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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner
+Speeches E-O, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: Thomas B. Reed
+
+Release Date: July 13, 2006 [EBook #18823]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN ELOQUENCE: VOL II ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Janet Blenkinship, Carolyn
+Bottomley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ELOQUENCE
+
+LIBRARY OF
+
+AFTER-DINNER SPEECHES, LECTURES
+
+OCCASIONAL ADDRESSES
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: REPRODUCTIONS OF MURAL DECORATIONS
+
+FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON
+
+
+"_JUSTICE_"
+
+_Photo-engraving in colors after the original painting by George W.
+Maynard_
+
+This picture is one of a series of eight panels representing "The
+Virtues"--Fortitude, Justice, Patriotism, Courage, Temperance, Prudence,
+Industry, and Concord. The number of virtues to be represented was
+limited to the number of panels, so the selection was necessarily
+somewhat arbitrary. Each figure is about five and a half feet high, clad
+in floating classic drapery, and represented to the spectator as
+appearing before him in the air, without a support or background other
+than the deep red of the wall. "Justice" holds the globe in one hand,
+signifying the extent of her sway. In the other hand she holds a naked
+sword upright, in token of the terribleness of her punishment.]
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ELOQUENCE
+
+
+EDITOR
+
+THOMAS B REED
+
+
+JUSTIN McCARTHY, ROSSITER JOHNSON, ALBERT ELLERY BERGH
+
+ASSOCIATE EDITORS
+
+
+VOLUME II
+
+After-Dinner Speeches
+
+E--O
+
+
+GEO. L. SHUMAN & CO.
+CHICAGO
+Copyright, 1903
+JOHN R. SHUMAN
+
+
+
+
+  _COMMITTEE OF SELECTION_
+
+
+  EDWARD EVERETT HALE, Author of "The Man Without a
+  Country."
+
+  JOHN B. GORDON, Former United States Senator.
+
+  NATHAN HASKELL DOLE, Associate Editor "International
+  Library of Famous Literature."
+
+  JAMES B. POND, Manager Lecture Bureau; Author of "Eccentricities
+  of Genius."
+
+  GEORGE MCLEAN HARPER, Professor of English Literature,
+  Princeton University.
+
+  LORENZO SEARS, Professor of English Literature, Brown University.
+
+  EDWIN M. BACON, Former Editor "Boston Advertiser" and
+  "Boston Post."
+
+  J. WALKER MCSPADDEN, Managing Editor "Edition Royale"
+  of Balzac's Works.
+
+  F. CUNLIFFE OWEN, Member Editorial Staff "New York
+  Tribune."
+
+  TRUMAN A. DEWEESE, Member Editorial Staff "Chicago
+  Times-Herald."
+
+  CHAMP CLARK, Member of Congress from Missouri.
+
+  MARCUS BENJAMIN, Editor, National Museum, Washington,
+  D. C.
+
+  CLARK HOWELL, Editor "Atlanta Constitution."
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTIONS AND SPECIAL ARTICLES BY
+
+  THOMAS B. REED,   HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE,
+  LORENZO SEARS,    JONATHAN P. DOLLIVER,
+  CHAMP CLARK,      EDWARD EVERETT HALE,
+           ALBERT ELLERY BERGH.
+
+
+NOTE--A large number of the most distinguished speakers of this country
+and Great Britain have selected their own best speeches for this
+Library. These speakers include Whitelaw Reid, William Jennings Bryan,
+Henry van Dyke, Henry M Stanley, Newell Dwight Hillis, Joseph Jefferson,
+Sir Henry Irving, Arthur T. Hadley, John D. Long, David Starr Jordan,
+and many others of equal note.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  VOLUME II
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+  EGGLESTON, GEORGE CARY
+    Southern Literature                                              423
+
+  ELIOT, CHARLES WILLIAM
+    Harvard and Yale                                                 427
+
+  ELIOT, SAMUEL A.
+    The Source of Song and Story                                     431
+
+  EMERSON, RALPH WALDO
+    England, Mother of Nations                                       437
+    The Memory of Burns                                              439
+    War                                                              442
+    The Wisdom of China                                              445
+
+  EVARTS, WILLIAM MAXWELL
+    International Arbitration                                        448
+    The Republic and Its Outlook                                     452
+    The French Alliance                                              457
+    Tribute to Herbert Spencer                                       462
+    The Classics in Education                                        465
+    Liberty Enlightening the World                                   469
+
+  EWING, THOMAS C.
+    Ohio and the Northwest                                           474
+
+  FARRAR, FREDERIC WILLIAM
+    Poet and Painter                                                 479
+
+  FELLOWS, JOHN R.
+    North and South                                                  482
+
+  FIELD, DAVID DUDLEY
+    The Telegraph                                                    490
+    Early Connecticut                                                493
+
+  FINCH, FRANCIS M.
+    The Office of the Law                                            496
+
+  FOORD, JOHN
+    The Land o' Cakes                                                500
+
+  FORD, SIMEON
+    Me and Sir Henry                                                 505
+    A Run on the Banker                                              507
+
+  FROUDE, JAMES ANTHONY
+    Men of Letters                                                   510
+
+  FULLER, MELVILLE WESTON
+    The Supreme Court                                                513
+
+  GARLAND, HAMLIN
+    Realism versus Romanticism                                       518
+
+  GILBERT, JOHN
+    Playing Old Men Parts                                            522
+
+  GILBERT, WILLIAM SCHWENK
+    Pinafore                                                         524
+
+  GILMAN, DANIEL COIT
+    The Era of Universities                                          528
+
+  GLADSTONE, WILLIAM EWART
+    The Age of Research                                              530
+
+  GRADY, HENRY W.
+    The Race Problem                                                 534
+
+  GRAND, SARAH
+    Mere Man                                                         551
+
+  GRANT, ULYSSES SIMPSON
+    A Remarkable Climate                                             557
+    Characteristics of Newspaper Men                                 559
+    The Adopted Citizen                                              561
+
+  GRIGGS, JOHN WILLIAM
+    Social Discontent                                                564
+
+  HALE, EDWARD EVERETT
+    The Mission of Culture                                           570
+    Boston                                                           577
+
+  HALL, WILLIAM F.
+    Yarn of the Manager Bold                                         581
+
+  HALSTEAD, MURAT
+    Our New Country                                                  584
+
+  HARRISON, BENJAMIN
+    The Union of States                                              589
+
+  HAWLEY, JOSEPH ROSWELL
+    The Press                                                        593
+
+  HAY, JOHN
+    Omar Khayyam                                                     598
+
+  HAYES, RUTHERFORD B.
+    National Sentiments                                              601
+
+  HENDRIX, JOSEPH C.
+    The Wampum of the Indians                                        603
+
+  HERSCHELL, LORD
+    Great Britain and the United States                              609
+
+  HILLARD, GEORGE STILLMAN
+    The Influence of Men of Genius                                   616
+
+  HOLE, SAMUEL REYNOLDS
+    With Brains, Sir!                                                622
+
+  HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL
+    Welcome to the Alumni                                            625
+    Dorothy Q.                                                       627
+
+  HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, JR.
+    Sons of Harvard Who Fell in Battle                               630
+    The Joy of Life                                                  645
+
+  HOUGHTON, LORD (RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES)
+    Your Speech and Ours                                             635
+    Bonds of National Sympathy                                       639
+
+  HOWE, JULIA WARD
+    Tribute to Oliver Wendell Holmes                                 645
+
+  HOWELL, CLARK
+    Our Reunited Country                                             647
+
+  HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN
+    The "Atlantic" and Its Contributors                              653
+
+  HOWLAND, HENRY ELIAS
+    Russia                                                           657
+    Our Ancestors and Ourselves                                      661
+
+  HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY
+    Science and Art                                                  670
+
+  INGERSOLL, ROBERT GREEN
+    The Music of Wagner                                              672
+
+  IRVING, SIR HENRY
+    Looking Forward                                                  676
+    The Drama                                                        678
+    The Function of the Newspaper                                    681
+
+  JEBB, RICHARD CLAVERHOUSE
+    Literature and Art                                               686
+
+  JEFFERSON, JOSEPH
+    My Farm in Jersey                                                688
+    In Memory of Edwin Booth                                         691
+
+  KITCHENER, LORD
+    The Relief of Khartum                                            694
+
+  LANG, ANDREW
+    Problem Novels                                                   698
+
+  LAURIER, WILFRID
+    Canada                                                           702
+
+  LAWRENCE, FRANK R.
+    The Future of New York                                           705
+
+  LECKY, WILLIAM E. H.
+    The Artistic Side of Literature                                  708
+
+  LEE, FITZHUGH
+    The Flag of the Union Forever                                    710
+
+  LEIGHTON, SIR FREDERIC
+    Variety in British Art                                           713
+
+  LELAND, CHARLES GODFREY
+    Hans Breitmann's Return                                          717
+
+  LINCOLN, ABRAHAM
+    Central Ideas of the Republic                                    720
+
+  LODGE, HENRY CABOT
+    The Blue and the Gray                                            723
+
+  LONG, JOHN DAVIS
+    The Navy                                                         727
+
+  LOW, SETH
+    The Chamber of Commerce                                          731
+
+  LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL
+    Harvard Alumni                                                   737
+    National Growth of a Century                                     741
+    The Stage                                                        745
+    Commerce                                                         748
+    After-Dinner Speaking                                            750
+    "The Return of the Native"                                       753
+    Literature                                                       758
+    International Copyright                                          761
+
+  LOWELL, JOHN
+    Humors of the Bench                                              766
+
+  LYTTON, LORD (SIR EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON)
+    Macready and the English Stage                                   769
+    Farewell to Charles Dickens                                      774
+
+  MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT
+    Spirit of New England Literature                                 778
+
+  MACKAY, DONALD SAGE
+    The Dutch Domine                                                 782
+
+  MACKENZIE, ALEXANDER C.
+    Music                                                            787
+
+  MACREADY, WILLIAM CHARLES
+    Farewell to the Stage                                            791
+
+  McCARTHY, JUSTIN
+    Ireland's Struggle                                               795
+
+  McCLURE, ALEXANDER KELLY
+    An Editorial Retrospect                                          799
+
+  McKELWAY, ST. CLAIR
+    Smashed Crockery                                                 807
+    Tribute to Mark Twain                                            811
+
+  McKINLEY, WILLIAM
+    Our Country                                                      815
+    The Future of the Philippines                                    818
+
+  MELISH, WILLIAM B.
+    The Ladies                                                       825
+
+  MILES, NELSON APPLETON
+    The Spanish-American War                                         831
+
+  MILLER, SAMUEL FREEMAN
+    Federal Judges                                                   834
+
+  MORLEY, JOHN
+    Literature and Politics                                          838
+
+  MOTLEY, JOHN LOTHROP
+    The Poets' Corner                                                842
+
+  NEWMAN, JOHN PHILIP
+    Commerce                                                         845
+
+  NORTON, CHARLES ELIOT
+    Castles in Spain                                                 850
+
+  OGLESBY, RICHARD
+    The Royal Corn                                                   853
+
+  O'REILLY, JOHN BOYLE
+    Moore, the Bard of Erin                                          856
+
+
+
+
+  _ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+
+  VOLUME II
+
+
+  "JUSTICE"                                                _Frontispiece_
+    Photo-engraving in colors after an original painting
+    by George W. Maynard
+
+  HENRY WOODFIN GRADY                                                534
+    Photogravure after a photograph from life
+
+  OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES                                              625
+    Photogravure after a photograph from life
+
+  ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL                                             672
+    Photogravure after a photograph from life
+
+  MENU CARD                                                          676
+    Photogravure after a design by Thompson Willing
+
+  FANEUIL HALL                                                       723
+    Photogravure after a photograph
+
+  "PATRIOTISM"                                                       815
+    Photo-engraving in colors after an original painting
+    by George W. Maynard
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
+
+
+SOUTHERN LITERATURE
+
+[Speech of George Cary Eggleston at the first annual banquet of the New
+  York Southern Society, February 22, 1887. Algernon Sidney Sullivan,
+  President of the Society, was in the chair. In introducing the speaker
+  Mr. Sullivan said: "We want to hear a word about 'Southern
+  Literature,' and we will now call upon Mr. George Cary Eggleston to
+  respond to that sentiment."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT:--I have cheered myself so hoarse that I do not
+think I can make a speech at all. I will say a word or two if my voice
+holds out. It is patriotically hoarse.
+
+If I manage to make a speech it will be the one speech of the evening
+which was most carefully prepared. The preparations were all made,
+arrangements were completed and it was perfectly understood that I
+should not make it. The name set down under this toast is that of Hon.
+John Randolph Tucker, and the wild absurdity of asking a writer who does
+not make speeches, to take the place of such an orator as John Randolph
+Tucker would seem to be like asking a seasick land-lubber to take the
+captain's place upon the bridge of the ocean steamer in a storm, and
+there is another reason by which I am peculiarly unfit to speak in
+response to the toast--"Southern Literature," and that is, that I am
+firmly convinced that there is no Southern Literature; that there never
+was a Southern Literature; that there never will be a Southern
+Literature, and that there never ought to be a Southern Literature. Some
+very great and noble work in literature has been produced by men of
+Southern lineage and birth and residence. John Marshall, if he had not
+been the greatest of American jurists, would have been counted, because
+of his "Life of Washington," the greatest of biographers. I might name
+an extended list of workers in this field, all of Southern birth. Sims;
+my dead friend, John Esten Cooke; his brother, Philip Cooke; Cable, who
+is married to New England; the gifted woman who calls herself Charles
+Egbert Craddock; and a host of others including that noble woman now
+going blind in Lexington, who has done some of the sweetest work in
+American poetry, Margaret J. Preston. [Applause.] I might go further and
+claim Howells, every drop of whose blood is Virginian. If it were not
+getting personal and becoming a family affair, I might mention the fact
+that the author of the "Hoosier Schoolmaster," with whom I used to play
+on the hills of Ohio River, was of direct Southern descent; that he was
+born as I was, exactly on Mason and Dixon's line, and one of us fell
+over on one side and the other on the other when the trouble came.
+
+Notwithstanding all this, I hold that there can be no such thing as a
+Southern Literature, because literature is never provincial, and to say
+of any literature that it is Southern or Western or Northern or Eastern
+is to say that it is a provincial utterance and not a literature. The
+work to which I have referred is American literature. It is work of
+which American literature is proud and will ever be proud, whatever is
+worthy in literature or in achievement of any kind in any part of the
+country goes ultimately in the common fund of American literature or of
+American achievement; and that is the joy I have had in being here
+to-night, when I ought to have been at home. The joy I have had to-night
+has been that this sentiment of Americanism has seemed to be all around
+me, and to run through and through everything that has been said here
+to-night--a sentiment which was taken out of my mouth, as it were, by
+the President this evening, that our first devotion above all is to what
+I call the American idea. It seems to me that we are sometimes
+forgetting what idea it is that has made this country great; what it is
+that has made of it a nation of free men and educated men--a nation in
+which the commonest laborer has the school open to him, as well as the
+workshop; in which the commonest laborer can sit down three times every
+day to a bountiful table. We sometimes forget the idea on which our
+country was founded; the idea which prompted Jefferson, as a young man,
+to stand up in the legislature of Virginia and fight through three bills
+directly affecting mere questions of law, but determining the future of
+this country more largely than any other acts,--even the acts of
+Washington himself. Those three bills, one providing for the separation
+of Church and State, one for the abolition of primogeniture, and the
+third for the abolition of entail. The idea that ran through that time
+was the idea of equal individual manhood--of the supremacy of the man to
+all else, to the State itself, to Government and Society; that the
+individual man was the one thing to be taken care of; that it is the
+sole business of the Government to give him rights of manhood, to
+protect him in his personal freedom, and then to let him alone.
+
+We have imported of late subtly sophistical advocates of socialism who
+would set up in opposition to these American ideas the system of State
+paternalism, and assert the doctrine that the State should not let a man
+alone to make the best use he can of his abilities and opportunities,
+but should guide him and support him and direct him and provide for him
+and, in short, make a moral and intellectual cripple of him. That is the
+new and un-American idea which has recently been promulgated and which
+has found expression in New York in 60,000 votes; it is the idea which
+has been seized upon by those persons who have leagued themselves
+together to secure to themselves larger profits upon their industry or
+investments by taxing the whole people for the benefit of the few,
+making the State the pap-giver, taking from the people the taxes that
+should be rigidly limited to the needs of the government and turning
+them into the pockets of the individual; supporting, helping and making,
+as I have said, a cripple of him. That is the idea which has prompted in
+large degree disturbances through which we have passed, and to which
+reference has been made here to-night. It is the idea that somehow or in
+some particular way a man should have some support other than his own
+individual exertion, and absolute freedom can provide for him.
+
+It seems to me that one lesson we here to-night should take most to
+heart is that lesson taught by the whole history of our country, that
+the American idea--the idea of the individuality and manhood of man,
+the idea of a government formed simply to protect man, as individuals in
+their rights, and leave them free in their action and mode of
+thought--is the idea that has made this country great. It is in
+pursuance of that that we have become the nation we are; it is by
+adherence to that that we have become a model to all other nations, so
+much so that in the German election yesterday, with the aid of friendly
+foreign despots, with the aid of a threatened war, with all the aids
+that imperialism can call to its assistance, Bismarck was able to carry
+his point only by a small majority. This is the idea under which we have
+founded our nation and grown great, and it is by that idea that we shall
+continue great, if we are so to continue. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT
+
+
+HARVARD AND YALE
+
+[Speech of Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University, at the
+  seventy-second anniversary banquet of the New England Society in the
+  City of New York, December 22, 1877. The President of the Society,
+  William Borden, presided, and said by way of introducing the speaker:
+  "Gentlemen, I now give you the sixth regular toast: 'Harvard and Yale,
+  the two elder sisters among the educational institutions of New
+  England, where generous rivalry has ever promoted patriotism and
+  learning. Their children have, in peace and war, in life and death,
+  deserved well of the Republic. Smile, Heaven, upon this fair
+  conjunction.' [Applause.] We are fortunate to-night, gentlemen, in
+  having with us the representatives of both these institutions, and I
+  will ask President Eliot, of Harvard, first, to respond." The allusion
+  made by President Eliot to the words of the Secretary of State refers
+  to the following remarks which William M. Evarts made in the course of
+  his address: "New England, I observe, while it retains all its
+  sterling qualities, is nevertheless moving forward in the direction of
+  conciliation and peace. I remember when I was a boy, I travelled 240
+  miles by stage-coach from Boston to New Haven to avoid going to
+  Harvard University which was across the Bridge. [Great applause and
+  laughter.] It was because of the religious animosities which pervaded
+  the community, and I suppose animated my youthful breast; and now here
+  I come to a New England Society, and sit between the Presidents of
+  those renowned universities, who have apparently come here for the
+  purpose of enjoying themselves, and of exhibiting that proximity is no
+  longer dangerous to the peace of those universities. [Applause and
+  laughter.] No doubt there is a considerable warfare going on between
+  them as to the methods of instruction; but to us who have looked on,
+  we have seen no more obtrusive manifestation of it than that the
+  President on my left, of Yale, in dealing with the subjects that have
+  successively been placed before him, has pursued the methods of that
+  university, its comprehensive method, that takes in the whole
+  curriculum; while on my right, the eclectic principle is exercised by
+  my friend, President Eliot [applause and laughter], and he has
+  confined himself to the dainty morsels of the repast. I speak of this
+  to show that, although an amelioration of climate or an obliteration
+  of virtues is not to be expected in New England, or in New England
+  men, yet there may be an advancement of the sunshine of the heart, and
+  that an incorporation of our narrow territory in a great nation, and a
+  transfusion of our opinions, our ideas, our purposes into the veins
+  of a nation of forty millions of people, may enlarge and liberalize
+  even the views, the plans, and the action of New England."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--I am obliged to my friend Dr.
+Clarke [James Freeman Clarke, D.D.] for the complimentary terms in which
+he has presented me to you. But I must appeal to your commiseration.
+Harvard and Yale! Can any undergraduate of either institution, can any
+recent graduate of either institution, imagine a man responding to that
+toast? [Laughter.] However, I must make the best of the position, and
+speak of some points upon which the two institutions are clearly agreed.
+And here I am reminded of a story of a certain New England farmer, who
+said that he and 'Squire Jones had more cows between them than all the
+rest of the village; and his brag being disputed, he said he could prove
+it, for the 'Squire had forty-five cows and he had one, and the village
+altogether had not forty-six. [Laughter.]
+
+We shall all agree that it is for the best interests of this country
+that it have sundry universities, of diverse tone, atmosphere, sphere,
+representing different opinions and different methods of study to some
+extent, and in different trainings, though with the same end.
+[Applause.] Holding this view, I have been somewhat concerned to see of
+late that the original differences between Harvard and Yale seem to be
+rapidly disappearing. For example, a good many years ago, Harvard set
+out on what is called the "elective" system, and now I read in the Yale
+catalogue a long list of studies called "optional," which strikes me as
+bearing a strong resemblance to our elective courses. [Laughter.] Again,
+my friend the Secretary of State has done me the honor of alluding to
+the reasons which induced his father, I suppose, rather than himself, to
+send him on that journey, which we Harvard men all deplore. [Laughter.]
+
+Now, it is unquestioned, that about the year 1700 a certain number of
+Congregationalist clergymen, who belonged to the Established Church (for
+we are too apt to forget that Congregationalism was the "Established
+Church" of that time, and none other was allowed), thought that Harvard
+was getting altogether too latitudinarian, and though they were every
+one of them graduates of Harvard, they went off and set up another
+college in Connecticut, where a stricter doctrine should be taught.
+Harvard men have rather nursed the hope that this distinction between
+Harvard and Yale might be permanent. [Laughter.] But I regret to say
+that I have lately observed many strong indications that it is wholly
+likely to disappear. For example, to come at once to the foundations, I
+read in the papers the other day, and I am credibly informed it is true,
+that the head of Yale College voted to install a minister whose opinions
+upon the vital, pivotal, fundamental doctrine of eternal damnation are
+unsound. [Laughter.] Then, again, I look at the annual reports of the
+Bureau of Education on this department at Washington, and I read there
+for some years that Harvard College was unsectarian; and I knew that it
+was right, because I made the return myself. [Laughter.] I read also
+that Yale College was a Congregationalist College; and I had no doubt
+that that was right, because I supposed Dr. Porter had made the report.
+But now we read in that same report that Yale College is unsectarian.
+That is a great progress. The fact is, both these universities have
+found out that in a country which has no established church and no
+dominant sect you cannot build a university on a sect at all--you must
+build it upon the nation. [Applause.]
+
+But, gentlemen, there are some other points, I think, of national
+education on which we shall find these two early founded universities to
+agree. For example, we have lately read, in the Message of the Chief
+Magistrate, that a national university would be a good thing.
+[Applause.] Harvard and Yale are of one mind upon that subject, but they
+want to have a national university defined. [Laughter.] If it means a
+university of national resort, we say amen. If it means a university
+where the youth of this land are taught to love their country and to
+serve her, we say amen [applause]; and we point, both of us, to our past
+in proof that we are national in that sense. [Applause.] But if it means
+that the national university is to be a university administered and
+managed by the wise Congress of the United States, then we should agree
+in taking some slight exceptions. [Laughter.] We should not question for
+a moment the capacity of Congress to pick out and appoint the
+professors of Latin and Greek, and the ancient languages, because we
+find that there is an astonishing number of classical orators in
+Congress, and there is manifested there a singular acquaintance with the
+legislation of all the Latin races. [Laughter.] But when it should come
+to some other humbler professorships we might perhaps entertain a doubt.
+For example, we have not entire faith in the trust that Congress has in
+the unchangeableness of the laws of arithmetic. [Laughter.] We might
+think that their competency to select a professor of history might be
+doubted. They seem to have an impression that there is such a thing as
+"American" political economy, which can no more be than "American"
+chemistry or "American" physics. [Applause.] Finally, gentlemen, we
+should a little distrust the selection by Congress of a professor of
+ethics. [Laughter.] Of course, we should feel no doubt in regard to the
+tenure of office of the professors being entirely suitable, it being the
+well-known practice of both branches of Congress to select men solely
+for fitness, without regard to locality, and to keep them in office as
+long as they are competent and faithful. [Laughter and applause.]
+
+But, gentlemen, I think we ought to recur for a moment, perhaps, to the
+Pilgrim Fathers [laughter], and I desire to say that both Harvard and
+Yale recognize the fact that there are some things before which
+universities "pale their ineffectual fires."
+
+ "Words are but breath; but where great deeds were done,
+  A power abides, transferred from sire to son."
+
+Now, gentlemen, on that sandy, desolate spot of Plymouth great deeds
+were done, and we are here to commemorate them. Those were hard times.
+It was a terrible voyage, and they were hungry and cold and worn out
+with labor, and they took their guns to the church and the field, and
+the half of them died in the first winter. They were not prosperous
+times that we recall with this hour. Let us take some comfort from that
+in the present circumstances of our beloved country. She is in danger of
+a terrible disaster, but let us remember that the times which future
+generations delight to recall are not those of ease and prosperity, but
+those of adversity bravely borne. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL A. ELIOT
+
+
+THE SOURCE OF SONG AND STORY
+
+[Speech of Rev. Samuel A. Eliot at the fifteenth annual dinner of the
+  New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1894. The
+  President of the Society, Robert D. Benedict, presided. In introducing
+  Mr. Eliot, he said: "I am not aware that there were any poets among
+  the Pilgrim Fathers. They had something else to do besides versifying.
+  But poesy has found many a home among the hills of New England. And
+  many a home, not only in New England, but in Old England also, was
+  saddened during the year that is gone to hear that the song of one of
+  the poets of New England was hushed forever. I give you as the next
+  sentiment: 'The Poets and Poetry of New England,' and I call upon the
+  Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, of the Church of the Saviour, in this city, to
+  respond."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY IN
+BROOKLYN:--I have been given to understand, sir, that in these
+unpuritanic days lovers keep late hours; and as I listened to the wooing
+of fair Brooklyn by the eloquent son[1] of New York I thought we might
+be here till papa turned out the gas. Brooklyn is a New England maiden
+and a trifle coy, and it may take even more than an hour's pleading and
+persuasive wooing to win her. [Applause.] You ask me, sir, to turn our
+thoughts back from these considerations of pressing and immediate
+problems, from discussion of international and even intercontinental
+relations, to the beginnings and the causes of our rejoicings here. I am
+glad to do that, for I love to trace the connections and contrasts of
+past and present, and to mark the growth and evolution of that New
+England genius and character which are illustrated at these tables.
+
+The early history of New England seems to many minds as dry and
+unromantic as it was hard and narrow. No mist of distance softens the
+harsh outlines, no mirage of tradition lifts events and characters into
+picturesque beauty. There seems a poverty of sentiment. The
+transplanting of a people breaks the successions and associations of
+history. No memories of conqueror and crusader stir for us poetic fancy.
+Instead of the glitter of chivalry there is but the sombre homespun of
+Puritan peasants. In place of the "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"
+of Gothic cathedral there is but the rude log meeting-house and
+schoolhouse. Instead of Christmas merriment there is only the noise of
+axe and hammer or the dreary droning of psalms. It seems a history bleak
+and barren of poetic inspiration, at once plebeian and prosaic.
+
+How is it then that out of the hard soil of the Puritan thought and
+character, out of the sterile rocks of the New England conscience, have
+sprung the flowers of poetry which you bid me celebrate to-night? From
+those songless beginnings have burst, in later generations, melodies
+that charm and uplift our land--now a deep organ peal filling the air
+with music, now a trumpet blast thrilling the blood of patriotism, now a
+drum-beat to which duty delights to march, now a joyous fantasy of the
+violin bringing smiles to the lips, now the soft vibrations of the harp
+that fill the eyes with tears. What is it in the Puritan heritage,
+externally so bare and cold, that make it intrinsically so poetic and
+inspiring?
+
+There is no poetry in the darkness of the Puritan's creed nor in the
+rigid rectitude of his morality. His surly boldness, his tough hold on
+the real, his austere piety enforce respect, but do not allure
+affection. The genial graces cannot bear company with ruthless bigotry
+and Hebraic energy. Nor is there any poetry in the mere struggle for
+existence, and the mean poverty that marked the outward life. The
+Pilgrims were often pinched for food; they suffered in a bitter climate;
+they lived in isolation. We think lightly of these things because we
+cannot help imagining that they knew that they were founding a mighty
+nation. But that knowledge was denied them. Generations of them sank
+into nameless graves without any vision of the days when their
+descendants should rise up and call them blessed. Nor is there any
+inspiration in the measure of their outward success. Judged by their own
+ideals, the Puritans failed. They would neither recognize nor approve
+the civilization that has sprung from the seeds of their planting. They
+tried to establish a theocracy; they stand in history as the heroes of
+democracy. Alike in their social and religious aims they ignored
+ineradicable elements in human nature. They attempted the impossible.
+How then have their deeds become the source of song and story? Why all
+the honor that we pay them? It is not because in danger, in sacrifice,
+and in failure, they were stout-hearted. Many a freebooter or soldier of
+fortune has been that. It is, as one said whose name I bear, "because
+they were stout-hearted for an ideal--their ideal, not ours, of civil
+and religious liberty. Wherever and whenever resolute men and women
+devote themselves, not to material, but to spiritual ends, there the
+world's heroes are made," and made to be remembered, and to become the
+inspiration of poem and romance and noble daring.
+
+Scratch a New Englander to-day, it is said, and you find the Puritan.
+That is no less true of the poets than of the warriors and the men of
+facts and figures. The New England poets derived their nourishment from
+the deep earth of that wholesome past, into which the roots of all our
+lives go down. The mystical and mediaeval side of Puritanism finds its
+embodiment in Hawthorne; its moral ideals shine in Bryant; its
+independency is incarnated in Emerson. Emerson is the type of the
+nineteenth-century Puritan, in life pure, in temperament saintly, in
+spirit detached from the earth, blazing a path for himself through the
+wilderness of speculation, seeing things from the centre, working for
+the reconstruction of Christian society and the readjustment of the
+traditional religion. An enfranchised Puritan is a Puritan still. Of
+such is Holmes, who shot his flashing arrows at all shams and
+substitutes for reality, and never failed to hit the mark; of such is
+Whittier,
+
+ "Whose swelling and vehement heart
+  Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart;"
+
+of such is Lowell, to whom belongs the supreme distinction of having
+written the greatest poem yet produced on this continent.
+
+We who have undergone the shock of material, intellectual and spiritual
+growth too often fail to recognize our debt to the deserted cause. Our
+poets remind us that our very freedom is our inheritance from the system
+we reject. It was inevitable that our six great poets should have been
+in literature, idealists; in politics, abolitionists; in religion,
+Unitarians. It was the progressive independency of a Puritan ancestry
+declaring itself. Save, perhaps, in Longfellow, no gloss or glamour of
+Europe obscures their poetry. No hush of servility rests on it. No
+patronage summoned it, and no indifference silenced it. Our poetry is
+the genuine utterance of democracy, and betrays in every syllable the
+fibre of freemen.
+
+New England poetry is well nigh as Puritan in its form as in its spirit.
+There is in it a true Cromwellian temper. Our poets have been patriots,
+firm and prophetic believers in their country's destiny, loving their
+country so well that they dared to tell the sometimes unwelcome truth
+about her. The Biblical strain is in our poetry. If our English Bible
+were lost to us we could reconstruct almost all of its best verses out
+of Whittier's poems. The thunders of Sinai still roll in Lowell's fiery
+denunciations of smug conventionalities and wickedness in high places.
+The music of the psalmist is in Longfellow's meditations, and all the
+prophet's vision in Emerson's inspired utterance. The Puritan restraint
+is on New England poetry. There is no noisy rhetoric, no tossing about
+of big adjectives and stinging epithets, no abuse of our noble English
+tongue by cheap exaggerations. Our poets do not need to underscore words
+or to use heavy headlines and italics. Their invective has been mighty
+because so restrained and so compressed. There is none of the common
+cant or the common plausibilities. There is no passing off of
+counterfeits for realities, no "pouring of the waters of concession into
+the bottomless buckets of expediency."
+
+Thus do our poets declare their inheritance. But they do not stop there.
+To the indomitable power of the Puritan conscience they have added a
+wealth of imaginative sympathy. They have made sweetness to be the issue
+of strength, and beauty to be the halo of power. They have seen the
+vision of the rainbow round the throne. They have touched with divine
+light the prosaic story of New England, and found the picturesque in
+what seemed commonplace. They have seen the great in the little, and
+ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual insight. They have
+set to music the homely service and simple enjoyments of common life.
+They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very
+provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some
+foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But,
+verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national
+estate. Our poets have preserved for us in ballads our homespun legends.
+They have imaged in verse the beauty of New England's hills and waters.
+As we read there comes the whiff of fragrance which transports us to the
+hillside pasture where the sweet fern and sorrel grow, or the salt
+breeze of the sea blows again on our cheeks, or the rippling Merrimac
+sings in our ears, or the heights of Katahdin or Wachusett, lift our
+eyes upward. Finally, our poets, in their characters, disprove the
+reproach that a democracy can produce only average men. As they wrote,
+they were.
+
+The harp of New England is silent. The master hands sweep the chords no
+more. But shall we dare to think that the coming generation will have no
+songs and no singers? Shall we build the sepulchre of poetry? Shall we
+express ourselves only in histories and criticisms? Shall man no longer
+behold God and nature face to face? "Things are in the saddle to-day,"
+said Emerson; and indeed it may well depress us to see our greatness as
+a nation measured by the number of bushels of wheat raised, or the
+number of hogs packed. "The value of a country," said Lowell, "is
+weighed in scales more delicate than the balance of trade. On a map of
+the world you may cover Judea with your thumb, Athens with a finger tip,
+and neither of them figures in the prices current, yet they still live
+in the thought and action of every civilized man. Material success is
+good, but only as the necessary preliminary of better things. The
+measure of a nation's true success is the amount it has contributed to
+the thought, the moral energy, the intellectual happiness, the
+spiritual hope and consolation of mankind." Before we can have a rebirth
+of poetry, we must have a fresh infusion of the Puritan devotion to
+ideal ends. We must be baptized again into the spirit of non-conformity,
+of intellectual and moral honesty, the spirit which does not suffer men
+to go with the crowd, when reason and conscience and a living God bid
+them go alone. There never was a time when we needed more the background
+of Puritanism. We need in our business and our politics a sterner sense
+of the fear of God, and in our home life a renewed simplicity. If we are
+to build up to the level of our best opportunities, we must build down
+to solid foundation on the sense of obligation. We have new times, new
+land and new men. Shall we not have new thought, new work and new
+worship? [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+RALPH WALDO EMERSON
+
+
+ENGLAND, MOTHER OF NATIONS
+
+[Speech of Ralph Waldo Emerson at the annual banquet of the Manchester
+  Athenaeum, Manchester, England, November, 1847. Sir Archibald Alison,
+  the historian, presided]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--It is pleasant to me to meet this
+great and brilliant company, and doubly pleasant to see the faces of so
+many distinguished persons on this platform. But I have known all these
+persons already. When I was at home, they were as near to me as they are
+to you. The arguments of the League and its leader are known to all the
+friends of free trade. The gaieties and genius, the political, the
+social, the parietal wit of "Punch" go duly every fortnight to every boy
+and girl in Boston and New York. Sir, when I came to sea, I found the
+"History of Europe"[2] on the ship's cabin table, the property of the
+captain;--a sort of programme or play-bill to tell the seafaring New
+Englander what he shall find on landing here. And as for Dombey, sir,
+there is no land where paper exists to print on, where it is not found;
+no man who can read, that does not read it, and, if he cannot, he finds
+some charitable pair of eyes that can, and hears it.
+
+But these things are not for me to say; these compliments, though true,
+would better come from one who felt and understood these merits more. I
+am not here to exchange civilities with you, but rather to speak of that
+which I am sure interests these gentlemen more than their own praises;
+of that which is good in holidays and working-days, the same in one
+century and in another century. That which lures a solitary American in
+the woods with the wish to see England, is the moral peculiarity of the
+Saxon race,--its commanding sense of right and wrong,--the love and
+devotion to that,--this is the imperial trait, which arms them with the
+sceptre of the globe. It is this which lies at the foundation of that
+aristocratic character, which certainly wanders into strange vagaries,
+so that its origin is often lost sight of, but which, if it should lose
+this, would find itself paralyzed; and in trade, and in the mechanic's
+shop, gives that honesty in performance, that thoroughness and solidity
+of work, which is a national characteristic. This conscience is one
+element, and the other is that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship,
+that homage of man to man, running through all classes,--the electing of
+worthy persons to a certain fraternity, to acts of kindness and warm and
+staunch support, from year to year, from youth to age,--which is alike
+lovely and honorable to those who render and those who receive
+it;--which stands in strong contrast with the superficial attachments of
+other races, their excessive courtesy, and short-lived connection.
+
+You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it be, I
+have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates
+real and not pretended joys; and I think it just, in this time of gloom
+and commercial disaster, of affliction and beggary in these districts,
+that on these very accounts I speak of, you should not fail to keep your
+literary anniversary. I seem to hear you say that, for all that is come
+and gone, yet we will not reduce by one chaplet or one oak-leaf the
+braveries of our annual feast. For I must tell you, I was given to
+understand in my childhood that the British island, from which my
+forefathers came, was no lotus-garden, no paradise of serene sky and
+roses and music and merriment all the year round, no, but a cold, foggy,
+mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open air, but robust
+men and virtuous women, and these of a wonderful fibre and endurance;
+that their best parts were slowly revealed; their virtues did not come
+out until they quarrelled; they did not strike twelve the first time;
+good lovers, good haters, and you could know little about them till you
+had seen them long, and little good of them till you had seen them in
+action; that in prosperity they were moody and dumpish, but in adversity
+they were grand.
+
+Is it not true, sir, that the wise ancients did not praise the ship
+parting with flying colors from the port, but only that brave sailor
+which came back with torn sheets and battered sides, stript of her
+banners, but having ridden out the storm? And so, gentlemen, I feel in
+regard to this aged England, with the possessions, honors and trophies,
+and also with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her,
+irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot
+be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new
+and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines and competing
+populations,--I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering
+that she has seen dark days before; indeed, with a kind of instinct that
+she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle
+and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. I see
+her in her old age, not decrepit, but young, and still daring to believe
+in her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, All hail!
+mother of nations, mother of heroes, with strength still equal to the
+time; still wise to entertain and swift to execute the policy which the
+mind and heart of mankind require in the present hour, and thus only
+hospitable to the foreigner, and truly a home to the thoughtful and
+generous who are born in the soil. So be it! so let it be! If it be not
+so, if the courage of England goes with the chances of a commercial
+crisis, I will go back to the capes of Massachusetts, and my own Indian
+stream, and say to my countrymen, the old race are all gone, and the
+elasticity and hope of mankind must henceforth remain on the Alleghany
+ranges, or nowhere.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE MEMORY OF BURNS
+
+[Speech of Ralph Waldo Emerson at the festival of the Boston Burns Club,
+  at the Parker House, Boston, Mass., January 25, 1859, commemorating
+  the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Scottish bard. Around
+  the tables were gathered a company numbering nearly three hundred,
+  including Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, George S. Hillard, Nathaniel P.
+  Willis, and others of the literary guild. Among the decorations of the
+  banqueting-hall was displayed a bust of Burns crowned with a wreath of
+  roses and bays. Mr. Emerson spoke to the principal toast of the
+  evening, "The Memory of Burns," and his graceful flights of oratory
+  were received with cheers, and calls for "More! More!" which the
+  presiding officer, General John S. Tyler, quieted with the remark:
+  "Mr. Emerson begs to be excused, not because the well of gushing
+  waters is exhausted, but because, in the kindness of his heart, he
+  thinks he ought to leave room for gentlemen who are to succeed him."
+  Willis, writing later of the festival, said of this speech, "Why, in
+  that large and convivially excited audience, there was not, while he
+  spoke, a wandering eye--not a pulse or a breath that was not held
+  absolutely captive. Wherein lies the wonderful spell?"]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--I do not know by what untoward
+accident it has chanced--and I forbear to inquire--that, in this
+accomplished circle, it should fall to me, the worst Scotsman of all, to
+receive your commands, and at the latest hour, too, to respond to the
+sentiment just offered, and which, indeed, makes the occasion. But I am
+told there is no appeal, and I must trust to the inspiration of the
+theme to make a fitness which does not otherwise exist.
+
+Yet, sir, I heartily feel the singular claims of the occasion. At the
+first announcement, from I know not whence, that the twenty-fifth of
+January was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, a
+sudden consent warned the great English race, in all its kingdoms,
+colonies and states, all over the world, to keep the festival. We are
+here to hold our parliament with love and poesy, as men were wont to do
+in the Middle Ages. Those famous parliaments might or might not have had
+more stateliness, and better singers than we--though that is yet to be
+known--but they could not have better reason.
+
+I can only explain this singular unanimity in a race which rarely acts
+together--but rather after their watchword, each for himself--by the
+fact that Robert Burns, the poet of the middle class, represents in the
+mind of men to-day that great uprising of the middle class against the
+armed and privileged minorities--that uprising which worked politically
+in the American and French Revolutions, and which, not in governments so
+much as in education and in social order, has changed the face of the
+world. In order for this destiny, his birth, breeding and fortune were
+low. His organic sentiment was absolute independence, and resting, as it
+should, on a life of labor. No man existed who could look down on him.
+They that looked into his eyes saw that they might look down the sky as
+easily. His muse and teaching was common sense, joyful, aggressive,
+irresistible. Not Latimer, nor Luther, struck more telling blows
+against false theology than did this brave singer. The "Confession of
+Augsburg," the "Declaration of Independence," the French "Rights of
+Man," and the "Marseillaise," are not more weighty documents in the
+history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His satire has lost none of
+its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through the air. He is so
+substantially a reformer, that I find his grand, plain sense in close
+chain with the greatest masters--Rabelais, Shakespeare in comedy,
+Cervantes, Butler, and Burns. If I should add another name, I find it
+only in a living countryman of Burns. He is an exceptional genius. The
+people who care nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns. It was
+indifferent--they thought who saw him--whether he wrote verse or not; he
+could have done anything else as well.
