professions, that of the jurist. I render the highest honor to him, the law-giver, the true jurist, the man who of right provides against wrong, under whose impartial supervision laws are made and enforced, and by whom the rigid provisions of statute law, imperfect as it must always be, may be alleviated in the Court of Equity.

Had I anticipated the honor which you have conferred upon me in granting me the Degree of Doctor of Laws, I should hardly have ventured to incorporate in my address this estimate of the jurist. You may well conceive that my satisfaction is the greater because the passport which you have given me to enter my name among the learned in the higher law, carries with it a recognition of service measured more highly than I could have ventured to hope for. I most profoundly thank you for this recognition, and I shall value a Degree from the University of South Carolina more than any that could have been conferred upon me by any other institution of learning.

So long as man dwells in this body upon the earth, the development both of the mental and the spiritual elements in human life must depend in great measure upon the manner in which the human body itself is sustained; that is what bread and butter stand for, or as I believe Carlyle himself once named it, the " Potato Gospel."

I might not again venture to quote to you the old and trite aphorism "Mens sana in corpore sano," had I not asked my friend Dr. William Everett to give me a similar aphorism which should indicate that even the spirit could not be rightly developed except in a well-nourished body; to which demand he at once replied, "Non est animus cui non est corpus." Can there be a soul unless the body eats?

On the other hand, the very necessity which is imposed upon us to sustain the human body by manual and mechanical work re-acts upon the mind, and this tends to build up the character of the man himself in just and even proportion to his own conception of the true purpose of his own life. To him who has faith in a higher power which is both supreme and wholly beneficent, no matter from what source he may have derived his idea of the Eternal, there can be but one conception of life itself. The premises on which that conception may be based must be, that this world is the best world that could have been made; that the conditions of this life are the best conditions that could have been established for the development of mankind; and that the struggle for existence, hard and severe as it seems to us, must be the necessary school by which man could have been elevated above the beasts of the field. If there could have been a better world or a better method for the development of mankind, man would have the right to ask his Creator why it had not been established.

In other words, to me the alternative of Atheism is my own conception that the whole purpose of life is beneficent and not maleficent, and

that all shall share in the wise purpose of the Almighty to bring all to that conception of life which shall give rest and re-creation to the soul.

In the material world, all we can do is to move something; but if there were no obstruction to movement, if there were no friction, there could be no movement of any kind. So in the moral world, if there were no possibility of wrong-doing, there could be no right-doing.

In the material world again, if there were no law of gravitation exerting its centripetal force, there could be no lifting of the clouds, no falling of the rain, no development of the plant, no life of the animal; then no man could exist upon the earth to be elevated by the necessity of labor to the perception of his manhood, and by the development of his own personal character and intelligence to the domination of the forces of nature.

If there were no material wrong to be overcome in the physical world, there could be no virtue in overcoming wrong; and without the struggle in and with the physical world in order to attain true character, there could be no mental conception of the spiritual world which is around us and beyond us.

It follows then that the three phases of our life upon the earth, the material, the mental, and the spiritual, cannot be separated; they are complements of each other, each necessary to the other; therefore each phase of life must be developed in harmonious relation to the others. May we not then assume that the beneficent purpose of that part of our lives which is passed upon the earth in which we are forced to keep up the struggle and to labor for existence, is the building up of each individual character by way of that very struggle? Would not the work of life otherwise be wholly without meaning? This is the true "potato gospel." It is not a dismal science. The experience of men and of nations may sustain this principle.

We can seldom help those who cannot help themselves, and the sentiment of philanthropy often leads to mistaken efforts to remove the necessity for labor. We may alleviate want, and our humane sympathies compel us to do so when called upon; but we cannot remove the causes of poverty by giving relief, only by showing how relief may be earned. We can maintain great bodies of men if we have the capacity to dominate over them, by directing their mere physical force to the supply of their material wants, without mental effort on their own part; but such conditions are dangerous to him who assumes the control, and are also degrading to those who subject themselves to such domination and control.

There can be no great progress in a community where a privileged class assumes a superior position, and, holding it by force or cunning, undertakes to protect an inferior class from the consequences of their own ignorance. In any well-organized society, equality of rights and

the recognition of the law of mutual service are the necessary conditions on which only must rest any true and permanent progress even in material welfare. Every one knows how easy it is to render those who are willing to be helped without rendering corresponding work or service ever more and more incapable of helping themselves. What we can do is to remove obstructions from their way, to provide for their education, and then to give all an equal opportunity with ourselves to work for their own living under just laws assuring equal rights.

Let us then analyze this work of life. One half the work of life in this most prosperous country is even to-day of necessity devoted to the mere purpose of obtaining food. Why should this struggle for food have been permitted? What does it mean? The greater part of the surrounding atmosphere consists of nitrogen; yet the most important and costly element of our food is nitrogen in such a form that it may be capable of being absorbed by plants and thereby converted to the subsistence of men. There are great tropical sections of the world in which the conversion of the nitrogen into plant life through the rapid decay of all organic forms yields most abundant subsistence. But we do not look to the tropics for the development of the highest type of manhood. If what are called favorable conditions for the most abundant product did in fact develop the highest type of man, we who dwell far away amid the granite and ice of New England might in truth have some cause to fear for our future. Midway between the tropics and our zone, which is sometimes called Temperate-perhaps because it is subject alike to tropical heat and to polar cold, and can only be called Temperate on the average, comes in your Sunny South. Dividing the Sunny South midway is the terra, no longer almost incognita, as it was when I first ventured to picture it, the Land of the Sky.

