The Birmingham age-herald., 1903-08-02
JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE
 TALKS TO BIRMINGHAM

md mischievous idea foisted upon us a decade ago when,I was boy and lived here and equally alive today, had it ever attained a footing on Alabama SOIL when the hour of Santiago came, when a thousand generations of white courage were needed to walk the decks of the Merrimac and sink her in the teeth Of the enemy's jaw, think you mongrel would have planned, a half breed have executed it7
 short-bred men like short-bred horses, auit In the backstretch, and mongrel people like mongrel dogs, inherit the vices of both ancestors and the virtues of neither. For excellence Is a tning that will stand no division; achievement is a furnace that needs ever the white heat of pure flame, success is the bride of endeavor and there Is no niche on the pinnacle of fame for any stone save that carved out of the undefiled marble.
 Memorleo of Home.
 How easy it is to talk of Alabama, how lovingly the human heart dwells upon that which it loves. It Is my belief that there Is no sermon to a man ike the sermon of his old home, the spot where he was born and reared We can never know it, 1t is true, because the dead speak not again; but 1t is beiet of mine the very last lingering memory of earth to every dying man, is some faint rustic of summer leaf out In the old garden where the sunfecks Tall through the apple blossoms; some faint June odor of the wind blowing over the flowers in the old fashioned garden of his mother, the vanishing blue of an autumn sky. the echo of a forgotten voice, somehow somewhere, from out of the spot of his childhood home.
 But that Is not the only message have come today to bring you. l give my approval to the establishment of this park, that the strenuous and overworked people of this city, great now, but des- tined yet to be greater, so surely as these mountains have sunk their pillars in sunless steel, and these valleys are scanned with veins of coal. In establish ing this park you have made 1t possible for the people of this great steel seo- ton of the south to have a safety valve for the outlet of their encompassed en- ergy
 I desire, therefore, to call your atten- tion to the timeliness of this park, one of the real needs of Birmingham and to the antiquity and universality of sport of this character.
 As far back as we can go into the past we find in all civilized nations that have ltu III t0t uDDullullb Ol i1lC HoiAtf NhN establishment of such parks as this and the encouragement of such games and sports as will be encouraged here, most essential to the healthy progress of the nation and the race. They go back to the remotest antiquity and on the un- varying test of the strength and yirility of the nation. Even in the clash of con7 fict on the plains of Troy, Homer tells us how the armies ceased fighting long enough to enjoy great horse race The most intellectual. the most artistic, the most glorious nation that ever four ished the Creeks owed it's first strength and cohesiveness to the Olympian games occurring every fourth year. Think of the hold they had on the Greeks nature when xenophon tells us in the march of the ten thousand, the most heroic fight ever made by a betrayed and cut off army from home-that scarcely had they staggered back and looked down on the sea, ere they threw down their shields and swords to enjoy a horse race. We find it running riot in the blood of the Romans, from the time they opened their first park and trotted off, each man with a Sabine maid, and perhaps two of them in his arms, to the time of the horse of Caligula, shod with gold, bedecked with jewels and made a Roman consul. Our early Saxon fathers were literally born upon horse The love of 1t runs through their veins and the roan of it was bred in their red boards. And 1t Is a remarkable coincidence that at the very height of their intellectual great ness, the Elizabethan age. the age of Shakespeare and Bacon, of Raleigh and Drake, this age saw the foundation laid of the thoroughbred horse, an animal that made the famed Arabian look as cheap as so many yellow dogs. The Aryan. the Egyptian, the Chaldean. no matter how far back we go, we find this love of the horse and sport of racing the prevailing passion of every nation that has any claim to greatness.
 Horse and Man.
 Ay, and there Is another and greater thought of linking this grand animal to the fame of human achievements with hoops of steel Out from the dim, shift ing bloody curtain of the past he has come, side by side with man, fighting with him the battles of progress, bearing with him the burden of the centuries. Down the hard road through flint or mire, through swamp or sand, wherever there has been footprint, there will be seen a hoof print. They have been one and inseparable, the aim and the object, the means and the end. And if the time shall ever come as some boastingly de- clare, when the one shall breed away from the other, the puny relic of once perfect manhood will not live long enough to trace the record of 1t on the tablets of his time
 love him because I love my state. because I love liberty and independence, the restful face of nature In wood and field because I love honest worth and true manhood.
 He came with our forefathers across the mountains of Virginia and Carolina, and he carried the hardy settlers from the Appalachian to the Pacific. In the "Old North State he stood out in the rain all day hitched to a rack around the courthouse with bit in his mouth