On May 13, 1607, three boats anchored off a peninsula which jutted into Powhatan’s River, and there set up a stockaded place of defence, which they called James Fort. One hundred and five settlers were left by the ships; among these was John Smith, a wonderful genius and adventurer, a man destined to carry the infant colony through perilous trials.
Smith and his men and those who followed them made out of the fort a town which they called James City, and later Jamestown. From Jamestown grew Virginia, and from Virginia, these United States.
The Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition will celebrate from the last of April to the last of November, the three hundredth anniversary of the nation’s nativity. The beautiful waters and the historic shores will witness a magnificent tribute to those faithful pioneers who with their energies, aye with their very life-blood, laid the foundation of our greatness.
It will be impossible to fail of gaining information by a visit to the Exposition, it matters not what the extent of a man’s knowledge may be. Every department of our national government will be represented in miniature, complete in every detail. Every state will be represented by a reproduction of some building connected with its formative history, and the whole will form an object lesson in the history and development of our country that will surpass any means of teaching and interest ever before seen. Nearly every state in the Union is already at work upon its special buildings, and of the Southern states, all (at this writing) have commenced work except Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and Tennessee. It is certain that these states will fall into line and their respective legislatures ought not to fail to make immediate appropriations in order that the work may be worthily and adequately completed by the opening of the Exposition. Some of the states whose legislatures could not be awakened to sufficient patriotic pride to make an appropriation, have made up a fund by the efforts of their public-spirited citizens, but Tennessee will not need to resort to such methods. The Volunteer State, whose affiliations with Virginia, both in past history and in present commercial development are of the closest, will not fail to help make this enterprise a shining success. In view of the abundance of her resources she cannot afford not to make a showing of her phenomenal growth from a struggling and neglected mountain settlement to her present proud position among the galaxy of states. We have contributed leaders and men, and the bone and sinews for every movement which has resulted in our national progress and our supplies for future development are unrivalled and inexhaustible, and we cannot afford to be absent when the showing of the states is made.
THE PARADISE OF FOOLS
PART XI
I sat in a great theater at the National Capital. It was thronged with youth, and beauty, old age, and wisdom. I saw a man, the image of his God, stand upon the stage, and I heard him speak. His gestures were the perfection of grace; his voice was music, and his language was more beautiful than I had ever heard from mortal lips. He painted picture after picture of the pleasures, and joys, and sympathies, of home. He enthroned love and preached the gospel of humanity like an angel. Then I saw him dip his brush in ink, and blot out the beautiful picture he had painted. I saw him stab love dead at his feet. I saw him blot out the stars and the sun, and leave humanity and the universe in eternal darkness, and eternal death. I saw him like the serpent of old, worm himself into the paradise of human hearts, and by his seductive eloquence and the subtle devices of his sophistry, inject his fatal venom, under whose blight its flowers faded, its music was hushed, its sunshine was darkened, and the soul was left a desert waste, with only the new-made graves of faith and hope. I saw him, like a lawless, erratic meteor without an orbit, sweep across the intellectual sky, brilliant only in his self-consuming fire, generated by friction with the indestructible and eternal truths of God.
That man was the archangel of modern infidelity; and I said: How true is holy writ which declares, “the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”
Tell me not, O Infidel, there is no God, no Heaven, no Hell!
“A solemn murmur in the soul tells of a world to be,