jure your State; perfect your primary election laws; perfect them so they will speak absolutely, and finally, and truly the verdict of the people, and then when this is done, come together and register your verdict in the final election, and whether we stand together under the name of Democracy or what name, we will stand together as united Georgians and hold to the control of our State and to the supremacy of the intelligence of Georgia, and while we may wish to see success in national affairs, we can calmly view the conflicts that will take place in the national government so long as we protect Georgia and keep Georgia from political divisions that mean her political ruin.-Louis F. Garrard.

[Extract from an address delivered before the General Assembly of Georgia, October 30, 1894.]

AT THE GRAVE OF ALSTON.

The question naturally arises: Why this affectionate and unparalleled exhibition? What charms attached to the person? What virtues adorned the life? What glow and glory of character accumulated upon and crowned the manes of the man who is the subject of this singular and profound manifestation of esteem? Robert A. Alston was murdered at the door of the treasury vault under the very feet of the Governor. But the circumstances of violence and crime accompanying his taking off, while in themselves deplorable, are not sufficient of themselves to explain the manifestation upon the part of the colored people of this county and of this State. Men have fallen before in the flush of their youth. The widow has

yielded up in silence her only son, and her sole support in years and feebleness. The bridegroom has been snatched from the altar. The young mother has exhaled the life of her lungs into the nostrils of her babe. Our fellow men have been cut down in the flush of their strong young morning; in the shut-up bud of whose youth one might plainly enough discern the germ, the outline, the tinting and the fragrance of the royal rose: Young kings innumerable fallen with the foot lifted to mount the throne!

Oh, Death! Thou bandit of every roadside! Thou pirate of every ocean! Thou hast invaded the sweetest homes. Thou hast brought low the loftiest ambitions; love thou hast enhungered; joy hast thou converted into mourning. Thou hast filled the air with the wails of widowhood. Thou hast salted the earth with the tears of orphanage. Oh, Death! Death! The blistered track along which thou hast furrowed thy march down the centuries is clearly blazed on stones set up in human hearts. Humanity is familiar with thy port and mien and carriage. Oh, Death! Sudden death; death of youth; the wife wailing for the husband; children crying aloud for the father; death by accident, by disease, by violence: All these things are as familiar to the ears of mortality as the knells of funeral bells.

And thou, oh, Life! How glorious thou art! When we look upon these meadows covered with greenest verdure; these vast overarching primeval forests; these myriad flowers, so bright and glad and winsome; these singing birds of the fair Southland, so transcendently mirthful and musical; these hills and mountains, reaching far, towering high-vast sky-vaulted star-blazoned

Westminsters in whose sacred niches resposes so much dead and gone grandeur, and yet so much of living beauty and glory-when all these pass before the healthful mind the song carols up out of the heart, cutting its wing-way up into the ether-heights of soul-ecstasy, trilling and thrilling forth in notes glad and joyous as the matutinal song of the English lark!

Reflecting upon the many traits of character which distinguish Colonel Alston, I am led to conclude that sympathy for the weak, the suffering, the needy, was the most prominent sentiment in his heart. That is the quality in him which has evoked from the colored people of DeKalb the sentiment of this occasion. Colonel Alston loved you, my friends. You do well to honor his memory. He loved you because you were weak, because suddenly emancipated from slavery and ignorance, you were struggling desperately for footing as freemen. He was the type of the new sentiment which has grown up in the South toward the colored people, and stood a few steps, but only a few steps, in advance of his party. The North to-day understands but imperfectly the true relations of friendliness and good-will that exist between the whites and blacks of Georgia and of the South. I assert that there is little race prejudice or bitterness left. The vast numbers of those who, as hereditary slaves, toiled bravely to produce supplies for the support of the army, and who, in oldfashioned gentleness and affection protected the women and children of the South; who, since the termination of the war, have been busy accumulating property, combatting ignorance and progressing in wealth, intelligence and morals; this people have earned and have received the respect and friendship of Southern whites. But these

friendly relations are reciprocal. You entertain the same sentiment of cordial good will toward my own race. And hence you come to-day to honor one who refused not to treat you with fairness, to deal with you in the strictest justice, and to encourage you by the words of his lips and the benefaction of his hands.

The

We honor, we can not help honoring, Alston. grand man who, standing in philosophic and virtuous elevation, looking around upon his fellow men, discovered none so worthy his attention and regard as the poor, the weak, and the humble! It is said that while his body was being lowered into the grave in the rear of the great throng a ragged, barefooted boy, his soiled and dirty face furrowed with the track plowed by streams of tears. sobbed alone and unregarded. The grief of that friendless boy whose neglected head Alston may have once stroked with his royal fingers was a tribute no less touching than the assemblage of his colored friends, so full of awe and reverence for his memory. It is said that as his poor bruised body was being conveyed with slow, sorrowing steps to its last resting-place, in the doorways of no less than six squalid cabins there were standing pale-faced women weeping great bursts of sorrow. Oh, why these manifestations? Not because a youth of talent had fallen in the capital, leaving wife bereft and children desolate, but because in the flash of that murderous pistol a bullet was winged to destroy the life of Colonel Robert A. Alston, a husband to the widow, a father to the fatherless, humanity's friend and lover! For this we shall never dry our eyes. And as a consequence no selected choir of trained voices is brought together to sing his praises, but out of the great congregation of the people a grand an

them is rising in which the poor and weak and desolate are joining, in which the colored freemen of Georgia— Nature's singing children-are joining, and which blending with the symphonies of creation and swollen by the seraphic and cherubic voices and by the innumerable hosts of angelic hierarchies, is to-day, I trust, reverberating around the throne of God.—Judge Howard Van Epps.

[Extract from an address delivered on the occasion of the decoration of Colonel Robert A. Alston's grave by the colored people of DeKalb county.]

AGAINST IMPERIALISM.

Unless met by superior power there is no halt to the imperial tread when once it starts upon its conquering and its despoiling march. Until it meets with disaster it can only be stayed by the command of the people. The thirst for empire is like the desire for human blood, which is stirred to an unquenchable appetite in the veins of every man who tastes it. The cry will be "More! More!" It was a long step into the middle of the sea to take Hawaii. It was a much longer step across the widest of all the oceans to take the Philippines. It is now a much shorter step from the Philippines to the continent of Asia. Everywhere the bounties which Providence has bestowed upon foreign nations invite the greed for spoil and the lust for domination.

And thus from step to step the march of empire will go on and as a necessary inevitable consequence a standing army of half a million men and an annual expenditure drawn from the pockets of the people, the magnitude of which one hardly dares venture to estimate.