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very different, I suppose, from other progressive nations—have always with us some burning issue—the question of the day, and as such so absorbing in interest as to throw all other questions out of the field of discussion; for the time being it is, or seems, all-important. Of several questions of this sort we will hear more or less to-night; as also of Mr. connection with them. Even if the programme in your hands did not name them, these issues would at once suggest themselves. There was the Slavery debate, which filled men's minds and kept busy their tongues, through twenty years; then came the Civil War; then Reconstruction; then Fiat Money; then Civil Service Reform; then Bimetalism; and now, at last, what some call “Imperialism,” and others know only as “Expansion.” In the discussion of each of these issues Mr. has been prominent, and I should be at a loss to decide which I thought he had discussed most effectively; and yet it is not with any one of these issues, or with all of them together, that he, this evening, is most closely associated in my mind. His closest association, as I now think of him, is with another American political problem—a problem I
 * We in America—in that respect not