USA > Illinois > The centennial of the state of Illinois. Report of the Centennial Commission > Part 31
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Mr. Shurtleff is the only man who was elected Speaker and served three times in succession. Semple, Cullow, Carwin, Smith, Ifames, Crafts, Sherman and Shanahan served two terms each. In the Thirty-isth General Assembly. . Wiele our ned in January, 1889, three men served as Speaker data the session. First, Mr. A. C. Matthews, who was later appointed Comptroller of the Cur- reney, resigned, and was needed by Mr. James II. Miller, who died during the session and was sereal : Iv Judge W. G. Coch- ran of Moultrie County. Mr. Samuel Budapester served as Speaker in the famous session of 1-2 when the Legislature was prorogued by the famiens War Gove row Richard Yates. Buek- master was the local supporter of the Governor during that stormy war period.
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E. M. Haines was Speaker of the Thirty-fourth General As- sembly in 1885, during the famous deadlock over the election of United States Senator, when General John 1. Logan was re- elected after a contest lasting over five months.
Clayton E. Crafts was Speaker of the Thirty-seventh General Assembly in 1891, during another noted senatorial contest, which lasted over three months, in which General John M. Pahner was elected United States Senator.
Under the Constitution of 1870 there are fifty-one senatorial districts in Illinois, which bienmally eket three members of the House of Representatives from cach district, so that the body is composed of one hundred and fifty-three members. The House convenes on the first Wedne day after the first Monday in January and procede to organize. The session is called to order by the Secretary of State and after the roll call of the members is had, a temporary organization is made and after the credentials of the members have been passed upon, a permanent organization is made by the election of a Speaker and other officers. The rules of the House provide what the powers of the Speaker shall be and they are very broad. I am not permitted at this time to take up the various Inties of the Speaker. or what these Speakers have done. Enough to say that during the one hundred years of its history, Illinois has reason to be proud of the men who have served as Speakers of its House of Representatives.
THE ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT
JUDGE JAMES H. CARTWRIGHT
Justice of the Supreme Court
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Centennial Commission, Ladies and Gentlemen: Every Government whether centralized in a monarch or divided into different departments, exercises three separate and distinct functions-the making of the law ; the appli- cation of the law to conditions, and the execution of it. Neither is efficient without the other. The law itself is absolutely inert. The printed page protects no right, punishes no crime, accomplishes no results. The judicial department, construing and applying the law
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is helpless without the executive behind it to enforce its decrees. The perfection of a government is one that binds all different de- partments with each other as a whole, neither one being permitted to exercise the function of another.
Our forefathers did not contend for any particular form of government. They were in the Revolutionary War fighting against a monarch and that War was in progress more than a year before the Declaration of Independence, when they severed their connec- tion with the mother country. At that time they declared in that instrument that prudence dictated that a government long estab- lished should not be changel for light or transient reasons. They were fighting against injustice, against wrongs committed by a gov- ernment over which they had no contrel; and when they came to frame a Constitution at the close of the confederacy, they declared the first purpose which was in their minds which was to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defence, lo seenie to themselves and their posterity the blessings of liberty.
The states followed the same declaration. Our Constitution of 1818, declared its purpose to be to establish justice, to secure domestic tranquility, and followed the same language as the Con- stitution of the United States. They divided the functions of the government into three departments by which the Legislature should make the laws; the courts should constru- and administer them, and the executive should enforce and carry out the decrees of the court and see that laws were faithfully executed. All officers were required to take an oath to support the Constitution of the State and to perform the duties of their office to the best of their ability, and that has been the oath taken by every judge and by every member of the Legislature and executive officer since that tinie.
There must, of course, be some authority to say when the pro- visions of the Constitution have been transgressed and what is the meaning of the different laws. The people are the sovereign and they have enacted only one original pices of legislation, and that is the Constitution. They declared what should be done and what should not be done, and defined the powers of the different depart-
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ments. They committed to the Supreme Court the decision of questions relating to the Constitution.
In a representative form of government it is especially neces- sary, that there should be such an authority, because a wise monarch will take into account all the wishes and needs and views of the minority; but in a representative form of goverment it is not expected that a majority will regard the views or the wishes or the interests of the minority ; andt so when the Constitution was framed, it was provided that there were certain things which a majority should not do to the individual or to the minority, and necessarily there must be some authority to say when that Jimit has been transgressed.
We have had a great history as a State Security has been provided for person and property, and the declaration of the Con- stitution that "all men are by nature free and independent and have certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and to sceure these things governments are instituted.
It is only where the laws are administered for the security of all that a nation can fulfill its highest destiny. The whole history of the world from the beginning, to the bloody program now being enacted in other lands during the present war, shows the same condition of anarchy as in the days of Israel when every man did according to his own will because there was no judge in the land. They were the prog of their enomics. The weak were assaulted, destroyed, scattered, and divided. When the successful Jewish system was established, there was More, who, in the wilder- ness following for advice of Jethro, his father-in-law, a priest of Midian, when he came with his wife and his sons to visit him there, established judges over the people.
