ADDRESS OF HON. A. MITCHELL INNES. After the address of Mr. Anderson, the Hon. A. Mitchell Innes, the acting British Ambassador and representative of the Court of St. James, spoke as follows: "Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: "It is with peculiar pleasure that I have come among you today to do honor to the brave and accomplished gentleman, whose statue decorates this spot. Oglethorpe was in every way a fitting founder of the great state, to which he alluded as 'the little colony now called Georgia.' "What would he think if he could return to the city of Savannah today and see how great a forest his little plantation has grown? When he landed at Charlestown nearly two hundred years ago in the good ship Anne, of about two hundred tons burden, with his company of 130 souls, who must have been tightly packed in the small craft, not the most vivid imagination could have pictured the brilliant future which that adventurous voyage inaugurated. "Nine years later, indeed, the opposition to the paternal government of Oglethorpe saw nothing better than a scene of desolation, and his opponents complained that he would allow them neither riches, nor property, nor rum to gladden their hearts. They were no better than slaves themselves, according to their own account. "No doubt his government, which his enemies characterized as a jumble of politics and power was despotic, as it had to be in the circumstances, as every beginning must be, and no doubt he maintained a discipline which was irksome to many. But we may be sure that it was at that time not only important, but vitally necessary to the life of the colony, bounded as it was on the south by the territory of a hostile power. If he had allowed the introduction of spirits, or if he had permitted the life of ease, which the possession of slaves would have entailed in the little community, the weakening of energy which would have resulted and the demoralization which might have ensued among the Indian tribes, on who he relied, might have been fatal to the future of the colony. "For Oglethorpe was no Puritan. Quite the contrary; his sympathies were with the Jacobites, and certainly the first feast which the weary travelers enjoyed when they landed on these shores savors but little of Puritanism. A chronicler has kindly handed down to posterity an account of the bill of fare. It consisted of four fat hogs, eight turkeys, besides English beef and fowls and other provisions. A hogshead of punch, that is 63 gallons of that potent beverage; a hogshead of beer, besides large quantities of wine. And when the chronicler went on to notice what evidently struck him as the most remarkable thing about the banquet, as it certainly was: 'And all,' he says, 'was disposed in a manner so regular that no person was drunk.' "The whole of Oglethorpe's life contradicts the accusations which his enemies hurled against him. On the contrary, his was one of those minds filled with a great human love, which refuses to believe that nature has fixed a gulf between this class and that. A born gentleman, he had grasped the truth that the distinction which we, in our little circle, draw between the aristocrat and the peasant comes not of God but of man. More than this, he had grasped a still greater truth, that there is gold of full value in the destitute and the outcast, that the terrible retribution that society visits on the unsuccessful is not always either necessary or just; that in the Fleet and the Marshal sea, those awful prisons of the debtor, there was hidden a human nature full of power to rise, full of the ability to create, wanting only in the strength to burst the gyves which society, which professed but did not always practice Christianity, had firmly welded round their limbs. "You all of you remember the experiences of the immortal Pickwick in the Fleet, when rather than pay the damages which had been unjustly awarded to Mrs. Bardell, he preferred to submit to the penalty of imprisonment. You remembered the cells he looked into, which he mistook for coal cellars, and the atmosphere of depravity and degradation which pervaded the whole place. Yet in his day the debtors' prisons had already been improved, thanks to the efforts of Oglethorpe and later of Howard, who must have been inspired by Oglethorpe's example in the great work of reform which he undertook. "Today, I am glad to say, we have come to a better knowledge of human nature. Slowly we are realizing that prison is not the cure for all social evils; that, far from it, it is often nothing but the nostrum of the quack, which while doing no good to the patient's sickness, induces other disorders not less grave than that which it professes to heal. "In all great reform movements of the present day America is taking an honorable and a prominent part, whether it is for the reform of the prison system, the reform of corrupt municipalities, or the improvement in international relations. The United States has been especially to the fore in the promotion of the friendly settlement of disputes. "At no time in the history of our two countries have the relations been more cordial. There is not a cloud on the horizon. All the difficult boundary disputes have been settled. The complicated questions regarding the use of boundary waters have been regulated, and a joint commission has been established for settling all questions which may arise in the application of the principles laid down and for advising on any other questions that may be referred to it. A quarrel a century old has just been swept away by arbitration. And this result is in no small measure due to the untiring efforts of Mr. Knox and his predecessor, Mr. Root, toward this goal. "Only a few days ago one of your prominent statesmen said to me that he could imagine no dispute between the United States and Great Britain which could not be settled by amicable negotiations or by arbitration, and that he considered the future destinies of the two countries to be indissolubly bound up together. "You may feel sure that those sentiments are heartily reciprocated on the other side of the water, and that, so far as human effort can prevail or good will can reach, we shall do our share toward preserving and cementing a friendship which we regard as one of our most priceless treasures."