And this we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.
Champlain Memorial Lighthouse, July 5, 1912
Then followed the formal unveiling of the Champlain Memorial Lighthouse by Miss Louise G. Witherbee, daughter of Commissioner Walter C. Witherbee, as the patriotic strains of the Star Spangled Banner were being played by the Port Henry Band. As the memorial was exposed to full view, its symmetry and beauty provoked the applause of the admiring spectators, who thus saw the fulfillment of their long cherished hopes, that there be erected in the Valley a stately memorial to Samuel Champlain. Chairman Knapp, in speaking for the New York Tercentenary Commission, thereupon formally presented the memorial to the Governor of New York. In doing so he spoke as follows:
In obedience to the authorization of the Federal Government, the Commissions of the States of Vermont and New York have erected on the lands of the United States of America, adjacent to the Crown Point Reservation, the specified memorial of the discovery of the Champlain valley, and are now acting in the discharge of their final duties, with the sincere feeling of gratification that a task so honorable has been brought to so happy an ending.
Our duty has been to do, rather than to speak, and yet it may not be wholly out of place to give expression to the general thought, that the light of peace and safety, that is to glow from this monument through an unreckoned future, replaces the fitful fire of early war.
The shores that the discoverer scanned with painful daring are no longer dark and solitary. He is no longer alone. The temptation to review the events of his arrival here are strong, but time forbids, and to do so in detail must be left to the official record. Nor need we in the discharge of our official functions attempt to portray the full significance of the deed we now commemorate. We must wait till the voice of history speaks, with the judgment of warriors and statesmen, with the inspiration of poetry and the reverence of enlightened piety.
There seem to be moments in the life of every man, when he pauses in his career to recall the past and seeks to peer into the future, and so it is appointed for us to do to-day. While the daily rush of the outer world passes us by unheedingly in appearance, it is yet not truly so. From the day of the first visit of the white man, the eyes of the enlightened world have been upon the Champlain valley and the attentive good will of all well-wishers of their kind who are with us now.
It can hardly be said that the present occasion marks the ending of an old epoch or the beginning of a new one. Peace has reigned within our borders for a hundred years. It marks rather the recognition of a century of peace as a harbinger of still more harmonious conditions for all times between the peoples whose fathers struggled here for mastery. It marks the welcoming of a new order of things in which the old problems have met their just solution and in which the ancient grudge is lost in charity. Standing here beside this monument to the past, and beacon of the future, we know that:
God fulfills Himself in many ways,