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fields and the birds of the air. Poverty and despair long pleaded to excuse us, but that excuse is not true now. Let the voice of the people "throng in and become partakers of the councils of State," until the peoples' representatives take away this reproach. It can- not be, as some have urged, that the State which could send over one hundred thousand men to battle and death, may not, under the Constitution for which they fought, rightly expend money for the roll of their names or history of their achievements. It cannot be that the State which can give a money reward to a civil officer for catching a malefactor, cannot give a sword as reward to a soldier for honoring her people in battle. This State were weak, indeed, if so poor in power and right. Long ago, the law was declared in Ala- bama that the "whole, unbounded power" of man over man, in matters temporal, resides in the government of the State, save as expressly or by necessary implication denied by the State and Fed- eral Constitutions. There is no want of power.

THE PASSING OF THE CONFEDERACY.

That is a masterpiece the touching Idyl of the ' ' Passing of Ar- thur. " The king, beaten in his last battle, and drawing near to death, commanded his knight to take the blade, "which would be known wherever he was sung in after time," and throw it in the lake. But the knight, believing the king's fame would be hid from the world in after times, if "so precious thing should be lost from earth forever," feigned obedience, and hid the sword among the water- flags. Then came from the king's pale lips the despairing cry: ' ' Woe is me, authority forgets a dying king, laid widowed of his power." Shamed to obedience, the knight threw the blade in the lake, and Arthur, when told of the arm that rose up from the mists and caught it, sure it would never again be seen by mortal eyes, " passed to be king of the dead."

Our Arthur passed to the ' ' island valley of Avilion ' ' with no cry on his lips or thought in his heart that ' ' authority forgets a king, laid widowed of his power; " for here the love of a people touched away the scar of the fetters, and crowned him king again. As the monu- ment, whose foundation he laid, crowned in its finished glory with the statues, is about to be committed to the State and Time, we are looking upon the passing of the Confederacy. No " arm clothed in white sasmite, mystic and wonderful," rises out of earth to bear away our treasures from the sight of men; but here, where the Confed- eracy was born, and in the presence of God and this multitude, we