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About The Columbia sentinel. (Harlem, Ga.) 1882-1924 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 12, 1919)
I fol. 37 It was a glorious success, in every way. The crowd was the largest ever seen in this place; and it was representative , orderly , intelligent, and deeply interested. Men stood for three hours, eagerly listening to the addresses of Mr. B. J. Stev¬ ens, (Chairman) and of-the young ex-soldiers, Lieutenant J. W. Holbrooke, John I. Kelly and Grover Edmondson. In the assemblage, were delegations from North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Texas and Tennessee. •There were people who came from every sec¬ tion of Georgia: there were ladies who told me that they had traveled hundreds of miles to be present. In the immense throng, I recognized “the old familiar faces” of those who have been my devoted friends for many and many a year. The first playmate of my boyhood was there, Fayette Goolsby. Numbers of those who support¬ ed me in my first race for Congress were on hand. Old Screven County, where I taught school, was largely represented; aitd it gave me a peculiar pleas¬ ure to welcome these visitors. Will Stanford, of Valdosta, was the first to mention the birthday celebration: and therefore he may be considered the God-father of the grandest mass-meeting we have ever held. There were mang beautiful gifts presented to me and to my good wife; and our appreciaion could hardly be expressed. The president of the Senate, lion. Sam L. Olive, presented one of these mementoes, and lion. Ben M. Blackburn, another. No speeches of presentation could have been more appropriate and touching. The gift presented by Mr. Olive was from the State House officers; and that of Mr. Blackburn from one of the great orders of Atlanta. My friend, Giles, of Deep-Step, Washington County, said—“Mr. Watson, my old mother wanted to be here today, but she was too sick to come: she. went out and gathered some plain old-fashioned flowers for you, and she sent them by me” When 'one possesses the esteem and the love of the common people as I have been made to feel that I possess it, one is prouder of that than any king could be of his crown. James W. Hill, assisted by Robert Ray, cooked the barbecue; and everyone who partook of it pro¬ nounced it perfect. It would be hard to estimate the number of those; who enjoyed the hospitality of Hickory Hill; the house was crowded, as delegations came and went: the tables under the trees were lined with relays .of guests, one after another, until late in the day. Everybody wanted to see “Miss Georgia,” and she shook more hands that day than you could easily count. Rev Dr. E. J. Forrester, of Sparta, was a re¬ minder of Old Mercer University, and of the primi¬ tive, immemorial democracy, of organized Christi¬ anity: he offered and read the Resolutions, which Ben Blackburn seconded in a brief but perfect speech; and which were unanimously adopted when Chairman Stevens put them to a vote.. The, speech which follows was written Out be¬ fore hand, and I leave it a.s it stood, without in¬ terpolating the “applause,” “cheers,” “laughter,” etc. The audience must have numbered more than 7,000—possibly 8,000—and I never addressed one that was more responsive and unanimous. In the afternoon, there was a free-for-all ses¬ sion addressed by Hon. J. J. Brown, Commissioner of Agriculture; Hon. Thos. G. Kent, representative from Glasscock County; Mr. Beck Hogan, of Lin coin County, and a number of other visitors whose names unfortunately were not handed up to Chair¬ man Stevens. Mr. Watson's Speech. There never was a time known to history when our great Anglo-Saxon race did not love liberty, self-government, the honor of manhood and the purity of woman. Before the voice of John the Baptist was heard crying in the wilderness, our ancestors, in the vast woods of Germany, were practising democ¬ racy; making their own laws, in their public meetings; choosing their own magistrates in times of peace, and their own chieftains in time of war. The Anglo-Saxon home, as Julius Ga?sar found it, 2,000 years ago, was the same in its main features that it is today—one wife, a help-meet and not a slave; and a high standard of morality which punished with death the unfaithful woman who brought shame upon the household. A conquering race of men the Germanic tribes o X J x m Price $2.00 Per Year THE THOMSON IVfASlg : e TING AND 1VIR. WATSON’S SPEECH. have ever been; and away back in those dim ages we find theiii sweeping down upon the sunny plains of Italy, France, and Spain, establishing empires with their swords. They crossed into Britain, conquered' the natives, and changed the name of the country into that which it bears today—Angleland, England. Into this British Isle, our ancestors carried their distinctive, primitive institutions, the one wife home; the freeman’s liberty of person and of speech and of property; the right to be tried bv a jury of his equals, in the neighborhood, in which he lived; the right to dwell undisturbed in the house ihat was his castle—his castle which, as the great Lord Chatham declared, might be a rickety luit, into which beat the rain and the snow, but into which even the King could not come, without^he warrant of the law. In course of time, another tribe, Northmen and conquerors, crossed into England, bearing ban¬ ners blessed by the Pope; and they caught the Anglo-Saxons divided and unprepared. One great cattle at Hastings, gave England to the Norihans; and then came the suppression of Anglo Saxon liberties. Later on, the Norman robbers fell out themselves, partly because the burdens of the Feudal System had been illegally increased, arid partly because the government of the realm was rapidly becoming a