Samuel was the first circuit judge, when he went from year to year in a circuit to Bethel and Gilgal and Mizpah and returned to Ramal. It was not because of the great military genius of any of those judges who ruled over Israel that they overcame their enemies, but because they established justice and right and law, that the Jewish nation was then indestructable and unconquerable.
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A government by which law and justice are administered, and rights are maintained and whose people are devoted to the prin- ciples declared by our forefathers will endure in some form which secures those objects. The fields and lands of such a nation may be ravished, its cities and villages pillaged and burned; its citizens murdered and property destroyed, but the principles of liberty then instilled and planted will live forever, and they will come together again in some new form adapted to the conditions in life to secure the ble-sings of justice and liberty.
Since 1$18 the Judges of the Supreme Court have been elected by the people, and I think it has been demonstrated that no safer plan can be adopted than for the election of judges by a free and intelligent and independent ve ple. Whether the work has been done with credit and ability is pot for any of the judges of the court to say; that it has been done with integrity and fidelity and honesty no one has ever questioned.
CENTENNIAL ADDRESS
JOHN II. FINLEY
President of the University of New York
Governor Lowden, Men and Women of Illinois: It is very gratinying to Know that I am still remembered as a son of Illinois. Some years ago, shortly after I left Illinois to go to New York, I read an editorial in a Chiesto paaror- I still took the Chicago paper-speaking of an address which I had made as a young man out here in Bloomington -- I think it was called an oration in those days-and referring to my apparent familiarity with the Old Testament, which has been referred to by Judge Cartwright here tonight so beautifully -- and then it went on to say that this young man would probably have amounted to something in the world except for his untimely death-evidently it is known to very few in Illinois that I am still in existence.
It is very grati ying also to hear an introduction by one who has not gotten his information sol ly from Who's Who, and cer- tainly it is a great distinction to be introduced by my friend,
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Frank. Lowd. n. I do not wish Ilinois any ill, but I hope some day-it is pretty lonesome on the other side-I hope some day he will take the Lincoln Highway over the mountains to the only place there that is more exalted than the Governorship of Illinois. It & ms, Governor, that they would like to have you go over.
I have great difficulty down Ease in making them distinguish between some of these western states. They sometimes put me from Indiana, or lowa or out in Wisconsin, which, of course, makes me feel badly. But sometimes they locate my state and they refer to me-usually by that other appropriate term they call me-you know-they call me e "Sucker," and my response is, "Do you know why we are called -wekers" out in Illinois? It is because we believe all that the people of this side of the moun- tains say about their own states.
I have already made my address here, and it was an eloquent address. It was made by my dearest friend, one who was my mentor-one whose office I used to -wrap out, and I was hardly worthy to do that-the one who taught me to make iny first pub- lie speech. I shall have to admit that I have been a very poor pupil, after you have heard him st ek -- my friend Edgar _1. Bancroft. I should not hive conwe here tonight if it had not been that I had promised and that reale I wanted some excuse for coming back to Illinois.
I was plowing corn one day, one hot day in June, when I heard a singing, or a sound rather. in the sky. I know it was not the celestial choir-I knew it was a swarm of bees flying across my field toward the woods in the dist. neo. I did what every Illinois boy would do under the circonstances --- I started after those boss, picking un clos of earth and dust and shouting and throwing the dust and the clos towards the bees, with the result that I braught them down at the elge of the field on a branch of a tree; and that night I brought out the hives and took the bees home and they made honey for us the rest of the year. That is what I shell try to do tonight in the few minutes Tam allotted -- forty five. I believe -- I am just going to throw up a few words to try to bring down the ideas that have been floating in my sky since I was asked to come out here.
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I have been asked to speak about the Illinois of the future, but I shall speak rather of America-of the America that could not be the America she is except for what happened a hundred years ago. It is upon that tree that I would gather my little swarin of bees in your presence.
I once heard a Iceturer dowa in New York trying to amuse an audience by telling au experience he had had out here some- where. He said he was lecturing on the Mediterranean Ocean and in order to get his audience interested, he asked what body of water was in the middle of the earth, and one boy put up his hand and the lectarer asked him what it was, and he said, the Sangamon River. And the lecturer to make his story still more amusing pronounced it the San-gam-'on River. I went to the lecturer afterwards-he did not know very much about this country --- and I said to him, "the boy spoke truer than you thought when he said the Sangamon River is the water in the middle of the earth, because Abraham Lincoln lived here and his dust lies on its shores.
