This profound
historian is, beyond all question, accurate in attributing the chief
share in the national movement to the energy and ability of the
first President of Aureataland, his Excellency, President Marcus
W. Whittingham, a native of Virginia. Having enjoyed a personal
friendship (not, unhappily, extended to public affairs) with that
talented man, as will subsequently appear, I have great pleasure
in publicly indorsing the professor's eulogium. Not only did the
President bring Aureataland into being, but he molded her whole
constitution. "It was his genius" (as the professor observes with
propriety) "which was fired with the idea of creating a truly modern
state, instinct with the progressive spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race.
It was his genius which cast aside the worn-out traditions of European
dominion, and taught his fellow-citizens that they were, if not all by
birth, yet one and all by adoption, the sons of freedom." Any mistakes
in the execution of this fine conception must be set down to the fact
that the President's great powers were rather the happy gift of nature
than the result of culture. To this truth he was himself in no way
blind, and he was accustomed to attribute his want of a liberal
education to the social ruin brought upon his family by the American
Civil War, and to the dislocation thereby produced in his studies.
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