+
+Yet how true a poet is he! And the poet, too, of poor men, of
+hodden-gray, and the Guernsey-coat, and the blouse. He has given voice
+to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farmhouse and
+cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man's
+wine; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of
+brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding
+amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. What a love of
+nature! and--shall I say it?--of middle-class nature. Not great, like
+Goethe, in the stars, or like Byron, on the ocean, or Moore, in the
+luxurious East, but in the homely landscape which the poor see around
+them--bleak leagues of pasture and stubble, ice, and sleet, and rain,
+and snow-choked brooks; birds, hares, field-mice, thistles, and heather,
+which he daily knew. How many "Bonny Doons," and "John Anderson my
+Joes," and "Auld Lang Synes," all around the earth, have his verses been
+applied to! And his love songs still woo and melt the youths and maids;
+the farm work, the country holiday, the fishing cobble, are still his
+debtors to-day.
+
+And, as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working
+humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural
+district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he
+has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only
+example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single
+man. But more than this. He had that secret of genius to draw from the
+bottom of society the strength of its speech, and astonish the ears of
+the polite with these artless words, better than art, and filtered of
+all offence through his beauty. It seemed odious to Luther that the
+devil should have all the best tunes; he would bring them into the
+churches; and Burns knew how to take from fairs and gypsies, blacksmiths
+and drovers, the speech of the market and street, and clothe it with
+melody.
+
+But I am detaining you too long. The memory of Burns--I am afraid heaven
+and earth have taken too good care of it to leave us anything to say.
+The west winds are murmuring it. Open the windows behind you, and
+hearken for the incoming tide, what the waves say of it. The doves,
+perching always on the eaves of the Stone Chapel [King's Chapel]
+opposite, may know something about it. Every home in broad Scotland
+keeps his fame bright. The memory of Burns--every man's, and boy's, and
+girl's head carries snatches of his songs, and can say them by heart,
+and, what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from
+mouth to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the
+corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them; nay, the music-boxes
+at Geneva are framed and toothed to play them; the hand-organs of the
+Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them
+in the spires. They are the property and the solace of mankind.
+[Cheers.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+WAR
+
+[Speech of Ralph Waldo Emerson at the dinner of Harvard Alumni at
+  Cambridge, Mass., July 21, 1865, on the occasion of the commemoration
+  of the patriot heroes of Harvard College in the Civil War.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--With whatever opinions we come
+here, I think it is not in man to see, without a feeling of pride and
+pleasure, a tried soldier, the armed defender of the right. I think
+that, in these last years, all opinions have been affected by the
+magnificent and stupendous spectacle, which Divine Providence has
+offered us, of the energies that slept in the children of this
+country,--that slept and have awakened. I see thankfully those who are
+here; but dim eyes in vain explore for some who are not. They shine the
+brighter "in the domain of tender memory." The old Greek, Heraclitus,
+said: "War is the father of all things." He said it, no doubt, as
+science, but we of this day can repeat it as a political and social
+truth.
+
+War passes the power of all chemical solvents, breaking up the old
+cohesions, and allowing the atoms of society to take a new order. It is
+not the Government but the war that has appointed the great generals,
+sifted out the pedants, put in the new and vigorous blood. [Great
+applause.] The war has lifted many other people, besides Grant and
+Sherman, into their true places. Even Divine Providence, we may say,
+always seems to work after a certain military necessity. Every nation
+punishes the general who is not victorious. It is a rule in games of
+chance that "the cards beat all the players," and revolutions disconcert
+and outwit all the insurgents. The revolutions carry their own points,
+sometimes to the ruin of those who set them on foot. The proof that war
+also is within the highest right, is a marked benefactor in the hands of
+Divine Providence, is its _morale_. The war gave back integrity to the
+erring and immoral nation. It charged with power, peaceful, amiable,
+men, to whose whole life war and discord were abhorrent. What an
+infusion of character went out from this and the other colleges! What an
+infusion of character down to the ranks! The experience has been
+uniform, that it is the gentle soul that makes the firm hero, after all.
+It is easy to recall the mood in which our young men, snatched from
+every peaceful pursuit, went to war. Many of them had never handled a
+gun. They said, "It is not in me to resist. I go because I must. It is a
+duty which I shall never forgive myself if I decline. I do not know that
+I can make a soldier. I may be very clumsy; perhaps I shall be timid;
+but you can rely on me. Only one thing is certain, I can well die, but I
+cannot afford to misbehave." [Loud applause.]
+
+In fact, the infusion of culture and tender humanity from these scholars
+and idealists who went to the war in their own despite,--God knows they
+had no fury for killing their old friends and countrymen,--had its
+signal and lasting effect. It was found that enthusiasm was a more
+potent ally than science and munitions of war without it. "'Tis a
+principle of war," said Napoleon--_principe de guerre_--"that when you
+can use the thunderbolt, you must prefer it to the cannon." Enthusiasm
+was the thunderbolt. Here in this little Massachusetts, in smaller Rhode
+Island, in this little nest of New England republics, it flamed out when
+that guilty gun was aimed at Sumter.
+
+Mr. Chairman, standing here in Harvard College, the parent of all the
+colleges, in Massachusetts, the mother of all the North, when I consider
+her influence on the country as a principal planter of the Western
+States, and now by her teachers, preachers, journalists and books, as
+well as by traffic and production, the diffuser of religious, literary
+and political opinion, and when I see how irresistible the convictions
+of Massachusetts are on those swarming populations, I think the little
+State bigger than I knew; and when her blood is up, she has a fist that
+could knock down an empire. And her blood was roused. [Great applause.]
+Scholars exchanged the black coat for the blue. A single company in the
+44th Massachusetts contained thirty-five sons of Harvard. You all know
+as well as I the story of these dedicated men, who knew well on what
+duty they went, whose fathers and mothers said of each slaughtered son,
+"We gave him up when he enlisted." One mother said, when her son was
+offered the command of the first negro regiment, "If he accepts it, I
+shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot." [Applause.] These
+men, thus tender, thus high-bred, thus peaceable, were always in the
+front, and always employed. They might say with their forefathers, the
+old Norse Vikings, "We sang the mass of lances from morning until
+evening;" and in how many cases it chanced, when the hero had fallen,
+they who came by night to his funeral on the morrow returned to his
+war-path, to show his slayers the way to death!
+
+Ah! young brothers, all honor and gratitude to you! you, manly
+defenders, Liberty's and Humanity's home guard. We shall not again
+disparage America, now that we have seen what men it will bear. We
+see--we thank you for it--a new era, worth to mankind all the treasure
+and the lives it has cost; yes, worth to the world the lives of all this
+generation of American men, if they had been demanded. [Loud applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE WISDOM OF CHINA
+
+[Speech of Ralph Waldo Emerson at the banquet given by the City of
+  Boston, August 21, 1868, to the Hon. Anson Burlingame, Envoy
+  Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from China, and his
+  associates, Chih Ta-Jin and Sun Ta-Jin, of the Chinese Embassy to the
+  United States and the European powers. Mr. Emerson responded to the
+  toast: "The union of the farthest East and the farthest West."]
+
+
+MR. MAYOR:--I suppose we are all of one opinion on this
+remarkable occasion of meeting the Embassy sent from the oldest Empire
+in the world to the youngest Republic. All share the surprise and
+pleasure when the venerable oriental dynasty, hitherto a romantic legend
+to most of us, suddenly steps into the fellowship of nations. This
+auspicious event, considered in connection with the late innovations in
+Japan, marks a new era, and is an irresistible result of the science
+which has given us the power of steam and the electric telegraph. It is
+the more welcome for the surprise. We had said of China, as the old
+prophet said of Egypt, "Her strength is to sit still." Her people had
+such elemental conservatism, that by some wonderful force of race and
+national manners the wars and revolutions that occur in her annals
+proved but momentary swells or surges on the Pacific Ocean of her
+history, leaving no trace. But in its immovability this race has claims.
+
+China is old not in time only, but in wisdom, which is gray hair to a
+nation, or rather, truly seen, is eternal youth. As we know, China had
+the magnet centuries before Europe; and block-printing and stereotype,
+and lithography, and gunpowder, and vaccination, and canals; had
+anticipated Linnaeus's nomenclature of plants; had codes, journals,
+clubs, hackney coaches, and, thirty centuries before New York, had the
+custom of New-Year's calls of comity and reconciliation. I need not
+mention its useful arts,--its pottery, indispensable to the world; the
+luxury of silks; and its tea, the cordial of nations. But I must
+remember that she had respectable remains of astronomic science, and
+historic records of forgotten time, that have supplied important gaps in
+the ancient history of the western nations.
+
+Then she has philosophers who cannot be spared. Confucius has not yet
+gathered all his fame. When Socrates heard that the oracle declared that
+he was the wisest of men, he said, it must mean that other men held that
+they were wise, but that he knew that he knew nothing. Confucius had
+already affirmed this of himself: and what we call the Golden Rule of
+Jesus, Confucius had uttered in the same terms, five hundred years
+before. His morals, though addressed to a state of society utterly
+unlike ours, we read with profit to-day. His rare perception appears in
+his Golden Mean, his doctrine of Reciprocity, his unerring insight,
+putting always the blame of our misfortunes on our selves; as when to
+the governor who complained of thieves he said: "If you, sir, were not
+covetous, though you should reward them for it, they would not steal."
+His ideal of greatness predicts Marcus Antoninus. At the same time, he
+abstained from paradox, and met the ingrained prudence of his nation by
+saying always: "Bend one cubit to straighten eight."
+
+China interests us at this moment in a point of politics. I am sure that
+gentlemen around me bear in mind the bill which Hon. Mr. Jenckes, of
+Rhode Island, has twice attempted to carry through Congress, requiring
+that candidates for public offices shall first pass examination on their
+literary qualifications for the same. Well, China has preceded us, as
+well as England and France, in this essential correction of a reckless
+usage; and the like high esteem of education appears in China in social
+life, to whose distinctions it is made an indispensable passport.
+
+It is gratifying to know that the advantages of the new intercourse
+between the two countries are daily manifest on the Pacific coast. The
+immigrants from Asia come in crowds. Their power of continuous labor,
+their versatility in adapting themselves to new conditions, their
+stoical economy, are unlooked-for virtues. They send back to their
+friends, in China, money, new products of art, new tools, machinery, new
+foods, etc., and are thus establishing a commerce without limit.
+
+I cannot help adding, after what I have heard to-night, that I have read
+in the journals a statement from an English source, that Sir Frederic
+Bruce attributed to Mr. Burlingame the merit of the happy reform in the
+relations of foreign governments to China. I am quite sure that I heard
+from Mr. Burlingame in New York, in his last visit to America, that the
+whole merit of it belonged to Sir Frederic Bruce. It appears that the
+ambassadors were emulous in their magnanimity. It is certainly the best
+guaranty for the interests of China and of humanity.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM MAXWELL EVARTS
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION
+
+[Speech of William M. Evarts at the sixty-seventh anniversary banquet of
+  the New England Society in the City of New York, December 23, 1872.
+  The President, Elliot C. Cowden, occupied the chair. Introducing the
+  speaker, he said: "I now ask your attention to the eighth regular
+  toast: 'The Geneva Tribunal of Arbitration, a victory of peace,
+  demonstrating that the statesman's wisdom is mightier than the
+  warrior's sword.' This sentiment will be responded to by one who has
+  added a new lustre to a fame already achieved by his consummate
+  argument in defence of our claims before the late Tribunal of
+  Arbitration, your honored ex-President, Mr. Evarts."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--It
+has, I believe, in the history of our race, never been permitted that a
+great nation should pass through the perils of a serious internal
+conflict without suffering, in some form or other, an intervention in
+its affairs by other nations that would not have been permitted, or been
+possible, but for the distraction of its power, or the stress to which
+it was exposed by its intestine strifes. And when, in our modern
+civilization, a nation so great as ours was pressed by so great a stress
+as our Civil War imposed upon us, we could not escape this common fate
+in human affairs. It has rarely, in the history of our race, been
+permitted to a nation that has suffered this foreign intervention, in
+whatever form, to preserve its peace and the peace of the world, and yet
+settle its account with the nations which had interposed in its affairs.
+[Applause.]
+
+When the great power of France seized upon the occasion of our Civil War
+to renew a European possession upon our boundaries, and when England,
+upon the same opportunity, swept the seas of our commerce; properly to
+deal with those forms of intervention, when our domestic troubles were
+ended by the triumph of our arms, called for the exercise of the highest
+statesmanship and the most powerful diplomacy. It was at this juncture
+that our great minister of foreign affairs (than whom no greater has
+been seen in our country, and than whom no greater has been presented in
+the service of any foreign nation) was able, without war, to drive the
+French from Mexico, and to establish the _principle_ of arbitration, for
+the settlement of our controversy with England. [Applause.] It was
+reserved for the present administration to extricate the imperfect work
+of the adjustment of the differences between England and the United
+States from a difficulty of the gravest character, and to place the
+negotiations upon a footing satisfactory to the public sense of our
+people by the illustrious work of the Joint High Commission at
+Washington. It was reserved for that administration to complete, within
+its first term of power, the absolute extinction of all antecedent
+causes, occasions or opportunities for future contention between our
+nation and the mother country, by the actual result of the Geneva
+arbitration. [Applause.]
+
+And now, gentlemen, I think we may well be proud of that self-contained,
+yet adequate, appreciation of our power, of our right, and of our duty,
+that could thus, while abating not one jot or tittle of our rights,
+compose such grave differences by the wisdom of statesmanship, instead
+of renewing the struggles of war. I may, I think, recognize in the
+general appreciation by our countrymen of the excellence of this great
+adjustment between England and the United States, their satisfaction
+with this settlement, which, without in the least abating the dignity or
+disturbing the peace of England, has maintained the dignity and made
+secure the peace of the United States. [Applause.] I think I may
+recognize in this general satisfaction of our countrymen, their
+conviction that the result of the Geneva arbitration has secured for us
+every point that was important as indemnity for the past, and yet has so
+adjusted the difficult question between neutrality and belligerency as
+to make it safe for us, in maintaining our natural, and, as we hope, our
+perpetual, position in the future, of a neutral, and not a belligerent.
+
+The gentlemen to whom were entrusted, by the favor of the President of
+the United States, the representation of our country in this great
+forensic controversy, have been somewhat differently situated from
+lawyers, in ordinary lawsuits, charged with the interests of clients.
+For, as we all know, the interest of the client and the duty of the
+lawyer are, for the most part, limited to success in the particular
+controversy that is being agitated, and, therein, the whole power of the
+lawyer and all his resources may be properly directed to secure the
+completest victory in the particular suit. But, when a nation is a
+party, and when the lawsuit is but an incident, in its perpetual duty
+and its perpetual interests, in which it must expect to change sides, in
+the changing circumstances of human affairs, it is very plainly its
+interest, and the duty of those to whom its interests are entrusted, to
+see to it, that in the zeal of the particular contest there shall be no
+triumph that shall disturb, embarrass, or burden its future relations
+with foreign nations. [Applause.] In other words, when our government
+was calling to account a neutral which had interfered with our rights as
+belligerents, it was of very great importance that we should insist upon
+neither a measure of right nor a measure of indemnity, that we could
+not, wisely and safely, submit to in the future ourselves. [Applause.]
+
+While, then, there was a preliminary question of gravest importance to
+be determined in this arbitration--this peaceful substitute for
+war--"the terrible litigation of States"--no less than this, how widely
+and how heavily we should press the question of accountability against a
+neutral, and how far the question should be pressed, in the future,
+against us, I must congratulate the country for having received, at the
+outset of the deliberations at Geneva, a determination from the
+Tribunal, upon the general principles of public law, that when peaceful
+adjustments in redress of wrongs are attempted between friendly States,
+no measure of indemnity can be claimed which at all savors of the
+exactions made only by a victorious over a beaten foe. [Applause.]
+
+And when we come to the final award of this High Tribunal, I think the
+country may be congratulated, and the world may be congratulated, that
+while we have secured a judgment of able and impartial publicists in
+favor of the propositions of international law on which we had
+insisted, and have received amends by its judgment for the wrongs we had
+suffered from Great Britain, we have also secured great principles in
+favor of neutrality in the future, making it easier, instead of harder,
+for nations to repress the sympathies, the passions and the enlistments
+of their people, and to keep, during the pendency of war, the action of
+a neutral State within and subject to the dictates of duty and of law.
+For we have there established that the duty of a neutral government to
+preserve its subjects from interference with belligerent rights is in
+proportion to the magnitude of the evils that will be suffered by the
+nation against whom, and at whose cost, the infraction of neutrality is
+provoked. We have made it apparent, also, that a powerful nation, in the
+advanced civilization of our age, cannot escape from an accountability
+upon the rough calculation, upon which so much reliance has doubtless
+been placed in the past, upon the unwillingness of the offended and
+injured nation, in the correction of its wrongs, to rush into the costs
+and sacrifices of war. And we have made it apparent to the proudest
+power in the world (and there is none prouder than our own nation,) that
+there must be a peaceful accounting for errors and wrongs, in which
+justice shall be done without the effusion of blood. [Prolonged
+applause.] Practically, too, we have established principles of great
+importance in aid of the efforts of every Government to preserve its
+neutrality in trying and difficult situations of sympathy. An error long
+provided, that if a vessel, in violation of neutrality, should escape to
+commit its ravages upon the sea, and should once secure the protection
+of a commission from the offending belligerent, that that was an end of
+it, and all the nations of the world must bow their heads before these
+bastard flags of belligerency. But the tribunal has determined, as the
+public law of the world, that a commission from a belligerent gives no
+protection to a vessel that owes its power and place upon the seas to a
+violation of neutrality. [Applause.] The consequence is, that so far
+from our success in this arbitration having exposed us, as a neutral
+nation, in the future, to greater difficulties, we have established
+principles of law that are to aid our Government, and every other
+Government, to restrain our people and every other people, in the
+future, from such infractions of neutrality.
+
+And now, gentlemen, is it too much for us to say that, coming out from a
+strife with our own blood and kindred, upon the many hard-fought fields
+of our Civil War, with our government confirmed, with the principles of
+our confederation made secure forever, we have also come out from this
+peaceful contest with a great power of the world, with important
+principles established between this nation and our principal rival in
+the business affairs of the world, and with an established conviction,
+alike prevalent in both countries, that, hereafter, each must do its
+duty to the other, and that each must be held accountable for that duty?
+
+I give you, gentlemen, in conclusion, this sentiment: "The little
+Court-room at Geneva--where our royal mother England, and her proud
+though untitled daughter, alike bent their heads to the majesty of Law
+and accepted Justice as a greater and better arbiter than Power."
+[Prolonged applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE REPUBLIC AND ITS OUTLOOK
+
+[Speech of William M. Evarts at the first banquet of the New England
+  Society of the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1880. Benjamin D.
+  Silliman, President of the Society, occupied the chair and introduced
+  Mr. Evarts to speak to the toast, "The Republic and its Outlook,"
+  saying: "He may well speak of the 'Outlook' who is on the watch-tower.
+  His brethren of the bar would prefer his remaining here but if he will
+  return to the competitions and collisions of the courts, he will be
+  welcomed as a brother, however unwelcome he may be as an adversary.
+  Meantime, that he may tell us of the outlook of the Republic, let us
+  listen to the Secretary of State, the Honorable William M. Evarts."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF
+BROOKLYN:--I have been accustomed to the City of New York, and have
+been accustomed to the estimate which the people of New York make of the
+people of Brooklyn. [Laughter.] I now come to make some trial of the
+estimate which the people of Brooklyn put upon the people of New York.
+[Applause.] In one distinct feature of the City of New York--I mean in
+its population--and in one distinct feature of the City of Brooklyn--in
+its population--you will see the secret of your vast superiority to us.
+[Laughter.] In the City of New York there are more Irishmen than there
+are in Dublin. [Applause.] In the City of Brooklyn there are more
+Bostonians than there are in Boston. [Laughter.] We have always felt it
+as a reproach, however little we relish the satire, that our New England
+festivals--mean in New York--were little in keeping with the poverty and
+frugality, and perhaps with the virtues, of our ancestors. But here I
+see exactly such a company, and exactly such a feast, as in the first
+years of the emigration, our ancestors would have sat down to.
+[Laughter.] We honor our fathers with loud praises, you, by noble and
+self-denying example. [Laughter.]
+
+The Republic, which is the theme I am to speak to, is the Republic which
+has grown from the seed that was planted in New England. It has gained
+as the oak has gained in its growth, from the soil, and from the air; so
+in the body and the strength, and the numbers and the wealth of the
+Republic, it has gained by the accretions of other races, and the
+incoming population from many shores. But the oak, nevertheless, is an
+oak, because the seed which was planted was the seed of an oak. [Loud
+applause.] Now, our Pilgrim Fathers seem to have been frustrated by
+Providence a good deal, in many of their plans. They came with the
+purpose, it is said, of occupying the pleasant seat of all this wealth
+and prosperity which these great cities enjoy. But the point was to
+plant them in New England, where they might grow, but would never stay.
+One of the first letters which I received after taking charge of the
+Department over which I preside was an extremely well-written one from a
+western State, asking for a Consulate, and beginning in this wise: "I
+have no excuse for intruding on your busy occupations except a
+pardonable desire to live elsewhere." [Laughter.] Now that has been the
+mainspring of New Englanders ever since they were seated by Providence
+on its barren shores, a pardonable desire to live elsewhere. [Laughter.]
+If they had been planted here--if they had been seated in the luxurious
+climate and with the fertile soil of the South, they would have had no
+desire, pardonable or otherwise, to live elsewhere. Though they might
+have grown and lived they never would have proved the seed that was to
+make the Great Republic as it now is. [Applause.]
+
+There has been an idea that some part of the active, spreading and
+increasing influence of the New England people as they moved about the
+world, was from a meddlesome disposition to interfere with other people.
+There is nothing in that. If there ever was a race that confined itself
+strictly to minding its own business, it is the New Englanders; and they
+mind it, with great results. The solution of this apparent discord is
+simply this: that a New Englander considers everybody else's business
+his business. [Loud laughter.] Now these two essential notions of
+wishing to live elsewhere, and regarding everybody else's business as
+our business, furnish the explanation of the processes by which this
+Republic has come to be what it is--great in every form of power, of
+strength, of wealth. This dissemination of New England men, and this
+permeation through other people's business--of our control of it--have
+made the nation what it is. [Applause.]
+
+The statesmanship of the New England character, was the greatest
+statesmanship of the world. It did not undertake to govern by authority,
+or by power, but by those ideas and methods which were common to human
+nature, and were to make a people great, and able to govern themselves.
+[Applause.] The great elements of that State thus developed, were
+education, industry and commerce. Education which, as Aristotle says,
+"makes one do by choice what others do by force;" industry, which by
+occupying and satisfying all the avidities of our nature, leaves to
+government only the simple duty of curbing the vicious and punishing the
+wicked. Commerce, that, by unfolding to the world the relations of
+people with people, makes a system of foreign relations that is greater
+and firmer, and more beneficent, than can be brought about by all the
+powers of armies, or all the skill of cabinets. [Applause.]
+
+This being, then, the Republic which has grown up from the seed thus
+planted, that has established our relations among ourselves over our
+wide heritage, and established our relations with the rest of the world,
+what is its outlook to-day? What is it in the sense of material
+prosperity? Who can measure it? Who can circumscribe it? Who can,
+except by the simple rule of three, which never errs, determine its
+progress? As the early settlement of Plymouth is to the United States of
+America, as it now is, so is the United States of America to the future
+possession and control of the world as they are to be. [Cheering.] This
+is to be, not by armies of invasion, nor by navies that are to carry the
+thunders of our powers. It is to be by our finding our place in the
+moral government of the world, and by the example, and its magnificent
+results, of a free people, governed by education, occupied by industry,
+and maintaining our connection with the world by commerce. Thus we are
+to disarm the armies of Europe, when they dare not disarm them
+themselves. [Cheers.] We present to mankind the simple, yet the
+wonderful evidence that a peasant in Germany, or France, or Ireland, or
+England carrying a soldier on his back, cannot compete in their own
+markets with a peasant in America who has no soldier on his back, though
+there be 5,000 miles distance between their farms. [Loud applause.] No
+doubt wonderful commotions are to take place in the great nations of
+Europe, under this example. There is to be overturning, and overturning,
+for which we have no responsibility, except, that by this great
+instruction, worked out by Providence on this continent, there is to be
+a remodelling of society in the ancient countries of the world.
+[Applause.] Now you see in the magnitude of the designs of Providence,
+how, planting the Puritans where they would desire to spread themselves
+abroad, and filling a continent, whence the ideas that they develop
+intelligibly to the whole world, are to distribute themselves over the
+world, that this is the way in which the redemption of society at home
+first, and abroad afterward, is to be accomplished by the power of the
+wisdom of God.
+
+And now for the outlook in other senses than that of material
+prosperity, how is it? As difficult and critical junctures have been
+reached in the development of the nation, and collisions, as when two
+tides meet, have awakened our own fears, and tried our own courage, and
+have raised the question whether these true ideas of our Republic were
+to triumph or to be checked--has not the issue always shown us, that
+faith in God, and faith in man, are a match for all the powers of evil
+in our midst and elsewhere? [Cheering.] If there needed to be a march
+to the sea, it was to be through the Southern country. [Loud applause.]
+If there needed to be a surrender of one portion of this people to the
+other, it was to be in and of Virginia, and not in and of New England.
+[Applause.] And now what a wonderful spectacle is presented to our
+nation, and to the world, when the direst calamities that ever afflict a
+people--those of Civil War, had fallen upon us; when the marshalling of
+armies, in a nation that tolerated no armies, was greater and more
+powerful than the conflicts of the world had ever seen; when the
+exhaustion of life, of treasure, of labor, had been such as was
+unparalleled; yet, in the brief space of fifteen years, the nation is
+more homogeneous, more bound together, more powerful and richer than it
+ever could have been but for the triumph of the good over the weak
+elements of this Republic. [Applause.]
+
+And what does all this show but the essential idea that it is man--man
+developed as an individual--man developed by thousands, by hundreds of
+thousands, by millions, and tens of millions, these make the strength
+and the wealth of a nation. These being left us, the nation, the
+consumption as by a fire, attacking a city, or ravaging a whole
+territory, or sweeping the coffers of the rich, or invading the cottages
+of the poor--all this material wealth may easily be repaired. If the
+nation remains with its moral and intellectual strength, brighter and
+larger and more indestructible possessions than the first will soon
+replace them. On the three great pillars of American society--equality
+of right, community of interest, and reciprocity of duty, rests this
+great Republic. Riches and honor and length of days will mark the nation
+which rests on that imperishable basis. [Prolonged applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE FRENCH ALLIANCE
+
+[Speech of William M. Evarts at a banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of
+  the State of New York, New York City, November 5, 1881. The banquet
+  was given in honor of the guests of the nation, the French diplomatic
+  representatives in America, and members of the families descended from
+  our foreign sympathizers and helpers, General Lafayette, Count de
+  Rochambeau, Count de Grasse, Baron von Steuben, and others, who were
+  present at the Centennial celebration of the victory at Yorktown. The
+  chairman, James M. Brown, Vice-President of the Chamber of Commerce,
+  proposed the following toast: "The French Alliance; the amicable
+  relations between our two countries founded in 1778, by the Treaty of
+  Amity and Commerce, between the nation of France and the American
+  people, cemented in blood in 1781, renewed by this visit of our
+  distinguished guests, will, we trust, be perpetuated through all
+  time."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE:--It is
+with great pride, as well as with great pleasure, that I respond to the
+call in behalf of the merchants of the United States, as represented by
+the merchants of the great city of the United States, through this
+ancient guild of the Chamber of Commerce, in paying their tribute of
+honor and applause to the French nation, that was present as a nation in
+the contest of our Revolution, and is present here as a nation by its
+representatives to-day [applause]; and to the great Frenchmen that were
+present with their personal heroism in the struggles of the Revolution,
+and are present here in their personal descendants, to see the fruits of
+that Revolution, and to receive our respectful greeting [applause]; and
+to the Germans who were present, where they could not have been spared
+in the great trials of our feeble nation in its struggles against the
+greatest power in the world, and who are here, by the descendants of
+those heroic Germans, to join in this feast of freedom and of glory.
+[Applause.]
+
+But I felt a little doubt, Mr. Chairman, whether the etiquette of this
+occasion required me to speak in my own tongue, or in the German or the
+French, for I speak French and German equally well [laughter], but I
+thought it would be a poor compliment, after all, to talk to these
+Frenchmen, or these Germans, in their native tongues. They surely hear
+enough of that at home. [Laughter.]
+
+Well, Mr. President, the French Alliance was one of the noblest
+transactions in history. The sixth day of February, 1778, witnessed the
+Treaty of Alliance and the accompanying Treaty of Amity and Commerce
+which filled out our Declaration of Independence, and made that an
+assured triumph, which was until then nothing but a heroic effort on our
+part. [Cheers.] I do not know that the sixth of February has anywhere
+been honored in any due proportion to the Fourth of July; but for my
+part, as an humble individual, from the earliest moment I have done all
+in my power to show my homage to that day, for on that day I was born.
+[Laughter and applause.]
+
+Now, we talk the most and must feel the most and with great propriety,
+of the presence of our French and of our German aids, and of our own
+presence at the battle of Yorktown and the surrender. But what would
+that occasion have amounted to, either in the fact of it or in the
+celebration of it, if the English had not been there? [Laughter.] You
+may remember the composure of the hero that was going to the block and
+felt that there was no occasion for hurry or confusion in the attendant
+crowd, as nothing important could take place until he got there
+[laughter]; and so, in this past history and in the present celebration,
+we recognize that it is not a question of personal mortification or of
+personal triumph--not even of national mortification or of national
+triumph. This was one of the great battles of the world, in which all
+the nations engaged, and all other nations had an everlasting interest
+and one through which they were to reap an everlasting good. [Applause.]
+
+And I would like to know if the granddaughter of George III has ever had
+from her subjects, British or Indian, any sweeter incense than has just
+now been poured out from the hearts of the American people, who freely
+give that homage to her virtues as a woman that they deny to her sceptre
+and her crown as a queen. [Applause.] Who would not rather be a great
+man than a great king? Who would not rather be a great woman than a
+great queen? [Applause.] Ah, is there not a wider sovereignty over the
+race, and a deeper homage from human nature than ever can come from an
+allegiance to power? And for woman, though she be a queen, what personal
+power in human affairs can equal that of drawing a throb from every
+heart and a tear from every eye, when she spoke to us as a woman in the
+distress of our nation? [Applause.]
+
+It was a very great thing for France to make the Treaty of Alliance and
+the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with a nation that, as yet, had
+received no acceptance from the powers of the earth. And when we
+remember that France, in the contests of a thousand years, had found
+England no unequal match in the quarrels that belonged to the two
+nations, I must think that human history has shown nothing nobler than
+her espousal of this growing struggle between these colonists and the
+great power of England. [Applause.] How much nearer France was to
+England than we! How much wider her possessions through the world, open
+to the thunders of the British navy and the prowess of the British arms!
+And when France, in a treaty, the equal terms of which will strike every
+reader with wonder, speaks of the "common cause" to be pursued until the
+result of our complete independence, governmental and commercial, was
+attained, I know nothing in the way of the "bearing the burdens of one
+another," enjoined as the Christian spirit, that is greater than this
+stupendous action of France. [Applause.]
+
+The relations of blood and history that make England and us one, as we
+always shall be, do not, nevertheless, make it clear that there is not a
+closer feeling of attachment, after all, between us and France. It is a
+very great compliment, no doubt, in classical phrase, to bespoken of as
+"_matre pulchra filia pulchrior"_--the fairer daughter of a fair mother,
+but, after all, it is a greater compliment to the daughter than to the
+mother. I don't know that maternal affection, the purest sentiment on
+earth, is ever quite pleased that the daughter is taller and fairer and
+more winning in her ways than the mother is, or ever was [laughter]; and
+I do know that there comes a time when the daughter leaves the mother
+and cleaves to a closer affection. And here were we, a young, growing,
+self-conscious, self-possessed damsel, just peeping from out our
+mother's apron, when there comes a gallant and noble friend, who takes
+up our cause, and that, too, at a time when it was not quite apparent
+whether we should turn out a beauty or a hoyden. [Laughter and
+applause.] And that is our relation to France. Nothing can limit,
+nothing can disturb it; nothing shall disparage it. It is that we, from
+that time and onward, and now finally in the great consummation of two
+Republics united together against the world, represent in a new sense
+Shakespeare's figure of the "unity and married calm of states."
+[Applause.]
+
+The French people have the advantage of us in a great many things, and I
+don't know that we have any real advantage of them, except in a superior
+opinion of ourselves. [Laughter.] God forbid that anybody should take
+that from us! Great as is our affection and gratitude toward the French
+and German nations, there is one thing that we cannot quite put up with
+in those nations, and that is, that, but for them, the English and we
+should think ourselves the greatest nations in the world. [Laughter.]
+So, with all the bonds of amity between us and them, we must admit that
+the Frenchmen and Germans make a pretty good show on the field of
+history in the past, and, apparently, mean to have a pretty good share
+of the future of this world. [Applause.]
+
+In comparing the Yorktown era with the present day, we find that then a
+great many more Frenchmen came here than Germans; but now a great many
+more Germans come here than Frenchmen. The original disparity of numbers
+seems to have been redressed by the later immigration, and we are
+reduced to that puzzling equilibrium of the happy swain whenever we are
+obliged to choose sides in the contest between these nations:--
+
+ "How happy could I be with either,
+  Were t'other dear charmer away."
+
+[Laughter.]
+
+The French are a great people in their conduct toward us in this
+respect, that the aid and sympathy and alliance has been all in our
+favor; they have done everything for us, and have been strong enough not
+to need anything from us. [Applause.] The fault of the French, changing
+a little Mr. Canning's memorable lines:--
+
+ "The fault of the French, unlike the Dutch,
+  Is asking too little, and giving too much."
+
+[Laughter and applause.]
+
+Now, this treaty commences with the very sensible statement that the two
+nations being desirous of placing their commerce and correspondence upon
+permanent and equitable grounds, His Most Christian Majesty and the
+United States of America had thought, to that end, it was best to place
+these relations upon perfect equality and reciprocity, without any of
+those burdensome preferences which are the source of debate and
+misunderstanding and of discontent between nations. In this spirit it
+is, no doubt, that we have each pursued toward each other, in commerce,
+that most equitable and equal system, by prohibitory duties, of keeping
+all of each other's products out of the other that we can. [Laughter.]
+Well, the Frenchmen knew, after all, that the Americans can never get
+along without their wines, and without their silks, and without their
+jewels, and without their art, and without their science, and without
+the numberless elegancies which make life even in our backwoods
+tolerable. And we know that they cannot very well dispense with our
+wheat and corn and the oil from the earth and the cotton to weave into
+those delicate tissues with which they clothe the world. [Applause.] So
+that, after all, these superficial barriers of customs duties do not
+really obstruct our commerce; and even if they have too much of our
+pork, as would seem to be the notion at present, we have no desire to
+dispense with their wines. [Laughter.]
+
+But there are some other interchanges between nations besides those of
+commerce in the raw material or in the products of industry. If we could
+make more of a moral interchange with the French; if we could take some
+of the moral sunlight which shines upon that great nation; if we could
+be more cheerful, more gay, more debonair, and if they could take from
+us some of the superfluous ice which we produce morally as well as
+naturally, and some of that cold resistance against the inflammation of
+enthusiasm which sometimes raises a conflagration among their citizens
+at home, we have no tariff on either side that would interfere in the
+blending and intercommunication of the moral resources of both nations,
+that shall make us more and more one people, in laws, liberties and
+national glory, and in all the passions that guide and animate the
+conduct of nations. [Applause.]
+
+I am happy to announce myself to you, gentlemen, what I am vain enough
+to suppose you would not suspect, that I am a contemporary of Lafayette.
+As a Boston schoolboy, I stood in the ranks at Boston when Lafayette in
+1825 passed with a splendid cortege along the malls of Boston Common. I
+had the pleasure, as a descendant of one of his Revolutionary friends,
+to be presented to him personally, and to hear him say that he well
+remembered his old friend, my grandfather. [Cheers.] This pleasing
+courtesy, it may be said, was all French politeness; but I can say to
+these Frenchmen that whether they believe one another at home or not, we
+always believe them in this country. [Applause.]
+
+And now your toast desires that this friendship, thus beginning and
+continued, shall be perpetual. Who is to stop it? No power but ourselves
+and yourselves, sir (turning to the French Minister), can interrupt it.
+What motive have you--what motive have we--what sentiment, but that on
+either side would be dishonor to the two nations--can ever breathe a
+breath to spoil its splendor and its purity? [Applause.] And, sir, your
+munificence and your affection is again to be impressed upon the
+American people in that noble present you are designing to make to us,
+in the great statue of "Liberty enlightening the World," an unexampled
+munificence from the private citizens of one nation to the people of
+another. We are to furnish the island for its site and the pedestal to
+place the statue on. This our people will do with an enthusiasm equal to
+your own. But, after all, the obligation will be wholly ours, for it is
+to be a lighthouse in our great harbor, a splendid monument to add new
+beauty to the glorious Bay of New York. [Applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+TRIBUTE TO HERBERT SPENCER
+
+[Speech of William M. Evarts at a dinner given to Herbert Spencer, New
+  York City, November 9, 1882, the day before his return to England. Mr.
+  Evarts presided, and delivered this speech, in introducing Mr. Spencer
+  to the company.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--We are here to-night, to show the feeling of
+Americans toward our distinguished guest. As no room and no city can
+hold all his friends and admirers, it was necessary that a company
+should be made up by some method out of the mass, and what so good a
+method as that of natural selection [laughter] and the inclusion, within
+these walls, of the ladies? It is a little hard upon the rational
+instincts and experience of man that we should take up the abstruse
+subjects of philosophy and of evolution, of all the great topics that
+make up Mr. Spencer's contribution to the learning and the wisdom of his
+time, at this end of the dinner.
+
+The most ancient nations, even in their primitive condition, saw the
+folly of this, and when one wished either to be inspired with the
+thoughts of others or to be himself a diviner of the thoughts of others,
+fasting was necessary, and a people from whom I think a great many
+things might be learned for the good of the people of the present time
+have a maxim that will commend itself to your common-sense. They say the
+continually stuffed body cannot see secret things. [Laughter.] Now, from
+my personal knowledge of the men I see at these tables, they are owners
+of continually stuffed bodies. [Laughter.] I have addressed them at
+public dinners, on all topics and for all purposes, and whatever
+sympathy they may have shown with the divers occasions which brought
+them together, they come up to this notion of continually stuffed
+bodies. In primitive times they had a custom which we only under the
+system of differentiation practise now at this dinner. When men wished
+to possess themselves of the learning, the wisdom, the philosophy, the
+courage, the great traits of any person, they immediately proceeded to
+eat him up as soon as he was dead. [Laughter.] Having only this
+diversity in that early time, that he should be either roasted or boiled
+according as he was fat or thin. [Laughter.] Now, out of that narrow
+compass, see how by the process of differentiation and of multiplication
+of effects we have come to a dinner of a dozen courses and wines of as
+many varieties; and that simple process of appropriating the virtue and
+the wisdom of the great man that was brought before the feast is now
+diversified into an analysis of all the men here under the cunning
+management of many speakers. No doubt, preserving as we do the identity
+of all these institutions, it is often considered a great art, or at
+least a great delight, to roast our friends and put in hot water those
+against whom we have a grudge. [Laughter.]
+
+Now, Mr. Spencer, we are glad to meet you here. [Applause.] We are glad
+to see you and we are glad to have you see us. [Laughter.] We are glad
+to see you, for we recognize in the breadth of your knowledge, such
+knowledge as is useful to your race, a greater comprehension than any
+living man has presented to our generation. [Applause.] We are glad to
+see you, because in our judgment you have brought to the analysis and
+distribution of this vast knowledge a more penetrating intelligence and
+a more thorough insight than any living man has brought even to the
+minor topics of his special knowledge. [Applause.] In theology, in
+psychology, in natural science, in the knowledge of individual man and
+his exposition, and in the knowledge of the world, in the proper sense
+of society, which makes up the world, the world worth knowing, the world
+worth speaking of, the world worth planning for, the world worth working
+for, we acknowledge your labors as surpassing those of any of our kind.
+[Applause.] You seem to us to carry away and maintain in the future the
+same measure of fame among others that we are told was given in the
+Middle Ages to Albertus Magnus, the most learned man of those times,
+whose comprehension of theology, of psychology, of natural history, of
+politics, of history and of learning comprehended more than any man
+since the classic time certainly; and yet it was found of him that his
+knowledge was rather an accumulation, and that he had added no new
+processes and no new wealth to the learning which he had achieved.
+
+Now, I have said that we are glad to have you see us. You have already
+treated us to a very unique piece of work in this reception, and we are
+expecting perhaps that the world may be instructed after you are safely
+on the other side of the Atlantic in a more intimate and thorough manner
+concerning our merits and our few faults. [Applause and laughter.] This
+faculty of laying on a dissecting board an entire nation or an entire
+age and finding out all the arteries and veins and pulsations of their
+life is an extension beyond any that our own medical schools afford. You
+give us that knowledge of man which is practical and useful, and
+whatever the claims or the debates may be about your system of the
+system of those who agree with you, and however it may be compared with
+other competing systems that have preceded it, we must all agree that
+it is practical, that it is benevolent, that it is serious, and that it
+is reverent; that it aims at the highest results in virtue; that it
+treats evil, not as eternal, but as evanescent, and that it expects to
+arrive at what is sought through the aid of the millennium--that
+condition of affairs in which there is the highest morality and the
+greatest happiness. [Applause.] And if we can come to that by these
+processes and these instructions it matters little to the race whether
+it be called scientific morality and mathematical freedom or by another
+less pretentious name. [Applause.] You will please fill your glasses
+while we propose the health of our guest, Herbert Spencer. [Continued
+applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE CLASSICS IN EDUCATION
+
+[Speech of William M. Evarts at the Thanksgiving Jubilee of the Yale
+  Alumni, New York City, December 7, 1883. Chauncey M. Depew presided.
+  Mr. Evarts responded for the Alumni.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ALUMNI:--I congratulate you,
+Mr. President, on having such a noble, such a generous, such a patient,
+such an appreciative body to preside over. I congratulate you,
+gentlemen, on having a President who combines in himself in a marked
+degree these two great traits of a presiding officer:--confidence in
+himself [great laughter], and distrust of all who are to come after him.
+[Laughter.] I remember forty years ago to have heard a Senator of the
+United States, making a stump speech in a quiet town in Vermont, amuse
+his audience with a story of a woodsawyer who had worked for him and who
+had the habit of accompanying the movement of his saw with talking to
+himself. He asked him one day why he did so. "Why," said he, "for two
+reasons. The first is, that it is a great pleasure to hear a sensible
+man talk, and the second is that it is a great pleasure to talk to a
+sensible man." [Laughter.]