I went out to see that place today-his tomb- and I thought, as I was telling you -- I thought of an experience of mine-I kept at the farther end of the great hall in my office when I lived in New York City, a splendid head of Lincoln. One Sunday morn- ing when I should not have been at my office, I was alone with my boy-he opened the door and le kel out, and he said, "Is no one here?" I said "No," He said. "No one except you and me and Lincoln." To him Lincoln was a reality. And so I can somehow feel that there is no one there except you and me and Lincoln. This is the middle of the earth.
I have just come, within the month, from the ocean that was in the middle of the earth, from traveling around its coasts. I was first of all in Italy, and then I went to Corfu, that beautiful island unon whose shores Ulysses was thrown at the end of his wandering. A braniiful island it is. The es-Kaiser bas a palace on top of the hill. I saw that palace. I was visiting the con- valescent camps down at the foot of the hill. My Ford grew so democratic that it retused to climb the hill. It is said that the ex-Kaiser intends to go to that palace. I hope not.
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He should never be permitted to go there -- it is too beautiful a place. I went over the hills of Albania and saw what was left of Servia, and then I went on by Macedon, the place where Alexander the Great was born. I passed through the place where St. Paul had preached to the Thessalonians and had written some of his epistles; and then on down through the Mediterranean Sea, be- holding in the distance the island on which John had written his Book of Revelation, and then on to Egypt, where I found people living much as they must have lived two thousand years ago; and then I went on to the Holy Land, where I have been for the last four months before my return, as head of the Red Cross mission to the Holy Land. I went by railroad first and made the trip over night. You remember that the children of Israel spent forty years in making that journey from Egypt into the land of Canaan. Later I made the trip by aeroplane in two and one-half hours, but I went first by rail -- over rails that had been furnished by America -- and alongside I saw a water pipe running ca-t from the Vile up into Palestine. and the water pipe had been furnished, I was told, by firms within this valley. It is said in an Arabie pro- verb iliat 1.or until the water of the Nile runs into Palestine will the Turk be driven from Jerusalem. The water now runs from the Nile into Palestine and the Turk has been driven from Jeru- salem. I am sorry we had no part in driving him out. I felt that rebuke-I know Judge Cartwright will remember this, if no body else in the House docs (except perhaps the minis- ters), that Deborah gave to one of the tribes (Reuben) for not coming to the help of Tera-l when they were fighting against their enemy, although a splendid auswer wa- made on the western front. We had not part in the actual recovery of the land, but we had a splendid part in ministering to those who had been stricken by the war. I am not going to speak of that. but simply of this little land, this little land which I traveled over from one end to the other, so narrow a land it is that I walked from one side to the other of it-it is just about the distance from here to Peoria, the way I walked. I walked from Joppa to Jerusalem and then down to Jericho, only sixty-three miles, and then from Beersheba to the northern end-less than two hundred miles, or not more than from
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here to Chicago, and I am proud to say to you my brothers and sisters of Illinois, I had the greatest privilege of my life in being permitted to go-the first American citizen to go into Nazareth after it had been taken from the Turks, except perhaps the military attache; and also I had the great honor to go, the only person aside from the staff of General Allenby, into Dasmascus the day he made his entry. I speak of that that you may share this pleasure and honor with me. That little land was the centre of the earth-the middle of the earth. The land from which we got our Ten Comt- mandments. I could see Mount Sinai a- I journeyed by aeroplane across the Red Sea without getting my feet wet. I could see Mount Sinai off in the distance. This little land from which we get our Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments and the two greater command- ments that are the basis of our civilization. That land seems a long way of now. It was on my horizon as a boy when I read of it at my mother's knee here in Illinois -- just over the horizon, but I saw it out yonder and it seemed a long way from these prairies of Illinois.
I was walking one night and I fell in with some British Tom- mies. I was very much in need of water. I was some distance from the wells of Sychar, and I asked where I could get water and they pointed to the emmip. I went to the camp and it was the camp of the First Irish Regiment down in one of the valleys of Palestine. I asked for water and I was taken to the place where the water was kept by a fine Irish strip of a lad. He brought the water out of great skins which were carried in by the camels during the day. The water was not very cold-there was no ice in Palestine. I said to the boy, "What part of Ireland did you come from?" He replied, "Tipperary." And I said to bim. "My lad you are indeed a long way from home." And Mount Nebo and those barren places that seemed a long, long way from this rich valley. I wish you could see the horizon of that land from which I have just come -- that land with its barrenne -- and its misery, but that land with all its great associations-you would the better appreci- ate-you would know as I know that this is the middle of the earth, for this is the place where that spirit of human brother- hood which was taught there in that land, has its highest expres-
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sion, its noblest expression in the democracy which was exempli- fied in our Lincoln.
