ADDRESS OF WELCOME ON BEHALF OF THE CHICAGO FOLK-LORE SOCIETY.
BY ITS PRESIDENT, WM. I. KNAPP. PH. D., LL. D. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.
Brothers and sisters in the hope and confidence of our immense racial affection.
The crowning principle of the 19th century is the recognition of the brotherhood of man. For forty years the peaceful procession has moved on from the remotest corners of the earth to a few common centres. Quaint faces, strange costumes, unintelligible tongues, have blended with the dominant civilizations of Western Europe and the New World beyond, while venerable races have made obeisance to the material prosperity of younger and novel institutions. London, Paris, Vienna, Philadelphia, Madrid, and Chicago, have vied with each other in hospitality toward the distant members of their long-estranged kindred. It is a sublime spectacle, and what does it portend? A profound mystery underlies this unconscious recognition of the solidarity of the nations. It is messianic in its deepest philosophic import, and reminds one of that beautiful passage in the Hebrew prayer-book: M'shíhénu yishlakh mĕhérâ, "He shall send us our Anointed in haste." Conceal it as we may from our consciousness, old things have passed away and all things, with their joys and dangers, are becoming new. New ideas, new intellectual disfranchisement, new aspirations, new yearnings, new life. We have sailed away from the moorings of our fathers into an atmosphere surcharged with the pyrotechnics of exultant individualism, and though our balloon-cable still holds us captive to the old planet, a wide-spread moral revolution is driving us out of sight of landmarks and ushering us into a climate of storms and adventure.
So all this gathering of human races and faces from the