+
+Now, sir, I have but one warning to give you. It is said of Mercutio,
+the wittiest creation of Shakespeare, who is despatched very early in
+the play, "My sore wound hath served its turn, although it were not as
+deep as a well nor as wide as a church door." It is said that if
+Shakespeare hadn't killed Mercutio early, Mercutio would have killed
+him. If you [turning to the President] are to preside year after year or
+to attempt it upon so high and brilliant and bold a key as you have
+assumed here to-night, if you don't kill the Alumni dinners, the Alumni
+dinners will kill you. [Great laughter.] Yale College, as represented by
+its graduates, is not self-conceited nor obtrusive. It is true they have
+always felt the magnificent compliment paid to the College by that
+greatest of English thinkers and philosophers Lord Bacon, who said in a
+famous passage, as you will recall: "Eating makes a full man, drinking a
+ready man, but to be an Alumnus of Yale, a wise man." Yet we are modest
+and even reverent toward the claims of other universities. We are
+satisfied at the humble position which the French bishop took towards
+that great berry, the strawberry. "Doubtless," said he, "God Almighty
+might have made a better berry than the strawberry, but doubtless He has
+not." [Laughter.] That is our opinion of Yale College. [Applause.]
+
+Now, to be an Alumnus of Yale College, is the object of all those who
+enter the college and the object after getting there is to get out.
+Sometimes indeed, the four years are spent without that fortunate
+result. I remember to have heard of the son of a somewhat conspicuous
+gentleman who had desired to give his children the benefit of an
+education such as Yale affords, who had spent four years there; but the
+entire four years were spent as a member of the Freshman class.
+[Laughter.] What a fortunate condition to be continually towering over
+more and more of those who are competing with him in scholarship and for
+distinction! I know of none greater unless some mode might be
+discovered by which one could be a Senior for four years. There is
+nothing in human affairs that could equal that happiness! [Laughter.]
+Well, college life in my generation--and I certainly had a singular
+reminder to-night from you, Mr. President, that I belonged to a
+generation that has passed out of memory, for you have excited the
+enthusiasm of this company only in the applause that you have drawn
+from those who were graduated under Presidents Woolsey and Porter. What
+are you to say for us who graduated under President Day? College life, I
+was about to say, is a charming life. The best men, we may presume, are
+collected from the community, placed under the happiest relations one to
+another and under the happiest influences from above and around them.
+
+The President of the college has spoken to you of the pleasing fact that
+there is an endowment of seventy thousand dollars for fellowships. Well,
+when I was in college, a very moderate endowment of five dollars
+contributed by those who were associated as companions was a very good
+endowment for good fellowship. [Laughter.] And now in looking at life as
+it is, as we remember it in college and have seen it since, who is there
+that would compare mere fellowship with good-fellowship? What is there
+that is heartier, what sincerer, what more generous and what more just
+than the relations of young men of a liberal spirit toward one another
+in college? How many of us as we have gone on in life, prosperous, as we
+may have been, with nothing to complain of as to our success or our
+situation--how many of us have been disposed to repeat that lament of
+AEneas where he was continually baffled in holding closer conversation
+with his goddess-mother who was always carried off in a nimbus or her
+accents lost in the whisper of the wind:--
+
+                 "cur dextrae jungere dextram
+ Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"
+
+Maybe in the good-fellowship of after-life, you, Mr. President, will not
+hesitate to walk down Broadway with your arm over General Jackson's
+shoulder and his about your waist, and then all the people shall cry
+with applause: "See how Yale men love one another!"
+
+You will observe, from this little classic allusion that I am on the
+side of those who favor in the curriculum the maintenance of the learned
+languages. For myself, whether an education in the classic languages and
+in the classic literature should or should not be discarded from the
+education of the noble youth of the country is the question whether it
+is worth while in the advancing and strenuous life of modern times that
+men should have a liberal education. For be sure that there is no trait
+in that education that entitles it to the name of liberal more sure and
+more valuable than this education in the literature, in the history, in
+the language of the great men of the ages past. If any boy is put
+through what is called a liberal education, and finds when he goes out
+from it, that he is not on a level with those who understand and cherish
+the Greek language and literature, he will find that he is mistaken in
+wishing to dispense with that distinguishing trait.
+
+I am able to give you a very interesting anecdote, as it seems to me, of
+this very point, of how a great man, great in his power, great in his
+fame, yet of an ingenuous and simple nature, may look at this
+accomplishment. On my return from Europe, when I first visited it, upon
+a public errand, while President Lincoln was at the height of his fame
+from the assured although not completed success and triumph in the war,
+and from the great transaction that had made him one of the famous men
+for all ages--the emancipation of the slaves--I had occasion, in a
+friendly meeting with him, to express a hope that he would find it in
+his power after the cares of State were laid aside to visit Europe and
+see the statesmen and great men there whose mouths were full of plaudits
+for his assured accomplished fame. Said he: "You are very kind in
+thinking I should meet with a reception so gratifying as you have
+proposed, and I certainly should enjoy as much as any one the
+acquisition and the observation that such a visit would give; but,"
+added he, "as you know very well my early education was of the
+narrowest, and in the society in which I should move I should be
+constantly exposed in conversation to have a scrap of Greek or Latin
+spoken that I should know nothing about." Certainly that was a very
+peculiar statement to be made by this wonderful man, but it struck me at
+the moment that his clear mind, his self-poised nature, recognized the
+fact that his greatness and his fame did not lie in the direction of an
+association with what he regarded as the accomplished men of society and
+of public life brought.
+
+I believe, therefore, that we will stand by the college while it stands
+by the Greek and the Latin, and certainly as representatives of the
+great mass of graduates we can now talk more of Greek and Latin as a
+common accomplishment than the greatest genius and orators of ancient
+times, Demosthenes or Cicero, could of English. [Laughter.]
+
+There are many things, gentlemen, that if I were the President of this
+association or the President of the University, I should say and expect
+to be listened to, while saying it. But I confess that I have pretty
+much exhausted, as I perceive, your patience and my own capacity. I am
+now living for the reputation of making short speeches, and I am only
+afraid that my life will not be long enough to succeed. But I promise
+you that if I get a good forum and a good audience like this I will run
+a short speech even if I run it into the mud. [Applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD
+
+[Speech of William M. Evarts at the banquet given by the Chamber of
+  Commerce of the State of New York, June 24, 1885, to the officers of
+  the French national ship "Isere," which brought over the Bartholdi
+  statue. Charles Stewart Smith, vice-President of the Chamber, presided
+  at the dinner and introduced the speaker as follows: "Gentlemen, fill
+  your glasses for the seventh regular toast: 'Liberty Enlightening the
+  World, a great truth beautifully and majestically expressed by the
+  unique gift which our guests of to-night have brought safely to our
+  shores.' The gentleman who will respond to this toast needs no
+  introduction--Senator William M. Evarts."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--I may be permitted at the outset,
+to speak a little about the share that we have taken on this side of the
+water in this great achievement which in its glorious consummation, now
+receives the applause of the world.
+
+When this great conception of friendship for America, joy at our
+triumph, and their own undaunted love of liberty, liberty for France,
+liberty for the United States, liberty for the world, arose, then the
+French people were set aflame with a desire to bring, as it were, their
+gifts of frankincense and myrrh to lay on this altar of liberty, that
+its censer might never die out, but forever perfume and ennoble the air
+of the world. [Applause.]
+
+The genius of Art, the patriotism of France, the enthusiasm of its
+people, accomplished by contributions drawn from more than one hundred
+thousand, perhaps two hundred thousand givers, made up this statue, not
+equalled in the history of the world, and not conceived in its genius or
+its courage before. [Applause.]
+
+Then it was for us to say whether we would furnish the pedestal upon
+which this great gift and emblem of Liberty should find its secure and
+permanent home; without the aid of the Government and by the movement of
+our own people in this city, an organization wholly voluntary, and
+without pretension or assumption had the faith that the American people
+would furnish a home fit for the statue of Liberty, however magnificent
+should be the reception, that would comport with its own splendor.
+[Cheers.]
+
+This organization undertook actively its work in 1882, before the statue
+was completed, and while it remained somewhat uncertain to many who
+doubted whether the great statue would really be brought to its
+anticipated prosperity and success. But we went on, and now, within
+three years, this work, both of receiving and collecting subscriptions
+and of raising the pedestal itself, will have been completed, and I do
+not hesitate to say, in the face of all critics and all doubters, that a
+work of so great magnitude, either in its magnificence, or in its labor,
+has never before been completed in so short a time. [Applause.]
+
+When we were reasonably assured of adequate funds, we commenced the
+concrete base on which this pedestal was to rest; and no structure of
+that kind, of that magnitude, of that necessity, of that perfection and
+permanence has ever been accomplished in the works of masonry before.
+[Cheers.] Commencing on the ninth of October, 1883, it was completed on
+the seventeenth day of May, 1884--and then commenced the work of the
+structure proper, of the pedestal, and it went on, and it went on, and
+it went sure, and it went safe, if it went slow, and there it stands.
+[Cheers.]
+
+And now a word or two about the Committee. An eminent lawyer of our city
+was once detected and exposed and applauded for being seen standing with
+his hands in his own pockets [laughter], and for about three months, if
+you had visited the meetings of this Committee of ours, you would have
+seen the whole assembly standing with their hands in their own pockets
+[applause], and taking the first step forward asking their
+fellow-citizens to follow us, and not for us to follow them. [Cheers.]
+And so we went on, and on the tenth of this present month, we had
+received in hand $241,000, of which $50,000 came from the grand and
+popular movement of a great newspaper--"The World" [three cheers for
+"The World"]--fifty thousand dollars! and that made up substantially
+what we had announced in advance as what would be required to complete
+the pedestal. But where did we miscarry even in that calculation? The
+exploration showed us that the concrete mass must go deeper in the
+ground, and that cost us alone $85,000, about $30,000 more than we had
+counted upon before the exploration; and then the $20,000 more that
+makes it up to the $300,000 as our need to complete the pedestal (when
+we had counted upon $250,000), is made by such delay and such expenses
+as made the general outlay for this immense structure, continuing longer
+than would have been necessary, had the promptness of contributions kept
+pace with the possibility of completion.
+
+Now, gentlemen, we have been patient and quiet. Nearly one-fourth of the
+contributions of the general citizens came from the pockets of the
+Committee. Instead of hearing from enterprising Chicago, and ambitious
+Boston, they are talking about the slowness and the dulness of New
+York's appreciation, of the delays in its contributions. Let the example
+of our patriotism and munificence be an example for them to imitate; and
+this city of Boston--let their people there reflect that, when they
+built Bunker Hill monument, it cost I am informed scarcely $100,000.
+They were twenty years in raising it, although the whole country was
+canvassed in its aid. [Laughter.]
+
+Well, gentlemen, so much for that. And how great is this monument! How
+noble! How beautiful! How inspiring for the time that looks upon its
+completion and for the ages that shall mark it hereafter! If our country
+and France, as we hope, may go on in the enlargement and advancement of
+a glorious civilization, we may feel sure that if our descendants shall
+overtop us in wealth, in strength, in art, and equal us in love of
+liberty, they will not say that this was not a worthy triumph for the
+age in which we live [applause]; and if, unhappily, malign influences
+shall degrade our civilization and our fame, and travellers and
+dwellers here shall find their power has waned, and their love of
+liberty declined, if they shall have become a poverty-stricken and
+debased people, what will they think of this remaining monument of a
+past and lost age, but that it was a creation of the gods and that no
+men ever lived. [Cheers.]
+
+Well, these French gentlemen, the Admiral and the Commandant, how shall
+we appreciate the beneficence of their visit, the urbanity of their
+attentions to us, and the happy and hearty manner in which they have
+accepted our hospitality. Why the Admiral--a greater triumph, let me
+say, than he could ever have by the power of his navy--has come here and
+carried New York by storm, without firing a gun. [Cheers.] And as for
+Commandant De Saune, he has done what in the history of the world--of
+our modern world, at least--no nation, no ruler has successfully
+attempted: he has kept "Liberty enlightening the World" under the
+hatches for thirty days. [Applause.]
+
+It was tried in England, and "Liberty enlightening the World" cut off
+the head of the king. Tried again, it drove the dynasty of the Stuarts
+forever from that free island. In France, they tried to suppress it, and
+it uprooted the ancient monarchy and scattered the forces which were
+expected to repress it. The milder form of a limited monarchy, even,
+France would not submit to as a repression of liberty, and again twice
+over, under an Imperial government, "Liberty enlightening the World" has
+broken out from under the hatches. [Cheers.]
+
+But Commandant De Saune is not only a bold represser of mutiny on board
+his vessel, but he is a great and cunning navigator; he did not tell it,
+but he planned it, and how narrow the calculation was. He arrived here
+on the seventeenth of June, Bunker Hill day [applause], and missed the
+eighteenth, the day of Waterloo. [Laughter and applause.]--It is thus
+that this French genius teaches us new lessons, and evokes irrepressible
+applause. [Cheers.]
+
+I imagine that a navigator who could thus seize the golden moment, and
+miss the disastrous one, might, if he undertook it, discover the North
+Pole. [Laughter.] But I am sure he has better work before him in the
+world than that. [Applause.] But if he goes on to that destination, oh,
+let us contribute some portion of the cargo that he will put under the
+hatches! [Laughter.]
+
+Well, gentlemen, this is a great event, this great triumph of
+civilization is indeed laden with many instructions, and many
+illustrations. No doubt "Liberty enlightening the World" in modern
+history finds its greatest instance in that torch which was lighted
+here; but from the enthusiasm and the inexorable logic of French
+philosophy on the "equality of man," was furnished we can never say how
+much of the zeal and of the courage that enabled our forefathers to
+shape the institutions of equality and liberty here [cheers], and all
+can mark the reaction upon France, by which our interests, our
+prosperity under them encouraged, ennobled and maintained the struggle
+for liberty there which overthrew ancient establishments and raised in
+their place new. And now both countries, at least, stand on the same
+happy combination of liberty regulated by law, and law enlightened by
+liberty. [Cheers.] And this great structure, emblem of so much else,
+example of so much else, guide to so much else, yet this emblem, this
+example, this guide is of the union between the genius and enthusiasm of
+liberty, the graceful statue and the massive and compact pedestal of our
+own granite by which it is upheld. [Cheers.]
+
+Liberty can only be supported by solid and sober institutions, founded
+upon law as built upon a rock; and the structure solid and sober which
+sustains it, if Liberty has fled, is but a shapeless and unsightly mass
+that is no longer worthy of respect as a structure, to be torn apart
+until it can be better rebuilt as the home of liberty. [Prolonged
+applause.]
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS C. EWING
+
+
+OHIO AND THE NORTH-WEST
+
+[Speech of Thomas C. Ewing at the first annual banquet of the New York
+  Southern Society, February 22, 1887. Algernon S. Sullivan, the
+  President of the Society, was in the chair, and announced that General
+  Ewing would respond to the toast "Ohio and the Northwest." General
+  Ewing was greeted with applause and cheers for Ohio.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--Ohio and her four sisters of the
+Northwest are always proud and happy to be reminded of the fact of their
+kinship to Virginia. It was the valor and the intrepidity of the Old
+Dominion which, long before the Confederation was formed, wrested that
+great territory from the Frenchmen and the savages. It was her lofty
+generosity which gave to the poor young Republic that vast territory out
+of which has been formed five of our greatest States, and in which dwell
+millions of our people. It was her humane and unselfish statesmanship
+which annexed to the gift the condition that neither slavery nor
+involuntary servitude, excepting punishment for crime, should ever exist
+in that magnificent domain. Thousands of our Revolutionary heroes sleep
+in Ohio in land given to them as a recognition of their own priceless
+services, and the beautiful district between the Scioto and the Little
+Miami is filled with their descendants. Therefore, Mr. President,
+whenever Virginia sits at the head of the table, Ohio claims a seat as
+one of the family.
+
+I, too, coming from that great State, and proud of it and its condition,
+may join in congratulating you, gentlemen, on the establishment of this
+"Southern Society of New York." After the long season of strife and
+discontent this is one of the many signs which mark the vernal equinox,
+and foretell the coming summer. I believe, notwithstanding the infinite
+disasters of the war, the overthrow of slavery, and with it all the
+industrial system of the South, and the needless loss and the
+humiliations of reconstruction--I believe that there is to-day a kinder
+and more cordial fraternity between the North and South than ever
+existed since the agitation of the slavery question sixty or seventy
+years ago. This society formed, and meeting here in this great centre of
+American political and business life, can do much to promote that peace.
+We need more social intercourse between the Northern and Southern men,
+and we need, above all, a clearer and manlier understanding of each
+other, in order that the recollections of the war may cease to check the
+growing accord between us.
+
+Gentlemen, the North craves a living and lasting peace with the South;
+it asks no humiliating conditions; it recognizes the fact that the
+proximate cause of the war was the constitutional question of the right
+of secession--a question which, until it was settled by the war, had
+neither a right nor wrong side to it. Our forefathers, in framing the
+Constitution purposely left the question unsettled; to have settled it
+distinctly in the Constitution would have been to prevent the formation
+of the union of the Thirteen States. They, therefore, committed that
+question to the future and the war came on and settled it forever. Now,
+the Northern people are not so mean, fanatical or foolish as to blame
+the South because it believed then and believes now that it had the
+right side of that question. How could we respect the South if it were
+to say now that it was insincere then, or if it were to pretend that its
+convictions on a question of constitutional construction had been
+changed by the cuffs and blows of the war? It is enough that the North
+and South alike agree that the war settled that question in favor of the
+Northern construction finally and forever.
+
+The North does ask that the settlement of the war as embodied in the
+constitutional amendments shall be accepted, and obeyed in the letter
+and spirit, as good faith and good citizenship require. There have been
+undoubtedly very many instances of violation of the spirit of the
+amendments and there will be in the future, but no more than from the
+very nature of things was to have been expected; and I have no doubt
+that they will decrease in number as time goes on, and will finally
+disappear in the breaking-up of the color line in the South; and under
+the influence of that great sentiment become more familiar and more
+general every year, in favor of equal political rights to every American
+citizen. Aside from these questions, there is nothing to perpetuate
+alienation between the North and South. The new questions will lead to
+new divisions on other lines; already the representatives of Alabama are
+getting ready to stand with Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in support
+of the tariff on the iron industry; the spinners of the Dan and the Saco
+will stand very soon with the spinners of the Willimantic and the
+Merrimac in supporting the cotton interests, and now we see the
+cotton-growers of the South and the wheat-growers of the Northwest
+united in demanding a tariff for revenue only.
+
+Common political interests, the ministry of social and political
+intercourse, and perhaps higher than all, the pride of a common
+citizenship are rapidly supplanting sectionalism among our own people
+and leading us to stand together and work out our common destiny in
+fraternal reunion. It has often occurred to me, as a cause of
+thankfulness to Almighty God--and I believe He is guiding this Republic
+so as to work out the problem of self-government for all mankind--that
+the tremendous fact of the war has caused so little change in our system
+of government; constitutional amendments have been so limited by
+interpretation by the Supreme Court of the United States that they have
+hardly added anything to the powers of the general Government or
+impaired the powers of the States. The legislation following the war
+when Congress seemed to have run mad with the theory that it could
+legislate outside of the Constitution has to a large extent fallen under
+the decisions of that high tribunal. One would have supposed that it
+could have been certain that, considering the fact that the war was
+waged to extend the extremest proposition of State sovereignty, that the
+triumph of the Federal theory would have added enormously and
+permanently to the powers of the general Government and diminished very
+greatly and permanently the powers of the States. It is well for
+Republican government that that evil was averted. We have our free State
+Government, States still stand as the fortresses of American liberty,
+and our Federal government moves in its orb with scarcely a perturbation
+to mark the influence of the war upon it.
+
+Gentlemen, we have successfully worked out the problem of
+self-government, and our example will undoubtedly and in due time be
+followed by the world. What else is there for this Republic to do? There
+is a tremendous question yet unsolved which is now rising unbidden in
+this and in every enlightened nation. It is the question of the proper
+distribution of the earnings of labor and capital combined. This is a
+question that will not down, and we have got to meet it. British
+publicists and statesmen from whom we have taken in the past far too
+much of our politics have either ignored that question entirely, or have
+treated it as practically settled by the apothegm of Ricardo, that the
+laborer is entitled out of his earnings to just enough food and clothing
+to keep the machine of his body in working order, and that when that
+machine becomes disarranged or worn out, he must go to the almshouse.
+
+In the United States, so far as the question does not lie outside of the
+powers of the State or general Government, so far as those powers can be
+used fairly to adjust the question, methods of adjustment will fall
+within the lines relating to revenue, currency, corporations, police
+regulations. The settlement of the intricate problem and of that
+immensely important one, will not be added to by flagrant assaults on
+public authority, nor by the interference by bodies or individuals with
+the free right of every single workingman to work for whatever he
+pleases and for whomever he pleases and as many hours as he pleases; nor
+by the confiscation of real or personal property. And on the other hand
+that question will not be solved nor aided in its solution by police
+interference with the right of free assembly and discussion, nor by
+police interference with the right to form organizations open or secret,
+nor by police interference with the right of laboring men to combine for
+their own benefit if they keep within the limits of the law. On the
+other hand, I dissent _in toto_ from some of the sentiments expressed in
+the letter of Mr. Hewitt. [Abram S. Hewitt, Mayor of the City of New
+York.] This question will only be settled by the people at the
+ballot-box and by the enactment of such laws as will fairly distribute
+the net earnings which labor and capital combine to make.
+
+Gentlemen, let us who have borne the heat and burden of the Civil War,
+commit it and its issues to the past, and join the incoming generation
+in settling this great industrial question in such a way as will be just
+to all, and best for the masses of the people. The South has always
+produced great statesmen. It was her peerless and immortal son whose
+love of the people and whose faith in their power of self-government did
+most to establish and animate our free institutions. And again let the
+New South send forth other statesmen armed with the power and animated
+with the spirit of Jefferson, [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+FREDERIC WILLIAM FARRAR
+
+
+POET AND PAINTER
+
+[Speech of Frederic W. Farrar, D.D., at the banquet of the Royal
+  Academy, London, May 3, 1884. He was at that time Canon and Archdeacon
+  of Westminster, and in 1895 became Dean of Canterbury. The President,
+  Sir Frederic Leighton, in introducing the speaker said: "In literature
+  as in science a different side of our subject is each year brought
+  into prominence according to the guest who does us the honor to
+  respond to it. To-night I have the pleasure to call on an accomplished
+  and eloquent divine, a writer whose sentences are pictures and his
+  language rich with color and who is known to you not only by his books
+  on the most sacred subjects, but also by the valuable chapters which
+  he has contributed to the study of language, the venerable Archdeacon
+  Farrar."]
+
+
+MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I have no pretension to be regarded as
+an adequate representative of English Literature, but the toast itself
+is one which could never be omitted at any banquet of the Royal Academy.
+The artist and the man of letters, though they differ in their gifts and
+in their methods, are essentially united in feeling and in purpose. They
+appeal to the same emotions; they enforce the same lessons; they
+illustrate the same truths; they labor for the same objects. The common
+aim of both is the emancipation and free development of our spiritual
+nature. The humblest artist as he reads the great works written by men
+of genius in all ages,--the humblest man of letters as year after year
+he has the delight of gazing on these splendidly illuminated walls--may
+claim that he belongs to one and the same great brotherhood--the
+brotherhood of those who have consistently labored to cheer, to bless
+and to elevate mankind. Turner called himself the "author" not the
+artist of his pictures; and indeed, writing and painting are but
+different forms of that one eternal language of which not even Babel
+could confound the significance. There is hardly a single work in this
+Exhibition which does not illustrate the close connection between
+literature and art.
+
+Landscape painting has always been the chief glory of our English
+school, and what are the great poets of all ages but landscape painters,
+and what are the best landscape painters but poets? Alike they reproduce
+for us aspects of nature translated into human thoughts and tinged with
+human emotion. When Homer shows us bees swarming out of the hollow rock
+and hanging in grapelike clusters on the blossoms of spring; when
+AEschylus flashes upon us the unnumbered laughter of the sea-waves; when
+Virgil in a single line paints for us the silvery Galaesus flowing now
+under dark boughs, and now through golden fields; when Dante bids us
+gaze on a sky which is of the sweet color of the Eastern sapphire; when
+Wordsworth points us to the daffodils tossing in the winds of March
+beside the dancing waves of the lake; when Tennyson shows us "the gummy
+chestnut buds that glisten in the April blue;" when even in prose Mr.
+Ruskin produces scenes and sunsets as gorgeous as those of his own
+Turner--what are they but landscape painters.
+
+Again, how many memorable scenes of history are inseparable in our minds
+alike, and almost equally, from the descriptions of the writer or the
+conceptions of the artist? Shall we ever think of the execution of Mary
+Queen of Scots without recalling Mr. Froude's description of her, as she
+stood, a blood-red figure on the black-robed scaffold? Shall we ever
+think of Monmouth pleading for his life with James II, without
+remembering the picture which hung last year upon these walls? Is there
+no affinity between novelist and our many painters of ordinary scenes,
+with their kindred endeavor to shed light and beauty on the hopes and
+fears, the duties and sorrows of human life? Nay, even if the preacher
+and the divine may claim any part in the domain of letters, they, too,
+look to the artist for the aid and inspiration which, in their turn,
+they lend to him. Which of us can ever read the words, "These are the
+wounds with which I was wounded in the house of my friends," or,
+"Behold, I stand at the door and knock," without being helped to realize
+their meaning by the pathetic allegories of Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman
+Hunt? And if, sir, you will pardon the allusion, the verse, "Oh! had I
+the wings of a dove," is in my own mind henceforth inseparably
+associated, not only with the melody of Mendelssohn, in which we seem to
+see the dove hovering, as it were, in a cloud of golden music, but also
+with the picture I saw many years ago in this room, of a weary king
+sitting on his palace roof, his hair sable silvered, and his crown laid
+humbly upon the parapet beside him, whose eyes wistfully follow the
+flight of a flock of doves towards the twilight sky.
+
+I am sure that I echo the sentiment of every painter, and of every
+author here when I say we are brothers in the effort to make the happy
+happier, and the sad less miserable, and in the poet's words, "to teach
+the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, to feel, and
+therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous."
+
+ "High is our calling, friends! creative art,
+  (Whether the instruments of words she use
+  Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues,)
+  Demands the service of a mind and heart
+  Though sensitive, yet in their weakest part
+  Heroically fashioned--to infuse
+  Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse,
+  While the whole world seems adverse to desert
+  Great is the glory, for the strife was hard."
+
+[Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+JOHN R. FELLOWS
+
+
+NORTH AND SOUTH
+
+[Speech of Col. John R. Fellows at the third annual banquet of the New
+  York Southern Society, New York City, February 22, 1889. Col. John C.
+  Calhoun, President of the Society, said, in introducing him. "Now,
+  gentlemen, the next toast is: 'The Day We Celebrate.' I have been an
+  Arkansas traveller. We have here with us to-night as our guest another
+  who has also been an Arkansas traveller, but he has come on to this
+  great metropolis and located here, and to-day voices the sentiment of
+  a vast portion of our population. We now propose to hear from the Hon.
+  John R. Fellows."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE SOUTHERN SOCIETY, AND THEIR
+GUESTS:--I have just come from a banquet board, the twenty-second
+of February gathering of a society over which for some time past I have
+had the honor of presiding, and which, therefore, commanded my first
+allegiance to-night. It is not often that I am accustomed to appear in
+the attitude of an apologist when called upon to respond to a sentiment
+such as you have assigned to me to-night, for it would be but the
+affectation of modesty to say that I have been unaccustomed to positions
+of this kind; yet I do feel something of reluctance in your presence
+to-night, at the first banquet of your society which I have done myself
+the honor of attending. I do feel some hesitation in attempting to
+respond to a toast which includes so much, and is so large in its scope
+as the one your partiality has given to me. It is altogether unexpected,
+for I had announced to your committee that my presence here would be of
+exceedingly limited duration, as I am compelled to leave your midst to
+visit another gathering, where I have other duties to perform to-night.
+
+Yet I shall not hesitate to say something in response to the toast. He
+must be very far less than imbued with sentiments of love for his
+country and of a just conception of its greatness, who can fail to have
+something of that sentiment awakened upon an occasion like this, or in
+the presence of such a toast as you have given me.
+
+I congratulate you, Mr. President, upon the auspicious character of this
+gathering. The youngest of all the societies which have now arisen to
+prominence in our midst, you give tokens in your infancy of what your
+future greatness is to be. It is exceedingly gratifying to hear a
+statement of your prosperity which insures for you so much of the
+future, confers so much of hope and promise upon your society as that to
+which we have listened to-night.
+
+Especially is it gratifying to know of your financial condition; "the
+society owes nothing." In that respect the society differs radically
+from each of its individual members. [Laughter.] It is a Southern
+characteristic to owe all you can, to pay if you possibly can. There is
+a sentiment of honor about the Southerner that induces him to pay if he
+possibly can; but there is a sentiment of chivalry which always actuates
+him to contract debts without any reference whatever. [Laughter.] Having
+started your society on a basis so different from that which
+characterizes the units of the society is an evidence of how you have
+become permeated and tinctured with Yankee influences. I am glad to hear
+of your financial prosperity. It is a good augury, a hopeful sign of the
+success which awaits your efforts.
+
+You have called upon me to respond to the toast of "The Day we
+Celebrate." I should rather have listened to what would be said of that
+toast from the lips of the eloquent Virginian who so admirably
+represents the State that was the birthplace of Washington, whose
+personal character and whose family have given so much of additional
+lustre and glory to the State. [Applause and cheers for General Lee.]
+
+I may not venture, gentlemen, upon a review of the character of
+Washington, upon all that his life, and services, and influence meant to
+the world. The world, in the language of another, knows that history by
+heart. An hundred and fifty-seven years ago, I believe, this day, he was
+born. He lived almost the full age allotted to man, but he crowded that
+narrow life with deeds that would have rendered illustrious and
+immortal the history of a thousand years. He gave to the world an
+impetus, he impressed upon it a character and force, he gave it a
+conception of new power, of solidity of judgment, of strength of
+character, of unbending and unyielding integrity, of high devotion to
+principle, of just conception of duty, of patriotism and heroic resolve
+in the midst of temptation to wander and be subservient, of
+self-abnegation, of sacrifices for the benefit of others, such as would
+have adorned and rendered immortal--I repeat--the history of the lives
+of ten thousand ordinary men. [Applause.] You claim him for Virginia,
+but I speak the universal language when I repeat the eloquent expression
+of the most eloquent Irishman--"No country can claim, no age appropriate
+him; the boon of Providence to the human race, his fame is eternity, and
+his residence Creation." [Applause.] Well was it that the English
+subject could say (though it was the defeat of their armies and the
+disgrace of their policy--even they could bless the convulsion in which
+he had his origin), "for if the heavens thundered and the earth rocked
+yet when the storm had passed how pure was the atmosphere it cleared,
+how bright in the brow of the firmament was the planet it revealed to
+earth." An hundred years have passed since Washington, crowned with the
+honors of the successful chieftain, having led his country through the
+turmoil of seven years of blood and strife, in these streets and under
+these skies was crowned with the highest civic triumph this Republic can
+bestow upon its citizen.
+
+And to-night we come to inquire less, perhaps, of Washington's history,
+of Washington's influence and character--for every child knows
+that--than we do of the country of which Washington was so conspicuous a
+part. It seems to me, gentlemen, that the great national holiday we
+celebrate, the Fourth of July, is the most significant of all holidays
+in the history of all the nations of the world. What does it typify,
+sirs? What does it signify to us? Your chairman has said that we have
+had an hundred years of national history. It is a little less than an
+hundred years since we inaugurated our first President. The Fourth of
+July does not celebrate the establishment of the independence of the
+United States; it marks but the beginning of the strife instead of its
+successful close. It was at the outset of the Revolutionary struggle
+that the Colonies threw down that gauge which defied all tradition,
+which stamped upon all past history, which mocked at ancient dogmas and
+hoary traditions, which introduced upon earth an entirely new and
+distinctive doctrine! Before that time men had fought for the
+realization of noble purposes and high aims; they had fought to win
+succor from distressful conditions; they had fought for relief against
+oppression; but they had fought for these only as the gaining of a boon
+and a privilege from powers that were; and everywhere it was conceded
+that there was upon earth a class of men ordained by Providence to rule,
+and that the vassal's obedience was the inheritance of the many. And
+when men rose up in their might to fight upon the plains of Runnymede,
+in earnest contest, for ancient rights, for ancient privileges, it was
+after all only asking something of the grace of the sovereign, and no
+one denied his absolute power to withhold or to grant it as he would.
+But the colonies threw down this defiance to earth--that there was no
+heaven-ordained class to govern men; that man, by virtue of his
+existence, by reason of his creation, was a sovereign in his own right;
+and that in these latter days all just rights in government were
+derived, not from the will of the ruler, but from the consent of the
+governed. [Applause.]
+
+It was a new doctrine, I repeat, and if it could be successfully
+maintained there was no foundation strong enough for a throne to rest
+securely upon! And so all the startled nations rose up to oppose it,
+this innovation of all that had been in the preceding centuries; but
+guided by that star, led on by the resolute courage, the steadfast
+integrity of Washington, our fathers went on and on in pursuit of this
+doctrine, in quest of this precious boon, on through blood and toil, on
+when the struggle seemed like the very madness of despair, on and on
+when hope seemed to have fled, but patriotism remained; on over
+trembling dynasties and crumbling thrones, until they wrested that jewel
+of their love from the reluctant hand of a sullen king, and set it to
+glitter forever upon the brow of a new-born nation. [Applause.]
+Auspicious day, which an hundred years ago proclaimed both civil and
+religious liberty to all the populations of the earth! To-day we have
+set four other stars in our national heaven. [Applause.] Through all the
+years we shall go on adding to the glories of the constellation, each
+one with a radiance of its own, each one with an orbit of its own, but
+all swinging in delightful harmony in that larger orbit within which we
+recognize our common country, our Federal Union. [Applause.]
+
+What did Washington do for us? Look around you! I cannot but say, as
+that monument in St. Paul's says of the architect of that splendid pile,
+Sir Christopher Wren. All of him that could die sleeps under the marble,
+but above his mouldering ashes there is this inscription: "Here lies the
+body of Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul's. Reader, would you
+see his monument, then look around you." [Applause.] There could be no
+higher evidence of the grandeur and greatness, the strength and
+character of the man and of his mind, than to point to the works he did.
+So we say of Washington. We have had an hundred years of experience in
+the form of government that his sword conquered for us, and that his
+statesman-like mind fashioned and controlled at the outset. The guidance
+he gave us we have never lost; the teachings he inculcated we cherish as
+dearly to-day as when they were uttered. Nay! nay! his memory and his
+fame grow brighter as the years recede, and as we get away from the
+frailties and foibles which attach to the weakness of our common
+humanity, even in the person of the strongest. As we get away it is like
+moving from some grand mountain peak. As you go away you see its
+symmetrical form rise clear in the clouds, with the eternal blue around
+the summit, with all its harsh and rugged outlines obliterated by
+distance; it is there in its perfect grandeur, in its completeness and
+beauty, without any of the weaknesses or foibles which attach to it.
+
+I think there is no better evidence of the character and influence of
+Washington upon the American mind than what has transpired during and
+since the war. Look, sir, at the South of which you spoke! She was
+largely a lethargic people prior to the war. She lived in luxury; she
+was in the midst of a condition which yielded to her abundant support,
+and eliminated from her life the necessity of hard labor and earnest
+effort. The war came. We were bound around with a cordon we could not
+break; we were encircled by fire; we were thrown upon our resources.
+What resulted? Ah, sir, at once there leaped into life, with a splendor
+and with a giant's strength such as the world, such as ourselves had
+never conceived of, the true manhood of the South. Every man became a
+laborer, every woman a worker. There was nothing that the necessities of
+our life demanded that we did not fashion with our own hands. Deprived
+of all support, of all assistance from the outside world, we dug from
+our hills, and wrested from our soil, and evoked from resources the
+measure and extent of which we had never dreamed before, whatever was
+necessary for the support of the loved ones at home and the armies we
+maintained in the field. [Applause.] We illustrated a heroism and valor
+which is the admiration of the world, which is the highest pride and
+admiration of our gallant adversaries. They conquered no ignoble foe;
+the field was worthy even of their efforts. And when the war was over,
+the terrible strife had ended, while yet the land was filled with
+mourning, while every church on every Sunday in this North was crowded
+with women wearing the sable garments of woe for sons, for brothers, for
+husbands, for the loved of every kind and condition who were sleeping
+their last sleep on Southern hillsides--how did the spirit of
+Washington, the toleration, the kindness, the generosity, the
+magnanimity which in all his life he breathed out toward all exhibit
+itself here in the North? They took us by the hand. They lifted us to
+our feet again, or assisted in doing so. They gave us the recognition
+which one gallant man extends to another whose heroism and courage he
+has tested; they wrote the title of American Citizen upon our brows
+again, and told us to go on as parts of the Union, with our loves and
+hopes bound up in its common destiny. [Applause.]
+
+The spirit of Washington has never died. The courage of Washington has
+never died. This war was a vital necessity--let us recognize it. This
+war was an ordination of Providence--let us confess it. There were
+issues distracting and dividing this country which no legislation, no
+government, and no decrees of courts could settle. At one time or
+another they had to be fought to their final conclusion upon the
+battle-field. When the contest was ended it eliminated from our national
+condition every element of strife, and welded us together in a bond ten
+thousandfold stronger and better than we had known before. [Applause.]
+
+Now, what remains? Ah! so much remains that can never die! There are
+Northern soldiers here, there are Southern soldiers here. We stood face
+to face through the bitterness of that conflict; we stand heart to heart
+now. [Applause.] Whenever this country shall call upon her sons to do
+battle against a common foe, when North and South Carolina with
+Massachusetts and Vermont, when Georgia and Ohio, when all the South and
+all the North march side by side in behalf of Old Glory, then at the
+bivouac, then around our council fires, the sons will recall the
+valorous deeds their fathers wrought upon either side and under opposing
+flags during the civil strife, as the loudest call and the strongest
+inspiration to awaken effort in behalf of the rescued and re-united
+country. [Applause.] Has it not always been so? If you would awaken a
+flame of martial life in the sons of France, appeal to them as those
+whose eagles flew in triumph above Wagram, and Austerlitz, and Lodi
+Bridge, and bore upon the outstretched wings the glorious destinies of
+her favored child of fortune, her thunderbolt of war! If you would
+awaken Caledonia to battle, appeal to her sons as descendants of--
+
+ "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
+  Scots whom Bruce has often led,"
+
+and at once, from Loch Lomond, from Ben Nevis, and from the Grampian
+Hills, her kilted warriors will troop to death as to a feast, stimulated
+by the recollection of the glorious deeds of those from whose loins they
+sprang! And hereafter, sir, if eloquence shall want a theme to awaken
+her sublimest efforts, or poetry shall seek some shrine at which to
+offer its most harmonious numbers, orator and bard will not go back to
+the romantic period of Agincourt and Crecy, when Henry V led his armies
+to victory, and Douglas poured the vials of his wrath across
+Northumbrian plains--no need to go back there--but they will tell of the
+deeds of the glorious men who drew their swords at Lee's, or
+Johnston's, or Longstreet's bidding, or of those who flamed the demigods
+of war where Grant and Sherman and Sheridan led [applause]; of those
+whose camp-fires shone out on the dark walls of Blue Ridge, or lit up
+with their glow the waters of Gauley and of Shenandoah; of those who
+sleep in graves consecrated forevermore, where the starts look down
+to-night through shadowy trees in Spottsylvanian woods and Stafford
+groves; of the long lines whose musketry rang out their sublime peal in
+the early gray of that April morning at Shiloh, whose fierce
+battle-shout at Chancellorsville or in the Wilderness mingled with the
+farewell sounds that broke on Jackson's and on Sedgwick's ears, sounds
+scarcely stilled ere the acclamations of angels woke them to sublimer
+greeting. [Applause.]
+
+We may safely trust the story of the unequalled valor, the peerless
+chivalry of those years, on whichever side they fought, to the verdict
+which the unprejudiced future will utter. But I know if ever this
+country shall ask us again to flock to her standard and to do duty for
+her cause, there is no stronger inspiration that can be invoked, there
+is no enthusiasm that can be created or awakened that will lead men so
+quickly into the ranks of the foe and hold them so steadily in the face
+of death as to talk to each other of the deeds their fathers did when
+they stood as foes battling for what they thought was right. [Applause.]
+Nay! out of our very strife we have grown strong. The magnanimity of the
+conquering party has fused and welded us together in one irresistible,
+unbreakable party. No internal dissension shall disturb us henceforth;
+and the world arrayed in arms against us we do not fear. And all of this
+we derive from the teachings, the heroism, the courage, the patience,
+the faith, the example of the fathers, at the head of whom stood the
+illustrious one in whose behalf we celebrate this day. [Applause and
+cheers for Colonel Fellows.]
+
+
+
+
+DAVID DUDLEY FIELD
+
+
+THE TELEGRAPH
+
+[Speech of David Dudley Field at the dinner given in honor of Samuel F.
+  B. Morse, New York City, December 27, 1863.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--In the early days of the electric
+telegraph, a proposition was made that it should be called the
+Morseograph. I cannot but think that that would have been a distinctive
+and appropriate designation; thus, in all future time, when the thing
+should be mentioned, recalling the history of its origin. But the name
+of the inventor is no secret; and the world will ratify the judgment we
+pronounce to-night that, as benefactor and discoverer, his name will be
+immortal.
+
+If we were to measure the future of the telegraph by what it has already
+accomplished, we should predict for it an indefinite extension. Less
+than twenty years ago, the first line was built in the United States.
+Though it extended only from Washington to Baltimore, it was begun in
+doubt and completed with difficulty. Thence it stretched itself out
+first to Philadelphia and New York, then to other principal cities, and
+afterward along the great thoroughfares. On the other side of the sea it
+advanced from city to city, and from one market to another.
+
+At first laid with hesitation underneath the rivers, it was next carried
+beneath narrow seas, and at last plunged into the ocean and passed from
+continent to continent. Compare its feeble beginning with its
+achievement of to-day. Think of the uncertainty with which, after weary
+months upon dusty Maryland roads, the last link of that first line was
+closed, and then think of the exultation with which great ships in
+mid-ocean brought up from the bottom of the sea a cable lost two miles
+down, and the problem was forever solved, not only that an
+ocean-telegraph cable was possible, but that it could not be so lost as
+that it might not be found.
