the country by the opportune arrival of help from abroad.

At last they took root in the land, and were already prospering when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. In a few years a great inflow of settlers began. Four of the present states of New England were founded. Virginia waxed apace. The Carolinas grew up to the south of it, and Maryland to the north of it. The Dutch colonies between, which had already absorbed the Swedish, were in their turn absorbed by the English. Pennsylvania was founded and, later still, Georgia. There were many wars with the Indians and with the dauntless captains whose banners bore the lilies of France. At last the British flag flew without a rival in all eastern North America. Then came the successful struggle for national independence.

For half a century after we became a separate nation there was comparatively little immigration to this country. Then the tide once again set hither, and has flowed in ever-increasing size until in each of the last three years a greater number of people came to these shores than had landed on them during the entire Colonial period. Generation by generation these people have been absorbed into the national life. Generally their sons, almost always their grandsons, are indistinguishable from one another and from their fellow-Americans descended from the Colonial stock. For all alike the problems of our existence are fundamentally the same, and for all alike these problems change from generation to generation.