It is just fifty years ago that our country finished one of the bloodiest and most expensive internecine wars recorded in history, and you all know that the worst strifes are those that are waged between brothers. All the southern states had been completely devastated; a large part of their white male population was killed during the war; millions of slaves had been set free and were unprepared to take care of themselves and would not work; both the North and the South were in a complete state of physical and financial exhaustion. The cost of the war exceeded 1,500 million dollars; our Government bonds were selling below par and were mostly owned in foreign countries; we had just been deprived of the wise leadership of the great Abraham Lincoln who had been foully murdered. We had fought for a principle and had won, but the hatred of the sections for each other survived and the great problem was to reconcile the combatants to the new conditions and again to absorb into our commercial and business activities the hundreds of thousands of members of the disbanded army and to have our communities resume their normal condition and bring about a reconstruction of the southern states. We were confronted by a tremendous problem, and it took wise statesmanship, great grit, patient toil, and unswerving enthusiasm born from an absolute and abiding faith in the future to solve it. We had only 35,000 miles of railroads and many of these traversed the devastated country. I say “only,” because to-day we have more than 250,000 miles of railroad which have brought into easy communication with the large markets of our country all our developed farms and mines, etc., and have given the country four transcontinental routes. We had a population of 34 millions which has now grown to more than 95 millions, of which 19 millions attend our public and two millions our private schools, and 320,000 attend 596 universities and colleges in which there are thirty thousand professors and instructors and which have libraries containing 16 million volumes of books. Our imports in 1870 were 436 millions and our exports 393 millions, showing a balance against us of 43 millions; while in 1913, our imports were 1,813 millions and our exports 2,465 millions, so that we had a balance of trade in our favour of 652 millions, and for the last seven years the average annual balance of trade has been more than five hundred million dollars. We have gained by immigration about 30 million people of which the year 1913 brought 1,200,000--practically equal to the population of the city of Constantinople. This great army, besides bringing their energy, strength, and capacity to work, also brought with them 30 million dollars in cash! I wonder if these figures give you the faintest idea of this tremendous growth.