+
+Standing in the presence of the great inventor, I am constrained to
+congratulate him upon the fulness of his triumph as he remembers the
+early effort, and contrasts it with the marvels of this night in this
+hall. That little instrument, no larger than the clock upon the chamber
+mantel, and making as little noise, is yet speaking to both America and
+Europe; and what it says will be printed before the dawn, and laid at
+morning under the eyes of millions of readers. Did I say before the
+dawn? It will meet the dawn in its circuit before it reaches the
+confines of eastern Europe. In the opposite quarter, we know that the
+message which has just left us for the West will outstrip the day. Even
+while I have been speaking, the message has crossed the Mississippi,
+passed the workmen laying the farthest rail of the Pacific road, bounded
+over the Sierra Nevada, and dashed into the plains of California, as the
+last ray of to-day's sun is fading from the shore, and the twilight is
+falling upon the Pacific Sea.
+
+It is, however, not alone its history which justifies us in predicting
+for the telegraph indefinite extension. Its essential character must
+sooner or later carry it to every part of the habitable globe. Of all
+the agencies yet vouchsafed to man, it is the most accessible and the
+most potent. While the machinery itself is simple and cheap, the element
+from which it is fed is abundant and all-pervading. It is in the heaven
+above, in the earth beneath, and in the water under the earth. You take
+a little cup and pass into it a slender wire, when lo! there comes to it
+a spark from air and water, from the cloud and the solid earth, which
+the highest mountains cannot stop, nor the deepest seas drown, as it
+dashes on its fiery way, indifferent whether its errand be to the next
+village or to the antipodes. No other voice can speak to the far and
+near at the same time. No other hand can write a message which may be
+delivered within the same hour at Quebec and at Moscow. By no other
+means may you converse at once with the farmer of Illinois and the
+merchant of Amsterdam, with the German on the Danube and the Arab under
+his palm.
+
+To the use of such an instrument there can be no limit but the desire of
+man to converse with man. If from this populous and opulent capital you
+would speak with any inhabitant of either hemisphere, you have here an
+agent which may be brought to do your bidding. If any, however distant,
+desire to speak with us, they have these means at their command. How
+great will be the effect of all this upon the civilization of the human
+race, I do not pretend to foresee. But this I foresee, as all men may,
+that the necessities of governments, the thirst for knowledge, and the
+restless activity of commerce will make the telegraph girdle the earth
+and bind it in a network of electric wire.
+
+The Atlantic, the most dangerous and difficult of all the seas, has been
+crossed. In the Pacific you may pass easily from island to island, till
+you reach the shores of Eastern Asia. There an American company will
+take it up and extend it from side to side of the central Flowery Land.
+And an English company is about to cross the straits which divide
+Australia from the elder continent. Indeed, I think that I declare not
+only what is possible but what will come to pass within the next decade,
+that there will be a telegraph-office wherever there is now a
+post-office, and that messages by the telegraph will pass almost as
+frequently as messages by the mail.
+
+Then the different races and nations of men will stand, as it were in
+the presence of one another. They will know one another better. They
+will act and react upon one another. They may be moved by common
+sympathies and swayed by common interests. Thus the electric spark is
+the true Promethean fire, which is to kindle human hearts. Then will men
+learn that they are brethren, and that it is not less their interest
+than their duty to cultivate good-will and peace throughout all the
+earth.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+EARLY CONNECTICUT
+
+[Speech of David Dudley Field at a complimentary dinner given by the
+  Saturday Night Club to the judges of the Supreme Court, New York City,
+  April 5, 1890. Clark Bell, President of the Club, said in the course
+  of his introductory remarks: "It is our grand good fortune to have
+  with us to-night the Nestor of the American bar, who was born in
+  Connecticut, and whose useful life has covered nearly all the years of
+  our present century. His eye has seen much that is far in the past,
+  and beside that love and affection he bears to his birthplace are the
+  reminiscences of the men conspicuous in the judicial annals of his
+  native State, who have been upon the stage of action during the
+  eventful years of the present century. When we shall have separated,
+  when this banquet shall be but a memory and a reminiscence, that which
+  will give us most pleasure, the reminiscence we shall prize among the
+  highest, will be that of the presence of the Hon. David Dudley Field,
+  whose illustrious name I will connect with the toast--'Reminiscences
+  of the Bench and Bar of Connecticut'"]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT:--When you did me the honor to invite me to this
+banquet, I was quick to accept the invitation, because I expected to
+meet the judges of my native State, of which I bear so pleasant a
+remembrance. I find, however, representatives from other seats of
+justice come to greet the judges of Connecticut. You have here a judge
+from the Dominion of Canada, over which shines the mild light of
+Arcturus, and on the other side a representative from Texas where glows,
+not the Lone Star of other days, but the bright constellation of the
+Southern Cross. You have judges from the neighboring State of New
+Jersey, from the further State of Pennsylvania, and from Delaware, about
+which I may use the language of John Quincy Adams, speaking of Rhode
+Island: "She is to be measured, not by the smallness of her stature, but
+by the loftiness of her principles." All these eminent judges are here
+to join in the salutation to the judges of Connecticut, and to them
+therefore our attention is to be chiefly directed.
+
+I am old enough to remember the judges of Connecticut when they sat
+under the authority of the Colonial charter, that charter which was
+hidden in the famous oak of Hartford to escape seizure by an emissary of
+the King of England. I was present at the trial in Haddam, my native
+town, of a man for murder. Trumbull was the judge, that Trumbull who
+wrote "McFingal," and who, being elected for a single year, as was
+then the rule, was re-elected as long as he lived. He was neatly
+dressed, wearing ruffles in the bosom, and at the wrists, and was in
+trim knee-breeches.
+
+I remember this incident of the trial. The crowd was so great that the
+court was adjourned from the court house to the church, then called the
+meeting-house. The jurors sat in the square pews. One of the jurors, a
+respectable farmer of the neighborhood, thinking that he had detected
+some mistake of the counsel rose to correct him, when the counsel
+retorted that the juror was the one mistaken, and added: "Let him that
+thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." The prisoner was convicted
+and was hanged at Middletown. I went up to see the execution, and when I
+reached the place trained bands were marching through the streets,
+playing their music as if for a great festivity. A sermon was preached
+to a crowded house, and the prisoner was then taken, dressed in a
+shroud, to a hill near by, and in the presence of thousands of
+spectators was executed. These scenes were of course impressed strongly
+on the memory of a boy. I remember the session of the county court at
+Haddam, when the judges, headed by the sheriff, marched in order from
+the tavern to the court house. I remember seeing in court David Daggett,
+wearing white top boots, and I met Roger Minot Sherman, driving into the
+village in a sulky. I remember Staples and Hungerford. The latter went
+into court one day with a Bible under his arm, to show from the first
+chapter of Genesis, as authority in an insurance case, that the day
+began at sunset, "and the evening and the morning were the first day."
+
+In those days party feeling ran high in Connecticut, between the
+Democrats and the Federalists--"Demos" and "Feds," as they were called
+for shortness--and contempt as well. Let me recount two anecdotes: The
+Rev. Dr. Backus, riding along the highway, stopped at a brook to water
+his horse, when another rider came up from the opposite side, and thus
+addressed the good man: "Good-morning, Mr. Minister." The latter
+replied, "Good-morning, Mr. Democrat. How did you know that I was a
+minister?" "By your dress. How did you know that I was a Democrat?" "By
+your address."
+
+At another time Dr. Backus, being prosecuted for a libel upon Mr.
+Jefferson, was taken from his home to Hartford to be bailed. The
+minister and the marshal rode of course, for that was not the heyday of
+vehicles. The minister rode very fast, so fast that the marshal called
+out after him: "Dr. Backus, Dr. Backus, you ride as if the devil were
+after you." The Doctor turning his head replied, "Just so!"
+
+Mr. President, Connecticut has been often abused for the frugality and
+thrift of its people, and called in derision the Nutmeg State. I
+remember hearing that a New Yorker once put into his will an injunction
+against any child of his being educated in Connecticut.
+
+An Episcopal clergyman removing from New York into a Connecticut town
+was actually boycotted. The people would not sell him anything to eat,
+and I believe he returned for food and shelter to the hither side of
+Byram River. I remember such a joke as this current in New York; that
+they had a singular habit in Connecticut, when a man cast up his
+accounts with his neighbor and gave him a note for the balance, he used
+to exclaim: "Thank God, that debt is paid." Some of the people have
+singular tastes now and then; as for example there is a hill behind East
+Haddam that used to be called "Stagger-all-hill," but inquiring the
+other day, I was told its name was now "Mount Parnassus."
+
+They may say all these things if they please, but Connecticut has no
+public debt, or a very small one at most, and her people are
+industrious, educated, polite to strangers, jealous of their rights and
+brave enough to defend them. I remember hearing Mrs. Fanny Kemble say,
+some years ago, of the twelve hundred thousand people then inhabiting
+Massachusetts, that, taking them all in all, she thought they were the
+foremost twelve hundred thousand people living together in the world,
+and I can speak in similar terms of the inhabitants of Connecticut, as
+really a part of the same people.
+
+In conclusion, Mr. President, may I without affectation utter these
+words of love for my native State, its scenery and its people. Flow on,
+gentle river, shine on, rugged and wooded hills, smile on, green meadows
+basking in the sun, and you, brave people, who dwell amid these scenes,
+prove yourselves ever worthy of your progenitors, and flaunt high as you
+will, the old banner with its hopeful and trustful motto--_qui
+transtulit sustinet_.
+
+
+
+
+FRANCIS M. FINCH
+
+
+THE OFFICE OF THE LAW
+
+[Speech of Francis M. Finch on assuming the chair of the President of
+  the New York State Bar Association, at their annual dinner, Albany,
+  N. Y., January 17, 1900. The ex-President, Walter J. Logan, introduced
+  him in the following words: "Before I introduce to you Judge Finch, I
+  want to say just one word for myself. The New York State Bar
+  Association has treated me with distinguished consideration, and I
+  shall ever regard every member of the Association as my personal
+  friend, and among the pleasantest experiences of my life, which I am
+  only just commencing, that the lawyers of the State of New York
+  thought me worthy of the position which I am now surrendering. Allow
+  me to introduce to you Judge Finch. [Applause.] I want to introduce to
+  you, Judge Finch, the most splendid body of men in the American
+  nation,--the New York State Bar Association. Judge Finch is now
+  President."]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--I regard it as a very great honor to be called upon
+to preside over the work of this Association for the coming year. I do
+not know of any other temptation which would have drawn me away from the
+quiet of my ordinary life into an arena so public and so open to
+critical observation. It is entirely natural that one who has crossed
+the line of threescore and ten should covet a life of rest, or at least
+some restful work which makes no heavy demand upon brain and nerves, but
+I have received from the Bar of the State of New York, in the years that
+have gone by, and which seem to me now almost like a dream, I have
+received at their hands so much kindness and courtesy, so much of that
+encouragement and generous approval which makes the hardest work a
+pleasure and happiness, that it seemed to me almost ungrateful and
+ungracious to refuse the duty which was sought to be imposed upon me,
+and so I have surrendered, with such grace as I may, and will endeavor,
+to the best of my ability, to push forward the work of this Association.
+[Applause.]
+
+Indeed, gentlemen, I confess, as over our cups confessions are sometimes
+excusable and in order--I confess that it is something of a comfort not
+to be quite forgotten. [Applause.] It is the lot of the average judge--I
+don't mean by that these old associates of mine, sitting by me, who are
+a long way above the average [applause]--it is the lot of the average
+judge to disappear from the public memory very soon after his work is
+done. Occasionally there is one who makes his appearance in the flush of
+some new and remarkable era, and fastens his name to its beginning.
+Occasionally there are others who do some excellent work, not altogether
+judicial, and in that manner keep their memories alive; but the most of
+us, when our work is done, step down into the mist and the darkness of a
+very swift and prompt oblivion. And if you, gentlemen of the Bar, have
+chosen for me to draw back the curtains a little, to dissipate somewhat
+the mist and the darkness, it is just like you; it is only another of
+those kindly deeds which it is pleasant to remember, and for which I am
+grateful, and glad to have the opportunity of saying so. [Applause.]
+
+I wished to confine what I have to say to-night simply to these words of
+acknowledgment, but the thought comes to me, and I think I must give it
+expression, that there never was a year in the history of this nation
+when the work of the intelligent, of the able and of the scholarly
+lawyer was more imperatively demanded in the interest of the nation and
+of the race, than this year which now opens before us. [Applause.] I
+have long been of the conviction that the law never leads civilization,
+but always follows in its wake; that its purpose and its object is to
+regulate and control the relations of men with each other, and their
+relations to the State; but those relations must first come, must first
+be established before there is anything for the law to regulate.
+Progress goes on; new inventions are made; new relations between men
+occur, and it is the office and the purpose of the law to march behind
+them, to regulate and order and systematize them, and produce, if need
+be, justice out of injustice; and to-day beyond the questions of
+taxation, which are an almost insoluble problem, we have already the
+beginnings in the metropolis of the State of an underground railway,
+likely to open and introduce questions as difficult and as remarkable
+as those which attended the elevated railways. We have a mass of
+colossal trusts, as they are called, combinations of capital, in an
+extraordinary degree, with which some of you have already been
+wrestling, and others of you will be called upon to confront or defend.
+Beyond that the student of international law is about to be obliged to
+look away from home and reconsider his foundations, to reflect anew upon
+the conclusions to which he has come in the application of the questions
+of what is contraband and what is not in the light of an extending
+commerce. Beyond that, again, and what interested me, perhaps, more than
+it may you, I saw the other day in one of our leading city journals, a
+statement which I have been able to verify, that the German nation on
+the first day of January in this year, set in operation a new Prussian
+code, which substituted for the civil law and the Latin doctrine the
+Teutonic law of Germany. I myself cannot read the German language; but,
+if there are some among you, within the sound of my voice, who are
+capable of doing that, I set you the task between now and one year from
+to-day of studying and examining that new Prussian code, which must be a
+marked departure, and giving us the benefit of your knowledge and your
+judgment. And, beyond that still, the nation itself stands to-day at the
+parting of the ways; stands to-day upon the verge of a new and most
+unexpected and remarkable destiny, and, I repeat, that there never was,
+I think, there never will be, gentlemen, another year in which the labor
+and the study and the thought of the scholarly and intelligent and
+learned lawyer could be more needed or more in demand. [Applause.]
+
+Let me add one word, not quite so serious, and that, with reference to
+my friend who has been your President during the past year, and who, for
+his patient industry in your behalf, for the manner in which he has
+conducted your affairs and looked after your interests, deserves the
+thanks of this Association, which, in your name and behalf, I venture to
+give him. [Applause.] What I want to say, however, outside of that, is a
+little bit in the line of complaint. He has undertaken to take away from
+me my surplus over and above ten millions of dollars [laughter], and
+give it to the State of New York. He says in justification that he
+thinks and believes that it would be for the best, but, with all
+deference to his opinion, I venture to say that I would rather trust my
+children to spend that surplus than the average legislature. [Laughter.]
+More than that, and the suggestion will relieve my friend somewhat, I do
+not intend to have any surplus over his ten millions, not if I know it.
+When I reach that happy point, and find that my inventory is running
+above it, I propose quietly to take that surplus and hand it over,
+first, on one side, and then on the other, to my children, and that
+beautiful inheritance law of his will have no application to me
+whatever. [Laughter.] Nevertheless, while I disagree with him about
+those things, and think I see my way out of the difficulty, I pardon all
+of it, because he has promised me faithfully on his honor that until the
+close of the festivities he would remain your President, and when in the
+end he bade you good-night he would do it for me, as well as for
+himself, and wish you each and all a happy journey to your homes and a
+safe return to these same tables one year from to-day. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+JOHN FOORD
+
+
+THE LAND O' CAKES
+
+[Speech of John Foord at the 143d annual banquet of the St. Andrew's
+  Society of the State of New York, December 1, 1899. The speech was
+  delivered in response to the toast, "The Land O' Cakes."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT, MEMBERS AND GUESTS OF THE ST. ANDREW'S
+SOCIETY:--I suppose there are some in this company who would find
+it hard to tell the difference between a bear bannock and a pease scone.
+For the benefit of such, I may be permitted to say that there was no
+suggestion of fancy bread about the "cakes" with which the name of
+Scotland has been associated. They were very plain bread, indeed, and
+quite as destitute of leaven as that which the Children of Israel were
+condemned to eat in the wilderness. The only sweetening they had came
+from the fact that they were the fruit of honest toil; and hunger, as
+you know, is "gude kitchen." Together with the "hale-some parritch,
+chief o' Scotia's food," they formed the staff of life of a people whose
+tastes were as simple as their ideals were high. "We cultivate
+literature on a little oatmeal," was the motto proposed by Sydney Smith
+for the "Edinburgh Review"; and, jocular as was the suggestion, it
+touches the keynote of Scottish character and history. For, what have we
+not done on a little oatmeal? Our fathers fought on it, worked on it,
+thought and studied on it, wrote ballads and preached sermons on it, and
+created the Scotland, kinship with which we are all so proud to claim,
+on a diet chiefly composed of oat cakes and oatmeal porridge. On such
+frugal fare, they subdued a harsh and stubborn soil and made it yield
+its yearly toll of harvest; they took tribute of wool and mutton from
+the moorland and the hillside, and of hide and beef from the fallow
+lea; they levied on loch and sea to support their fisher-folk; and kept
+the rock and the reel and the flying shuttle busy to clothe themselves
+with homespun, so that the old Arbroath toast became a very epitome of
+the vocations of that primitive time: "The life o' man, the death o'
+fish, the shuttle, and the plough; corn, horn, linen, yarn, lint, and
+tarry 'oo." Nay more, defying the rigors of an ungenial climate, they
+set themselves, in their dour and stubborn way, to make flowers grow
+where Nature never intended such flowers to be; and they became so
+cunning in the mystery of Adam's art that the Scottish gardener took the
+place of direction wherever men laid out flower-beds or built
+greenhouses throughout the civilized world.
+
+On such simple lines of industry were laid the foundations of the
+material greatness of Scotland--its mines, its furnaces, its machine
+shops, its shipyards, its flax and jute mills, and all the other forms
+of productive energy that have placed this little country and its few
+millions of people in the front rank of the mechanical activity of the
+world. But is it because of such triumphs as these that the name of
+Scotland appeals so powerfully to the heart and the imagination of men?
+I think not. Had our race been distinguished only for its care of the
+bawbees, for its indomitable perseverance, its capacity to endure
+hardship, its adaptiveness, and its enterprise, I trow that the
+passionate pilgrim would not turn so eagerly to Scotland to cull the
+flowers of poesy and breathe the air of romance. And remember, our
+Scottish people are rather what the country has made them, than the
+country is what it has been made by them. I heard Governor Roosevelt say
+the other evening that the State of New York was merely another name for
+the aggregate of the people in it, and I could not help thinking that
+there must be in the Dutch blood a certain deficiency of imagination.
+Can you imagine a Scotsman, however matter-of-fact and commonplace,
+offering such a definition of his native land? The land of brown heath
+and shaggy wood, land of the mountain and the flood, the land of our
+sires, must be, indeed, part of ourselves; but it is also something
+beyond and above ourselves,--the cradle of memories that will fade only
+with our latest breath, the home of traditions, whose spell we could
+not, if we would, shake off, the seat of beauty and of grandeur that we
+somehow think are finer than the fairest or sublimest scenes that earth
+can show. We know the feeling that prompted Byron to say:--
+
+ "When I see some tall rock lift its head to the sky,
+  Then I think of the hills that o'ershadow Culbean."
+
+For, to most of us, in all our intercourse with Nature, the Scottish
+mind supplies a Scottish background. There is nothing that affects me
+quite so powerfully as a fine sunset; but I confess that, from all the
+magnificent sunsets that I have seen between the Palisades and the Rocky
+Mountains, I have derived no such emotion as I have felt when,
+"gathering his glory for a grand repose," the sun set behind the
+Grampians; and the peak of Schehallion, like a spearhead, cleft the
+evening sky. Why, the Scottish exile thinks that the sun turns a
+kindlier face to his native land than it does to countries less favored,
+like the one who sang:--
+
+ "The sun rises bright in France,
+    And fair sets he;
+  But he's tint the blythe blink he had
+    In my ain countrie."
+
+We are what we are, gentlemen, because the land of our birth is "Bonnie
+Scotland," as well as the "Land o' Cakes." Its beauty has entered into
+our blood; its majesty and sublimity have given us a certain elevation
+of soul. Thus it came about that, beside the homely kailyard virtues of
+our forefathers, and their stern uncompromising religious zeal, there
+grew up in all their wild beauty such a profusion of the flowers of
+song, of poetry, and of romance that you shall hardly find between
+Tweed's silver stream and where the ocean billows break in thunder on
+Cape Wrath, ten square miles of Scottish ground which have not been
+celebrated in ballad, legend, song or story. Whence, think you, came
+that affluence of melody with which every strath and glen and carse of
+Scotland was vocal--melody that auld wives crooned at their spinning
+wheel: lasses lilted at ewe-milking, before the dawn of day; fiddlers
+played at weddings and christenings; and pipers sent echoing among the
+hills to inspire the march of the warlike living or sound a lament for
+the heroic dead? A long line of nameless Scottish minstrels had lived
+and died generations before Burns and Ferguson, Tannahill and Lady
+Nairne, and all the rest of our sweet singers took the old tunes and
+gave them a form and vesture as immortal as their own fame. We are
+called a practical, hard-headed people, and so we are; but the most
+enduring part of our literature tells of the romantic ideals that
+Scotsmen have cherished and the chivalrous deeds they have done. We are
+thought to be severely logical; and if allowance be made for our point
+of view, we are that also. But the unsympathetic student of Scottish
+history will not get very far with his subject by keeping steadily in
+mind our practicalness and our logic. If he thinks of these alone, he
+will be apt to pronounce those Scotsmen fools who sacrificed two
+centuries of progress for the barren, if glorious, privilege of national
+independence; he will think they must have been pure fanatics who spilt
+their blood that they might have Christ's Kirk and Covenant regulated in
+their own peculiar way; and he will hold them as mere feather-brains who
+sacrificed their lands and their lives to an obstinate loyalty to the
+House of Stuart. Yet it is of such unreason, if unreason it be, that the
+warp and the woof of the historic annals of Scotland have been spun: it
+is this defiance of what the utilitarian philosopher calls the rules of
+common sense, as applied to human conduct, that has given the Scottish
+race their unique position among the tribes of men.
+
+And, even in this age of steam and electricity, they will still cherish
+their romance. It was but the other day that there was pointed out to
+the Gordon Highlanders in the Transvaal the expediency of exchanging the
+garb of old Gaul for a uniform of khaki: the one would be less of a
+shining mark for the enemy than the other, and, its adoption would
+probably result in saving many lives. You know their decision. I think I
+hear them say, "All this may well be true; but we stand by the kilt and
+the tartan." That, a critical world may say, is magnificent, but it is
+not war. We say, magnificent or not, it is war; for the kilt and the
+tartan are inseparable from the sentiment that makes these men the
+redoubtable soldiers they are. Take those away, and you break their
+touch with a continuous tradition which transforms every man in the
+regiment, be he Scottish, English or Irish, into a Gordon, with all the
+dash and vim and dare-devil courage that centre around the name. The
+Gordon blood in him helped Byron to understand and express the potency
+of the Highland tradition:--
+
+            "But, with the breath that fills
+ Their mountain pipe, so fill the mountaineers
+   With the fierce native daring which instills
+ The stirring memories of a thousand years.
+ And Evan's, Donald's fame rings in each clansman's ears."
+
+May there never come a time when the mind of our race will be closed
+against such a sentiment as that! Let us go on doing our share,
+resolutely, faithfully, conscientiously, of the work of the world; let
+us keep well to the front with the same success that we have done of
+yore; but let us not forget that we owe the unconquerable spirit in us
+to our Auld Mither Scotland, that it is from her breast there has been
+drawn the celestial ichor which has nourished genius in the cottage as
+generously as in the Hall, and that has made the inheritance of the
+ploughman's son more precious than a Dukedom. We shall, as your
+President has said, be better, and not worse citizens of this great
+Republic; we shall play our part all the more worthily, in public or
+private station, if every fibre of our being thrills to an auld Scotch
+sang, and we feel in our inmost heart that--
+
+ "Where the caller breezes sweep
+    Across the mountain's breast,
+  Where the free in soul are nurst,
+    Is the land that we lo'e best."
+
+
+
+SIMEON FORD
+
+
+ME AND SIR HENRY
+
+[Speech of Simeon Ford at a banquet given to Sir Henry Irving by the
+  Lotos Club, New York City, October 29, 1899. The President, Frank R.
+  Lawrence, occupied the chair.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--I cannot but envy you the intellectual treat in
+which you are revelling, in being permitted to listen to the resistless
+eloquence of both me and Sir Henry Irving. It is not often that two such
+stars as me and Sir Henry will consent to twinkle in the same firmament.
+But your gifted President can accomplish wonders. He is what Weber and
+Fields[3] call a "hypnotister."
+
+As the President has said, I am not one of the set speakers. I just blew
+in here, and blew in my good money to attend this feast, like the rest
+of the rank and file, and now I have to work my passage as well. I am
+simply put in as a filler. The President, with his awe-inspiring,
+chill-producing gavel, is the "wrapper," and I am the filler; and you,
+who smoke, have observed ere this that a mighty fine wrapper is often
+associated with a very rank filler.
+
+If I had had about twenty minutes' warning I could have prepared a
+eulogy on Sir Henry, setting forth his virtues as a man and an actor in
+such a way that he never would have recognized himself, and with such
+eloquence that Dr. Greer [David H. Greer] would have looked like thirty
+cents. But I did not get the twenty minutes, so poor Sir Henry must
+content himself with the few scant bouquets with which he has already
+been bombarded.
+
+A sober, able-bodied eulogizer with a good address and a boiled shirt
+can get a pretty steady winter's job in this Club at board wages. I
+have, in my poor, weak way, eulogized several distinguished men in this
+historic room, all of whom I am happy to say, are now convalescent. I
+eulogized Joe Choate and he got a job at the Court of St. James; I
+eulogized Horace Porter, and he is now playing one night stands at the
+Moulin Rouge; Dr. Depew, and he not only got sent to Washington, but got
+a raise of wages at the Grand Central Depot; yet when I saw him the next
+day and delicately intimated that I was yearning to view the scenic
+beauty of his great four track system, his reception reminded me of the
+lines of Longfellow, beginning--
+
+ "Try not the pass, the old man said
+  Dark lowers the tempest overhead."
+
+and so, instead of resting that night on a beautiful Wagner
+hair-mattress, I had to be content with "excelsior."
+
+The only man who really appreciated my efforts was dear old Joe
+Jefferson. When I gave him to understand that I was anxious to see him
+in one of his matchless characterizations, he inquired if I had a family
+that shared my anxiety, and when informed that I had, he generously
+tendered all hands a pass to the family circle. The Lord loves a
+cheerful giver, but the Lord help any one who strikes Joe for a free
+pass.
+
+I can understand that the life of an actor must be a trying one, and
+success difficult to achieve, and it must be a source of great
+gratification to Sir Henry to feel that he has done so much to elevate
+the stage as well as the price of admission. But he deserves success,
+and the last time I gave up three dollars to behold him, and afterwards,
+with a lot of enthusiasts, took his horses from his carriage and dragged
+him in triumph two miles to his hotel, I really felt that I had had a
+run for my money.
+
+But if, Sir Henry, in gratitude for this beautiful tribute which I have
+just paid you, you should feel tempted to reciprocate by taking my
+horses from my carriage and dragging me in triumph through the streets,
+I beg that you will restrain yourself for two reasons. The first reason
+is--I have no horses; the second is--I have no carriage.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+A RUN ON THE BANKER
+
+[Speech of Simeon Ford at the Annual dinner of the Manhattan Bankers of
+  the New York State Bankers' Association, February 7, 1900. The
+  President, Warner Van Norden, presided.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--As I sat here this evening, listening to the
+strains of that fine old Bankers' anthem entitled "When you ain't got no
+money, why you needn't come around," I was thinking what a grand idea it
+was for you magnates to get together once a year to exchange ideas and
+settle among yourselves what shall be done, and who shall be done, and
+how you will do them. Personally, I'd prefer to exchange cheques rather
+than ideas with many here present; not but what the ideas are all right,
+but somehow, when money talks I am always a fascinated listener.
+
+I did not come here voluntarily, but at the pressing invitation of some
+of my most pressing creditors on your committee. They said Secretary
+Gage would be here, and Mr. J. P. Morgan, and that without my presence
+the affair would seem incomplete, but that if we three got together we
+could settle various perplexing financial problems right on the spot.
+The committee told me to choose my own subject and they would endorse
+anything I would say--without recourse. They delicately intimated,
+however, that any playful allusions to the City Bank better be left
+unsaid; and so I can only remark:--
+
+ "And I would that my tongue could utter,
+  The thoughts that arise in me!"
+
+and let it go at that.
+
+I must say, however, that Secretary Gage made one serious mistake. If he
+had consulted me (which he never did, although he had abundant
+opportunity) I would have advised him to put his money in an institution
+I know about where it would have received a rousing welcome and where I
+could have taken a fall out of it myself. If the price of the
+Custom-House had gotten into my hands, and I'd been given twenty-four
+hours' start, I believe I could have given the secretary a run for his
+money. But, instead, he placed it in a rich, smooth-running, well-oiled
+institution where it was used in averting a panic and straightening out
+financial tangles, and greasing the wheels of commerce, and similar
+foolishness.
+
+This is the first opportunity I have had of meeting you Bank Presidents
+collectively, and when you are thawed out. I have met most of you,
+individually, when you were frozen stiff. I never supposed you could
+warm up, as you seem to have done, my previous impressions having been
+of the "How'd you like to be the iceman" order. Sometimes I have thought
+I'd almost rather go without the money than get a congestive chill in a
+Bank President's office, and have him gaze into my eyes, and read the
+inmost secrets of my soul, and ask unfeeling questions, and pry rudely
+into my past, and throw out wild suggestions about getting Mr. Astor to
+endorse for me, and other similar atrocities. And even if I succeed in
+deceiving him he leads me, crushed, humiliated and feeling like thirty
+cents, to a fly cashier, who, taking advantage of my dazed condition,
+includes in my three-months' note, not only Christmas and the Fourth of
+July, but St. Patrick's Day, Ash Wednesday and sixteen Sundays, so that,
+by the time he has deducted the interest, what's coming to me looks like
+a Jaeger undershirt after its first interview with an African
+_blanchisseuse_. That's the kind of thing the poet had in mind when he
+wrote--"I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows."
+
+I have observed that one's reception at a bank varies somewhat with the
+condition of the money market. Go in when money is easy and the
+President falls on your neck, calls you by your first name, and
+cheerfully loans you large sums on your "Balloon Common" and your "Smoke
+Preferred," and you go on your way rejoicing. The next day, news having
+arrived that a Gordon Highlander has strained a tendon in his leg while
+sprinting away from a Dutchman near Ladysmith, or an Irish lady _chef_
+has sent home two pounds sterling to her family, money goes up to one
+hundred and eighty per cent. a minute, and you get a note requesting you
+to remove your "Balloon Common" and your "Smoke Preferred" and
+substitute Government Bonds therefor. And still you wonder at crime.
+
+But if you really want to know the meaning of the terms "Marble Heart"
+and "Icy Eye" go into one of these refrigerating plants for a loan when
+money is tight. It is prudent at such times to wear ear-muffs and red
+mittens fastened together by tape so they can't be lost, for you will
+need 'em.
+
+As soon as you reach the outer air--which will be in about a second--run
+home and plunge the extremities in hot water, and place a porous plaster
+on what remains of your self-esteem.
+
+Bankers are too prone to judge a man by his appearance, so that the very
+men who need the money most have the hardest work to get it. They are
+apt, especially at the City Bank, to discriminate against the "feller"
+who looks rocky, in favor of the Rockafeller. Clothes do not make the
+man! If they did, Hetty Green wouldn't be where she is and Russell Sage
+would be in the Old Ladies' Home. If Uncle Russell had to travel on his
+shape, he never would see much of the world. Yet, beneath that ragged
+coat there beats a heart which as a beater can't be beat--a heart as
+true (so the Standard Gas people say)--as true as "steal."
+
+But after all, Banks and Trust Companies do a lot of good in a quiet
+way, especially to their directors--in a quiet way. See what a
+convenience some of our Trust Companies have been to their directors of
+late. It would sometimes be mortifying for these directors to have to
+attempt to borrow money on certain securities, in institutions with
+which they were not connected, because, instead of getting the money,
+they might get six months.
+
+I had intended to touch upon a few vital questions concerning finance
+this evening, but the night is waning and I guess you've all been
+"touched" sufficiently of late, so I will restrain myself, and give some
+other orator a chance to get himself disliked.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+
+
+MEN OF LETTERS
+
+[Speech of James A. Froude at the banquet of the Royal Academy, London,
+  April 29, 1876. The President, Sir Francis Grant, in introducing Mr.
+  Froude, said: "The next toast is 'The Interests of Literature and
+  Science.' This toast is always so welcome and so highly appreciated
+  that it needs no exordium from the chair. I cannot associate with the
+  interests of literature a name more worthy than that of Mr. Froude,
+  the scholar and distinguished historian."]
+
+
+SIR FRANCIS GRANT, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, MY LORDS, AND
+GENTLEMEN:--While I feel most keenly the honor which you confer
+upon me in connecting my name with the interests of literature, I am
+embarrassed, in responding, by the nature of my subject. What is
+literature, and who are men of letters? From one point of view we are
+the most unprofitable of mankind--engaged mostly in blowing
+soap-bubbles. [Laughter.] From another point of view we are the most
+practical and energetic portion of the community. [Cheers.] If
+literature be the art of employing words skillfully in representing
+facts, or thoughts, or emotions, you may see excellent specimens of it
+every day in the advertisements in our newspapers. Every man who uses a
+pen to convey his meaning to others--the man of science, the man of
+business, the member of a learned profession--belongs to the community
+of letters. Nay, he need not use his pen at all. The speeches of great
+orators are among the most treasured features of any national
+literature. The orations of Mr. Grattan are the text-books in the
+schools of rhetoric in the United States. Mr. Bright, under this aspect
+of him, holds a foremost place among the men of letters of England.
+[Cheers.]
+
+Again, sir, every eminent man, be he what he will, be he as unbookish
+as he pleases, so he is only eminent enough, so he holds a conspicuous
+place in the eyes of his countrymen, potentially belongs to us, and if
+not in life, then after he is gone, will be enrolled among us. The
+public insist on being admitted to his history, and their curiosity will
+not go unsatisfied. [Cheers.] His letters are hunted up, his journals
+are sifted; his sayings in conversation, the doggerel which he writes to
+his brothers and sisters are collected, and stereotyped in print.
+[Laughter.] His fate overtakes him. He cannot escape from it. We cry
+out, but it does not appear that men sincerely resist the liberty which
+is taken with them. We never hear of them instructing their executors to
+burn their papers. [Laughter.] They have enjoyed so much the exhibition
+that has been made of their contemporaries that they consent to be
+sacrificed themselves.
+
+Again, sir, when we look for those who have been most distinguished as
+men of letters, in the usual sense of the word; where do we find them?
+The famous lawyer is found in his chambers, the famous artist is found
+in his studio. Our foremost representatives we do not find always in
+their libraries; we find them, in the first place, in the service of
+their country. ["Hear! Hear!"] Owen Meredith is Viceroy of India, and
+all England has applauded the judgment that selected and sent him there.
+[Cheers.] The right honorable gentleman [Mr. Gladstone] who three years
+ago was conducting the administration of this country with such
+brilliant success was first generally known to his countrymen as a
+remarkable writer. During forty years of arduous service he never wholly
+deserted his original calling. ["Hear! Hear!"] He is employing an
+interval of temporary retirement to become the interpreter of Homer to
+the English race [cheers], or to break a lance with the most renowned
+theologians in defence of spiritual liberty. [Cheers.]
+
+A great author, whose life we have been all lately reading with delight,
+contemplates the year 3000 as a period at which his works may still be
+studied. If any man might be led reasonably to form such an anticipation
+for himself by the admiration of his contemporaries, Lord Macaulay may
+be acquitted of vanity. The year 3000 is far away, much will happen
+between now and then; all that we can say with certainty of the year
+3000 is that it will be something extremely different from what any one
+expects. I will not predict that men will then be reading Lord
+Macaulay's "History of England." I will not predict that they will then
+be reading "Lothair." [Laughter.] But this I will say, that if any
+statesman of the age of Augustus or the Antonines had left us a picture
+of patrician society at Rome, drawn with the same skill, and with the
+same delicate irony with which Mr. Disraeli has described a part of
+English society in "Lothair," no relic of antiquity would now be
+devoured with more avidity and interest. [Loud cheers.] Thus, sir, we
+are an anomalous body, with very ill-defined limits. But, such as we
+are, we are heartily obliged to you for wishing us well, and I give you
+our most sincere thanks. [Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+MELVILLE WESTON FULLER
+
+
+THE SUPREME COURT
+
+[Speech of Melville W. Fuller at the fifth annual dinner of the New
+  England Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, December 22, 1888. The
+  President, Heman L. Wayland, D.D., said in introducing Justice
+  Fuller:--"The reverence of New England for law and her readiness to
+  make law (a readiness, perhaps our enemies will say, to make them for
+  other people) naturally suggests the topic which is first on the
+  programme--'New England in the Supreme Court.' I shall not enlarge
+  upon the sentiment, lest I should only mar the canvas which will
+  shortly be illumined by the hand of a master. The case of New England
+  versus The World has long been in court; the evidence is in; the
+  learned counsel have been heard; and now, before the case is finally
+  given to the intelligent jury of the human race, it remains only that
+  we hear a charge from his honor, the Chief Justice of the United
+  States."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--I
+thank you sincerely for the courtesy which has afforded me the
+opportunity of being with you this evening, and am deeply sensible of
+the compliment paid in the request to respond to the sentiment just
+given.
+
+We all know--we have heard over and over again--that the "Day We
+Celebrate" commemorates an emigration peculiar in its causes. It was not
+the desire to acquire wealth or power, nor even the spirit of adventure,
+that sent these colonists forth. They did not go to return, but to
+abide; and while they sought to make another country theirs, primarily
+to enjoy religious independence, they were much too sagacious not to
+know that emancipation from the ecclesiastical thraldom, of which they
+complained, involved the attainment of political rights and immunities
+as well. And so this day commemorates not simply the heroism of struggle
+and endurance in silence and apart, for a great cause, not simply the
+unfeigned faith which rendered such heroism possible, but the planting
+of that germ of local self-government which has borne glorious fruit in
+the reconcilement of individual freedom with a national sway of imperial
+proportions.
+
+It commemorates the advent of that first written constitution of civil
+government, that first attempt of a people in that form, by self-imposed
+fundamental law, to put it out of their own power to work injustice;
+that agreement, signed upon the sea, "to enact, constitute and frame
+such just and equal laws and ordinances, acts, constitutions and
+offices," as should be "thought most meet and convenient for the general
+good of the colony," to which all "due submission and obedience" was
+promised. And this was followed a few years later in the sister colony
+of Massachusetts Bay by that "Body of Liberties" which, it is well said,
+may challenge comparison with Magna Charta itself or the latest Bill of
+Rights. Instinct with the spirit of common law, though somewhat
+ameliorating its rigor, these "rites, privileges and liberties," to be
+"impartially and inviolably enjoyed and observed throughout our
+jurisdiction forever," commence with the preamble that "the free
+fruition of such liberties, Immunities and privileges humanitie,
+Civilitie and Christianitie call for as due to every man in his place
+and proportion without impeachment and Infringement, hath ever been and
+ever will be the tranquillitie and Stabilitie of Churches and
+Commonwealths. And the deniall and deprivall thereof, the disturbance.
+If not the ruine of both. We hould it therefore our dutie and saftie,
+whilst we are about the further establishment of this Government, to
+collect and expresse all such freedomes as for present we foresee may
+concern us, and our posteritie after us."
+
+And so they ordain that no man's life or liberty or property can be
+taken away, or his honor or good name stained, or his goods or estate in
+any way damaged under color of law or countenance of authority, unless
+by due process; that every person, inhabitant or foreign, shall enjoy
+the same justice and law general to the plantation; that there shall be
+no monopolies, except for new inventions profitable to the country, and
+for a short time; no imprisonment without bail except for crimes capital
+and contempts in open court; freedom of alienation and power to devise;
+no primogeniture, no escheats on attainder and execution for felony;
+succor to those fleeing from tyranny; full freedom to advise, vote, give
+verdict or sentence according to true judgment and conscience; in short,
+the expression or the indication of those safeguards to liberty, the
+possession of which enables a people to become and to remain free.
+
+Well may we claim for these documents large influence in forerunning the
+organic laws of the several States, and that matchless instrument which
+a century ago was framed in this fortunate city, which had been blessed
+before as the place where the Declaration put on immortality.
+
+And now in the latter half of the third century, since the bearers of
+the underlying principles of Republican rule placed their feet upon that
+rock, whose shadow was to become a solace to the weariness of the
+perpetual toils and encounters of the land, we may well hope that what
+they sought has been achieved, an enduring Government of laws and not of
+men; security to freedom and to justice, "justice, that venerable
+virtue, without which," as exclaimed New England's eloquent orator,
+"freedom, valor and power are but vulgar things."
+
+It is delightful to keep these remembrances alive, and while duly
+recognizing the rightful claims of all our brothers to their share in
+the foundation of the institutions of a common country, to dwell upon
+what the forefathers were, what they accomplished and what they still
+accomplish through the works that follow them. And as it is not
+unnatural that at the same time we should felicitate ourselves upon
+whatever of eminence or good fortune has attended the efforts of their
+descendants, the reference, Mr. President, you have made in connection
+with this toast to the court over which I have the honor to preside
+enables me with propriety to indulge in an allusion to those from New
+England who have labored in that field.
+
+On the seventh of April, 1789, a committee was appointed by the Senate
+"to bring in a bill for organizing the judiciary of the United States."