personal despotism of the King. Free-men were arbitrarily arrested, thrown in¬ to prison, and put to death. Estates were, confiscated, goods and seized android, without the judgment of any court or the sanction of any law. Personal freedom was violated by compulsory military service, which exceeded the legal require¬ ments of Feudalism. Men were forced to leal England, to fight in Flanders or in when the causes of the wars did not concern people, but were personal quarrels and ambitions Kings. i The Norman conquerors ' mpre ' a minority: the great mass of the people was com¬ pose^ of the submerged Anglo-Saxons; and original Britons; therefore, when the Kings created a division among the conquering minority, the conquered majority began to re-as sert itself, as the tree, bending to the storm, recovers, when the tempest has passed. To prevent the rebellion of the Anglo-Saxons —who spoke English —against the tyrant —who spoke French — the Kings granted in which they promised to restore to the Englisli people their ancient liberties. When those Charters had served the of the King in quieting the people, they weVc for¬ gotten—as political platforms are, today. But when Richard the Lion-hearted was killed in France, and his perfidious brother, John, the crown which belonged to (he son of his brother, the. Norman lords who were •rith the personal government of their Kings, fie¬ ri rmined that the feudal abuses should be correct¬ ed and the ancient liberties of the land restored. They formed a military federation against usurper, John, who had pusillanimous!/ rigned away the Kingdom of England to the and made it a tribute-paying province of the Papal Monarchy. Finally j those rebellious barons, at the head a great volunteer army of Anglo-Saxons, ed the Norman tyrarit, in the Meadow of Running Mead, near London and forced him to sign the Charter, June 15, 1215, seven hundred years ago! And those re-established liberties had been existence among the Angles and Saxons immemor iablv—“time whereof the memory of man not to, the contrary.” Let me sav, once again, that I have never tentionally cast a slur upon any man on account his religion. With the conscientious belief of the Catholic, I have nothing whatever to do. his business, not mine. But when any church adopts a code of which say, that no civil marriage among tians is anything more than legalized that the Church should lie united to the State supported by taxation; that the Church have control of education; that in governmental af¬ fairs the Church comes first, as the higher power; that freedom of speech and of press are pestilential heresies; that the layman must not read the without the permit of the bishop; that the have no right to rulo themselves; and that State should not allow to each citizen the right worship God according to the dictates of his conscience—when any Church adopts a code that, and endeavors to put it into operation in country, then it becomes my right and my duty Harlem, Ga., Friday, September ‘12, 1919. combat the encroachments of that Church. The Norman tyrants who took away the liber¬ ties of England, were Catholics: the people whom they oppressed, were Catholics: in those, days, everybody who wanted to live, had to be a Cath¬ olic. The barons who rebelled against the Catholic tyrant, were Catholics, also; but they were patriotic Englishmen, first, not papal serfs, as their Norman King was. What did the Pope do, when he heard that the barons of England had rebelled against King John, and had compelled him to sign, swear to and give security to observe, the Great Charter? The Pope was the earthly God of the Catholic world: his power, supreme; his word, law; his judgement, infallible. Wheel did the Pope dof He excommunicated those. barons; and, in the fearful language of Rome’s diabolical curse, he consigned their souls to the (lames and tortures of an eternal hell! As to King John, the Pope assumed the authority to cancel his bonds, and to release him from his oath. As to the Great Charter, the Pope damned it, and annulled it; and, to this day, the curse of Home rests upon the written enumeration of your time-honored Anglo-Saxon liberties. Yet, you are told by irresponsible American priests, that Popery has always been, is now, and ever will be, the ardent champion of civil and religious liberty. Dpen the Pope tell yon sof (No, indeed, he does not. In the Popes official declarations, and in the lav of his Church, you find the same implacable comity tojlm rights of man, that was displayed when Pope ‘Innocent III. excommunicated the Catholic barons for re-asserting the. ancient liber lies, tlle which Angles and Saxons had been enio ying o? lit 'fbhcSf&^'Hf NdffhCT’nT'Efiirope, 'Hundreds years before the Apostle Paul unfurled the banner of Jesus Christ at Romo. The Articles of the Great Charter which chief Iv concern us. read: “XXIX.' (39). No Free-man shall be taken, nor imprisoned, nor disseized, nor outlawed, ■not banished , nor in any ways damaged, nor shall the King send him to prison, excepting by t! ( judgement of his Peers and by the Law of the land. “XXX. (40) No right shall be sold, delay¬ ed, or deniedP Magna Charta, the Great Charter! Yes, a Great Charter, a beacon light of his¬ tory, a Bible of the elementary rights of the human race, a voice of inspiration ringing down the corridors of time, a banner in the skies, wav mg humanity upward and onward, a return of lost, liberties more glorious even than the return of the Israelites from the Babylonian captivity, in which they had hung their harps upon the willows and mingled their tears with the waters of the Euphrates. A Great Charter! You hear its clarion voice ringing in our Declaration of Independence; you hear it in every constitution adopted by the eman cipated