FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE STATES Address DELIVERED AT NORFOLK, VA., ON JUNE 29, 1907, AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE ADOPTION OF THE FIRST VIRGINIA CONSTITUTION BY MOORFIELD STOREY BOSTON GEO. H. ELLIS Co., PRINTERS, 272 CONGRESS STREET 1907 US Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I need not assure you how sincerely I appreciate the honor of being asked to join with you and with the eloquent orator, who will follow me, in celebrating this great event in the history of Virginia. Your Commonwealth and that from which I come stood shoulder to shoulder for long years in the contest for independence and constitutional liberty, and therefore it is appropriate that citizens of both should unite in rejoicing over every important step in that conflict. I thank your President and his associates for giving me this opportunity to meet you and to speak on this occasion. Our meeting to-day is significant because we are here to commemorate not some great victory on sea or land with its frightful sacrifice of human life, not the birth of some eminent statesman or soldier, nor yet some great discovery which has enlarged the possibilities of human achievement, but simply the enactment of a law,-a fundamental law, which defined the powers of the government and secured the rights of the citizen in this great Commonwealth. It is a welcome evidence of advancing civilization, a proof that the respect for law which is characteristic of Englishspeaking men is not yet weakened among us, that events like this are selected for especial honor. Indeed this great celebration, of which to-day is only an episode, is not held because a handful of people landed on an island in the James River and undertook to build a town. Such migrations have been common in all ages of the world, and these immigrants showed no peculiar courage, nor were they actuated by any unusual motive. They came to seek their fortunes, like the many who since their day have come from the Old World to the New. It is because those settlers sowed the seed of the first human government |