+Able as were his colleagues, it has been generally conceded that "that
+great act was penned" by the chairman of that committee, Oliver
+Ellsworth, of Connecticut. On the twenty-fourth of September--the day
+upon which the Judiciary Act became a law--President Washington
+nominated for the Supreme Court of the United States a chief justice and
+five associates, among the latter William Cushing, of Massachusetts,
+who, after holding high judicial office under the Crown, but supporting
+the cause of his country in the Revolution, becoming the first chief
+justice of the State of Massachusetts, passed from that distinguished
+station to the Federal bench, as one of his eminent successors has done
+in our day, and who was commissioned to, but compelled to decline, the
+headship of the court. Then came Ellsworth, whose great services in
+framing the Federal Constitution in the Connecticut Convention, in the
+United States Senate, in high diplomatic position, were complemented by
+those he performed in the discharge of the duties of this exalted
+office.
+
+And so, following the careers of Marshall and Taney, Chase (fresh from
+magnificent conduct of the national finances under circumstances of
+tremendous difficulty), and Waite, from long and successful practice at
+the bar, won enduring fame by deserving and obtaining the commendation
+that a place rendered so illustrious by their predecessors had lost
+nothing in their hands; men of New England birth, thus dividing in
+number the incumbency in succession to Ellsworth, while he who has but
+just entered upon that service, proud of the Prairie State from whence
+he comes, has never ceased to regard with affection that particular
+portion of the Fatherland in which he first saw the light.
+
+Ellsworth and Waite, Baldwin and Field, and Strong, of Connecticut;
+Chase and Woodbury, and Clifford, of New Hampshire; Cushing and Storey,
+and Curtis, and Gray, of Massachusetts--these are names written
+imperishably upon the records of the Court. But of the five from
+Connecticut, Pennsylvania and California and Ohio claim four, and of the
+three from New Hampshire, Ohio and Maine two; while the Old Bay State
+preserved her hold on hers.
+
+Surely it is not too much for me to say, that up to the present time New
+England has in this sphere of public usefulness vindicated her title to
+regard by the exhibition on the part of her sons of that devotion to
+duty and that adherence to principle which characterized the men to
+whose memory the celebration of this day is dedicated.
+
+May that memory ever be precious, and reliance upon that Providence
+which sustained them under the tribulations of their time, and has
+conducted their children in triumphant progress through succeeding
+years, never be less. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+HAMLIN GARLAND
+
+
+REALISM VERSUS ROMANTICISM
+
+[Speech of Hamlin Garland at the eighty-second dinner of the Sunset
+  Club, Chicago, Ill., January 31, 1895. The chairman of the evening,
+  Arthur W. Underwood, introduced Mr. Garland to speak in relation to
+  the general subject of the evening's discussion, "The Tendency and
+  Influence of Modern Fiction." Mr. Underwood said: "To some of us the
+  field of modern fiction may have seemed before this evening a
+  wilderness without a chart. We are fortunate in having with us a man
+  who has left the 'main travelled roads' of fiction and, to mix
+  metaphors a little, a man who can tell us whether the 'idols' that are
+  'crumbling' are those of the realist or those of the idealist,--Mr.
+  Hamlin Garland."]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--It is very interesting and pleasant to have the
+critic come at the problem in his mathematical fashion, but that will
+not settle it. I will tell you what will settle it--the human soul of
+the creative man; because if he has the creative power and impulse in
+him it will make no difference to him whether or not a single person in
+the world reads or understands his book, or appreciates and understands
+his painting. What could the critic do with Claude Monet thirty-five
+years ago? What could the critic do with Robert Browning when he
+appeared? What has the critic done thus far with Walt Whitman, the
+greatest spiritual democrat this nation has ever produced? This question
+is not settled by the schools; it is not settled by critics; it is not
+to be settled by a group of realists or a group of veritists, or the
+latest group of impressionists. It is to be settled by the creative
+impulse of the man, first; and second, and always subordinate to the
+real artist, the public.
+
+Now, I am perfectly willing to admit that there has been for the past
+year or two a revival of what might be called the "shilling shocker" in
+literature, but it seems to me Professor McClintock entirely
+overestimates and exaggerates the influence of the "yore and gore"
+fictionists; and even if it were true that they filled the magazines to
+the exclusion of Mr. Read [Opie P. Read] and myself--
+
+[Mr. Read: Which they don't:]
+
+Which they don't--and if it were true that the pendulum is swinging
+toward the "shilling shocker," it does not follow that it will be a
+century before there is a return to the thoughtful study of social life.
+This romance can die, and these books be as dead as Hugh Conway's
+"Called Back" in less than ten years. I am perfectly willing to admit
+all these mutations of taste, but there is something deeper than that.
+Do you know, I have a notion that the reign of cheap melodrama and
+farce-comedy on our stage and of the "shilling shocker" during the last
+two years is due largely to our financial condition. Many of you are
+business men, and I know how you talk. I ask you to go to see a serious
+play, and you say: "Well, I will tell you; I am pretty well worn out
+when business is done, and things are not going just as they should, and
+I would rather go to the theatre to laugh these days. I don't care to go
+to the theatre to think."
+
+In precisely the same way, when you are called upon, after a hard day of
+business care and worry, to read a book, and I say to you: "Read Israel
+Zangwill's 'Children of the Ghetto'; it is one of the greatest studies
+of our day," you say: "The fact is, I should go to sleep over it. I must
+have something that has fighting in it. I want 'yore and gore' fiction
+this year. Later on, when I get over my business difficulties and get
+where things are easy with me, I'll try Zangwill's 'Children of the
+Ghetto.' I will sit down with my wife and have her read it aloud." There
+is great significance in this confession as it appears to me.
+
+And what is this "yore and gore" fiction when you analyze it? It is
+simply a sublimated "dime novel" which, by reason of increased demand
+for easy reading, on the part of the tired brain, has been put into a
+little better cover, and published by Harpers. Hitherto it was published
+by Beadle or some other fellow of that sort. It is current now. The
+people are reading it. They will continue to do so for a year or two,
+and then it will disappear. I like what Zangwill said of it a while ago.
+I cannot quote it exactly, but it was like this: "I had a dream the
+other night, wherein I scrambled over the roofs of buildings pursued by
+detectives. I lowered myself by drain pipes. I did business in dark
+corridors. I retreated up narrow passages with my good broadsword
+flaming, and laid scores of men at my feet. I was sealed up in dungeons.
+I was snatched out of the deep by the hair of my head. I slew men in
+hecatombs; and then, when the morning came and I awoke, there was not a
+shred of intellectual wrack left behind on which my mind could take
+hold. I had dreamed it all with the cerebellum. It was all organic. Why
+didn't I dream a novel by Turgenef, or Bjornsen? It takes brains to
+write "Fathers and Sons" or the "Bankrupt," and it takes brains to read
+such masterpieces."
+
+With all due respect to the very calm and fine position taken by
+Professor McClintock [Prof. W. D. McClintock had asserted his belief
+that the twentieth century would stand for a great revival of romantic
+literature], this novel of lust and war does not strike me as being very
+high-class art. It may seem good and fine and fresh and inspiring, this
+fiction which slays its millions, but I am a good deal of a Quaker. I
+would not slay anybody for anything. Therefore, such art does not appear
+beautiful to me. I do not believe it is good for our youth to read "yore
+and gore" fiction.
+
+There _are_ romancers--Prof. McClintock named one--who have personal
+quality. I don't care what school of fiction a man belongs to if he has
+something to say to me which has not been said a thousand times by
+somebody else. Such a man is Robert Louis Stevenson. He slew men also,
+but he uttered something beside war cries. But this "shilling shocker,"
+this searching after the dreadful and the unknown which is red with
+blood, does not strike me as literature at all. It is all the work of
+the cerebellum. It is not the work of the cerebrum. I should put it like
+this--If a man can tell us something that has not been told before; if
+he can add something to the literature of the world--a real creation--if
+he can, like the coral insect, build his own little cell upon the
+great underlying mass of English literature, I do not care what you call
+him, nor what he calls himself, he is worthy my support.
+
+It is not safe to always reckon a man's merit by the sale of his books.
+The author of "Old Sleuth" measured in that way would be the greatest
+American writer, in fact, the greatest writer of any time. You can't
+reckon the sale of such books by numbers; you reckon them by tons. It is
+easy to make a book sell, but the thing is to produce an original work
+of art, to put something forth with the imprint of your own personality
+as a creative artist.
+
+I believe old Walt Whitman stated the whole problem when he said: "All
+that the past was not, the future will be." I do not believe that the
+future of the world is to be a future of war. I believe it is to be a
+future of industrial peace as Professor Pearson [Charles W. Pearson] has
+indicated. And I believe that the literature and the art of that future
+will not be based upon war; it will be humanitarian, and at its best
+always an individual statement of life. In other words, the whole
+tendency of modern art is towards the celebration of the individual by
+the individual, and you cannot class writers in any hard and fast
+division. There is not an artist living who delineates "things as they
+are." There is not a writer living holding that for a theory, or who has
+that desire for a fundamental impulse. Art is selection, and upon the
+individual soul of the creative artist is laid the burden of choice. It
+is in the way he chooses his material and in the way he works it out
+that he is to be judged. He may be a story-teller like Stevenson, or he
+may be a novelist like Zangwill. All I ask of him is just simply
+this--he must be an individual creative artist; he must not repeat, must
+not imitate for the sake of gain.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN GILBERT
+
+
+PLAYING "OLD MEN" PARTS
+
+[Speech of John Gilbert at a banquet given by the Lotos Club in
+  recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of his first appearance on the
+  stage, New York City, November 30, 1878. The chairman of the dinner
+  was Whitelaw Reid, President of the Lotos.]
+
+
+"CAESAR, WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE SALUTE YOU." Such the
+gladiator's cry in the arena standing face to face with death. There is
+a certain appositeness in the words I have just uttered that probably
+may correspond to my position. Understand me, I do not mean to die
+theatrically at present. [Laughter.] But when a man has arrived at my
+age, he can scarcely look forward to very many years of professional
+exertion. When my old friend, John Brougham [Mr. Brougham:--"I am not
+going to die just yet."] [laughter], announced to me the honor that the
+Lotos Club proffered me, I was flattered and complimented. But I said:
+"John, you know I am no speechmaker." He replied, "Say anything."
+"Anything," I said, "anything won't do." "Then," said he, "repeat the
+first speech of Sir Peter Teazle, 'When an old bachelor marries a young
+wife, what is he to expect?'" [Laughter.] Well, I think I can paraphrase
+that and say, "When a young man enters the theatrical profession, what
+is he to expect?" Well, he may expect a good many things that are never
+realized. However, suffice it to say that fifty years ago I made my
+debut as an actor in my native city of Boston. I commenced in the
+first-class character of Jaffier in Otway's charming tragedy of "Venice
+Preserved." The public said it was a success, and I thought it was.
+[Laughter.] The manager evidently thought it was, too, for he let me
+repeat the character. Well, I suppose it was a success for a young man
+with such aspirations as I had. There might have been some inspiration
+about it--at least there ought to have been--for the lady who personated
+Belvidera was Mrs. Duff, a lovely woman and the most exquisite tragic
+actress that I ever saw from that period to the present.
+
+After this, I acted two or three parts, Mortimer, Shylock, and some of
+those little, trifling characters [laughter], with comparative success.
+But shortly after, and wisely, I went into the ranks to study my
+profession--not to commence at the top and go to the bottom
+[laughter]--but to begin at the bottom and go to the top, if possible.
+As a young man, I sought for pastures fresh and new. I went to the South
+and West, my ambition still being, as is that of all youthful aspirants
+for dramatic honors, for tragedy. At last I went to a theatre, and to my
+great disgust and indignation I was cast for an old man--at the age of
+nineteen. [Laughter.] However, I must do it. There was no alternative
+and I did it. I received applause. I played a few more old men
+[laughter]; I found at last that it was my point, my forte, and I
+followed it up and after this long lapse of years, I still continue in
+that department. I went to England and was received with kindness and
+cordiality and, returning to my own country in 1862, I was invited to
+join Wallack's Theatre by the father of my dear friend here [alluding to
+Mr. Lester Wallack], his father whom I am proud to acknowledge as a
+friend of mine nearly fifty years ago, and I am also proud to say my
+dramatic master. [Applause.] I need not tell you that since that time I
+have been under the direction of his son. What my career has been up to
+the present time you all know. It requires no comment from me. I am no
+longer a young man, but I do not think I am an old man. [Applause and
+laughter.] I owe this to a good constitution and moderately prudent
+life. [Shouts of laughter.] I may say with Shakespeare's Adam, that
+
+ "In my youth I never did apply
+  Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,
+  Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,
+  Frosty, but kindly."
+
+Will you permit me, gentlemen, to thank you for the very high honor you
+have conferred upon me this evening and allow me to drink the health and
+prosperity and happiness of the Lotos Club? [Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM SCHWENK GILBERT
+
+
+PINAFORE
+
+[Speech of William S. Gilbert at a dinner given to him and to Sir Arthur
+  Sullivan by the Lotos Club, New York City, November 8, 1879. Whitelaw
+  Reid, the President, in introducing Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan,
+  said: "We do not welcome them as men of genius. It sometimes happens
+  that men of genius do not deserve welcome. But we do greet them as men
+  who have used their undoubted genius to increase the happiness of
+  their kind [applause]; men whose success has extended throughout the
+  nations and has added bright hours to the life of every man and woman
+  it has touched. [Applause.] That success has depended on no unworthy
+  means. Respecting themselves and their art, they have always respected
+  their audiences. They have so married wit and humor, and a most
+  delicate fancy, and the best light music of the time, to the public
+  temper, that we have seen here in New York, for example, their piece
+  so popular that we hadn't theatres enough in town to hold the people
+  who simultaneously and unanimously wanted to hear it. I propose first
+  the health of a gentleman who, not merely in the piece that has so
+  long been the rage of the town, but in a brilliant series of previous
+  successes, has always given us wit without dirt [applause]--a drama in
+  which the hero is not a rake, and the heroine is not perpetually
+  posing and poising between innocence and adultery."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--As my friend Sullivan and I were
+driving to this Club this evening, both of us being very nervous and
+very sensitive, and both of us men who are highly conscious of our
+oratorical defects and deficiencies, and having before us vividly the
+ordeal awaiting us, we cast about for a comparison of our then
+condition. We likened ourselves to two authors driving down to a theatre
+at which a play of theirs was to be played for the first time. The
+thought was somewhat harassing, but we dismissed it, because we
+remembered that there was always an even chance of success [laughter],
+whereas in the performance in which we were about to take part there was
+no prospect of aught but humiliating failure.
+
+We were rather in the position of prisoners surrendering to their bail,
+and we beg of you to extend to us your most merciful consideration. But
+it is expected of me, perhaps, that in replying to this toast with which
+your chairman has so kindly coupled my name, I shall do so in a tone of
+the lightest possible comedy. [Laughter.] I had almost said that I am
+sorry to say that I cannot do so; but in truth I am not sorry. A man who
+has been welcomed as we have been here by the leaders in literature and
+art in this city, a man who could look upon that welcome as a string on
+which to hang a series of small jokes would show that he was responding
+to an honor to which he was not entitled. For it is no light thing to
+come to a country which you have been taught to regard as a foreign
+country, and to find ourselves in the best sense of the word "at home"
+[applause] among a people whom we are taught to regard as strangers, but
+whom we are astonished to find are our intimate friends [applause]; and
+that proffered friendship is so dear to us that I am disposed, in behalf
+of my collaborateur and myself, to stray somewhat from the beaten paths
+of after-dinner oratory, and to endeavor to justify ourselves in respect
+to a matter in which we have some reason to feel that we have been
+misrepresented.
+
+I have seen in several London journals well-meant but injudicious
+paragraphs saying that we have a grievance against the New York managers
+because they have played our pieces and have offered us no share of the
+profits. [Laughter.] We have no grievance whatever. Our only complaint
+is that there is no international copyright act. [Applause.] The author
+of a play in which there is no copyright is very much in the position
+of an author or the descendants of an author whose copyright has
+expired. I am not aware that our London publishers are in the habit of
+seeking the descendants of Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron, or Captain
+Marryat, and offering them a share of the profits on their publications.
+[Laughter.] I have yet to learn that our London managers seek out the
+living representatives of Oliver Goldsmith, or Richard Brinsley Sheridan
+or William Shakespeare, in order to pay them any share of the profits
+from the production of "She Stoops to Conquer," or "The Good-Natured
+Man," or "The Merchant of Venice." [Laughter.] If they do so, they do
+it on the principle that the right hand knows not what the left hand
+doeth [laughter], and as we have not heard of it, we presume, therefore,
+that they have not done so. And we believe that if those eminent men
+were to request a share of the profits, they would be met with the reply
+that the copyright on those works had expired.
+
+And so if we should suggest it to the managers of this country, they
+would perhaps reply with at least equal justice: "Gentlemen, your
+copyright never existed." That it has never existed is due entirely to
+our own fault.
+
+We consulted a New York lawyer, and were informed that, although an
+alien author has no right in his works, yet so long as they remain
+unpublished, we held the real title in them, and there was no process
+necessary to make them our own. We, therefore, thought we would keep it
+in unpublished form, and make more profit from the sale of the
+pianoforte score and the words of the songs at the theatres and at the
+music publishers.
+
+We imagined that the allusions in the piece were so purely British in
+their character, so insular in fact, that they would be of no interest
+on this side; but events have shown that in that conclusion we were
+mistaken. At all events, we have also arrived at the conclusion that we
+have nobody to blame but ourselves. As it is, we have realized by the
+sale of the book and the piano score in London about $7,500 apiece, and
+under those circumstances I do not think we need to be pitied.
+[Laughter.] For myself, I certainly do not pose as an object of
+compassion. [Laughter.]
+
+We propose to open here on the first of December at the Fifth Avenue
+Theatre with a performance of "Pinafore." I will not add the prefixing
+initials, because I have no desire to offend your republican sympathies.
+[Laughter.] I may say, however, that I have read in some journals that
+we have come over here to show you how that piece should be played, but
+that I disclaim, both for myself and my collaborateur. We came here to
+teach nothing--we have nothing to teach--and perhaps we should have no
+pupils if we did. [Laughter.] But apart from the fact that we have no
+copyright, and are not yet managers in the United States, we see no
+reason why we should be the only ones who are not to be permitted to
+play this piece here. [Laughter and applause.]
+
+I think you will admit that we have a legitimate object in opening with
+it. We have no means of knowing how it has been played in this country,
+but we are informed that it has been played more broadly than in the old
+country--and you know that may be better or worse. [Laughter.]
+
+Afterward we propose to produce another piece, and in the fulness of
+time the longer it is delayed perhaps the better for us [laughter], and
+we propose to present it to an audience [laughter] in the same spirit in
+which we presented "Pinafore"--in a most serious spirit--not to permit
+the audience to see by anything that occurs on the stage that the actors
+are conscious of the really absurd things they are doing. Whether right
+or not, that is the way in which it was presented in London. We open
+with "Pinafore," not to show how that ought to be played, but to show
+how the piece that succeeds is about to be played, and to prepare the
+audiences for the reception of our new and highly preposterous story.
+[Applause.]
+
+The kindness with which we have been received this evening emboldens me
+to believe that perhaps you will not consider this explanation
+altogether indecent or ill-timed. I have nothing more, gentlemen, to
+say, except to thank you most heartily for the complimentary manner in
+which you proposed our health, and to assure you that it is a compliment
+which is to me personally as delightful as it is undeserved.
+[Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+DANIEL COIT GILMAN
+
+
+THE ERA OF UNIVERSITIES
+
+[Speech of Daniel C. Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University at
+  the Harvard Alumni dinner, at Cambridge, Mass., June 29, 1881.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--There are so many in this room to
+whom this scene is familiar and so many whose voices have been heard
+within these walls, that you can hardly understand how one feels who for
+the first time stands and endeavors to make his voice reach over this
+large assembly. It is not merely the sea of upturned faces, this noble
+company of noblemen, this regiment of brigadiers, as it might be called,
+it is not alone these pictures and busts, the devices and mottoes which
+adorn this edifice, nor is it alone the recollection of all the
+illustrious teachers who have been here brought together or the
+consciousness that we stand among museums and cabinets and laboratories
+unrivalled on this continent,--all this is noble and worthy of noble
+men. But there is one thing that seems to me more impressive than all
+this. It is the power which Harvard College has had throughout all the
+land and throughout all its history. [Applause.]
+
+I have had the opportunity of seeing on the shores of the Pacific how
+every act of the corporation of Harvard College, every new measure
+adopted by the faculty, every additional gift to its treasury, was
+watched as men look toward the east and watch the rising sun, rejoicing
+in its boundless store and radiant energy. [Applause.] And I have stood
+on the shores of a Southern river and have seen the development of a
+young college on the banks of the Patapsco, and I can truly say that if
+there had not been a John Harvard, there never would have been a Johns
+Hopkins [applause]; if there had never been a university in Cambridge,
+there never would have been a university in Baltimore; and if there is
+any merit in the plans adopted in that distant city, if there is any
+hope to be derived from the experiment which is there in vogue, it is
+largely due--and I rejoice in an opportunity of saying so in this public
+way--it is largely due to the kindly sympathy, the wise counsel, the
+generous help and the noble example of Harvard College. [Applause.] To
+the President of this university, to his associates in the corporation
+and in the faculty, to many of its alumni the plans adopted in Baltimore
+owe a most generous and hearty acknowledgment.
+
+The speaker who preceded me characterized Harvard College as the Alma
+Mater of Colleges, and well he did so. But, gentlemen, you can hardly
+fail to observe that in the progress of education in this country we are
+getting beyond the college period and we are entering the period of
+universities. What they are to be, none of us are wise enough to tell,
+but whatever they are will largely depend upon what you make of Harvard
+University. [Applause.] Many years ago I received a lesson from one
+whose name I can never mention without respect and honor, the late
+Benjamin Pierce. He said, in speaking of the formation of a university,
+"It will never succeed without eminent professors. They will tell you
+that great professors make poor teachers, but I will tell you it is only
+the eagle that is fit to teach the eaglets. Let the barn-door fowl take
+care of themselves." And so I say here, let there be a staff of
+professors the most eminent, the most earnest, the most free in their
+work that Harvard can bring together, and all the rest goes with it.
+[Applause.]
+
+I trust, then, that as the years roll on, as the era of universities in
+this country is developed from the period of college instruction, we
+shall find that the same wisdom that has governed the councils of our
+learned bodies, the same adherence to right principles, the same love of
+truth, will ever be present, and that Harvard College and all its
+younger sisters as they go on will repeat the lesson which they have
+taught from the beginning, and which they still teach, whether we turn
+our eyes to the depths of the sea or the boundless regions of space,
+that beyond the things which are seen and temporal are the things which
+are unseen and eternal. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
+
+
+THE AGE OF RESEARCH
+
+[Speech of William B. Gladstone at the annual banquet of the Royal
+  Academy, May 5, 1877. Sir Francis Grant, the President of the Academy,
+  being indisposed, Sir Gilbert Scott, the eminent architect, took the
+  chair at the special request of the President. In introducing Mr.
+  Gladstone, he said: "The next toast is, 'The Interests of Literature.'
+  I have been somewhat perplexed myself to think why the custom of the
+  Academy places Science before Literature. I see, however, that it is
+  quite right, for Literature is a member of our own family--our sister.
+  [Cheers.] I am old enough to recollect that when Sir Morton Archer
+  Shee, who united Art with Poetry, was elected President of the
+  Academy, this epigram appeared in the 'Times':
+
+ "'So Painting crowns her sister Poesie,
+   The world is all astonished, so is She (e).'
+
+  Many present will remember in more recent times how Charles Dickens,
+  when returning thanks for this toast, expressed the same sentiment of
+  relationship by altering some words of Rob Roy's and saying that when
+  at our Academy he felt so much at home, as to be inclined to exclaim:
+  'My foot is on my native heath, although my name is not Macgregor.'
+  Next to religion, literature in very many of its phases supplies the
+  noblest subjects for Art. History, Biography, and works of fiction all
+  contribute their share; while poetry enjoys the cumulative privilege
+  of uniting in itself the incentives to Art which are commanded by all
+  other branches of Literature as well as the ennobling sentiments
+  inspired by religion, patriotism and other affections of the human
+  heart. An elevating mission, indeed, be it only directed in a worthy
+  course. Frivolity and license are alike the bane of literature and
+  art. Earnestness of purpose and severity of moral tone are the stamina
+  of both. Shorn of these, both alike find their strength is gone from
+  them. It is consoling to reflect that notwithstanding the laborious
+  turmoil of politics we have had three, and I think successive, Prime
+  Ministers who have made Literature the solace of their scanty leisure
+  and delighted the world by their writings on subjects extraneous to
+  State politics. I give you the 'Interests of Literature,' and I have
+  the honor to connect the toast with the name of one of that
+  distinguished trio, the Right Honorable William Ewart Gladstone."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I
+think no question can be raised as to the just claims of literature to
+stand upon the list of toasts at the Royal Academy, and the sentiment is
+one to which, upon any one of the numerous occasions of my attendance at
+your hospitable board, I have always listened with the greatest
+satisfaction until the present day arrived, when I am bound to say that
+that satisfaction is extremely qualified by the arrangement less
+felicitous, I think, than any which preceded it that refers to me the
+duty of returning thanks for Literature. [Cheers and laughter.] However,
+obedience is the principle upon which we must proceed, and I have at
+least the qualification for discharging the duty you have been pleased
+to place in my hands--that no one has a deeper or more profound sense of
+the vital importance of the active and constant cultivation of letters
+as an essential condition of real progress and of the happiness of
+mankind [cheers], and here every one at once perceives that that
+sisterhood of which the poet spoke, whom you have quoted, is a real
+sisterhood, for literature and art are alike the votaries of beauty. Of
+these votaries I may thankfully say that as regards art I trace around
+me no signs of decay, and none in that estimation in which the Academy
+is held, unless to be sure, in the circumstance of your poverty of
+choice of one to reply to this toast. [Cheers.]
+
+During the present century the artists of this country have gallantly
+and nobly endeavored to maintain and to elevate their standard [cheers],
+and have not perhaps in that great task always received that assistance
+which could be desired from the public taste which prevails around them.
+But no one can examine even superficially the works which adorn these
+walls without perceiving that British art retains all its fertility of
+invention [cheers], and this year as much as in any year that I can
+remember, exhibits in the department of landscape, that fundamental
+condition of all excellence, intimate and profound sympathy with nature.
+[Cheers.]
+
+As regards literature one who is now beginning at any rate to descend
+the hill of life naturally looks backwards as well as forwards, and we
+must be becoming conscious that the early part of this century has
+witnessed in this and other countries what will be remembered in future
+times as a splendid literary age. [Cheers.] The elder among us have
+lived in the lifetime of many great men who have passed to their
+rest--the younger have heard them familiarly spoken of and still have
+their works in their hands as I trust they will continue to be in the
+hands of all generations. [Cheers.] I am afraid we cannot hope for
+literature--it would be contrary to all the experience of former times
+were we to hope that it should be equally sustained at that
+extraordinarily high level which belongs, speaking roughly, to the first
+fifty years after the peace of 1815. That was a great period--a great
+period in England, a great period in Germany, a great period in France,
+and a great period, too, in Italy. [Cheers.]
+
+As I have said, I think we can hardly hope that it should continue on a
+perfect level at so high an elevation. Undoubtedly the cultivation of
+literature will ever be dear to the people of this country; but we must
+remember what is literature, and what is not. In the first place, we
+should be all agreed that bookmaking is not literature. ["Hear!"] The
+business of bookmaking I have no doubt may thrive and will be continued
+upon a constantly extending scale from year to year. But that we may put
+aside. For my own part if I am to look a little forward, what I
+anticipate for the remainder of the century is an age not so much of
+literature proper--not so much of great, permanent and splendid
+additions to those works in which beauty is embodied as an essential
+condition of production, but I rather look forward to an age of
+research. [Cheers.] This is an age of great research--of great research
+in science, great research in history--an age of research in all the
+branches of inquiry that throw light upon the former condition whether
+of our race, or of the world which it inhabits [cheers]; and it may be
+hoped that, even if the remaining years of the century be not so
+brilliant as some of its former periods, in the production of works
+great in themselves, and immortal,--still they may add largely to the
+knowledge of mankind; and if they make such additions to the knowledge
+of mankind, they will be preparing the materials of a new tone and of
+new splendors in the realm of literature. There is a sunrise and sunset.
+There is a transition from the light of the sun to the gentler light of
+the moon. There is a rest in nature which seems necessary in all her
+great operations. And so with all the great operations of the human
+mind. But do not let us despond if we seem to see a diminished efficacy
+in the production of what is essentially and immortally great. Our sun
+if hidden is hidden only for a moment. He is like the day star of
+Milton:--
+
+ "Which anon repairs his drooping head
+  And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore,
+  Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."
+
+[Cheers.]
+
+I rejoice in an occasion like this which draws the attention of the
+world to topics which illustrate the union of art with literature and of
+literature with science, because you have a hard race to run, you have a
+severe competition against the attraction of external pursuits, whether
+those pursuits take the form of business or pleasure. It is given to you
+to teach lessons of the utmost importance to mankind, in maintaining the
+principle that no progress can be real which is not equable, which is
+not proportionate, which does not develop all the faculties belonging to
+our nature. [Cheers.] If a great increase of wealth in a country takes
+place, and with that increase of wealth a powerful stimulus to the
+invention of mere luxury, that, if it stands alone, is not, never can
+be, progress. It is only that one-sided development which is but one
+side of deformity. I hope we shall have no one-sided development. One
+mode of avoiding it is to teach the doctrine of that sisterhood you have
+asserted to-day, and confident I am that the good wishes you have
+expressed on behalf of literature will be re-echoed in behalf of art
+wherever men of letters are found. [Loud cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+HENRY W. GRADY
+
+
+THE RACE PROBLEM
+
+[Speech of Henry W. Grady at the annual banquet of the Boston
+  Merchants' Association, at Boston, Mass., December 12, 1889. Mr. Grady
+  was introduced by the President of the Association, Jonathan A. Lane,
+  as the spokesman for the South on the subject he was to treat. His
+  speech electrified his hearers, and was the feature of the occasion.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT:--Bidden by your invitation to a discussion of
+the race problem--forbidden by occasion to make a political speech--I
+appreciate, in trying to reconcile orders with propriety, the perplexity
+of the little maid, who, bidden to learn to swim, was yet adjured, "Now
+go, my darling, hang your clothes on a hickory limb and don't go near
+the water."
+
+The stoutest apostle of the Church, they say, is the missionary, and the
+missionary wherever he unfurls his flag, will never find himself in
+deeper need of unction and address than I, bidden to-night to plant the
+standard of a Southern Democrat in Boston's banquet hall, and to discuss
+the problem of the races in the home of Phillips and of Sumner. But, Mr.
+President, if a purpose to speak in perfect frankness and sincerity; if
+earnest understanding of the vast interests involved; if a consecrating
+sense of what disaster may follow further misunderstanding and
+estrangement; if these may be counted to steady undisciplined speech and
+to strengthen an untried arm--then, sir, I shall find the courage to
+proceed.
+
+Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New
+England's historic soil and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and
+her thrift. Here within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill--where
+Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought and Channing
+preached--here in the cradle of American letters and almost of American
+liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New
+England when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange
+apparition! This stern and unique figure--carved from the ocean and the
+wilderness--its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winter
+and of wars--until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in
+the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base--while startled
+kings and emperors gazed and marvelled that from the rude touch of this
+handful cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied
+genius of human government and the perfected model of human liberty! God
+bless the memory of those immortal workers, and prosper the fortunes of
+their living sons--and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.
+
+[Illustration: _HENRY WOODFIN GRADY Photogravure after a photograph
+from life_ ]
+
+Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the
+attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done
+everywhere, every word I then uttered--to declare that the sentiments I
+then avowed were universally approved in the South--I realize that the
+confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my
+presence here to-night. I should dishonor myself if I betrayed that
+confidence by uttering one insincere word, or by withholding one
+essential element of the truth. Apropos of this last, let me confess,
+Mr. President, before the praise of New England has died on my lips,
+that I believe the best product of her present life is the procession of
+17,000 Vermont Democrats that for twenty-two years, undiminished by
+death, unrecruited by birth or conversion, have marched over their
+rugged hills, cast their Democratic ballots and gone back home to pray
+for their unregenerate neighbors, and awake to read the record of 26,000
+Republican majority. May the God of the helpless and the heroic help
+them, and may their sturdy tribe increase.
+
+Far to the South, Mr. President, separated from this section by a
+line--once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in
+fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow--lies the
+fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and
+hospitable people. There is centred all that can please or prosper
+humankind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil yields to the
+husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night the
+cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the
+sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the
+fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the
+rains. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures;
+forests--vast and primeval; and rivers that, tumbling or loitering,
+run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all
+industries--cotton, iron and wood--that region has easy control. In
+cotton, a fixed monopoly--in iron, proven supremacy--in timber, the
+reserve supply of the Republic. From this assured and permanent
+advantage, against which artificial conditions cannot much longer
+prevail, has grown an amazing system of industries. Not maintained by
+human contrivance of tariff or capital, afar off from the fullest and
+cheapest source of supply, but resting in divine assurance, within touch
+of field and mine and forest--not set amid costly farms from which
+competition has driven the farmer in despair, but amid cheap and sunny
+lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season nor soil has set a
+limit--this system of industries is mounting to a splendor that shall
+dazzle and illumine the world. That, sir, is the picture and the promise
+of my home--a land better and fairer than I have told you, and yet but
+fit setting in its material excellence for the loyal and gentle quality
+of its citizenship. Against that, sir, we have New England, recruiting
+the Republic from its sturdy loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives
+new swarms of workers, and touching this land all over with its energy
+and its courage. And yet--while in the Eldorado of which I have told you
+but fifteen per cent. of its lands are cultivated, its mines scarcely
+touched, and its population so scant that, were it set equidistant, the
+sound of the human voice could not be heard from Virginia to
+Texas--while on the threshold of nearly every house in New England
+stands a son, seeking, with troubled eyes, some new land in which to
+carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact remains that in 1880 the
+South had fewer northern-born citizens than she had in 1870--fewer in
+'70 than in '60. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the sectional line
+be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of the North
+have crossed it over to the South, than when it was crimson with the
+best blood of the Republic, or even when the slaveholder stood guard
+every inch of its way?
+
+There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to
+consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the
+fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands
+whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it
+will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp
+in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing,
+sir, but this problem and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear
+understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and
+such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and
+Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices of Manassas and Gettysburg, and
+illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was
+ever wrought with the sword or sought at the cannon's mouth.
+
+If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night--hear one thing
+more. My people, your brothers in the South--brothers in blood, in
+destiny, in all that is best in our past and future--are so beset with
+this problem that their very existence depends on its right solution.
+Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slave-ships of the
+Republic sailed from your ports, the slaves worked in our fields. You
+will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution. But I do here
+declare that in its wise and humane administration in lifting the slave
+to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving
+him a happiness he has not yet found in freedom, our fathers left their
+sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this
+institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human
+slavery is gone forever from American soil. But the free man remains.
+With him a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling
+conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil--with equal
+political and civil rights--almost equal in numbers, but terribly
+unequal in intelligence and responsibility--each pledged against
+fusion--one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last
+by a desolating war, the experiment sought by neither but approached by
+both with doubt--these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at
+every point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor
+to the end.
+
+Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship. Never
+before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an
+alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed, because he hindered the
+way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this
+Republic because he is an alien, and inferior. The red man was owner of
+the land--the yellow man highly civilized and assimilable--but they
+hindered both sections, and are gone! But the black man, affecting but
+one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to
+the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any
+cost, his full and equal heirship of American privilege and prosperity.
+It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded without
+rhyme or reason. It matters not that wherever the whites and the blacks
+have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been an
+irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races, however
+similar, have lived anywhere, at any time, on the same soil with equal
+rights in peace! In spite of these things we are commanded to make good
+this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American
+prejudice--to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible
+between whites and blacks--and to reverse, under the very worst
+conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to
+this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay--a rigor
+that accepts no excuse--and a suspicion that discourages frankness and
+sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with
+our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would--so
+bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if
+we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone
+can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know; we cannot solve
+it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy--with less than the
+knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood--and that,
+when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall
+feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving
+hearts!
+
+The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South--the men
+whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of
+American history--whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years
+of the fiercest war--whose energy has made bricks without straw and
+spread splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes--these men wear
+this problem in their hearts and brains, by day and by night. They
+realize, as you cannot, what this problem means--what they owe to this
+kindly and dependent race--the measure of their debt to the world in
+whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their
+feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march cumbered with its
+burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness,
+nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate
+moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid
+abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go,
+are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete
+their consecration!
+
+Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr.
+President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here
+that the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible and as just as
+your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly
+solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist
+that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to
+plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and
+tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense
+and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly
+disregard--guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and
+irresponsible of either race--compensating error with frankness, and
+retrieving in patience what they lose in passion--and conscious all the
+time that wrong means ruin--admit this, and we may reach an
+understanding to-night.
+
+The President of the United States, in his late message to Congress,
+discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem,
+asks: "Are they at work upon it? What solution do they offer? When will
+the black man cast a free ballot? When will he have the civil rights
+that are his?" I shall not here protest against a partisanry that, for
+the first time in our history, in time of peace, has stamped with the
+great seal of our government a stigma upon the people of a great and
+loyal section; though I gratefully remember that the great dead soldier,
+who held the helm of State for the eight stormiest years of
+reconstruction, never found need for such a step; and though there is no
+personal sacrifice I would not make to remove this cruel and unjust
+imputation on my people from the archives of my country! But, sir,
+backed by a record, on every page of which is progress, I venture to
+make earnest and respectful answer to the questions that are asked. We
+give to the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth,
+$450,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses, and fruit. This
+enormous crop could not have come from the hands of sullen and
+discontented labor. It comes from peaceful fields, in which laughter and
+gossip rise above the hum of industry, and contentment runs with the
+singing plough. It is claimed that this ignorant labor is defrauded of
+its just hire. I present the tax books of Georgia which show that the
+negro, twenty-five years ago a slave, has in Georgia alone $10,000,000
+of assessed property, worth twice that much. Does not that record honor
+him, and vindicate his neighbors?
+
+What people, penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For every
+Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers,
+I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling
+their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their
+children the helpful message their State sends them from the schoolhouse
+door. And the schoolhouse itself bears testimony. In Georgia we added
+last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more than
+$1,000,000,--and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered--of the
+fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for
+$10,000,000, and yet forty-nine per cent. of the beneficiaries are black
+children; and in the doubt of many wise men if education helps, or can
+help, our problem. Charleston, with her taxable values cut half in two
+since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston.
+Although it is easier to give much out of much than little out of little
+the South, with one-seventh of the taxable property of the country, with
+relatively larger debt, having received only one-twelfth as much of
+public lands, and having back of its tax books none of the $500,000,000
+of bonds that enrich the North--and though it pays annually $26,000,000
+to your section as pensions--yet gives nearly one-sixth to the public
+school fund. The South, since 1865, has spent $122,000,000 in education,
+and this year is pledged to $32,000,000 more for State and city schools,
+although the blacks, paying one-thirtieth of the taxes, get nearly
+one-half of the fund. Go into our fields and see whites and blacks
+working side by side. On our buildings in the same squad. In our shops
+at the same forge. Often the blacks crowd the whites from work, or lower
+wages by their greater need and simpler habits, and yet are permitted,
+because we want to bar them from no avenue in which their feet are
+fitted to tread. They could not there be elected orators of white
+universities, as they have been here, but they do enter there a hundred
+useful trades that are closed against them here. We hold it better and
+wiser to tend the weeds in the garden than to water the exotic in the
+window.
+
+In the South there are negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists,
+doctors, preachers, multiplying with the increasing ability of their
+race to support them. In villages and towns they have their military
+companies equipped from the armories of the State, their churches and
+societies built and supported largely by their neighbors. What is the
+testimony of the courts? In penal legislation we have steadily reduced
+felonies to misdemeanors, and have led the world in mitigating
+punishment for crime, that we might save, as far as possible, this
+dependent race from its own weakness. In our penitentiary record sixty
+per cent. of the prosecutors are negroes, and in every court the negro
+criminal strikes the colored juror, that white men may judge his case.
+
+In the North, one negro in every 185 is in jail--in the South only one
+in 446. In the North the percentage of negro prisoners is six times as
+great as that of native whites, in the South, only four times as great.
+If prejudice wrongs him in Southern courts, the record shows it to be
+deeper in Northern courts. I assert here, and a bar as intelligent and
+upright as the bar of Massachusetts will solemnly indorse my assertion,
+that in the Southern courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life,
+liberty or property, the negro has distinct advantage because he is a
+negro, apt to be over-reached, oppressed--and that this advantage
+reaches from the juror in making his verdict to the judge in measuring
+his sentence.
+
+Now, Mr. President, can it be seriously maintained that we are
+terrorizing the people from whose willing hands comes every year
+$1,000,000,000 of farm crops? Or have robbed a people who, twenty-five
+years from unrewarded slavery, have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of
+property? Or that we intend to oppress the people we are arming every
+day? Or deceive them, when we are educating them to the utmost limit of
+our ability? Or outlaw them when we work side by side with them? Or
+re-enslave them under legal forms, when for their benefit we have even
+imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of
+law? My fellow-countrymen, as you yourselves may sometimes have to
+appeal at the bar of human judgment for justice and for right, give to
+my people to-night the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these
+incontestable facts.
+
+But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and
+violence. This, I admit. And there will be until there is one ideal
+community on earth after which we may pattern. But how widely is it
+misjudged. It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the
+negro. His helplessness, his isolation, his century of servitude, these
+dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition
+inflamed by prejudice and partisanry has led to injustice and delusion.
+Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an
+incident--in the South a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit
+of the community. Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons
+and it scarcely arrests attention--a chance collision in the South among
+relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one
+race is destroying the other. We might as well claim that the Union was
+ungrateful to the colored soldiers who followed its flag because a Grand
+Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran as for you
+to give racial significance to every incident in the South, or to accept
+exceptional grounds as the rule of our society. I am not one of those
+who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of either
+sections, and belie American character by declaring them to be
+significant and representative. I prefer to maintain that they are
+neither, and stand for nothing but the passion and sin of our poor
+fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its
+weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that
+society, sentient and responsible in every fibre, can mend and repair
+until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither.
+These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia's busy life as
+they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro! And
+if they did, no one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish. It is
+through them, and the men who think with them--making nine-tenths of
+every southern community--that these two races have been carried thus
+far with less of violence than would have been possible anywhere else on
+earth. And in their fairness and courage and steadfastness--more than
+in all the laws that can be passed, or all the bayonets that can be
+mustered--is the hope of our future.
