I consider it a great privilege to be intrusted, even for one short hour, with the destinies of the Holland Society, a society which represents those who three hundred years ago gave modern civilization its great impulse, industrial, political, and social, and whose works and ideas are today amongst us. The most active ferment in what promises to be one of the great crises of history, the sentiments to which you in this society gave your applause at your last annual meeting - sentiments demanding liberty, justice and mercy for an oppressed people near us - have been making rapid progress in the twelve months that have passed since. A story is told of Thomas Huxley, the philosopher, rushing out of the British Museum in a tremendous hurry, jumping into a cab and telling the man to drive as quickly as he could.

The cabby slamned the door and started off. After he had been riding for some time an idea struck Mr. Huxley, and he said to the man, "See here, do you know where you are going?" "No Sir," was the reply, "but we are getting there very fast." Such seems to be largely our position. I don't think we know just where we are going, but we do know that we are getting there very fast. We hope that we can see, not far ahead of us, two more Republics in the world - a Republic born in Cuba, and the Republic of Spain, the Republic of Castelar, (Spanish statesman and author) awakened again from its sleep of twenty years. The struggle which seems to be now approaching a climax is the same old war which has existed for three hundred years, begun long ago by William of Orange - the war of democracy against despotism; the war of free inquiry 3against the inquisition; the war of argument against assassination. And the contestants are the same. On the one side are the men of liberty, and on the other the men of slavery, with this difference. Alva,the representative man of the old regime, was able to boast when he left Holland for the last time, that in six years he had put to death 18,000 Hollanders; but today the Spanish representative of Alva in Cuba, Weiler, ( I don't know how to pronounce his name, but I suggest that we give it the German pronunciation and call it Viler), leaves Cuba, guilty, as Consul General Lee tells us of the death in one year of 200,000 men, women, and children. There is enough Dutch blood in the United States to put an end to this thing. We want no war. God forbid that there should be war; but if we have not yet arrived at the point, as Tennyson says, when we can leave unsought all the points of war, and fuse the people into one; 4if we are still on the stage where, as the same poet says, "The voice of any people is the sword that guards them, or the sword that beats them down," let us meet the issue as brave men and honest lovers of liberty that we have inherited from William of Orange, Washington and Lincoln. We want no Spanish money; we want no Spanish soil; but I mistake the American people, if this issue comes to a climax, if they are at peace again until the American flag has been run up once more upon the sacred spot where the dust of the marturs of the Maine lies abandoned in the desecrating mud of the Harbor of Havana. We want no Spanish money, but if we are forced against our will to avenge this intolerable wrong by war, then we shall not end it until the real castles in Spain pay every cent of the bill of indemnity, down to the last farthing. And if Spain and her allies and the adherents of peace ask why we have not used measures of conciliation and arbitration, we can not do better than answer, perhaps, in the 5words of a story that I heard the other day. A man, carrying a pitch-fork, who had been attacked by a bulldog, ran the dog through. The owner coming up in a great rage, said,"Why didn't you defend yourself with the other end of the pitch-fork?" "Why didn't your dog," said the man, "come at me with the other end!".............

Henry Lloyd.