How many of you, I wonder, yet know what opportunities you have at your disposal, waiting no longer for Northern capital but now being developed by Southern enterprise? Was I wrong when, but a few years since, I ventured to describe this land, in which, until a very recent day, two or three million homespun people still using archaic. forms of English speech, were almost the only dwellers? Was I wrong when I said that if a line were drawn southerly from the Potomac along the easterly margin of the Piedmont plateau, westerly on the southern edge of the uplands of Alabama, northerly to the Ohio along the margin of the Cumberland plateau, taking in that most fertile and beautiful country that eye hath ever seen, the blue-grass region of Kentucky, and back again to the point of beginning,—that boundary would enclose an area more than three fourths as large as France and twice as large as Great Britain, containing potential in agriculture

equal to either, with minerals and timber equal to both combined? That land was waiting only for the mind of man to become the prime factor in production. That I was not wrong, let the great enterprises of the New South bear witness. I need not name them.

Over this great stretch of country the glacial drift never passed; the soil consisting of the disintegrated rock of the old Laurentian Chain is rich in all the elements of fertility that give the strength to your timber and the beauty to your mountains; on which, within two hundred miles of distance east and west from the border of the Piedmont plateau to the top of Roan Mountain you may find the whole flora and fauna which extend from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, on a line of two thousand miles north and south. When the shrinking of the crust of the earth occurred, by which these convolutions were made, of which the Laurentian Chain with its lateral ridges and plateaus forms a part, the one hundred miles more or less of sandstone which separate iron from coal in the northern section (or which overlies them rendering the mines deep), forming sharp ridges and making difficult grades to be surmounted, were not thrown up. In the southern section of the chain down there in Alabama, the iron, the coal, and the limestone lie close together in adjacent hills, and almost dump themselves by their own gravity into the furnace in which they are to be converted to use, when they are but once loosened from their beds.

Endowed with all these elements of wealth and welfare, you young men of the Sunny South and of the Land of the Sky are now entering into vigorous and urgent competition with us of the cold and sterile. North. Behind us both stand the unnumbered millions who occupy the fat and fertile prairies of the far West, waiting for the service which each of us may render them in exchange for the huge abundance of their fields. We welcome the contest, because it is in the busy contest of industry that the highest qualities of manhood have been developed and may yet be established. But we may sound the note of warning

"We tell each land; while every toil they share,

Firm to sustain and resolute to dare,
Man is the nobler growth our realms supply,
And souls are ripened in our northern sky.'

It is the function of the economist to deal with these elements of wealth and welfare and to evolve the laws of social science to which all human statutes must be made subordinate, so that the gratuitous gifts of nature with which you are so abundantly endowed, and in which we may share by the exchange of services, may be converted equitably to the use of man.

I might have given you the title of this Address-Individual Liberty the only condition on which Material Welfare can be assured.

Given just laws and local self-government established under the central sustaining power of a great nation; given equal opportunity and free commerce between the States, under which each man may provide for his own wants by rendering service to his neighbor; and we may then discover that while our consumption is limited the power of production is practically unlimited.

In the treatment of this subject, in which I shall endeavor to demonstrate the principle that individual liberty is the only condition. on which material welfare can be predicated, you will bear in mind that liberty is not license; that it does not of necessity stand for the concept of the economists of France, who, at the end of the last century became famous by adopting the motto, "laissez faire, laissez passer." Individual liberty implies full liberty for men to combine for mutual benefit; it does not of necessity imply the separation of individuals any more than their combination. There are many processes of productive and distributive industry which may be accomplished more effectually by combination under laws and rules, as in the ordinary railway corporation, than through isolated individual action. There are also some necessary processes of a productive or constructive order which are intimately connected and bound up with the industry of every country, but which may be accomplished by the State acting as a corporation, better than they can be done by the individual or the private corporation.

At what point the function of the State or of the corporation rightly ends, and exactly at what point the separate function of the individual should begin, is a matter to be determined by experience and not to be laid down a priori with the assurance of a dogmatic principle. Given, as I have said, just laws and local self-government well established. under the central sustaining power of a great nation; given equal opportunity within the domain of a nation, with free commerce or the exchange of services established under organic laws, under which each man may provide for his own wants either by his own work, by combination with others, or by rendering service to his neighbor; and then only may we expect to derive from experience a true conception of the fundamental rules by which human society should be governed so that the general welfare may be assured.

Social science is therefore in great measure an experimental science. I have faith to believe that on the basis of the progress which we have already attained in this country, the conception which I present as an hypothesis may prove to be a principle, and may be acted upon with absolute assurance of its truth, to this effect: that while the consumption of man in respect to the means of subsistence is limited,-the power of material production, i. e., the power of mankind to direct the forces of nature to the purpose of sustaining human life in comfort and