+
+When will the blacks cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is not
+dominated by the will of the intelligent. When the laborer anywhere
+casts a vote unhindered by his boss. When the vote of the poor anywhere
+is not influenced by the power of the rich. When the strong and the
+steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and
+shiftless--then, and not till then, will the ballot of the negro be
+free. The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in
+prejudice against the blacks--not in sectional estrangement--not in the
+hope of political dominion--but in a deep and abiding necessity. Here is
+this vast ignorant and purchasable vote--clannish, credulous, impulsive
+and passionate--tempting every art of the demagogue, but insensible to
+the appeal of the statesman. Wrongly started, in that it was led into
+alienation from its neighbor and taught to rely on the protection of an
+outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the two great parties
+through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction and even
+that information on which conviction must be based. It must remain a
+faction--strong enough in every community to control on the slightest
+division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the
+cunning and unscrupulous of both parties. Its credulity is imposed upon,
+its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses
+misdirected--and even its superstition made to play its part in a
+campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardized and every
+approach to the ballot-box debauched. It is against such campaigns as
+this--the folly and the bitterness and the danger of which every
+southern community has drunk deeply--that the white people of the South
+are banded together. Just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if
+300,000 men, not one in a hundred able to read his ballot--banded in
+race instinct holding against you the memory of a century of slavery,
+taught by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already
+travestied legislation from your State House, and in every species of
+folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your credit.
+
+But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous
+menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote. This has long
+been flippantly charged to be evidence and has now been solemnly and
+officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on
+our part. Let us see. Virginia--a State now under fierce assault for
+this alleged crime--cast in 1888 seventy-five per cent. of her vote,
+Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty per cent. of her vote.
+Was it suppression in Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts? Last
+month Virginia cast sixty-nine per cent. of her vote, and Massachusetts,
+fighting in every district, cast only forty-nine per cent. of hers. If
+Virginia is condemned because thirty-one per cent. of her vote was
+silent, how shall this State escape in which fifty-one per cent. was
+dumb? Let us enlarge this comparison. The sixteen Southern States in '88
+cast sixty-seven per cent. of their total vote--the six New England
+States but sixty-three per cent. of theirs. By what fair rule shall the
+stigma be put upon one section, while the other escapes? A congressional
+election in New York last week, with the polling place in touch of every
+voter, brought out only 6,000 votes of 28,000--and the lack of
+opposition is assigned as the natural cause. In a district in my State,
+in which an opposition speech has not been heard in ten years and the
+polling places are miles apart--under the unfair reasoning of which my
+section has been a constant victim--the small vote is charged to be
+proof of forcible suppression. In Virginia an average majority of
+12,000, under hopeless division of the minority, was raised to 42,000;
+in Iowa, in the same election, a majority of 32,000 was wiped out and an
+opposition majority of 8,000 was established. The change of 40,000 votes
+in Iowa is accepted as political revolution--in Virginia an increase of
+30,000 on a safe majority is declared to be proof of political fraud.
+
+It is deplorable, sir, that in both sections a larger percentage of the
+vote is not regularly cast. But more inexplicable that this should be so
+in New England, than in the South. What invites the negro to the
+ballot-box? He knows that of all men it has promised him most and
+yielded him least. His first appeal to suffrage was the promise of
+"forty acres and a mule." His second, the threat that Democratic success
+meant his re-enslavement. Both have been proved false in his experience.
+He looked for a home, and he got the Freedman's Bank. He fought under
+promise of the loaf, and in victory was denied the crumbs. Discouraged
+and deceived, he has realized at last that his best friends are his
+neighbors with whom his lot is cast, and whose prosperity is bound up in
+his--and that he has gained nothing in politics to compensate the loss
+of their confidence and sympathy, that is at last his best and enduring
+hope. And so, without leaders or organization--and lacking the resolute
+heroism of my party friends in Vermont that make their hopeless march
+over the hills a high and inspiring pilgrimage--he shrewdly measures the
+occasional agitator, balances his little account with politics, touches
+up his mule, and jogs down the furrow letting the mad world wag as it
+will!
+
+The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well if
+partisans at the North would understand this. I have seen the white
+people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed
+sealed. But, sir, some brave man, banding them together, would rise, as
+Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and, touching their eyes with faith,
+bid them look abroad to see the very air "filled with the chariots of
+Israel and the horsemen thereof." If there is any human force that
+cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and
+responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption
+cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law, or divorced in force.
+It is the inalienable right of every free community--the just and
+righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on
+this, sir, that we rely in the South. Not the cowardly menace of mask or
+shotgun, but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility,
+massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation
+of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it
+all the powers of earth shall not prevail. It was just as certain that
+Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white
+race--that before the moral and material power of her people once more
+unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was
+left alone, vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts--as that night
+should fade in the kindling glory of the sun. You may pass force bills,
+but they will not avail. You may surrender your own liberties to federal
+election law, you may submit, in fear of a necessity that does not
+exist, that the very form of this government may be changed, you may
+invite federal interference with the New England town meeting, that has
+been for a hundred years the guarantee of local government in
+America--this old State which holds in its charter the boast that it "is
+a free and independent commonwealth"--it may deliver its election
+machinery into the hands of the government it helped to create--but
+never, sir, will a single State of this Union, North or South, be
+delivered again to the control of an ignorant and inferior race. We
+wrested our State governments from negro supremacy when the Federal
+drum-beat rolled closer to the ballot-box, and Federal bayonets hedged
+it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free
+government. But, sir, though the cannon of this Republic thundered in
+every voting district of the South, we still should find in the mercy of
+God the means and the courage to prevent its re-establishment. I regret,
+sir, that my section, hindered with this problem, stands in seeming
+estrangement to the North. If, sir, any man will point out to me a path
+down which the white people of the South, divided, may walk in peace and
+honor, I will take that path though I take it alone--for at its end, and
+nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my section
+and the full restoration of this Union. But, sir, if the negro had not
+been enfranchised, the South would have been divided and the republic
+united. His enfranchisement--against which I enter no protest--holds
+the South united and compact. What solution, then, can we offer for the
+problem? Time alone can disclose it to us. We simply report progress,
+and ask your patience. If the problem be solved at all--and I firmly
+believe it will, though nowhere else has it been--it will be solved by
+the people most deeply bound in interest, most deeply pledged in honor
+to its solution. I had rather see my people render back this question
+rightly solved than to see them gather all the spoils over which faction
+has contended since Catiline conspired and Caesar fought. Meantime we
+treat the negro fairly, measuring to him justice in the fulness the
+strong should give to the weak, and leading him in the steadfast ways of
+citizenship that he may no longer be the prey of the unscrupulous and
+the sport of the thoughtless. We open to him every pursuit in which he
+can prosper, and seek to broaden his training and capacity. We seek to
+hold his confidence and friendship--and to pin him to the soil with
+ownership, that he may catch in the fire of his own hearthstone that
+sense of responsibility the shiftless can never know. And we gather him
+into that alliance of intelligence and responsibility, that, though it
+now runs close to racial lines, welcomes the responsible and intelligent
+of any race. By this course, confirmed in our judgment, and justified in
+the progress already made, we hope to progress slowly but surely to the
+end.
+
+The love we feel for that race, you cannot measure nor comprehend. As I
+attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy, from her home up
+there, looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals
+the sweet music of her croonings as thirty years ago she held me in her
+black arms and led me smiling to sleep. This scene vanishes as I speak,
+and I catch a vision of an old Southern home with its lofty pillars and
+its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air. I see women
+with strained and anxious faces, and children alert yet helpless. I see
+night come down with its dangers and its apprehensions, and in a big
+homely room I feel on my tired head the touch of loving hands--now worn
+and wrinkled, but fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal woman, and
+stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man--as they lay a
+mother's blessing there, while at her knees--the truest altar I yet
+have found--I thank God that she is safe in her sanctuary, because her
+slaves, sentinel in the silent cabin, or guard at her chamber door, puts
+a black man's loyalty between her and danger.
+
+I catch another vision. The crisis of battle--a soldier struck,
+staggering, fallen. I see a slave, scuffling through the smoke, winding
+his black arms about the fallen form, reckless of hurtling
+death--bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the
+stricken lips, so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down
+his life in his master's stead. I see him by the weary bedside,
+ministering with uncomplaining patience, praying with all his humble
+heart that God will lift his master up, until death comes in mercy and
+in honor to still the soldier's agony and seal the soldier's life. I see
+him by the open grave, mute, motionless, uncovered, suffering for the
+death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him, when the
+mould is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and
+with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange
+fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure
+is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave
+comes a voice saying, "Follow him! put your arms about him in his need,
+even as he put his about me. Be his friend as he was mine." And out into
+this new world--strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering both--I
+follow! And may God forget my people--when they forget these!
+
+Whatever the future may hold for them, whether they plod along in the
+servitude from which they have never been lifted since the Cyrenian was
+laid hold upon by the Roman soldiers, and made to bear the cross of the
+fainting Christ--whether they find homes again in Africa, and thus
+hasten the prophecy of the psalmist, who said: "And suddenly Ethiopia
+shall hold out her hands unto God"--whether for ever dislocated and
+separate, they remain a weak people, beset by stronger, and exist, as
+the Turk, who lives in the jealousy rather than in the conscience of
+Europe--or whether in this miraculous Republic they break through the
+caste of twenty centuries, and, belying universal history, reach the
+full stature of citizenship, and in peace maintain it--we shall give
+them uttermost justice and abiding friendship. And whatever we do, into
+whatever seeming estrangement we may be driven, nothing shall disturb
+the love we bear this Republic, or mitigate our consecration to its
+service. I stand here, Mr. President, to profess no new loyalty. When
+General Lee, whose heart was the temple of our hopes, and whose arm was
+clothed with our strength, renewed his allegiance to this government at
+Appomattox, he spoke from a heart too great to be false, and he spoke
+for every honest man from Maryland to Texas. From that day to this
+Hamilcar has nowhere in the South sworn young Hannibal to hatred and
+vengeance, but everywhere to loyalty and to love. Witness the veteran
+standing at the base of a Confederate monument, above the graves of his
+comrades, his empty sleeve tossing in the April wind, adjuring the young
+men about him to serve as earnest and loyal citizens the government
+against which their fathers fought. This message, delivered from that
+sacred presence, has gone home to the hearts of my fellows! And, sir, I
+declare here, if physical courage be always equal to human aspiration,
+that they would die, sir, if need be, to restore this Republic their
+fathers fought to dissolve!
+
+Such, Mr. President, is this problem as we see it, such is the temper in
+which we approach it, such the progress made. What do we ask of you?
+First, patience; out of this alone can come perfect work. Second,
+confidence; in this alone can you judge fairly. Third, sympathy; in this
+you can help us best. Fourth, give us your sons as hostages. When you
+plant your capital in millions, send your sons that they may know how
+true are our hearts and may help to swell the Caucasian current until it
+can carry without danger this black infusion. Fifth, loyalty to the
+Republic--for there is sectionalism in loyalty as in estrangement. This
+hour little needs the loyalty that is loyal to one section and yet holds
+the other in enduring suspicion and estrangement. Give us the broad and
+perfect loyalty that loves and trusts Georgia alike with
+Massachusetts--that knows no South, no North, no East, no West, but
+endears with equal and patriotic love every foot of our soil, every
+State of our Union.
+
+A mighty duty, sir, and a mighty inspiration impels every one of us
+to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever
+divides. We, sir, are Americans--and we stand for human liberty! The
+uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth.
+France, Brazil--these are our victories. To redeem the earth from
+kingcraft and oppression--this is our mission! And we shall not fail.
+God has sown in our soil the seed of His millennial harvest, and He will
+not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until His full and perfect day
+has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle
+from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown all the way--aye, even from the hour
+when, from the voiceless and traceless ocean, a new world rose to the
+sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of
+that stupendous day--when the old world will come to marvel and to learn
+amid our gathered treasures--let us resolve to crown the miracles of our
+past with the spectacle of a Republic, compact, united, indissoluble in
+the bonds of love--loving from the lakes to the gulf--the wounds of war
+healed in every heart as on every hill, serene and resplendent at the
+summit of human achievement and earthly glory, blazing out the path and
+making clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in
+God's appointed time! [Great applause.]
+
+
+
+
+SARAH GRAND
+
+
+MERE MAN
+
+[Speech of Sarah Grand [Mrs. M'Fall] at the annual ladies' banquet of
+  the Whitefriars Club, London, May 4, 1900. Max O'Rell [Paul Blouet]
+  acted as chairman. L. F. Austin, who spoke earlier than Madame Grand,
+  said, turning to Max O'Rell: "It used to be said of certain
+  politicians by way of odium that they mumbled the dry bones of
+  political economy; but you, sir, who sit trembling in that chair
+  [laughter]--you are trying not to look it, but you are trembling with
+  apprehension of the delicately anointed barb with which Madame Sarah.
+  Grand will presently transfix you [laughter]; you must feel that we
+  shall not very long be permitted even to mumble the barren epigrams of
+  a vanished ascendancy."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN:--I have the honor to propose the toast of "Mere
+Man" [laughter], but why "Mere Man," I want to know? After all that has
+been said this evening so truthfully on the subject of "Sovran Woman,"
+it is impossible for me to use such an epithet without feeling myself in
+an invidious position, in the position of the dog that bites the hand
+which has just caressed it--or rather I should feel myself in that
+position if I were in any way responsible for the use of the ungracious
+word. I beg most emphatically to state that I am not in any way
+responsible for it. I decline to be identified with such an expression:
+I decline to be accused of calling man any names [laughter], any names
+that I have not already called him. [Laughter.] I do not decline out of
+consideration for mere man altogether, but in self-defence. To use such
+an expression deprives me of any dignity which I might myself derive
+from the dignity of my subject. Besides, the words in my mouth, were I
+to be identified with them, would be used against me as a bomb by a
+whole section of the press, to blow me up. [Laughter.] I object to be
+blown up for nothing by a whole section of the press. [Laughter.] That
+is the sort of thing which almost ruffles my equanimity. My comfort is,
+that no one can accuse me of having originated such an expression,
+because it is well known no woman ever originated anything. [Laughter.]
+I assure you I have seen it so stated in print; and in one article I
+read on the subject the perturbation of the writer, lest there should be
+any mistake about it, so agitated his grammar that it was impossible to
+parse it. I should like to know who was responsible in the first place
+for the expression which has been imposed upon me. It seems to me there
+is strong presumptive evidence that it was by man himself that man was
+dubbed mere man. If the lords of creation choose to masquerade sometimes
+as mere man by all means let them.
+
+The saying is, "In small things, liberty; in great things, unity; in all
+things, charity," but when you meet a man who describes himself as a
+mere man, you would always do well to ask what he wants, because, since
+man first swung himself from his bough in the forest primeval and stood
+upright on two legs, he has never assumed that position for nothing.
+[Laughter.] My own private opinion, which I confide to you, knowing it
+will go no further, is that he assumes that tone, as a rule, to draw
+sovran woman. [Laughter.] Mere man is a paradoxical creature--it is not
+always possible to distinguish between his sober earnest and his
+leg-pulling exercises. [Laughter.] One has to be on one's guard, and woe
+be to the woman who in these days displays that absence of the sense of
+humor which is such a prominent characteristic of our comic papers.
+[Laughter.] I do not mean to say for a moment that man assumes his
+"mere man" tone for unpleasant purposes. On the contrary, he assumes it
+for party purposes as a rule--for dinner party purposes. [Laughter.]
+When man is in his mere man mood sovran woman would do well to ask for
+anything that she wants--for it is then that he holds the sceptre out to
+her. [Laughter.] Unfortunately, the mood does not last; if it did he
+would have given us the suffrage ages ago. Sovran woman is the Uitlander
+of civilization--and man is her Boer. [Laughter.] It seems to me that
+sovran woman is very much in the position of Queen Esther; she has her
+crown, and her kingdom, and her royal robes, but she is liable to have
+her head snapped off at any moment. [Laughter.] On the other hand,
+there are hundreds of men who have their heads snapped off every day.
+[Laughter.] Mere man has his faults, no doubt, but sovran woman also can
+be a rasping sort of creature, especially if she does not cultivate
+sympathy with cigarettes as she gets older. [Laughter.] Let us be fair
+to mere man. Mere man has always treated me with exemplary fairness, and
+I certainly have never maintained that the blockhead majority is
+entirely composed of men; neither have I ever insinuated that it is man
+that makes all the misery.
+
+Personally, and speaking as a woman whose guiding principle through life
+has been never to do anything for herself that she can get a nice man to
+do for her [laughter], a principle which I have found entirely
+successful, and which I strongly recommend to every other
+woman--personally I have always found mere man an excellent comrade.
+[Applause.] He has stood by me loyally, and held out an honest hand to
+me, and lent me his strength when mine was failing, and helped me
+gallantly over many an awkward bit of the way, and that, too, at times
+when sovran woman, whom I had so respected and admired and championed,
+had nothing for me but bonnet-pins. [Laughter.] It does upset one's
+ideas and unsettle one's principles when sovran woman has nothing for
+one but bonnet-pins. [Laughter.] The sharp points of those pins have
+made me a little doubtful about sovran woman at times--a little apt to
+suspect that in private life her name is Mrs. Harris [laughter], but I
+must be careful about what I say in this connection lest it should be
+supposed that I have been perverted.
+
+In the great republic of letters to which I have the honor to belong--in
+the distinguished position of the letter "Z"--my experience is that
+woman suffers no indignity at the hands of man on account of her sex.
+That is the sort of experience which creates a prejudice. It is apt to
+color the whole of one's subsequent opinions. It gives one a sort of
+idea that there are men in the world who would stand by a woman on
+occasion; and I must confess that I began life with a very strong
+prejudice of that kind. For a woman to have had a good father is to have
+been born an heiress. If you had asked me as a child who ran to help me
+when I fell, I should have answered, "My daddy." When a woman begins
+life with a prejudice of this kind she never gets over it. The prejudice
+of a man for his mother is feeble in comparison with the prejudice of a
+woman for her father, when she has had a man for her father and not one
+of what Shelley called, those--
+
+ "Things whose trade is over ladies
+    To lean and flirt and stare and simper,
+  Till all that is divine in woman
+  Grows cruel, courteous, smooth, inhuman,
+    Crucified 'twixt a smile and whimper."'
+
+Whatever that woman has to suffer she never loses her faith in man.
+Remembering what her father was, she always believes there are good men
+and true in the world somewhere. The recollection of her father becomes
+a buffer between that woman and the shocks and jars of her after life;
+because of him, there is nothing distorted in her point of view, and she
+remains sane. It rather spoils a woman in some ways to have a good
+husband as well as a good father, because then she is so sure that
+
+ "God's in His heaven,
+  All's well with the world,"
+
+that she becomes utterly selfish, and cares for nothing that is outside
+her own little circle. But the thing to guard against is loss of faith.
+Men and women who have lost faith in each other never rise above the
+world again--one wing is broken, and they cannot soar. It has been said
+that the best way to manage man is to feed the brute [laughter], but
+sovran woman never made that discovery for herself--I believe it was a
+man in his mere man mood who first confided the secret to some young
+wife in distress--somebody else's young wife. [Laughter.] Feed him and
+flatter him. Why not? Is there anything more delightful in this world
+than to be flattered and fed? Let us do as we would be done by. It seems
+to me sometimes that it is impossible in reviewing our social relations
+ever to be wholly in earnest. One's opinions do wobble so. [Laughter.]
+If one would earn a reputation for consistency one must be like that
+great judge who declined to hear more than one side of the case because
+he found that hearing the other side only confused him. [Laughter.]
+
+The thing about mere man which impresses me most, which fills me with
+the greatest respect, is not his courage in the face of death, but the
+courage with which he faces life. The way in which we face death is not
+necessarily more heroic than the way in which we face life. The
+probability is that you never think less about yourself than you do at
+the moment when you and eternity are face to face. When you are sick
+unto death you are too sick to care whether you live or die. In some
+great convulsion of nature, a great typhoon, for instance, when the wind
+in its fury lashes the walls of the house till they writhe, and there
+are the shrieks of people in dire distress, and fire, and the crash of
+giant waves, and all that makes for horror, the shock of these brute
+irresponsible forces of nature is too tremendous for fear to obtrude.
+Thought is suspended--you are in an ecstasy of awful emotion, emotion
+made perfect by the very strength of it.
+
+But when it comes to facing life day after day, and day after day, as so
+many men have to face it, the workingmen, in all classes of society,
+upon whom the home depends, men whose days are only too often a weary
+effort, and whose nights are an ache of anxiety, lest the strength
+should give out which means bread, when one thinks of the lives these
+men live, and the way in which they live them, the brave, uncomplaining
+way in which they fight to the death for those dear to them, when one
+considers mere man from this point of view, one is moved to enthusiasm,
+and one is fain to confess that "sovran woman" on a pedestal is a poor
+sort of creature compared with this kind of mere man in that so often
+she not only fails to help and cheer him in his heroic efforts, but to
+appreciate that he is making any effort at all. I positively refuse to
+subscribe to the assertion, "How poor a thing is man!" [Laughter.] It
+takes more genius to be a man than manhood to be a genius. [Applause.]
+As to the differences between men and women, I believe that when finally
+their accounts have been properly balanced it will be found that it has
+been a case of six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, both in the
+matter of sovereignty and of mereness [laughter], and, therefore, without
+prejudice, I propose that the sixes to which I belong shall rise and
+cordially drink to the health of the other half dozens, our kind and
+generous hosts of to-night. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT
+
+
+A REMARKABLE CLIMATE
+
+[Speech of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the seventy-fifth annual dinner of
+  the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1880.
+  The President, James C. Carter, in introducing General Grant, said:
+  "Gentlemen, it is our good fortune to have with us to-night as a guest
+  an illustrious fellow citizen, who in a great and fortunate career has
+  been enabled to render signal service to his country and to achieve a
+  just renown for himself. [Applause.] Long may he live! But however
+  long, he cannot outlive the regard or the affection of the sons of New
+  England. I give you, gentlemen, 'The Health of General Grant.'" The
+  announcement of the toast was greeted with loud and prolonged cheers,
+  the company standing.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF THE CITY
+OF NEW YORK:--I suppose on an occasion of this sort that you will
+expect me to say something about this Society and the people of New
+England and the pilgrims who first landed on Plymouth Rock. It was my
+fortune last night to attend a banquet of this sort in the principal
+city on New York harbor. [Applause and laughter.] I did not know until I
+went there [Brooklyn] that it was the principal city [laughter]--the
+principal city of the harbor of New York, a city whose overflow has
+settled up Manhattan Island, which has built up fine houses, business
+streets, and shown many evidences of prosperity for a suburb, with a
+waste of people flowing across the North River that forms a third if not
+one-half the population of a neighboring state. [Applause.] As I say, it
+was my good fortune to attend a banquet of this sort of the parent
+society [laughter], and to which all the societies known, even including
+the one which is now celebrating its first anniversary in Las Vegas, New
+Mexico, owe their origin. [Laughter.] I made a few remarks there, in
+which I tried to say what I thought were the characteristics of the
+people who have descended from the Pilgrims. I thought they were a
+people of great frugality, great personal courage, great industry, and
+possessed within themselves of qualities which built up this New England
+population which has spread out over so much of this land and given so
+much character, prosperity, and success to us as a people and a nation.
+[Applause.] I retain yet some of the views I then expressed [peals of
+laughter], and should have remained convinced that my judgment was
+entirely right if it were not that some speakers came after me who have
+a better title to speak for the people of New England than myself, and
+who dispelled some of those views. [Renewed laughter.]
+
+It is too many generations back for me to claim to be a New Englander.
+Those gentlemen who spoke are themselves New Englanders who have, since
+their manhood, emigrated to this great city that I speak of. They
+informed me that there was nothing at all in the Pilgrim fathers to give
+them the distinguishing characteristics which we attribute to them
+[laughter], and that it was all entirely dependent upon the poverty of
+the soil and the inclemency of the climate where they landed. [Shouts of
+laughter.] They fell upon an ungenial climate, where there were nine
+months of winter and three months of cold weather [laughter], and that
+had called out the best energies of the men and of the women, too, to
+get a mere subsistence out of the soil, with such a climate. In their
+efforts to do that they cultivated industry and frugality at the same
+time, which is the real foundation of the greatness of the Pilgrims.
+[Laughter.] It was even suggested by some that if they had fallen upon a
+more genial climate and more fertile soil, they would have been there
+yet, in poverty and without industry. [Laughter.] I shall continue to
+believe better of them myself, and I believe the Rev. Dr. Storrs, who
+spoke here, will agree with me that my first judgment of them was
+probably nearly correct.
+
+However, all jesting aside, we are proud in my section of the country of
+the New Englanders and of their descendants. We hope to see them spread
+over all this land, and carry with them the principles inculcated in
+their own sterile soil from which they sprang. [Applause.] We want to
+see them take their independence of character, their self-reliance,
+their free schools, their learning, and their industry, and we want to
+see them prosper and teach others among whom they settle how to be
+prosperous. [Applause.] I am very much obliged to the gentlemen of the
+infant New England Society [laughter] for the reception which they have
+accorded to me and the other guests of this evening. I shall remember it
+with great pleasure, and hope that some day you will invite me again.
+[Long-continued applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CHARACTERISTICS OF NEWSPAPER MEN
+
+[Speech of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the eighth annual dinner of the New
+  York Press Club, January 6, 1881. John C. Hennessy, President of the
+  Press Club, was in the chair, and read the third toast: "The
+  Republic's Honored ex-President." General Grant, on being introduced
+  to respond to this toast, was received with a tumult of applause.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW YORK PRESS CLUB:--I confess
+to a little embarrassment this evening in being called upon unexpectedly
+to say a word to a set of such different men as compose not only the
+Press Club, but those associated with the Press of the country. I
+thought this was an evening that I was going to spend where all would be
+quiet and good order [laughter]; where nobody would have anything to
+say. We all know the characteristic modesty of the people associated
+with the Press [laughter], they never want to inquire into anybody's
+affairs, [laughter], to know where they are going, what they are going
+to do, what they are going to say when they get there. [Uproarious
+laughter.] I really thought that you would excuse me this evening, but I
+suppose you will expect me to say something about the Press--the Press
+of New York, the Press of the United States, the Press of the world. It
+would take a good deal to tell what is possible for the Press to do. I
+confess that, at some periods of my life when I have read what they had
+to say about me, I have lost all faith and all hope. [Great laughter.]
+But since a young editor has spoken of the Press, and has fixed the
+lifetime, the generation of newspaper men at about twelve years
+[laughter], I have a growing hope within me that in the future the Press
+may be able to do some of the great good which we all admit is possible
+for it to do. [Laughter.] I have been somewhat of a reader of the
+newspapers for forty years--I could read very well when I was eight
+years of age. [Laughter.] It has given me forty years of observation of
+the Press; and there is one peculiarity that I have observed from
+reading it, and that is, in all of the walks of life outside of the
+Press, people have entirely mistaken their profession, their occupation.
+[Laughter.] I never knew the Mayor of a city, or even a Councilman in
+any city, any public officer, any government official--I never knew a
+member of Congress, a Senator or a President of the United States, who
+could not be enlightened in his duties by the youngest member of the
+profession. [Great laughter and applause.] I never knew a general of the
+Army to command a brigade, a division, a corps of the Army who could
+begin to do it as well as men far away in their sanctums. [Renewed
+laughter.] I was very glad to see that the newspaper fraternity were
+ready to take with perfect confidence any office that might be tendered
+to them, from President to Mayor [laughter], and I have often been
+astonished that the citizens have not done so, because then all these
+offices would have been well and properly filled. [Laughter and
+applause.]
+
+Well, gentlemen, I am very happy to have been here with you, and I hope
+when a new generation, about twelve years hence, comes on, that I shall
+again dine with the Press Club of New York City, and that I shall see
+that those of this generation who were so well fitted to fill all of the
+civil offices have all been chosen, and that there will be nothing left
+for them to criticise. [Peals of laughter.] Thank you, gentlemen. [Great
+applause, with "Three cheers" for General Grant.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE ADOPTED CITIZEN
+
+[Speech of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the 115th annual banquet of the
+  Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, May 8, 1883. George W.
+  Lane, President of the Chamber of Commerce, presided, and announced as
+  the first regular toast: "The United States--the great modern
+  Republic--the home of a new cosmopolitan race; may those who seek the
+  blessings of its free institutions and the protection of its flag
+  remember the obligations they impose." The orchestra played "The
+  Star-Spangled Banner," and General Grant, who was called upon to
+  respond to this toast, was received with great enthusiasm.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND
+GUESTS:--I am very much obliged to your President for calling upon
+me first, because the agony will soon be over and I shall enjoy the
+misery of the rest of you. [Laughter.]
+
+The first part of this toast--The United States--would be a voluminous
+one to respond to on a single occasion. Bancroft commenced to publish
+his notes on the History of the United States, starting even before
+President Lane established this Chamber, which I think was something
+over one hundred years ago. [Laughter.] Bancroft, I say, commenced
+earlier, and I am not prepared to dispute his word if he should say that
+he had kept an accurate journal from the time he commenced to write
+about the country to the present, because there has been no period of
+time when I have been alive that I have not heard of Bancroft, and I
+should be equally credulous if President Lane should tell me that he was
+here at the founding of this Institution. [Laughter.] But instead of
+bringing those volumes of Bancroft's here, and reading them to you on
+this occasion, I will let the reporters publish them as the prelude to
+what I am going to say. [Laughter.]
+
+I think Bancroft has finished up to a little after the time that
+President Lane established this Chamber of Commerce, and I will let you
+take the records of what he [Lane] has written and what he has said in
+their monthly meetings and publish them as the second chapter of my
+speech. And, gentlemen, those two chapters you will find the longest;
+they will not amount to much more than what I have to say taking up the
+subject at the present time. [Laughter.]
+
+But in speaking of the United States, we who are native-born have a
+country of which we may well be proud. Those of us who have been abroad
+are better able, perhaps, to make the comparison of our enjoyments and
+our comforts than those who have always stayed at home. [Applause.] It
+has been the fortune, I presume, of the majority here to compare the
+life and the circumstances of the average people abroad with ours here.
+We have here a country that affords room for all and room for every
+enterprise. We have institutions which encourage every man who has
+industry and ability to rise from the position in which he may find
+himself to any position in the land. [Applause.] It is hardly worth my
+while to dwell upon the subject, but there is one point which I notice
+in the toast, that I would like to say a word about--"May those who
+seek the blessings of its free institutions and the protection of its
+flag remember the obligations they impose." I think there is a text that
+my friend Mr. Beecher,[4] on the left, or my friend Dr. Newman,[5] on
+the right, might well preach a long sermon upon. I shall say only a few
+words.
+
+We offer an asylum to every man of foreign birth who chooses to come
+here and settle upon our soil; we make of him, after a few years'
+residence only, a citizen endowed with all the rights that any of us
+have, except perhaps the single one of being elected to the Presidency
+of the United States. There is no other privilege that a native, no
+matter what he has done for the country, has that the adopted citizen of
+five years' standing has not got. [Applause.] I contend that that places
+upon him an obligation which, I am sorry to say, many of them do not
+seem to feel. [Applause,]
+
+We have witnessed on many occasions here the foreign, the adopted,
+citizen claiming many rights and privileges because he was an adopted
+citizen. That is all wrong. Let him come here and enjoy all the
+privileges that we enjoy, but let him fulfil all the obligations that we
+are expected to fulfil. [Loud applause.] After he has adopted it, let
+this be his country--a country that he will fight for, and die for, if
+necessary. I am glad to say that the great majority of them do it, but
+some of them who mingle in politics seem to bank largely on the fact
+that they are adopted citizens; and that class I am opposed to as much
+as I am opposed to many other things that I see are popular now.
+[Applause.]
+
+I know that other speakers will come forward, and when Mr. Beecher and
+Dr. Newman speak, I hope they will say a few words on the text which I
+read. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+JOHN WILLIAM GRIGGS
+
+
+SOCIAL DISCONTENT
+
+[Speech of John William Griggs, ex-Governor of New Jersey, at the 128th
+  annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York,
+  November 17, 1896. Alexander E. Orr, President of the Chamber,
+  presided. In 1897 ex-Governor Griggs succeeded Joseph McKenna as
+  Attorney-General in the Cabinet of President McKinley.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--I did not know this was
+Thanksgiving day. [Laughter.] I did not know that there were any
+discontents till I got over here to-night. When I arrive at this period
+on an occasion like this, and see you sitting in comfortable
+expectation, with your cigars lighted, and your intellects also lighted
+by the contact of such a flame as we have received from the
+distinguished Postmaster-General [William L. Wilson], I always think
+that the composition of the boy on Sir Walter Raleigh is applicable. He
+wrote a composition, and it was like this: "Sir Walter Raleigh was a
+very great man; he took a voyage and discovered America, and then he
+took another voyage and discovered Virginia, and when he had discovered
+Virginia he discovered the potato; and when he had discovered the
+potato, he discovered tobacco. And when he had done so, he called his
+associates about him, and said: 'My friends, be of good cheer; for we
+have this day lighted in England a flame which, by God's grace, shall
+never be quenched.'" [Laughter.]
+
+New Jersey greets to-night the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New
+York. [Applause.] We are your friends and your neighbors. We have
+furnished you a candidate in this election, who represents in the person
+of Garret A. Hobart [applause] the sympathies and the sentiments of such
+men as I see gathered here. We take much of our inspiration from New
+York; not all of it. [Laughter.] We have some kinds of inspiration
+peculiar to ourselves, of which we are always glad to invite our New
+York friends to partake in moderation and properly diluted. [Laughter.]
+
+Our citizens mingle with yours in all the daily walks of life. We read
+the same newspapers. We dress as you do, only not so well; and we vote
+the same ticket, by a large majority. [Applause.] This similarity is not
+always apparent. The impressions of the traveller through New Jersey are
+generally of salt marsh and sand banks and long monotonous stretches of
+landscape, and, where the railroad pierces some shabby neighborhood, the
+weather-boards bear shining invitations to take various brands of liver
+pills [laughter], to chew "Virgin leaf," or to "give the baby Castoria;"
+but we have green meadows bright with shining brooks; we have high
+mountains and pleasant valleys as well as marsh and sand dunes; and,
+instead of liver-pills and Castoria, by a large majority, we are for the
+gold cure. [Great applause.]
+
+I cannot let this opportunity pass without referring to the great work
+which this Chamber has wrought for the state and city whose name it
+bears and for the country at large. It is a long interval since these
+dinners were held at Fraunce's tavern, but during all that period, this
+institution has stood as the pilot, the guide, the director, and pioneer
+in all wise policies of commerce and trade and patriotism. [Applause.]
+You have bestowed not only wisdom and enlightenment and courage on the
+world of commerce, but millions of dollars upon the unfortunate victims
+of fire and flood and fever. You have been the promoters of good fortune
+and the comforters of misfortune. I wish that the people of this land
+could understand how much true and loyal patriotism, how much
+disinterested devotion to the highest interests of the country are found
+among just such men as compose the Chamber of Commerce of the State of
+New York. [Applause.]
+
+During your corporate life you have seen a great country grow into
+independence; you have seen it advance and extend along all the lines of
+progress and prosperity until the seven wonders of the world, of which
+we learned in our youth, have been lost sight of and forgotten in the
+thousand greater wonders of this industrial age. You have seen
+education become the common provision of every State for every child of
+the Republic. You have seen intelligence increase; you have seen reason
+and reasonableness, the ability to take right views of things, become
+more universal among this people than among the people of any other
+land. [Applause.] You have seen the average of comfort and prosperity
+higher among all classes in this country than could be found at any
+other age of the world and any other land upon the surface of the earth.
+[Applause.]
+
+And yet there are complainings, there are discontents, and there are
+dissatisfactions, and gloomy minds think they see, in these, evidences
+and signs that there is coming a social revolution, an overturning of
+our system of popular government, and the substitution for it of some
+plan whereby, by legal enactments, all the citizens of the Republic can
+be made comfortable and rich without regard to fortune or ability or
+frugality or merit.
+
+In one sense discontent is a good thing. It is the opposite of
+self-satisfaction. [Laughter.] It is a good thing to appreciate that we
+have not done our best, and then try to do it. It is a good thing to
+understand that we have not made the most of our opportunities. In this
+sense, discontent is the spur of ambition, the incentive to better work,
+the mountain of progress up which, from height to height, civilization
+has climbed to where now with shining face she stands still pointing
+upward to heights unknown. [Applause.]
+
+But there is another kind of discontent, born of ignorant and jealous
+envy, that seeks not to repair its mistakes nor to profit by its
+failures, not to build up, but to tear down. There is in many a sense of
+hopelessness over hopeless misfortune; and with these it is more to
+pity than to blame. But, withal, in these discontents there is a menace
+to the Republic. They afford the opportunity for the demagogue and the
+cheap candidate for public office. [Laughter and applause.] Glory to the
+American people! They cannot be fooled all the time, nor some of the
+time. They are too level-headed, too intelligent, too patriotic to be
+caught by appeals of the demagogue and the social revolutionist, to the
+dictates and sentiments of envy, hatred and malice.
+
+May I venture to suggest that there are some ways by which it is
+possible for us to minimize the danger we find in these discontents? The
+American people, as I have said, have not up to date been fooled. They
+are the nation's court; they deserve a better certificate of character
+than a certain colored man who, when he was about to leave his master's
+employ because of the mysterious disappearance of certain small articles
+about the house, asked for a certificate of character to take to his
+next employer, and his employer said: "Well, 'Rastus, I can give you a
+good certificate for energy and ability, but I cannot say much about
+your honesty." "Tell you what, boss," says 'Rastus, after a moment's
+reflection: "can't you put it in that I am just as honest as my
+instincts will let me be?" [Laughter.]
+
+The first remedy I would suggest, and it is one that is to be ever
+applied, is education. Reduce the percentage of illiteracy. Let the
+public schools teach not only reading and writing, but let public
+schools teach all the principles of American popular government.
+[Applause.] Let us go back to the days in which I was taught to write,
+when the copybook bore a text taken from Poor Richard--"Industry and
+frugality lead to wealth," or "Who by the plough would thrive, himself
+must either hold or drive,"--there was not anything said in those days
+about legislating a boy into wealth or comfort or ease, especially at
+the expense of anybody else. [Applause.]
+
+The next remedy I would speak of is to cast out the demagogue. They are
+the fellows that are the curse of both and of all political parties. We
+have had them from the days of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony down to
+date. [Laughter.] These smooth, sleek, mellifluous-tongued fellows that
+always have the same blood-stained garment to hold up before the
+populace, and some forged will to read, whereby the people were to get
+great legacies which they never could collect, let us cast them out. Let
+us frown upon them in both parties, so that they never have a standing
+on any political platform. [Applause.] Why, it makes the blood of an
+honest, straightforward, intelligent, American citizen boil to see the
+impudence, the hypocrisy, of men of this kind,--and they belong to both
+parties. I heard a story of one who used, when Long Branch was more
+popular than it is now, to go down there for a summer outing. One day
+he went out in the surf to bathe. He was strong and vigorous and bold,
+and he swam out beyond the breakers; he was heading strongly and
+fearlessly for the European shore. All at once, a shark, a man-eater,
+was coming the other way, and swam up squarely in front of him. They
+eyed each other for a moment, and then the shark blushed and swam out.
+[Laughter and applause.]
+
+Then, let us have more mutual sympathy and confidence between all
+classes and conditions of men. The man who works for wages, day by day,
+is our equal in right and our equal at the ballot-box. Very often he
+has, generally he has, as high instincts, as loyal and true a heart, as
+his employer. [Applause.] There is no reason why his employer or the
+candidate for office or anybody else should make friends with him only
+about election-time. Be his friend all the year round. Show him that you
+sympathize with him as a fellow-citizen. This is not condescension. It
+is his right. It is not altruism. You understand what that is. The
+teacher told her class in Sunday-school: "Now, my children, you know an
+altruist is one who sacrifices his own interests to the interests of his
+fellows." "Oh! yes," says one boy, "I know; a fellow who makes his
+sacrifice hit." [Laughter.]
+
+But let there be confidence between the men that earn wages and the men
+that pay wages. Let them meet together on a plane of political equality,
+and they will learn to respect the employer, and the employer, take my
+word for it, will learn to respect them. [Applause.]
+
+And then, let us stop making citizens out of unworthy material.
+[Applause.] We welcome all those that come from over the sea, men of
+merit and worth and proper instincts who want to build and work among
+us. We do not want those who only come here to tear down and destroy. We
+have had the gates wide open. They have been coming--all sorts and all
+conditions and all beliefs. Let us shut those gates, and open them
+hereafter only to men of merit with right instincts. [Applause.] The law
+of the land declares that no subject of any foreign government shall be
+naturalized unless he can prove to the satisfaction of the court that he
+has been well attached to the principles of the Constitution of the
+United States. How that provision has been mocked! Why, we have taken
+into citizenship with us thousands of men who not only were not attached
+to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, who not only
+did not know what those principles are, but who held principles
+diametrically opposed to it. Now, let us see that America suffers no
+longer from indigestion [laughter], from a surfeited feast of foreign
+anarchists and socialists and revolutionists; give us good men and true,
+who will not impede our digestion, and keep out those that tend to
+indigestion. [Applause.]
+
+And then, let every citizen go into politics. [Laughter.] Oh, not for
+what is in it, but for the good of his country, to speak, write,
+organize, lead processions and keep it up. Rally round the flag, and
+keep on rallying! [Applause.] Do not let your enthusiasm and your
+patriotism evaporate and die away in the shouts that follow one
+triumphant campaign. Keep them up the whole year round--the four years
+round. You have heard from two sources, to-night, how important it is
+that we should always be vigilant and alert to defend, to educate and
+scatter knowledge and the spirit of intelligence among all the people.
+It is a very old saying but can never be too often repeated, that
+"eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
+
+ "O freedom! thou art not, as poets dream,
+  A fair young girl with light and delicate limbs,
+  And wavy tresses gushing from the cap
+  With which the Roman master crowned his slave,
+  When he took off the gyves. A bearded man,
+  Arm'd to the teeth, art thou; one mailed hand
+  Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,
+  Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarr'd
+  With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs
+  Are strong with struggling.... Oh! not yet,
+  Mayst thou unbrace thy corselet nor lay by
+  Thy sword; nor yet, O Freedom! close thy lids
+  In slumber; for thine enemy never sleeps,
+  And thou must watch and combat till the day
+  Of the new earth and heaven."
+
+[Great applause.]