HIere, in America! I have been thinking when the name America was first put upon the printed page in southeastern France-that part of France where many of our boys were in the first days of the war and near which some of them are even now. In that little village to which I have often made a pilgrimage. It was there that this name was written in a book called Ptolemy's Cosmography, a new edition to it. I was back there in the war and inquired for a bookseller who had given me, when I was there before, a reproduction of this book-the original is over in Strass- burg. When I came back the second time they said he had gone. He was crossing the bridge between the two parts of the village and had both legs shot off. When he came to die he said, "Alas (I have been thinking of this many times in the last few days), I shall not be able to carry flowers to Strassburg." The flowers have been carried back to Strassburg, but by American boys. It was there that the name of America was first written upon the printed page. It was an edition of Ptolemy's Cosmography, but at the moment it was being printed, in Berlin there was a man working out a new theory (you see I have become a school teacher again)-this theory called the Copernican Theory-a theory in ' which the sun does not revolve around the earth, but the earth revolves around the sun. America was, in a sense, under the Ptolemy theory or system; she had Fer national existence under the Copernican theory or system, a system under which the indi- vidual becomes infinitesimal'y sinall, but in which the earth be- comes a part of the great universe. And so we have begun to appreciate our relationship. I think, to the rest of the world. It was an astronomical or infinite distance, and it was under that astronomical distance that our fathers came to this place. I can hear my own father in a little room up here in the prairie, singing a song which I have not heard on the other side of the mountains, a song which some of you, perhaps, still remember:
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"l'in a pilgrim and I'm a stranger, I can tarry, I can tarry but a night. Do not detain me, for I am going, To where the fountains are ever flowing. I'm a pilgrim and I'm a stranger, I can tarry, I can tarry but a night."
It was, as I said, a comography (although that seems rather a large word), a cosmography of infinite distance. We have lived always out here at any rate, under the Copernican system.
I have written here (in lienting the manuscript which he held in his hand), more or less of what I intended to say tonight, but I think a portion of it at any rate will have to be left to the records, but ] ean outline to yon what I intended to say about this Ameriea. America that has not by chance taken the stars and put them in the field of our flag. They are cosmic symbols gathered from the immeasurable universe. This America of cosmic horizon, of starry symbols and of universal sympathy, is clearly not .a geographie comet, though one cannot di-associate the soul of America from its body. It is only through the identification of this spirit with a love of the physical body that it can become an international and a cosmic influence. Without its incarnation between lines of latitude and longitude. it would be a nebulous internationalism that we should have. a co-mie life love that, eschewing nationalism, would come in the end to nothing.
I have written here what I hope we may teach our children- the love of this land. They may come to know its beauty, its grandeur, the miraculous productivity of this land: how the Al- mighty has prepared its wealth through millions of years; how the wind has kept it swept chan; how the waters drain it : how these same winds bring clouds to nourish it, and how the seasons in their ceaseless round bring soed-time and harvest. Even before our children come to know the history which has given this land its soul, they should come to know and love its wondrous beauty.
I have set forth here some definitions which I hope they may learn : descriptions which are given, not by geographers as we call them, but by poets and by artists, so that the children may come
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to love this land as the children of France love their land and the children of Italy love their land.
Ilere is the description of the Illinois prairie which I came upon-the prairie as some of you knew these prairies: a "sea of grass and flowers, from Mr. Francis Grierson's description of the "Lincoln Country." "A breeze springs up from the shores of old Kentucky or from across the Mississippi and the plains of Kansas, gathering force as the hours steal on, gradaally changing the aspect of nature by an undulating motion of the grass, until the breeze becomes a gale, and behold the prairie a rolling sea. The pennant- like blades dip before the storm in low rushing billows as of myriads of green birds skinning the surface. When clouds fleek the far horizon with Jim shifting vapors, shadows as of long gray winds, swoop down over the prairie, while here and there immense veils rise and fall and sweep on towards the sky line."
That is not in our grographics, but it is a grand description of beautiful Illinois in those days as we remember the prairie grass.
It is an America that is more than the land we live on, the objective land. Dear as it is in its association and fair as it is in its inherent beauty, America has another content than its physical resource. It is more than the land we live on, more than the land we live from, that is, the land from which we get our living, this wonderful land which here in Illinois yields corn for the world, two or three crops of alfalfa out in Colorado, wheat for the world in Minnesota, and only satisfying scenery in New Hampshire -- the land which has gold in its veins in California, silver in Colo- rado, lead in Missouri, coal in West Virginia, oil in Pennsylvania and natural gas in Indiana ; the land which, like a magician, has taken the same elements out of the soil and the sky, and makes an car of corn in Illinois, a bunch of grapes in western New York, a peach in Delaware, a cranberry in New Jersey, and a nitrogenous legume in Massachusetts : a land which, with slight assistance from synthetic chemistry and horticultural grafting. makes figs to grow on thistles and olive oil to flow from cotton seed, the rarest perfume to rise from coal tar and maraschino cherries to ripen where cherry trees have never been seen ; the land which, stretching from
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