peoples of Europe; you hear it in the Bills of Rights of the forty-eight States of this Union; you hear it in the Amendments which our fore¬ fathers compelled the Federalists to make to the Constitution of the United States. For 700 years, Great Britain venerated these Charters, upon which the Kings endeavored to en croach, again and again; and to defend which, the English people shed their blood like water, again and again. In our Mother Country, there has bee’n strug¬ gle after struggle, between the principles of royal prerogative, Anglo-Saxon and the principles embodied in the primitive institutions. By bloodless Revolution of 1688, it was fondly believed that the Common people had decisively anil permanently won the right to choose their own rulers, make their own laws, control their national destinies—secure, under the law, in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. When Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the other pioneers of the American Revolution, rose against British tyranny, what was the burden of their complaint ? It was, that the Mother Country had denied to the English colonists, in America, the rights which belonged to Englishmen, in England. The Revolutionary War made good that claim. And the supreme question before the Ameri¬ can people today is, Arc we now in full possession of the rights which the Revolutionary War con firmed to ust the rights reasserted in the English Revolution of 1688? the rights re-written into the Issued Weekly Great Charter wrung from King John and his sue cesors? the riglits which our remote ancestors were enjoying in their tribal home:;, long before the eagles of the Roman conquerors Hew over tlie Rhine: -Ire we still in possession, of those liberties, those primary rights of man.' hour Revolutionary forefathers fought seveu years, to rind:rate, their title to them. You are the lixk.w legal heirs ! Yov still h ave tub title • m T ARK YOU IN’ 1 ‘OSSESSION ( I ou arc assembled here on (lie soil of the youngest <>1 the original Thirteen Colonics that defied the power of the greatest Empire the sun ever shone on. From Georgia, went the powder used at the battle of Bunker Hill. From Georgia, went food for the starving troops of Washington, from Georgia, rode a band of volunteers v.ho fought with the volunteer Tonin'-wans, Vir g mans, and Carolinians to win, as King's. Moun¬ tain, the turning-point battle of the Revolutionary War. From Georgia, the Continental Congress asked T.iO volunteers: nearly 5.000 patriots answered the call. From Georgia, went the first war-vessel to defy the 1 uion Jack of Great Britain; and that little schooner captured from the British the powder that New England was so glad to got. It was in Georgia, that Sergeant Jasper of South Carolina, won the fame that shall be his, as long us the Savannah runs to the sea. In Burke County, almost adjoining us, a. bat¬ tle was fought; in Richmond County,, our neigh¬ bor, battles were fought; in Wilkes County, ano.o er neighbor, a battle was fought; and Columbia County, which then embraced the ground you stand on, furnished volunteer soldiers who helped do the fighting. ribjali u Conntj ti lie. the hopes of General Clarke, a hfero of the Battles of Kettle Creek and of Ifing's Mountain. In Jefferson County, you'll find the grave of as true a patriot as ever lived, General Solomon \\ ood, whose name, I am glad to see, is handed down to future generations by the brilliant, true¬ hearted Georgian, Lucian Lamar Knight. In the old Midway Cemetery, in Liberty Coun¬ ty, you will find Georgia's primitive Westminster Abbey, whose dome is the heavens above, whose ‘bm aisles are the moss-draped live-oaks which stood there before the Pale-face had come to drive the Red Man out. The bannered moss waves, and waves, and waves,—all the day long, all through the solemn night—above the monument, above the marble slab, above the sunken, nameless grave: and as you stand among those memorials of Georgia’s Rev¬ olutionary' heroes, you feel moved to the depth of ur soul, you bate your head, you lower your voice, for you know that indeed your feet have touched holy ground. On land and. on sea, those men fought and died, for you and for me, that wo might he free— free to exercise the elemental rights of man; free to govern on reel res; free to express and publish honest convictions; free to do as we pleased, so long as we pleased to do right; free to adopt whatever principles—political, or religious—our consciences dictated. George Washington’s monument towers into the clouds, in the City that bears his name, and it is none too high for the man it commemorates; but that noble tribute to a patriot’s military suc¬ cess ivpuld not he there, had lie not been served by the fearless forgotten heroes of Dixieland. Georgians, I call on you today—today as I stand under the gray hairs of sixty-three years— 1 call on you to remember tite glories of your past! Americans, everywhere, I call upon you to remember how your fathers struggled to establish, a government which the people, having made, would control, for the benefit of the common¬ wealth, and not of a privileged aristocracy! Your hard-won, blood-bought liberties are al¬ most gone: if you mean to regain and keep them, you have no time to lose in starting about it. You may own a farm that you inherited from your great-grandfather: your chain of title may reach back to the colonial days, when George III. was your great-grandfather’s King. I myself have just such a place, near old Wrightsboro; and to the original deed hangs the largo wax seal of the Royal Council, and the deed is countersigned by Charles Watson, Clerk. Your title to your place is undisputed, but in i lie course of the long yeare; the boundary lines (Continued on Page Two.) Rio. 51 *