+
+
+
+
+EDWARD EVERETT HALE
+
+
+THE MISSION OF CULTURE
+
+[Speech of Edward Everett Hale, D.D., at the seventy-first annual
+  dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December
+  22, 1876. The President, William Borden, gave the fifth regular toast,
+  to which Dr. Hale responded, as follows: "New England Culture--the
+  open secret of her greatness."
+
+  "Yet on her rocks, and on her sands,
+   And wintry hills the school-house stands,
+   And what her rugged soil denies,
+   The harvest of the mind supplies.
+   The riches of the Commonwealth
+   Are free strong minds and hearts of health
+   And, more to her than gold or grain
+   The cunning hand and cultured brain."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--You seem to have a very frank way
+of talking about each other among yourselves here. I observe that I am
+the first stranger who has crossed the river which, I recollect Edward
+Winslow says, divides the Continent of New England from the Continent of
+America [laughter], and, as a stranger, it is my pleasure and duty at
+once to express the thanks and congratulations of the invited guest here
+for the distinguished care which has been taken on this occasion
+outdoors to make us feel entirely at home. [Laughter.] As I came down in
+the snow-storm, I could not help feeling that Elder Brewster, and
+William Bradford, and Carver, and Winslow could not have done better
+than this in Plymouth; and indeed, as I ate my pork and beans just now,
+I felt that the Gospel of New England is extending beyond the
+Connecticut to other nations, and that what is good to eat and drink in
+Boston is good to eat and drink even here on this benighted point at
+Delmonico's. [Laughter.]
+
+When you talk to us about "culture," that is rather a dangerous word. I
+am always a little afraid of the word "culture." I recollect the very
+brightest squib that I read in the late election campaign--and as the
+President says, gentlemen, I am going to respect the proprieties of the
+occasion. It was sent to one of the journals from the Western Reserve;
+and the writer, who, if I have rightly guessed his name, is one of the
+most brilliant of our younger poets, was descanting on the Chinook
+vocabulary, in which a Chinook calls an Englishman a Chinchog to this
+day, in memory of King George. And this writer says that when they have
+a young chief whose war-paint is very perfect, whose blanket is
+thoroughly embroidered, whose leggins are tied up with exactly the right
+colors, and who has the right kind of star upon his forehead and cheeks,
+but who never took a scalp, never fired an arrow, and never smelled
+powder, but was always found at home in the lodges whenever there was
+anything that scented of war--he says the Chinooks called that man by
+the name of "Boston Cultus." [Applause and laughter.] Well, now,
+gentlemen, what are you laughing at? Why do you laugh? Some of you had
+Boston fathers, and more of you had Boston mothers. Why do you laugh?
+Ah! you have seen these people, as I have seen them, as everybody has
+seen them--people who sat in Parker's and discussed every movement of
+the campaign in the late war, and told us that it was all wrong, that we
+were going to the bad, but who never shouldered a musket. They are
+people who tell us that the emigration, that the Pope of Rome, or the
+German element, or the Irish element, is going to play the dogs with our
+social system, and yet they never met an emigrant on the wharf or had a
+word of comfort to say to a foreigner. We have those people in Boston.
+You may not have them in New York, and I am very glad if you have not;
+but if you are so fortunate, it is the only place on God's earth where I
+have not found such people. [Laughter and applause.] But there is
+another kind of culture which began even before there was any
+Boston--for there was such a day as that. [Laughter.] There were ten
+years in the history of this worlds ten long years, too, before Boston
+existed, and those are the years between Plymouth Rock and the day when
+some unfortunate men, not able to get to Plymouth Rock, stopped and
+founded that city. [Laughter.] This earlier culture is a culture not of
+the schoolhouse, or of the tract, but a culture as well of the church,
+of history, of the town-meeting, as John Adams says; that nobler culture
+to which my friend on the right has alluded when he says that it is born
+of the Spirit of God--the culture which has made New England, which is
+born of God, and which it is our mission to carry over the world.
+[Applause.]
+
+In the very heart of that culture--representing it, as I think, in a
+very striking way, half-way back to the day we celebrate--Ezra Styles,
+one of the old Connecticut men, published a semi-centennial address. It
+seems strange that they should have centennials then, but they had. He
+published a semi-centennial address in the middle of the last century,
+on the condition of New England, and the prospects before her. He
+prophesied what New England was to be in the year 1852. He calculated
+the population descending from the twenty thousand men who emigrated in
+the beginning, and he calculated it with great accuracy. He said, "There
+will be seven million men, women, and children, descended from the men
+who came over with Winslow and with Winthrop," and it proved that he was
+perfectly right. He went on to sketch the future of New England when
+these seven million should crowd her hillsides, her valleys, her farms,
+and her shops all over the four States of New England. For it didn't
+occur to him, as he looked forward, that one man of them all would ever
+go west of Connecticut, or west of Massachusetts. [Applause.] He cast
+his horoscope for a population of seven million people living in the old
+New England States, in the midst of this century. He did not read, as my
+friend here does, the missionary spirit of New England. He did not know
+that they would be willing to go across the arm of the ocean which
+separated the Continent of New England from the Continent of America.
+[Laughter.] All the same, gentlemen, seven million people are somewhere,
+and they have not forgotten the true lessons which make New England what
+she is. They tell me there are more men of New England descent in San
+Francisco than in Boston to-day. All those carried with them their
+mothers' lessons, and they mean their mothers' lessons shall bear fruit
+away out in Oregon, in California, in South Carolina, in Louisiana.
+[Applause.] They have those mothers' lessons to teach them to do
+something of what we are trying to do at home in this matter.
+[Applause.] We have been so fortunate in New England in this Centennial
+year that we are able to dedicate a noble monument of the past to the
+eternal memory of the Pilgrim principle. We have been so fortunate that
+we are able to consecrate the old South Meeting-House in Boston to the
+cause of fostering this Pilgrim principle [applause], that it may be
+from this time forward a monument, not of one branch of the Christian
+religion, not of one sect or another, but of that universal religion,
+that universal patriotism, which has made America, and which shall
+maintain America. [Applause.] For myself, I count it providential that
+in this Centennial year of years this venerable monument, that monument
+whose bricks and rafters are all eloquent of religion and liberty, that
+that monument has passed from the possession of one sect and one State
+to belong to the whole nation, to be consecrated to American liberty,
+and to nothing but American liberty. [Applause.] I need not say--for it
+is taken for granted when such things are spoken of--that when it was
+necessary for New England to act at once for the security of this great
+monument, we had the active aid and hearty assistance of the people of
+New York, who came to us and helped us and carried that thing right
+through. [Applause.] I am surrounded here with the people who had to do
+with the preservation of that great monument for the benefit of the
+history of this country for ever.
+
+Let me say, in one word, what purposes it is proposed this great
+monument shall serve, for I think they are entirely in line with what we
+are to consider to-night. We propose to establish here what I might
+fairly call a university for the study of the true history of this
+country. And we propose, in the first place, to make that monument of
+the past a great Santa Croce, containing the statues and portraits of
+the men who have made this country what it is. Then we propose to
+establish an institute for the people of America from Maine to San
+Francisco, the people of every nationality and every name; and we hope
+that such societies as this, and all others interested in the progress
+and preservation of the interest of our country, will aid us in the
+work. [Applause.] For we believe that the great necessity of this hour
+is that higher education in which this people shall know God's work with
+man. We hope that the Forefathers' societies, the Sam Adams clubs, the
+Centennial clubs over the land, shall make the State more proud of its
+fathers, and more sure of the lessons which they lived. We mean by the
+spoken voice and by the most popular printed word, circulated
+everywhere, to instil into this land that old lesson of New England
+culture. We stand by the side of those of you who believe in compulsory
+education. We desire, in looking to the future, that the determination
+shall be made here by us, as it has been in England, that every child
+born on American soil shall learn to read and write. [Applause.]
+
+But there is a great deal more to be taught than that. There is a great
+deal which the common school does not teach and cannot teach, when it
+teaches men to read. We not only want to teach them to read, but we want
+to teach them what is worth reading. And we want to instil the
+principles by which the nation lives. We have got to create in those who
+came from the other side of the water the same loyalty to the whole of
+American principles that each man feels to his native country.
+
+What is this Constitution for which we have been fighting, and which
+must be preserved? It is a most delicate mutual adjustment of the powers
+and rights of a nation, among and because of the powers and rights of
+thirty or forty States. It exists because they exist. That it may stand,
+you need all their mutual rivalries, you need every sentiment of local
+pride, you need every symbol and laurel of their old victories and
+honors. You need just this homestead feeling which to-night we are
+cherishing.
+
+But that balance is lost, that whole system is thrown out of gear, if
+the seven million people of foreign parentage here are indifferent to
+the record of New York as they are to that of Illinois, to that of
+Illinois as to that of Louisiana, to that of Louisiana as to that of
+Maine; if they have no local pride; if to them the names of Montgomery,
+of John Hancock, of Samuel Adams, have no meaning, no association with
+the past. [Applause.] Unless they also acquire this local feeling,
+unless they share the pride and reverence of the native American for the
+State in which he is born, for the history which is his glory, all these
+delicate balances and combinations are worthless, all your revolving
+planets fall into your sun! It is the national education in the
+patriotism of the Fathers, an education addressing itself to every man,
+woman, and child from Katahdin to the Golden Gate--it is this, and only
+this, which will insure the perpetuity of your republic. [Applause.]
+
+Now, gentlemen, if you would like to try an experiment in this matter,
+go into one of your public schools, next week, and ask what Saratoga
+was, and you will be told it is a great watering-place where people go
+to spend money. You will find there is not one in ten who will be able
+to tell you that there the Hessian was crushed, and foreign bayonets
+forever driven from the soil of New York. [Applause.] Ask about
+Brandywine, the place where Lafayette shed his young blood, where a
+little handful of American troops were defeated, yet, although they were
+defeated, broke the force of the English army for one critical year. Put
+the word Brandywine in one of your public schools, and you will see that
+the pupils laugh at the funny conjunction of the words "brandy" and
+"wine," but they can tell you nothing about the history which made the
+name famous. It seems to me it is dangerous to have your children
+growing up in such ignorance of the past. [Applause.] How much did they
+know here about the day when, a short time since, you celebrated the
+battle of Haarlem Heights, where the British were shown that to land on
+American soil was not everything? Is it quite safe for your children to
+grow up in ignorance of your past, while you are looking down upon the
+century of the future? The great institution we are hoping for in the
+future is to carry this New England culture above the mere mathematics
+of life, and to incorporate into all education that nobler culture which
+made the men who made the Revolution, which made the men who have
+sustained this country. [Applause.] We shall ask for the solid
+assistance of all the Forefathers' stock in the country to carry out
+this great work of national education, and I am quite sure, from what I
+have seen here to-night, that we shall not ask in vain. [Applause.]
+
+I ought to apologize for speaking so long. I am conscious of the fact
+that I am a fraud, and I am nothing but a fraud. [Laughter.] The truth
+is, gentlemen (I say this as I am sitting down), I have no business to
+be here at all. I am not a Pilgrim, nor the son of a Pilgrim, nor the
+grandson of a Pilgrim; there is not one drop of Pilgrim blood in my
+veins. I am a "forefather" myself (for I have six children), but I am
+not the son of a forefather. I had one father; most men have [laughter];
+I have two grandfathers, I have four great-grandfathers, but I have not
+four-fathers. [Laughter.] I want to explain, now, how all this happened,
+because something is due to me before you put me out of the room. Like
+most men, I had eight great-great-grandfathers--so have you; so have
+you. If you run it up, I have got sixty-four great-grandfathers
+of the grandfathers of my grandfathers, and I have sixty-four
+great-grandmothers of the grandmothers of my grandmothers. There were
+one hundred and twenty-eight of these people the day the "Mayflower"
+sailed. There were one hundred and twenty-eight of them in England eager
+to come over here, looking forward to this moment, gentlemen, when we
+meet here at Delmonico's, and they were hoping and praying, every man of
+them and every woman of them, that I might be here at this table
+to-night [laughter], and they meant me to be; and every one of them
+would have come here in the "Mayflower" but for Miles Standish, as I
+will explain. The "Mayflower," you know, started from Holland. They had
+to go to Holland first to learn the Dutch language. [Laughter.] They
+started from Holland, and they came along the English Channel and
+stopped at Plymouth in England. They stopped there to get the last
+edition of the London "Times" for that day, in order that they might
+bring over early copies to the New York "Tribune" and New York "World".
+These ancestors of mine, the legend says, were all on the dock at
+Plymouth waiting for them. It was a bad night, a very bad night. It
+fogged as it can only fog in England. [Laughter.] They waited on the
+wharf there two hours, as you wait at the Brooklyn and Jersey ferries,
+for the "Mayflower" to come along. Methinks I see her now, the
+"Mayflower" of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospect of a fertile
+State and bound across an unknown sea. Her dark and weather-beaten form
+looms wearily from the deep, when the pilot brings her up at the
+Plymouth dock, and a hundred and twenty-eight of my ancestors press
+forward. They were handsome men and fair women. When they all pressed
+forward, Miles Standish was on hand and met them. He was on board and
+looked at them. He went back to the governor, and said, "Here are one
+hundred and twenty-eight of as fine emigrants as I ever saw." "Well,"
+Governor Carver said, "the capacity of the vessel, as prescribed in the
+emigrant act, is already exceeded." Miles Standish said, "I think we
+could let them in." The Governor said, "No, they cannot come in." Miles
+Standish went back to the gangway, and said, "You are handsome men, but
+you can't come in;" and they had to stand there, every man and every
+woman of them. [Laughter.]
+
+That is the unfortunate reason why I had no ancestors at the landing of
+the Pilgrims. [Laughter.] But my ancestors looked westward still. They
+stayed in England, praying that they might come, and when Winthrop, ten
+years afterwards, sailed, he took them all on board, and if the little
+State of Massachusetts has done anything to carry out the principles of
+the men who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, why, some little part of
+the credit is due to my humble ancestry. [Laughter and applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+BOSTON
+
+[Speech of Edward Everett Hale, D.D., at the first annual dinner of the
+  New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1880. The
+  President, Benjamin D. Silliman, in proposing the toast, "Boston,"
+  said: "We are favored with the company of a typical and eloquent
+  Bostonian, identified with all that is learned and benevolent in that
+  ancient home of the Puritans, and familiar with all its notions. In
+  response to the toast, we call on the Rev. Edward Everett Hale."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--I am sure that there is not a
+Boston boy who hears me to-night who does not recollect that when he
+went out to his first Pilgrim dinner, or to see Fanny Kemble or to any
+other evening dissipation of fifty years ago, the last admonition of his
+mother was, "We will leave the candle burning for you, John, but you
+must be sure and be home before twelve o'clock!" I am sure that the
+memory of this admonition is lingering among our friends now, that we
+are entering on the small hours, and that I must only acknowledge your
+courtesy and sit down. I feel, indeed, all along in your talk of hoar
+antiquity, that I owe my place here only to your extreme hospitality. In
+these aged cities you may well say to me, "You Bostonians are children.
+You are of yesterday," as the Egyptians said to the Greek traveller. For
+we are still stumbling along like little children, in the anniversaries
+of our quarter-millennium; but we understand perfectly well that the
+foundations of this city were laid in dim antiquity. I know that nobody
+knows when Brooklyn was founded. Your commerce began so long ago that
+nobody can remember it, but I know that there was a beaver trap on every
+brook in Kings County, while Boston was still a howling wilderness.
+These noble ancestors of yours had made themselves at home on Plymouth
+Rock before we had built a flat-boat on any river in Massachusetts Bay.
+[Applause.]
+
+It is only as the youngest daughter, quite as a Cinderella, that we of
+Boston have any claim on your matchless hospitality. But, as Cinderella
+should, we have done our best at home to make ready our sisters when
+they should go to the ball. When my brother Beecher, just now, closed
+his speech with a Latin quotation, I took some satisfaction in
+remembering that we taught him his Latin at the Boston Latin school. And
+I could not but remember when I listened with such delight to the
+address of Mr. Secretary Evarts, which you have just now been cheering,
+that the first time I heard this persuasive and convincing orator, was
+when he took the prize for elocution, a boy of thirteen, on the platform
+in the great hall in our old schoolhouse in School Street. Nay, I
+confess also, to a little feeling of local as well as national pride,
+when the President of the United States [Rutherford B. Hayes] was
+speaking. Just as he closes this remarkable administration, which is
+going to stand out in history, distinguished indeed among all
+administrations from the beginning, so pure has it been, so honorable
+and so successful--just as he closes this administration he makes here
+this statement of the principles on which are based the success of an
+American statesman, in a few fit words so epigrammatic that they will be
+cited as proverbs by our children and our children's children. I heard
+that masterly definition of the laws which have governed the New
+Englander, I took pride in remembering that the President also was a
+graduate of our law school. These three are the little contributions
+which Cinderella has been preparing in the last half-century, for the
+first dinner-party of the Brooklyn Pilgrim Society. [Applause.]
+
+I read in a New York newspaper in Washington the other day that
+something done in Boston lately was done with the "usual Boston
+intensity." I believe the remark was not intended to be a compliment,
+but we shall take it as one, and are quite willing to accept the phrase.
+I think it is true in the past, I hope it will be true in the future,
+that we go at the things which we have to do with a certain intensity,
+which I suppose we owe to these Puritan Fathers whom to-night we are
+celebrating. Certainly we have gone at this business of emigration with
+that intensity. It is perfectly true that there are in Brooklyn to-day
+more people than there are in Boston, who were born in Boston from the
+old New England blood. Not that Brooklyn has been any special favorite.
+When I met last year in Kansas, a mass meeting of twenty-five thousand
+of the old settlers and their children, my daughter said to me: "Papa, I
+am glad to see so many of our own countrymen." She certainly had never
+seen so many before, without intermixture of people of foreign races.
+Now it is certainly our wish to carry that intensity into everything. If
+the thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing thoroughly. What we do
+we mean to do it for everybody. You have seen the result. We try, for
+instance, if we open a Latin school at all, to have it the best Latin
+school in the world. And then we throw it open to everybody, to native
+and heathen, to Jew and to Greek, to white and black and red, and we
+advise you to go and do likewise. [Applause.]
+
+You recollect the old joke, I think it began with Preston of South
+Carolina, that Boston exported no articles of native growth but granite
+and ice. That was true then, but we have improved since, and to these
+exports we have added roses and cabbages. Mr. President, they are good
+roses, and good cabbages, and I assure you that the granite is excellent
+hard granite, and the ice is very cold ice. [Laughter and applause.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM F. HALL
+
+
+YARN OF THE MANAGER BOLD
+
+[Speech of William P. Hall (popularly known by his pen name, "Biff"
+  Hall) at the fortieth dinner of the Sunset Club, Chicago, Ill.,
+  January 7, 1892. The Secretary, Joseph B. Mann, acted as Chairman. The
+  general subject of the evening's discussion was, "The Modern Stage;
+  its Mission and Influence."]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN.:--I must confess that I have never regarded the
+drama in a very serious light. As to its purpose and mission, if I was
+trying to find out, I should consult the pleasant-faced young man who
+sits in the box-office. He knows how these things stand with the public.
+Perhaps the reason I do so regard the matter may be found in my early
+experiences. The first theatrical performance I ever saw was in this
+city twenty-five years ago, and one of the prominent features was our
+old friend, Billy Rice.[6] Billy Rice never gives rise to a serious
+thought on any occasion. Why, the other night I went to hear Billy Rice,
+and I heard him tell that same old story that he told in the same old
+way twenty-five years ago. It really gave me the idea that the drama is
+not progressive. [Laughter.]
+
+I consider that the theatre and the newspaper are brother and sister;
+they are always together. Wherever two or three are gathered together in
+the wilderness some venturesome individual starts a newspaper, and then
+immediately through its columns induces some other equally venturesome
+individual to build an opera-house. The people who act there are called
+turkey actors, for the reason that they hibernate during most of the
+year and only appear when the turkey is ripe for plucking in holiday
+time. They then go out and depredate the country. They have a wonderful
+repertoire, from Howard's "Shenandoah" to Hood's "Sarsaparilla." They
+play everywhere; it is called the kerosene circuit. If there is nothing
+else available they let the water out of the water-tank at the station
+and play in that. [Laughter.] Gentlemen, these are the pioneers of the
+drama. They convey to the rural mind what knowledge it has of real
+fire-engines and the triumphs of the scenic artist, and I think we
+should give to them the credit of spreading through this land those
+beautiful dramas, "Jim the Westerner," and "The Scout of the Rockies." I
+do not know what their influence may be; I don't care to touch upon that
+part of the subject; but I think I cannot better illustrate the straits
+they are in sometimes than by reciting a little parody on W. S.
+Gilbert's Bab Ballad, the "Yarn of the Nancy Bell." It is entitled:--
+
+
+    THE YARN OF THE MANAGER BOLD
+
+  It was near the town they call Detroit,
+    In the State of Mich-i-gan,
+  That I met on the rocks, with a property-box,
+    A gloomy theatrical man.
+  His o. p. heel was quite worn off,
+    And weary and sad was he,
+  And I saw this "fake" give himself a shake,
+    As he croaked in a guttural key:
+   "Oh, I am the star and the manager bold,
+    And the leading and juvenile man,
+  And the comedy pet, and the pert soubrette,
+    And the boss of the box-sheet plan."
+
+  He wiped his eye on a three-sheet bill,
+    'Twas lettered in blue and red,
+  He cursed the fates and the open dates,
+    And I spoke to him, and said:
+  "'Tis little I know of the mimic show,
+    But if you will explain to me--
+  I'll eat my vest if I can digest
+    How you can possibly be,
+  At once a star, and a manager bold,
+    And a leading and juvenile man,
+  And a comedy pet, and a pert soubrette,
+    And a boss of a box-sheet plan."
+
+  He ran his hand through his dusty hair,
+    And pulled down a brunette cuff,
+  And on the rocks, with his property-box,
+    He told me his story tough:
+  "It was in the year of eighty-three,
+    When a party of six and me
+  Went on the road with a show that's knowed
+    As a 'musical com-i-dee.'
+  I writ it myself--it knocked 'em cold--
+    It made 'em shriek and roar;
+  But we struck a reef and came to grief,
+    On the west of the Michigan shore.
+  Each night it rained, or snowed or blowed,
+    And when the weather was clear
+  They'd say: 'It's sad your house is bad.
+    But wait till you come next year.'
+  We travelled along from town to town
+    A-tryin' to change our luck--
+  With nothin' to taste but bill-board paste
+    An' the 'property' canvas duck.
+  At last we got to Kankakee,
+    All travel-stained and sore,
+  When the star got mad and shook us bad
+    For a job in a dry-goods store--
+  And then the leading heavy man
+    Informed me with a frown
+  He was going away the very next day
+    With a circus then in town;
+  And the comedy pet and the pert soubrette
+    Engaged as cook and waiter--
+  They are still doing well in a small hotel
+    Near the Kankakee the-ay-ter.
+  Then only the 'comic' and me remained,
+    For to leave he hadn't the heart;
+  Each laugh was a drop of blood to him,
+    And he loved that comedy part.
+  We played one night to a right good house,
+    Eight dollars and a half;
+  But to my ill-luck in my lines I stuck
+    And I queered the comedian's laugh.
+  He fell down dead of a broken heart--
+    The coroner, old and sage,
+  Said his brain was cracked with a bad attackt
+    Of the centre of the stage.
+  I played that part all by myself
+    For a week in Kankakee;
+  O'er rails and rocks with this property-box
+    I've walked to where I be.
+  I never say an actor's good,
+    I always damn a play;
+  I always croak, and a single joke
+    I have, which is to say:
+  That I am the star, and the manager bold,
+    And the leading and juvenile man
+  And the comedy pet, and the pert soubrette,
+    And the boss of the box-sheet plan."
+
+[Laughter and applause.]
+
+
+
+
+MURAT HALSTEAD
+
+
+OUR NEW COUNTRY
+
+[Speech of Murat Halstead at the 126th annual banquet of the Chamber of
+  Commerce of the State of New York, November 20, 1894. Alexander B.
+  Orr, President of the Chamber, in proposing this toast, said: "I now
+  have the honor of introducing to you that eminent journalist, the Hon.
+  Murat Halstead, who will respond to the toast, 'Our New Country.'"]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT:--In the Orkney Islands there is a cathedral
+described by the guide as of two parts--the old and the new. The story
+is glibly told that when it had stood for five hundred years a storm
+beat down the tower and did other damage, making reconstruction
+necessary; and that tempest was six hundred years ago. On the road from
+Geneva to Chamouni there is a point of which Baedeker says: "The rocks
+on the left are seven thousand feet high." In the Orkneys a tower six
+hundred years old is new, and in the Alps a precipice seven thousand
+feet high is a moderate bit of scenery. The standards of the measurement
+of time and space may be exact, and yet are comparative, affected by the
+atmosphere of history and the scale of landscapes.
+
+In that portion of this country which was the West a generation ago, a
+farm was old when the stumps had rotted in the fields, and the land was
+improved when the trees were cut. New ground was that which had not been
+ploughed. Once a man of varied experiences accounted to a pious woman
+for an unhappy bit of profanity by saying that when a boy he had
+ploughed new ground, and the plough caught in the roots, and the horses
+balked, and his feet were torn with splinters and thorns, and the
+handles of the plough kicked and hurt him, until depravity was
+developed. The lady said she would pray for his forgiveness, if he
+never would do so any more, and he promised, and I am told he did not
+keep that promise.
+
+Daniel Boone's new country, when he lived on the Yadkin, in North
+Carolina, was Kentucky, and afterward it was Missouri. Washington's new
+country was first Ohio, and then Indiana. Lincoln's new country, when he
+was a child, was Indiana, and then Illinois. Beyond the Alleghany
+Mountains was the land of promise of the original States; beyond the
+Mississippi was the new world of those who moved west in wagons, before
+the Mexican war and the railroads broadened our dominions, and we were
+bounded east and west by the oceans. It was for the new country of their
+ages that Columbus and the Puritans and Captain John Smith set sail. In
+the new country there is always, at least, the dream of liberty and the
+hope that the earth we inherit may be generous in the bounties it yields
+to toil.
+
+The march of manhood westward has reached the shores of the seas that
+look out on ancient Asia. We have realized the vision of the
+Genoese--finding in the sunset the footsteps of Marco Polo. We have
+crossed the mountain ranges and followed the majestic rivers, have
+traced the borders of the great lakes, whitened by the sails and
+darkened by the smoke of a commerce that competes in magnitude with that
+of the salted sea; and Texas, our France, confronts the Mediterranean of
+our hemisphere.
+
+We have crushed the rocks and sifted the sand that yielded silver and
+gold, and the soil is ours that is richer than gold mines, whether we
+offer in evidence South Carolina, whose Sea-Island cotton surpasses the
+long staple of Egypt; or the Dakotas, matchless for wheat; or the lands
+of the cornstalk in the Mississippi Valley, that could feed all the
+tribes of Asia; or Nebraska, whose beets are sweeter with sugar than
+those that were the gift of Napoleon to Germany.
+
+We have found the springs that yield immortal youth, not in bubbling
+waters in a flowery wilderness, but in the harvests of the fields and
+the stored energies of inexhaustible mines, not for the passing person
+who perishes when his work is done, but for the imperishable race.
+
+All this in our country, "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," but with
+the clothing of life on the ribs, and new in the evolution of
+conditions by the works of man that make the nations of the earth a
+family--achievements wonderful in scope, splendid in promise, marvellous
+in the renown that is of peace; in the fame of the genius that is labor,
+the spell-binder that gathers and builds, creates and glorifies.
+
+Within the historic record of this Chamber of Commerce of New York, the
+waters of Lake Erie have been carried through our canals and rivers to
+the Atlantic, making the Hudson River what Henry Hudson thought it was
+when he sailed through the beautiful gate of the incomparable
+continent--the road from the east to the west around the world; and the
+statue of Thomas Benton points westward from the great cross of the
+rivers in the heart of the continent--the Ohio, Missouri and
+Mississippi--and the inscription reads: "There is the road to India."
+
+How familiar is the construction of the Pacific railroad; of the
+telegraph lines across the continent and through the oceans; the record
+of steamers of ten thousand tons, five hundred knots a day; the
+miraculous telephone; the trolley, that is with us to stay and to
+conquer, introducing all the villages to the magic of rapid transit,
+promoting, with the incessant application of a new force, the American
+homogeneity of our vast and various population--blending them for one
+destiny. One is not venturing upon disputed ground--there is no
+prohibited politics in it to say that slavery is gone--for all classes
+and sections of our common country will agree it is well. The earth has
+grown both small and great for us. Its gigantic mysteries are no more.
+Its circumnavigation is commonplace. The kinetoscope comes to aid the
+phonograph to make pictures of action and lasting records of music and
+of speech. The people of coming generations are to hear the voices that
+have charmed or awed, persuaded, bewitched or commanded, in departed
+centuries. There will be libraries of rolls, storing for all time these
+treasures; rolls not unlike those cylinders preserved in the Babylonish
+deserts. Photography is bringing to us, as on parchment leaves painted
+with sunlight, the secrets of the depths of the seas and the skies; it
+is finding new stars, and with the telescopic camera likenesses may be
+snatched across spaces impenetrable by the naked eye. The aristocracy of
+intelligence becomes a democracy for the diffusion of the knowledge of
+the history of the day, which is the most important chapter that has
+been written, impartial, instantaneous, and is becoming universal.
+
+This is more than a new country; it is a new world. Our own farmers are
+in competition with those of Egypt, India, Russia and Argentina.
+Australia with her wool and beef and mutton, Egypt and India with cotton
+and wheat, South America, Africa and Asia, made fruitful with resources,
+seek the same markets with our producers; and the mills of Old England
+are within a few cents and hours, in cost of transportation and time, as
+cheap and nigh as those of New England to New York. Once, a war between
+Japan and China would have been so remote that, as they say in the
+newspapers, there could have been no news in it; but it means matter of
+business for us now. With the novel conditions, there come upon us new
+and enormous problems for solution, and responsibilities that cannot be
+evaded. Once, we were an isolated nation. There was no trouble about
+becoming involved in the "entangling alliances" that were the cause of
+alarm to the Father of his Country. Now, the ends of the earth are in
+our neighborhood, and we touch elbows with all the races of mankind, and
+all the continents and the islands are a federation. The newspapers are,
+to continue the poetic prophecy, "the parliament of man."
+
+The drift of human experience is to increased aggregations, to
+concentration and to centralization. This mighty city, in her material
+grandeur, and, we may trust, her moral redemption, stands for forty-six
+indestructible States and one indivisible nation. Her lofty structures
+far surpass already the palaces of the merchant princes of Tyre and
+Venice and Liverpool, and we behold, in these imperial towers, the types
+of the magnificence of the coming time. There never was so fair and
+superb, ample and opulent a bride as she, in the wholesome arms of the
+ocean that embrace these islands, adorned with the trophies of the
+wealth of the world, and whose rulers, the slavery of crime abolished,
+are the sovereign millions. These are new developments of authority, new
+growths of responsibility.
+
+The Congress, forty years ago, was a body insignificant in its relations
+with the masses of the people, in comparison with what it is to-day. It
+grapples, of necessity, with the new conditions, and the character of
+the public service is of enlarged consequence, for it is to all the
+communities and commonwealths far more comprehensive and penetrating in
+its influence than in other days; and it is well the citizens of the
+Republic are aroused to appreciation of their added requirements in the
+care that public life must give the general welfare.
+
+During the recent popular experience of Christian science applied to
+practical politics, that resulted, among other things, in the intimacy
+of representative men of the Bowery and the Fifth Avenue, that allows
+the citizens of each locality to walk into the other locality at bedtime
+and select their sleeping-rooms, without asking whether the folks are at
+home, and to depart with or without leaving their P. P. C. cards, one of
+the speakers, noting in his audience evidences of dissent, said: "If I
+am speaking in a way that is prerogatory, while I want to go on, I am
+willing to quit." He honored his nativity by his modesty, and was
+allowed to go on; but he preferred to sit down, though his theme seemed
+to him to expand under treatment, and with his new word he retired. I
+quote him as a precedent and example for immediate imitation. It is more
+than a joke, though, that Fifth Avenue and the Bowery have got together,
+and we may hope they will work well for the good of this new country.
+[Prolonged applause.]
+
+
+
+
+BENJAMIN HARRISON
+
+
+THE UNION OF STATES
+
+[Speech of Benjamin Harrison at the thirteenth annual dinner of the New
+  England Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, December 22, 1893. In
+  proposing the first toast, "The President of the United States," the
+  Chairman, Charles Emory Smith, said: "Gentlemen, my first duty is to
+  give a welcome to our honored guests and a greeting to our worthy
+  members. My second duty is to make an immediate change of the
+  programme. Among the distinguished guests who honor us by their
+  presence to-night is the illustrious patriot and statesman who has
+  filled--yes, filled, not rattled around in--the great dignity of the
+  Presidency of the United States. [Applause.] In his career he has won
+  the admiration of the country not merely by his transcendent abilities
+  as a statesman, but by his noble qualities as a man. Among other
+  characteristics, his love of children has touched the heart of the
+  country. He has promised the little children who are gathered in his
+  distant home that he will join them in preparing and sharing the joys
+  of Christmas. It is imperative not that he shall leave us at this
+  moment but that he shall terminate the three days of cordial and
+  perhaps somewhat burdensome hospitality which he has enjoyed in
+  Philadelphia, at a later stage of this evening. In order that he may
+  be entirely free, and because the first word should be spoken by the
+  first man at the table, I ask you to join me, at this time, in
+  drinking a toast to the health of the illustrious patriot, who is as
+  greatly respected and honored in private life as he was in the
+  Presidency--General Benjamin Harrison, whom I now have the pleasure of
+  presenting to you."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF
+PENNSYLVANIA:--When my good friend and your good neighbor and
+President, Mr. Charles Emory Smith, invited me to be present to-night, I
+felt a special demand upon me to yield to his request. I thought I owed
+him some reparation for appointing him to an office the emoluments of
+which did not pay his expenses. [Merriment.] Your cordial welcome
+to-night crowns three days of most pleasurable stay in this good City of
+Philadelphia. The days have been a little crowded; I think there have
+been what our friends of The Four Hundred would probably call "eight
+distinct functions;" but your cordiality and the kind words of your
+presiding officer quite relieve my fatigue and suggest to me that I
+shall rightly repay your kindness by making a very short speech. ["No,
+no!"] It is my opinion that these members of the New England Society are
+very creditable descendants of the Forefathers. I'm not quite sure that
+the Forefathers would share this opinion if they were here; but that
+would be by reason of the fact that, notwithstanding the load of
+substantial virtues, which they carried through life, their taste had
+not been highly cultivated. [Laughter.]
+
+I dread this function which I am now attempting to discharge more than
+any other that confronts me in life. The after-dinner speaker, unlike
+the poet, is not born,--he is made. I am frequently compelled to meet in
+disastrous competition about some dinner-table gentlemen who have
+already had their speeches set up in the newspaper offices. They are
+given to you as if they were fresh from the lip; you are served with
+what they would have you believe to be "impromptu boned turkey;" and
+yet, if you could see into the recesses of their intellectual kitchen,
+you would see the days of careful preparation which have been given to
+these spontaneous utterances. The after-dinner speaker needs to find
+somewhere some unworked joker's quarry, where some jokes have been left
+without a label on them; he needs to acquire the art of seeming to
+pluck, as he goes along in the progress of his speech, as by the
+wayside, some flower of rhetoric. He seems to have passed it and to have
+plucked it casually,--but it is a boutonniere with tin foil round it.
+[Laughter.] You can see, upon close inspection, the mark of the planer
+on his well-turned sentences. Now, the competition with gentlemen who
+are so cultivated is severe upon one who must speak absolutely upon the
+impulse of the occasion. It is either incapacity or downright laziness
+that has kept me from competing in the field I have described.
+
+It occurred to me to-day to inquire why you had to associate six States
+in order to get up a respectable Society. My friend Halstead [Murat
+Halstead] and I have no such trouble. We are Ohio-born, and we do not
+need to associate any other State in order to get up a good Society,
+wherever there is a civil list of the Government. If you would adopt the
+liberal charter method of the Ohio Society, I have no doubt you could
+subdivide yourselves into six good societies. The Ohio Society admits to
+membership everybody who has lived voluntarily six months in Ohio. No
+involuntary resident is permitted to come in. [Laughter.]
+
+But the association of these States and the name "New England" is a part
+of an old classification of the States which we used to find in the
+geography, and all of that classification has gone except New England
+and the South. "The West" has disappeared and "the Middle States" cannot
+be identified. Where is "the West"? Why, just now it is at the point of
+that long chain of islands that puts off from the Alaska coast; and, if
+I am to credit what I read (for I have no sources of information now
+except the not absolutely reliable newspaper press), there are some who
+believe there are wicked men who want to hitch the end of that chain
+into an island farther out in the sea. [Applause.] If that is to be
+done, the West would become the East, for I think the Orient has
+generally been counted to be the East.
+
+I would not, however, suggest a division of the New England Society. It
+is well enough to keep up an association that is one, not only of
+neighborhood and of historical association, but of sentiment. Let the
+New England Society live, and I fancy it will not be long until you
+enjoy the distinction of being the only great subdivision of the States;
+for, my fellow-citizens, whatever barriers prejudice may raise, whatever
+obstruction the interests of men may interpose, whatever may be the
+outrages of cruelty to stay the march of men, that which made the
+subdivision called "the Southern States," and all that separated them
+from the States of the West and of the North, will be obliterated.
+[Cheering.]
+
+I am not sure, though the story runs so, that I have a New England
+strain. The fact is that I have recently come to the conclusion that my
+family was a little overweighted with ancestry, and I have been looking
+after posterity. [Merriment.]
+
+One serious word, gentlemen. The New England character and the
+influence of New England men and women have made their impress upon the
+whole country; for, even in the South, during the time of slavery,
+educated men and women from New England were the tutors and instructors
+of the youth of the South in the plantation home. The love of education,
+the resolve that it should be general, the love of home with all the
+pure and sacred influences that cluster about it, are elements in the
+New England character that have a saving force which is incalculable in
+this great nation in which we live. Your civil institutions have been
+free, high and clean. From the old town-meeting days till now, New
+England has believed in and practised the Free Election and the Fair
+Count. But, gentlemen, I cannot enumerate all of your virtues--time is
+brief, the catalogue long. Will you permit me to thank you and your
+honored President for your gracious reception of me to-night?
+[Long-continued cheering.]
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH ROSWELL HAWLEY
+
+
+THE PRESS
+
+[Speech of Gen. Joseph R. Hawley at the seventieth annual dinner of the
+  New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1875. The
+  President, Isaac H. Bailey, said by way of introduction: "Gentlemen, I
+  will now give you the tenth regular toast: 'The Press.' This toast,
+  gentlemen, will be responded to by a member of the press who has
+  always adorned his profession--General Hawley, of Connecticut."]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--Our distinguished President paid the very highest
+compliment to the Press to-night; for, while he has given at least a
+fortnight's notice to every other gentleman, he only told me to-night
+that I had to respond to the toast of "The Press." But as I have
+attended a good many dinners of the New England Society, and never knew
+"The Press" to be called upon before midnight, I felt entirely safe.
+[Laughter.] Now, sir, I have spent an evening--some six hours--here,
+enjoying all the festivities and hospitalities of this occasion to the
+utmost, and at last I am called upon, at an hour when we are all full of
+jollity and mirth, to respond to a toast that in reality calls upon me
+for my most serious effort. [Applause.] I assure you that, had I known
+that I was to speak upon this subject to-night, I would, contrary to my
+usual custom, have been deliberately prepared [laughter]; for I, in
+reality, have a great deal to say upon that matter; and permit me to add
+that I have a somewhat peculiar qualification, for I have been a man
+within the press, "a chiel amang ye takin' notes, an' prentin' them;"
+and I have been again a man altogether outside of the press, not writing
+for months to his own people, and subject to receive all the gibes and
+criticisms and attacks of the press. [Applause.] "I know how it is
+myself." [Laughter.]
+
+"The Press of the Republic" is a text worthy of the noblest oration. It
+has a great, a high, and a holy duty. It is at once the leader and
+educator, and, on the other hand, the representative of the people. I
+can only touch on some points that I have in my mind, upon this
+occasion. It seems to me that we are passing through a period of
+peculiar importance regarding the value and influence of the press of
+the American Republic. There are times when I join with them in the most
+indignant denunciation, in the warmest appeal. There are times when I
+feel the cutting, cruel, stinging injustice of the American press.
+[Applause.] It is the duty of an editor, sitting, as he does, as a
+judge--and I mean all that the word implies--upon all that goes on about
+him in public life--it is his duty to hear both sides, and all sides, as
+deliberately and calmly as he may, and to pronounce a judgment that, so
+far as he knows, may be the judgment of posterity. [Applause.] It is
+true that he has two duties. We know that it is his duty to condemn the
+bad. When it is made perfectly clear that the bad man is really a bad
+man, a corrupter of youth, make him drink the hemlock, expel him, punish
+him, crush him. [Applause.]
+
+But there is another duty imposed upon the American press, quite as
+great. If there be a man who loves the Republic, who would work for it,
+who would talk for it, who would fight for it, who would die for
+it--there are millions of them, thank God!--it is the duty of the
+American press to uphold him, and to praise him when the time comes, in
+the proper place, on the proper occasion. [Applause.] The press is to
+deal not alone in censure of the bad, but in praise of the good. I like
+the phrase, "The independent press." [Applause.] I am an editor myself.
+I love my calling. I think it is growing to be one of the great
+professions of the day. I claim, as an editor (and that is my chief
+pursuit in life), to be a gentleman also. [Applause, and cries of "Good!
+Good!"] If I see or know anything to be wrong in the land, high or low,
+I will say so. If it be in my own party, I will take special pains to
+say so [applause]; for I suppose it to be true of both parties that we
+have a very high, a very glorious, a very beautiful, a very lovable idea
+of the future American Republic. [Applause.]
+
+So I will condemn, I say, whatever may be wrong. I hold myself to be an
+independent journalist. [Cries of "Good!"]
+
+But, my friends, I hope you will excuse the phrase--I am going to follow
+it by another--at the same time I do freely avow that I am a _partisan_;
+for I never knew anything good, from Moses down to John Brown, that was
+not carried through by partisanship. [Applause.] If you believe in
+anything, say so; work for it, fight for it. There are always two sides
+in the world. The good fight is always going on. The bad men are always
+working; the devil is always busy. And again, on the other side you have
+your high idea of whatever is beautiful and good and true in the world;
+and God is always working also. The man who stands between them--who
+says: "This is somewhat good, and that is somewhat good; I stand between
+them"--permit me to say, is a man for whom I have very little respect.
+[Applause.] Some men say there is a God; some men say there is no God.
+Some of the independents say that the truth lies between them.
+[Laughter.] I cannot find it between them. Every man has a God. If you
+believe in your God,--he may be another God from mine--if you are a man,
+I want you to fight for him, and I may have to fight against you, but do
+you fight for the God that you believe in. [Applause.]
+
+I do sincerely think (and I wish that this was a congregation of my
+fellow-editors of the whole land, for my heart is in reality full of
+this thing)--I do sincerely think that there is something of a danger
+that our eloquent, ready, powerful, versatile, indefatigable, vigorous,
+omnipresent, omniscient men of the press may drive out of public
+life--and they will ridicule that phrase--may drive out of public life,
+not all, but a very considerable class of sensitive, high-minded,
+honorable, ambitious gentlemen. [Applause.] Now, I do not say anything
+about the future for myself. I have got a "free lance," I have got a
+newspaper, and I can fight with the rest of them; but I will give you a
+bit of my experience in public life. I tell you, my friends of the New
+England Society, that one of the sorest things that a man in public life
+has to bear is the reckless, unreasonable censure of members of the
+press whom individually he respects. [Applause.] That large-hearted man,
+whom personally I love, with whom I could shake hands, with whom I did
+shake hands, with whom I sat at the social board time and again, grossly
+misinterprets my public actions; intimates all manner of dishonorable
+things, which I would fight at two paces rather than be guilty of; and
+it would be useless for me to write a public letter to explain or
+contradict. [Applause.]
+
+Now, I am only one of hundreds. I can stand still and wait the result,
+in the confidence that, if not all, yet some, men believe me to be
+honorable and true; if they do not, God and I know it, and I would
+"fight it out on that line." [Applause.]
+
+Gentlemen, it is rather my habit to talk in earnest. Next to the evil of
+having all public men in this land corrupt; next to the evil of having
+all our governmental affairs in the hands of men venal and weak and
+narrow, debauching public life and carrying it down to destruction, is
+the calamity of having all the young men believe it is so, whether it be
+so or not. [Applause.] Teach all the boys to believe that every man who
+goes into public life has his price; teach all the boys to believe that
+there is no man who enters public life anywhere that does not look out
+for his own, and is not always scheming to do something for himself or
+his friends, and seeking to prolong his power; teach every young man who
+has a desire to go into political life, to think--because you have told
+him so--that the way to succeed is to follow such arts, and by that kind
+of talk you may ruin your country. [Applause.]
+
+Now, gentlemen, as I have said, this is a matter for an evening oration.
+I have barely touched some of the points. I have said the press has a
+twofold duty and fortune: it is the leader, the educator, the director
+of the people. It is, at the same time, the reflector of the people. I
+could spend an hour upon the theme.
+
+I cannot cease, however, without thanking the President of the St.
+Patrick's Society [Denis MacMahon], the only gentleman who has mentioned
+the word "centennial." When I was leaving Philadelphia, my wife warned
+me not to use that word, knowing to what it might lead me [laughter];
+and so I shall simply ask you all to come to Philadelphia next year, and
+join in the great national exhibition, where you will have an
+opportunity of seeing the progress which this nation has made under the
+ideas of liberty, government, industry, and thrift which were instilled
+by the Pilgrim Fathers. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+JOHN HAY
+
+
+OMAR KHAYYAM
+
+[Speech of John Hay, American Ambassador to Great Britain, at a dinner
+  of the Omar Khayyam Club, London, December 8, 1897. Henry Norman,
+  President of the Club, took the chair and in introducing Colonel Hay,
+  as the guest of the evening, spoke of him as soldier, diplomatist,
+  scholar, poet and Omarian.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--I cannot sufficiently thank you for the high and
+unmerited honor you have done me to-night. I feel keenly that on such an
+occasion, with such company, my place is below the salt, but as you
+kindly invited me it was not in human nature for me to refuse. Although
+in knowledge and comprehension of the two great poets whom you are met
+to commemorate I am the least among them, there is no one who regards
+them with greater admiration, or reads them with more enjoyment than
+myself. I can never forget my emotions when I first saw Fitzgerald's
+translation of the Quatrains. Keats, in his sublime ode on Chapman's
+Homer, has described the sensation once for all:--
+
+ "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
+  When a new planet swims into his ken."
+
+The exquisite beauty, the faultless form, the singular grace of those
+amazing stanzas, were not more wonderful than the depth and breadth of
+their profound philosophy, their knowledge of life, their dauntless
+courage, their serene facing of the ultimate problems of life and of
+death.
+
+Of course the doubt did not spare me, which has assailed many as
+ignorant as I was of the literature of the East, whether it was the poet
+or his translator to whom was due this splendid result. Was it, in fact,
+a reproduction of a new song, or a mystification of a great modern,
+careless of fame and scornful of his time? Could it be possible that in
+the eleventh century, so far away as Khorassan, so accomplished a man of
+letters lived, with such distinction, such breadth, such insight, such
+calm disillusion, such cheerful and jocund despair? Was this
+Weltschmerz, which we thought a malady of our day, endemic in Persia in
+1100? My doubt lasted only till I came upon a literal translation of the
+Rubaiyat, and I saw that not the least remarkable quality of
+Fitzgerald's was its fidelity to the original. In short, Omar was a
+Fitzgerald before the latter, or Fitzgerald was a reincarnation of Omar.
+It is not to the disadvantage of the later poet that he followed so
+closely in the footsteps of the earlier. A man of extraordinary genius
+had appeared in the world; had sung a song of incomparable beauty and
+power in an environment no longer worthy of him, in a language of narrow
+range; for many generations the song was virtually lost; then by a
+miracle of creation, a poet, a twin-brother in the spirit to the first,
+was born, who took up the forgotten poem and sung it anew with all its
+original melody and force, and all the accumulated refinement of ages of
+art. [Cheers.]
+
+It seems to me idle to ask which was the greater master; each seems
+greater than his work. The song is like an instrument of precious
+workmanship and marvellous tone, which is worthless in common hands, but
+when it falls, at long intervals, into the hands of the supreme master,
+it yields a melody of transcendent enchantment to all that have ears to
+hear. If we look at the sphere of influence of the two poets there is no
+longer any comparison. Omar sang to a half barbarous province;
+Fitzgerald to the world. Wherever the English speech is spoken or read,
+the Rubaiyat have taken their place as a classic. There is not a
+hill-post in India, nor a village in England, where there is not a
+coterie to whom Omar Khayyam is a familiar friend and a bond of union.
+In America he has an equal following, in many regions and conditions. In
+the Eastern States his adepts form an esoteric sect; the beautiful
+volume of drawings by Mr. Vedder is a centre of delight and suggestion
+wherever it exists. In the cities of the West you will find the
+Quatrains one of the most thoroughly read books in every Club Library.
+I heard Omar quoted once in one of the most lovely and desolate spots of
+the High Rockies. We had been camping on the Great Divide, our "roof of
+the world," where in the space of a few feet you may see two springs,
+one sending its water to the Polar solitudes, the other to the eternal
+Carib summer. One morning at sunrise as we were breaking camp, I was
+startled to hear one of our party, a frontiersman born, intoning these
+words of sombre majesty:--
+
+ "'Tis but a tent where takes his one day's rest
+   A Sultan to the realm of death addressed.
+   The Sultan rises and the dark Ferrash
+   Strikes, and prepares it for another guest."
+
+I thought that sublime setting of primeval forest and pouring canon was
+worthy of the lines; I am sure the dewless, crystalline air never
+vibrated to strains of more solemn music.
+
+Certainly our poet can never be numbered among the great popular writers
+of all times. He has told no story; he has never unpacked his heart in
+public; he has never thrown the reins on the neck of the winged horse,
+and let his imagination carry him where it listed. "Ah! the crowd must
+have emphatic warrant." Its suffrages are not for the cool, collected
+observer, whose eye no glitter can ever dazzle, no mist suffuse. The
+many cannot but resent that air of lofty intelligence, that pale and
+subtle smile. But he will hold a place forever among that limited number
+who, like Lucretius and Epicurus--without rage or defiance, even without
+unbecoming mirth--look deep into the tangled mysteries of things; refuse
+credence to the absurd, and allegiance to the arrogant authority,
+sufficiently conscious of fallibility to be tolerant of all opinions;
+with a faith too wide for doctrine and a benevolence untrammelled by
+creed, too wise to be wholly poets, and yet too surely poets to be
+implacably wise. [Loud cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+RUTHERFORD B. HAYES
+
+
+NATIONAL SENTIMENTS
+
+[Speech of Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States, at the
+  first annual banquet of the New England Society in the City of
+  Brooklyn, December 21, 1880. The President of the Society, Benjamin D.
+  Silliman, in introducing him, said: "Gentlemen, we are honored this
+  evening by the presence of an illustrious descendant of New England,
+  the Chief Magistrate of the Nation. [Cheers.] He is about retiring
+  from his high position, with the respect, admiration and the gratitude
+  of the people for the great wisdom, the pure purpose, the steady will
+  and the unwavering firmness with which he has administered the
+  government, preserved its honor and secured its property. [Loud
+  cheers.] I propose to you, as our first toast, 'The President of the
+  United States.'"]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--We have often heard, we often
+hear, the phrase "New England ideas." It is said, and I think said
+truly, that these ideas have a large and growing influence in shaping
+the affairs of the people of the United States. It is not meant, I
+suppose, that the principles referred to in this phrase, are peculiar to
+New England, but merely that in New England they are generally accepted,
+and that perhaps there they had their first practical illustration.
+These ideas, these principles generally termed New England ideas, and
+New England principles, it seems to me, have had much to do with that
+prosperity which we are now enjoying, and about which we are perhaps apt
+to be too boastful, but for which it is certain we cannot be too
+grateful. [Applause.]
+
+The subject, New England ideas, is altogether too large a one for me, or
+anybody, to discuss this evening. If it were to be done at length, in
+protracted speaking, we have our friends here, able and with a
+reputation for capacity in that way. Our friend, Mr. Evarts, for example
+[applause], Mr. Beecher [applause], and I am confident that I shall be
+excused for naming in this connection, above all, our friend General
+Grant. [Loud applause.]
+
+Leaving then to them the discussion of the larger topic, I must content
+myself with the humbler duty of merely naming the New England ideas to
+which I refer.
+
+New England believes that every man and woman, under the law ought to
+have an equal chance and an equal hope with every other man and woman
+[applause], and believes that in a country where that is secured
+individuals and society will have their highest development and the
+largest allotment of human happiness. [Applause.] New England believes
+that equal rights can be best secured in a country where every child is
+provided freely with the means of education. [Applause.] New England
+believes that the road--the only road, the sure road--to unquestioned
+credit and a sound financial condition is the exact and punctual
+fulfilment of every pecuniary obligation, public and private [applause],
+according to its letter and spirit. [Applause.] New England believes in
+the home, and in the virtues that make home happy [cries of "Good!"],
+and New England will tolerate, so far as depends on her, no institutions
+and no practices in any state or territory which are inconsistent with
+the sacredness of the family relation. [Cries of "Good!"] New England
+cherishes the sentiment of nationality and believes in a general
+government strong enough to maintain its authority, to enforce the laws
+and to preserve and to perpetuate the Union. [Applause.]
+
+Now, with these New England ideas everywhere accepted and prevailing--to
+repeat, with just and equal laws, administered under the watchful eyes
+of educated voters; with honesty in all moneyed transactions; with the
+New England home and the New England family as the foundation of
+society; with national sentiments prevailing everywhere in the country;
+we shall not lack that remaining crowning merit of New England life
+which lends to every peopled landscape its chief interest and glory, the
+spires pointing heavenward that tell to every man who sees them that the
+descendants of the Pilgrims still hold to and cherish, and love that
+which brought their fathers to this continent, which they here sought
+and here found--freedom to worship God. [Long-continued applause.]
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH C. HENDRIX
+
+
+THE WAMPUM OF THE INDIANS
+
+[Speech of Joseph C. Hendrix at the fifteenth annual dinner of the New
+  England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1894. The
+  President, Robert D. Benedict, introducing the speaker, said: "I do
+  not remember ever to have heard at any of the New England festivals
+  which I have attended any discussion of the currency questions which
+  plagued the Pilgrims. We cannot doubt that they had such questions for
+  such questions must arise where there are different currencies. But
+  the attention of our committee this year has naturally been drawn in
+  that direction, and they have selected as the next subject one of the
+  currencies with which the Pilgrims had to deal: 'The Wampum of the
+  Indians.' Upon this subject they have invited the Hon. Joseph C.
+  Hendrix to speak. Doubtless he may draw from that subject lessons that
+  will be of interest and of use for the present day."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--While
+your poetic souls are attuned to the sweet music of the last speech, I
+must chide the Fates which compel me to so suddenly precipitate upon you
+a discussion of a practical nature, especially when at the very outset I
+must begin to talk about clams. [Laughter.] For when we begin to
+consider wampum we have to begin to consider the familiar hard-shell
+clam of daily use, which was the basis of wampum. At this stage of the
+feast, after the confections contained in that eulogium passed upon you
+by the Governor of Massachusetts [Frederick T. Greenhalge], and after
+that private parlor-car, canvas-back-duck, cold-champagne view of
+consolidation taken by the great trunk-line president [Chauncey M.
+Depew] [laughter], can you endure anything savoring of the clam? Would
+you not prefer to go home and sleep upon what you already have? Yet
+every loyal son of Long Island ought to be partial to clams. The Mayor
+[Charles A. Schieren], who typifies what a German head can do in a
+contest with an Irish appetite, should love them because they reside
+within the city limits, and have ceased to vote in Gravesend. You, Mr.
+Chairman, as a lawyer, ought to tolerate the clam, for there are two
+sides to the case, and there's meat inside. Our friend the preacher
+[Rev. Samuel A. Eliot] knows that they are as good every day in the week
+as they are on Sunday. Dr. Johnson [Dr. J. G. Johnson] there favors them
+as part of his internal revenue system. The Mugwumps cannot object to
+them, because they change from side to side so easily. The Democrats
+ought to like anything that is always digging a hole for itself, and the
+Republicans cannot but be patient with what comes on top at the change
+of the tide. [Laughter.] So, gentlemen, I present to you the clam.
+Professor Hooper [Franklin W. Hooper] tells me to call it the _Venus
+Mercenaria_, but we shall have to wait for our free public library
+before venturing so far.
+
+You remember, when you were children, looking over the old story-book
+handed down to you by the Puritan fathers, that one of the conundrums
+with which the gayety of their times was illustrated was, "Who was the
+shortest man in the Bible?" The answer was, "Bildad, the Shuhite;" but
+now, in the revised text it is Peter, because Peter said: "Silver and
+gold have I none," and no one could be shorter than that. The North
+American Indian was no better off than Peter in his gold reserve or
+silver supply; but he managed to get along with the quahog clam. That
+was the money substance out of which he made the wampum, and the
+shell-heaps scattered over the island are mute monuments to an industry
+which was blasted by the demonetization of the hard-shell clam. Wampum
+was a good money in the Indian civilization. It was the product of human
+labor as difficult and tedious as the labor of the gold-miner of to-day.
+It had intrinsic value, for it was redeemable in anything the Indian had
+to give, from his skill in the chase to his squaw. It took time,
+patience, endurance and skill to make a thing of beauty out of a clam,
+even in the eyes of an Indian, but when the squaws and the old men had
+ground down the tough end of the shell to the size of a wheat straw, and
+had bored it with a sliver of flint, and strung it upon a thew of
+deerskin, and tested its smoothness on the noses, they had an article
+which had as much power over an Indian mind as a grain of gold to-day
+has over us. There were two kinds of wampum, the blue and the white. The
+Montauks to this day know that there is a difference between the two.
+The blue came from our clam. The white, which was the product of the
+periwinkle, did not need so much labor to fit it for use as wampum, and
+it was cheaper. The blue was the gold; the white was the silver. One
+blue bead was worth two white ones. The Indians did not try to keep up
+any parity of the beads. They let each kind go for just what it was
+worth. The Puritans used to restring the beads and keep the blue ones.
+Then the Indians strung their scalps.
+
+Why was wampum good money in its time? The supply was limited. It took a
+day to make four or five beads. It was in itself a thing of value to the
+Indian for ornament. It was easily carried about from place to place. It
+was practically indestructible. It was always alike. It was divisible.
+The value attached to it did not vary. It was not easily counterfeited.
+So it was that it became the money of the colonists; a legal tender in
+Massachusetts and the tool of the primitive commerce of this continent.
+The Puritan took it for firewater and gave it back for furs. Long Island
+was the great mint for this pastoral coinage. It was called the "Mine of
+the New Netherlands." The Indian walked the beach at Rockaway, dug his
+toes in the sand, turned up a clam, and after swallowing the contents
+carried the shells to the mint. Gold and silver at the mouth of a mine
+obtain their chief value from the labor it takes to get the metals;
+wampum was the refinement by labor of a money substance free to all. The
+redemption of wampum was perfect. To the Indians it was a seal to
+treaties, an amulet in danger, an affidavit, small change, a savings'
+bank, a wedding ring and a dress suit. To this day the belt of wampum is
+the storehouse of Indian treasure. In the Six Nations, when a big chief
+made an assertion in council, he laid down a belt of wampum, as though
+to say, "Money talks." The Iroquois sent a belt of it to the King of
+England when they asked his protection. William Penn got a strip when he
+made his treaty. The Indians braided rude pictures into it, which
+recorded great events. They talked their ideas into it, as we do into a
+phonograph. They sent messages in it. White beads between a row of dark
+ones represented a path of peace, as though to say: "Big chief no longer
+got Congress on his hands." A string of dark beads was a message of war
+or of the death of a chief, and a string of white beads rolled in mud
+was equivalent to saying that there was crape on the door of Tammany
+Hall. So you see that it was a combined post-office, telegraph,
+telephone, phonograph and newspaper.
+
+The Iroquois had a keeper of wampum--a sort of secretary of the treasury
+without the task of keeping nine different kinds of money on a parity.
+This old Indian financier had simple and correct principles. No one
+could persuade him to issue birch-bark promises to pay and delude
+himself with the belief that he could thus create money. He certainly
+would have called them a debt, and would have paid them off as fast as
+he could. Nor can we imagine him trying to sustain the value of the
+white wampum after the Puritans started in to make it out of oyster
+shells by machinery. Nor would he have bought it, not needing it, and
+have issued against it his promises to pay in good wampum as fast and as
+often as they were presented.
+
+It was said that wampum was so cunningly made that neither Jew nor Devil
+could counterfeit it. Nevertheless a Connecticut Yankee rigged up a
+machine that so disturbed the market value of the beads that in a short
+time the Long Island mints were closed to the free coinage of clams.
+Wampum was demonetized through counterfeit, overproduction and
+imitation; but when this occurred the gentle Puritan didn't have enough
+of it left to supply the museums. The Indian had parted with his lands
+and his furs, had redeemed all the outstanding wampum with his labor,
+and when he went to market to get firewater, he was taught that he must
+have gold and silver to get it. Then he wanted to ride in blood up to
+his horse's bridles. Commerce had found a better tool than wampum had
+become. The buccaneers and the pirates had brought in silver and that
+defied the Connecticut man's machinery or the Dutchman's imitations. The
+years pass by and commerce finds that silver, because of overproduction,
+becomes uncertain and erratic in value, and with the same instinct it
+chooses gold as a standard of value. A coin of unsteady value is like a
+knife of uncertain sharpness. It is thrown aside for one that can do all
+that is expected of it. Gold is such a tool. It is the standard of all
+first-class nations. It is to-day, and it will remain, the standard of
+this Republic.
+
+The value of the gold dollar is not in the pictures on it. It is in the
+grains of gold in it. Smash it and melt it, and it buys one hundred
+cents' worth the world over. Deface a silver dollar and fifty cents of
+its value goes off yonder among the silent stars. Free coinage means
+that the silver miner may make fifty cents' worth of silver cancel a
+dollar's worth of debts. This is a greenback doctrine in a silver
+capsule. Bimetallism is a diplomatic term for international use.
+Monometallism with silver as the metal is the dream of the Populist and
+of the poor deluded Democratic grasshoppers who dance by the moonshine
+until they get frost-bitten.
+
+The free-silver heresy is about dead. It has cost this country, at
+to-day's price for silver, $170,000,000. The few saddened priests of
+this unhappy fetich who remain active find their disciples all rallying
+round the standard of currency reform. The report of the Secretary of
+the Treasury is a confession of national financial sins, and a
+profession of faith in sound money doctrines. Every business man will
+watch with keen interest the progress of a plan for the reform in our
+currency. You all know that the straight road is the retirement of the
+greenback and the Treasury note, and the withdrawal of the Government
+from the banking business, and you will naturally distrust any makeshift
+measures. The greenback is a war debt, and a debt that is now
+troublesome. We are funding and refunding it in gold daily, and are
+still paying it out as currency to come back after gold. Any scheme to
+sequestrate, to hide it under a bushel, or to put it under lock and key,
+is a shallow device. The way to retire it is to retire it. It has served
+its full purpose, and there never was a better time than now to call it
+in.
+
+In twelve years all our Government debt matures. The national banking
+system based upon it must expire with it, unless existing laws are
+changed. This system has served the nation well. No one has ever lost a
+dollar by a national bank note. The system is worth preserving, and
+with a little more liberal treatment it can be made to serve until a
+currency based upon commercial credits and linked to a safety fund, a
+system which works so admirably in Canada, can be engrafted upon it.
+There is a great hurry to create such a system now on a basis of the
+partial sequestration of the greenback and the Treasury note, but the
+bottom principle is wrong. The Government should discourage a commercial
+credit currency based upon a public credit currency, which, in turn,
+rests upon a slender gold deposit, exposed to every holder of a
+Government demand note. A credit currency is a double-edged tool, and
+needs to be handled with great care. We have had so much crazy-quilt
+finance that I am sure that we want no more of it. We have been sorely
+punished for our financial sins in the past, and now that we are
+repentant, we want to get everything right before we go ahead with our
+full native energy. We have suffered from the distrust of the world, and
+then from our own distrust. In retracing our steps let us be sure that
+we are on solid ground, and make our "wampum" as good as the best there
+is in the world. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+LORD HERSCHELL
+
+
+GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
+
+[Speech of Lord Farrer Herschell at the 130th annual banquet of the
+  Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, November 15, 1898. Lord
+  Herschell was present in this country as President of the Joint High
+  Commission appointed to arbitrate the dispute between Canada and the
+  United States relative to the Bering Sea seal fisheries. Alexander E.
+  Orr, President of the Chamber, proposed the toast to which Lord
+  Herschell spoke: "The Future Relations between Great Britain and the
+  United States--a determined union of heart and purpose will carry the
+  forces of justice and humanity the world over."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE:--I
+assure you that I am most deeply sensible of the warm welcome that you
+have extended to me, and grateful for the manner in which you have
+received the words which were uttered introducing me to you. But I can
+assure you that I rejoiced to hear the cheers with which this toast was
+greeted, not merely because they were a compliment to myself, but
+because I was satisfied that you were regarding me rather in the
+character of a representative of my country, and that there rang in
+those cheers sentiments of good will to the country that I have the
+honor to represent to-night. [Applause.] And I heard in them something
+more than that--they indicated to me a conviction that in the
+continuance of good relations between your country and mine, there were
+involved blessings, priceless blessings, to the countries we love so
+well. [Applause.]
+
+I can assure you that all my countrymen reciprocate the feeling which
+has been expressed; that they desire, as you do, that the cordial
+relationship should continue, and that they have toward the United
+States of America nothing but feelings of good will and a desire for its
+welfare and progress. [Applause.] I have said--all my countrymen. I
+ought, perhaps, not to have been so bold. There are some fools in all
+lands. [Laughter.] They are the product of every soil. No nation has a
+monopoly of them. [Laughter.] But with these exceptions, I can speak, I
+think, for all my countrymen. The echoes of those now distant events of
+a century and a quarter ago, which left much soreness behind them, have
+died away in England. [Applause.] We can rejoice as much as you rejoice
+to-day, in the fact that you are one of the leading nations of the
+world. [Applause.] And there is to me a peculiar interest in the fact
+that I, who have had the honor to fill the office of Lord Chancellor,
+should be here as the representative of my country engaged in
+negotiations between Great Britain and the United States. A century and
+a quarter ago or more, a predecessor of mine in that high office made a
+most unfortunately foolish prediction. He said, with reference to these
+(at that time) colonies: "If they withdraw their allegiance, we shall
+withdraw our protection; and then they will soon be overrun by the
+little States of Genoa and San Marino." [Laughter.] I am happy to say--I
+must say it for the credit of the office--that there was even then a
+distinguished lawyer who was to succeed the Lord Chancellor to whom I
+have referred, who made a speech at which to-day neither I nor any one
+else need blush. But I could not help thinking of those words when I
+reflected that I was here negotiating with the representatives of a
+mighty nation of seventy millions of people, who have not been overrun
+by the little Republics of Genoa and San Marino [laughter], although
+undoubtedly, in a sense very different from that which the speaker
+intended, you may have been overrun by the natives of some of the
+Italian towns. [Laughter.]
+
+Gentlemen, there is to-day in my country, as in yours, a pride in the
+United States. We cannot forget that if you won your independence, if
+you achieved your liberties, if you laid the foundations of your
+constitution, if you prepared for such a nation as exists here to-day,
+you were at that time colonists of Great Britain. The men who laid the
+foundation stones of the United States, in which you to-day glory, were
+those who had gone out from amongst us, who had in the country of my
+birth imbibed for the most part their traditions of liberty, and their
+desire and determination to achieve it; and, therefore, with no
+misgiving, with nothing but a feeling of pride, we may rejoice in your
+success and in your progress. We long ago admitted the follies and the
+wrong-doings of those times, as freely as you could insist upon them
+yourselves. [Applause.]
+
+I am not going to dwell upon that aspect of the case to-night, because I
+am quite aware that sometimes the ready admission of wrong-doing is
+rather irritating than soothing. [Laughter.] I remember once hearing a
+learned counsel, who was conducting the trial of a case before a judge
+of great ability but not of the best of tempers, put a question of a
+character such as to shock any one accustomed to be guided by the rigid
+rules of evidence. Strictly in confidence, I don't think he had the
+least idea that it was a wrong question, but the learned judge
+interposed and said: "That was an improper question, Mr. so and so."
+"Yes, my Lord, it was very improper." "Yes," said the judge, "you ought
+not to have put the question,--a most improper question." "Yes, sir; I
+ought not to have put it, a more improper question never was." And the
+more the judge reproached him the more submissive he became, until he
+drove the judge nearly mad. [Laughter.]
+
+Gentlemen, there has been a great deal of discussion lately as to the
+exact nature of the bond which united Great Britain and the United
+States. Some one says blood is thicker than water, whereupon another
+with perverse ingenuity begins at once to analyze the blood and
+discovers that the elements are not, when resolved, precisely the same.
+That, it is said, is the bond of the Anglo-Saxon race; whereupon a
+Scotchman insists, or a Welshman insists, that it is not all
+Anglo-Saxon, that there is something Celtic in its constitution, and
+that to speak of it as the Anglo-Saxon race, either in my country or in
+yours, is not in strictness historically accurate. Another finds that
+they are the great English-speaking peoples, whereupon an ingenious man
+points out that there are people in Great Britain and its dependencies
+to whom the English language is not the most natural means of
+communication, and that not every inhabitant of the United States is a
+perfect master of the English tongue. [Laughter.]
+
+Well, then, I saw an ingenious argument the other day to prove that it
+is a gross impropriety to speak of England as the mother country; that
+the two countries were really in the relation of sisters, and that we
+ought to call them sister countries, and not speak of them as mother and
+daughter. I am not going to enter into any of this controversy to-night.
+The probability is that none of these suggested explanations is a
+completely adequate explanation of the bond that binds the two nations
+together, but that in each of them is to be found some element of truth.
+I am not going to dwell on them to-night; I prefer a practical rather
+than a theoretical view of any subject, and they all agree in this: a
+tacit assertion of the fact that there is a bond which unites Great
+Britain and the United States such as unites no two other nations
+[applause and cheers]; and they express a realization of the fact that
+there is a very close relationship between the two countries. Now,
+undoubtedly we have at times said nasty things of one another
+[laughter]; but then that is not proof that we are not near relations.
+[Laughter.] Indeed, it might, perhaps, be cited by some as evidence the
+other way. We have sometimes seemed to be very near serious--what shall
+I say?--attacks upon one another. But, again, that is no proof that a
+close relationship does not exist between us. It is not impossible that
+at some future time, when we are either of us menaced by the
+intervention of some third party which seriously threatens our existence
+or our prosperity, we may find that, whatever differences arise amongst
+ourselves from time to time, we shall be ready to unite in defence of
+each other against a stranger. [Applause and cheers.] A friend of mine
+who is a great champion of woman's rights, and a man of the most
+chivalrous disposition, when walking home one night, found a man and a
+woman, husband and wife, in serious controversy, and the man was just
+about to strike his wife. With his usual chivalry he intervened between
+them. In a moment they were both upon him [laughter], and he had much
+ado to withdraw himself from their clutches. May not that, perhaps, be
+an indication of the kind of action which relations may show who are not
+always perfectly peaceably disposed toward one another?
+
+Gentlemen, I rejoice to think that I am here to take part in an
+endeavor to compose such differences as exist at present between the two
+nations. There is another bond of union beyond the natural one to which
+I have alluded, and that is the commercial interests of the two
+countries. I know there are some who think that no country can gain in
+commercial prosperity or make real progress in commerce except at the
+expense of some other. I believe that to be a profound mistake. I do
+not, of course, deny that a particular interest here or there--perhaps
+many interests--may suffer from the stress of international competition,
+but I think we take too narrow a view when in gazing on the industrial
+world we fix our eyes upon this local spot or that, and consider how
+this or that particular place may be affected. Our interests are more
+widespread, strike deeper roots, roots in more different directions than
+we are at all times ready to admit or to conceive. And of this I am
+perfectly certain, that where two nations are so closely bound up in
+commercial intercourse as we are, neither of those nations can possibly
+progress in commercial prosperity, without a reflection of that
+commercial prosperity upon the other nation with which it deals.
+[Applause.]
+
+Gentlemen, many of the events which to-day bulk largely in our eyes will
+look strangely insignificant when seen through the vista of time; but of
+this I feel satisfied, that if the men of to-day by their actions can do
+anything to put upon a permanent basis cordial, friendly relations and
+co-operation between your Republic and the British Empire, these actions
+will grow in men's estimation larger rather than smaller, and
+generations to come will rise to call those blessed who put the
+relations of the two countries upon a sound and satisfactory footing.
+[Applause.]
+
+Gentlemen, however successful we may be, as I trust we shall be
+successful, in composing such differences as now exist--in the nature of
+things it is impossible but that difficulties from time to time will
+arise--in the future, how are we going to treat them? In what spirit
+shall we meet them as they arise? It sometimes seems to me strange that
+nations which, after all, are but collections of individuals should deal
+with their differences in a manner in which sensible men as individuals
+never would dream of treating them. [Applause.] We seem, somehow, when
+once we have taken up a position, to feel as if it were impossible to
+withdraw from it. We must adhere to it, whether originally we took it up
+wisely or unwisely, whether it was sound or unsound. We lash ourselves
+into a white heat over the differences that arise, although the
+relations that they bear to our national life and our national interests
+may be of comparative insignificance. If an individual were to deal in
+that way, always to stand out in every case for his strict rights,
+always to be prepared to contest everything, to adhere always to what he
+claims as his right, to get into a rage with his neighbor because he
+would not see as he saw himself--well, we should call that man an
+intolerably quarrelsome fellow who was not fit for civilized human
+society [cheers]; and yet, as nations, apparently there seems nothing
+strange in our doing that which, as individuals, we should be the last
+to dream of doing.
+
+A friend, a former colleague of mine--now, alas! no more,--told me that
+he was, many years ago, travelling up to London with an owner of race
+horses who was accompanied by his trainer. When they arrived at the
+station near the metropolis where the tickets are collected, the
+ticket-collector came, and my friend said, "My servant has my ticket in
+the next carriage." The ticket-collector retired and presently came back
+rather angry and said, "I cannot find him." My friend said, "he is in
+the next carriage--or the next carriage but one; he is there." As soon
+as the ticket-collector retired for the second time the trainer leaned
+forward and said, "Stick to it, my Lord, you will tire him out."
+[Laughter and cheers.] Is not that sometimes a little indicative of the
+spirit in which we are inclined to act nationally when we have taken up
+any position, even though it be a false one?
+
+Gentlemen, it seems to me that these questions of our future relations
+with one another are questions of special moment just now. You are at a
+parting of the ways. It would be presumptuous, as it would be unwise, in
+me to forecast or to attempt to forecast the decision at which you will
+arrive on questions that have yet to be solved. But, putting these
+questions that remain for solution aside, and dealing only with the
+events as they are now known and fixed, it is impossible not to feel
+that this year marks an epoch in the history of the United States, and
+the relation which the United States is to bear to Great Britain, and
+the relation which Great Britain is to bear to the United States; and
+the spirit which is to animate those two peoples becomes of more
+importance than it ever has been before. I rejoice to see those flags
+joined as they are around this room to-night. [Applause.] God grant that
+they may never be flaunted in defiance of one another. [Applause.] I
+rejoice to see them united in concord, not in any spirit of arrogance
+toward other peoples, not as desiring to infringe the rights of any
+other power, but because I see in that union a real safeguard for the
+maintenance of peace in the world [applause], and because I see more
+than that--I see the surest guaranty of an extended reign of liberty and
+justice. [Prolonged applause.]
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE STILLMAN HILLARD
+
+
+THE INFLUENCE OF MEN OF GENIUS
+
+[Speech of George S. Hillard at the banquet given to Charles Dickens by
+  the "Young Men of Boston," February 1, 1842. The company consisted of
+  about two hundred, among whom were George Bancroft, Washington Allston
+  and Oliver Wendell Holmes.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT:--Our meeting together this evening is one of the
+agreeable results of the sympathy established between two great and
+distant nations by a common language and a common literature. We are
+paying our cheerful tribute of gratitude and admiration to one who,
+though heretofore a stranger to us in person, has made his image a
+familiar presence in innumerable hearts, who has brightened the sunshine
+of many a happy, and cheered the gloom of many a desponding breast,
+whose works have been companions to the solitary and a cordial in the
+sick man's chamber, and whose natural pathos and thoughtful humor,
+flowing from a genius as healthy as it is inventive, have drawn more
+closely the ties which bind man to his brother man, and have given us a
+new sense of the wickedness of injustice, the deformity of selfishness,
+the beauty of self-sacrifice, the dignity of humble virtue, and the
+strength of that love which is found in "huts where poor men lie."
+
+The new harvest of applause which is gathered by the gifted minds of
+England, in a country separated from their own by three thousand miles
+of ocean, is a privilege peculiar to them, and one to which no author,
+however rich in golden opinion won at home, can feel himself
+indifferent. No brow can be so thickly shaded with indigenous laurels,
+as not to wear, with emotion, those which are the growth of a foreign
+soil. There is no homage so true and unquestionable as that which the
+stranger offers. At home the popularity of an author may, during his own
+life at least, be greatly increased by circumstances not at all
+affecting the intrinsic value of his writings. The caprice of fashion,
+the accident of high rank or distinguished social position, the zeal of
+a literary faction or a political party, may invest some "Cynthia of the
+minute" with a brief notoriety, which resembles true fame only as the
+meteor resembles the star. But popularity of this kind is of too flimsy
+and delicate a texture to bear transportation. It is only merit of a
+solid and durable fabric which can survive a voyage across the Atlantic.
+It has been said, with as much truth as point, that a foreign nation is
+a sort of contemporaneous posterity. Its judgment resembles the calm,
+unbiased voice of future ages. It has no infusion of personal feeling;
+it is a serene and unimpassioned verdict, neither won by favor, nor
+withheld from prejudice. The admiration which comes from afar off is
+valuable in the direct ratio of its distance, as there is the same
+degree of assurance that it springs from no secondary cause, but is a
+spontaneous and unbought tribute. An English author might see with
+comparative unconcern his book upon a drawing-room table in London, but
+should he chance to meet a well-thumbed copy of it in a log-house beyond
+our western mountains, would not his heart swell with just pride at the
+thought of the wide space through which his name was diffused and his
+influence felt, and would not his lips almost unconsciously utter the
+expression of the wandering Trojan:--
+
+    "_Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?_"
+
+It is also probably true that, in our country, English authors find
+their warmest and most impassioned admirers. It is as true of the mind
+as of the eye, that distance lends enchantment to the view. There are no
+hues so soft and delicate as those with which the imagination invests
+that which is unseen or faintly discerned. Remoteness in space has the
+same idealizing effect as remoteness of time. The voice that comes to us
+from the dim distance is like that which comes to us from the dim past.
+We know, but we do not feel, the interval which separates Shakespeare
+from Scott, Milton from Wordsworth, Hume from Hallam. We know them only
+by those airy creations of the brain which speak to us through the
+printed page. Solitude, and silence too, are the nurses of deep and
+strong feeling. That imaginative element which exalts the love of Dante
+for Beatrice, and of Burns for his "Mary in Heaven," deepens the fervor
+of admiration with which the pale, enthusiastic scholar, in some lonely
+farmhouse in New England, hangs over a favorite author, who, though
+perhaps a living contemporary, is recognized only as an absolute essence
+of genius, wisdom or truth. The minds of men whom we see face to face
+appear to shine upon us darkly through the infirmities of a mortal
+frame. Their faculties are touched by weariness or pain, or some
+humiliating weakness or unhandsome passion thrusts its eclipsing shadow
+between us and the light of their genius. Not so with those to whom they
+speak only through the medium of books. In these we see the products of
+those golden hours, when all that was low is elevated, when all that was
+dark is illumined, and all that was earthly is transfigured. Books have
+no touch of personal infirmity--theirs is undying bloom, immortal youth,
+perennial fragrance. Age cannot wrinkle, disease cannot blight, death
+cannot pierce them. The personal image of the author is quite as likely
+to be a hindrance as a help to his book. The actor who played with
+Shakespeare in his own "Hamlet" probably did but imperfect justice to
+that wonderful play, and the next-door neighbor of a popular author will
+be very likely to read his books with a carping, censorious spirit,
+unknown to him who has seen his vision only in his mind.
+
+Mr. President, I dwell with pleasure on the considerations to which an
+occasion like this gives birth. It is good for us to be here. Whatever
+has a tendency to make two great nations forget those things in which
+they differ, and remember those only in which they have a common
+interest, is a benefit to them both. Whatever makes the hearts of two
+countries beat in unison, makes them more enamored of harmony, more
+sensitive to discord. Honor to the men of genius who made two
+hemispheres thrill to the same electric touch, who at the same time, and
+with the same potent spell, are ruling the hearts of men in the
+mountains of Scotland, the forests of Canada, the hillsides of New
+England, the prairies of Illinois, and the burning plains of India.
+Their influence, so far as it extends, is a peaceful and a humanizing
+one. When you have instructed two men with the same wisdom, and charmed
+them with the same wit, you have established between them a bond of
+sympathy, however slight, and made it so much the more difficult to set
+them at variance. When I remember the history of England, how much she
+has done for law, liberty, virtue and religion--for all that beautifies
+and dignifies life--when I realize how much that is most valuable and
+characteristic in our own institutions is borrowed from her--when I
+recall our obligations to her matchless literature, I feel a throb of
+gratitude that "Chatham's language is my mother-tongue," and my heart
+warms to the land of my fathers. I embrace with peculiar satisfaction
+every consideration that tends to give us an unity of spirit in the bond
+of peace--to make us blind to each other's faults, and kind to each
+other's virtues. I feel all the force of the fine lines of one whom we
+have the honor to receive as a guest this evening:--
+
+ "Though ages long have passed
+    Since our fathers left their home,
+  Their pilot in the blast,
+    O'er untravelled seas to roam,
+  Yet lives the blood of England in our veins.
+    And shall we not proclaim
+    That blood of honest fame,
+    Which no tyranny can tame
+      By its chains?
+
+ "While the manners, while the arts
+    That mould a nation's soul,
+  Still cling around our hearts,--
+    Between, let ocean roll,
+  Our joint communion breaking with the sun.
+  Yet still from either beach
+  The voice of blood shall reach,
+  More audible than speech--
+    We are one."
+
+It is now more than sixty-seven years since the rapid growth of our
+country was sketched by Mr. Burke, in the course of his speech on
+conciliation with America, in a passage whose picturesque beauty has
+made it one of the commonplaces of literature, in which he represents
+the angel of Lord Bathurst drawing up the curtain of futurity,
+unfolding the rising glories of England, and pointing out to him
+America, a little speck scarce visible in the mass of the national
+interest, yet which was destined before he tasted of death to show
+itself equal to the whole of that commerce which then attracted the
+admiration of the world. There are many now living whose lives extend
+over the whole of this period--and during that space, what memorable
+changes have taken place in the relations of the two countries! Let us
+imagine the angel of that illustrious author and statesman, when the
+last words of that profound and beautiful speech were dying upon the
+air, withdrawing him from the congratulations of his friends, and
+unfolding to him the future progress of that country, whose growth up to
+that period he had so felicitously sketched:--"There is that America,
+whose interests you have so well understood and so eloquently
+maintained, which, at this moment, is taking measures to withdraw from
+the protection and defy the power of the mother country. But mourn not
+that this bright jewel is destined to fall from your country's crown. It
+is an obedience to the same law of Providence which sends the
+full-fledged bird from the nest, and the man from his father's house.
+Man shall not be able to sever what the immutable laws of Providence
+have joined together. The chafing chains of colonial dependence shall be
+exchanged for ties light as air, yet strong as steel. The peaceful and
+profitable interchange of commerce--the same language--a common
+literature--similar laws, and kindred institutions shall bind you
+together with cords which neither cold-blooded policy, nor grasping
+selfishness, nor fratricidal war, shall be able to snap. Discoveries in
+science and improvements in art shall be constantly contracting the
+ocean which separates you, and the genius of steam shall link your
+shores together with a chain of iron and flame. A new heritage of glory
+shall await your men of genius in those now unpeopled solitudes. The
+grand and lovely creations of your myriad-minded Shakespeare--the
+majestic line of Milton--the stately energy of Dryden, and the compact
+elegance of Pope, shall form and train the minds of uncounted multitudes
+yet slumbering in the womb of the future. Her gifted and educated sons
+shall come over to your shores with a feeling akin to that which sends
+the Mussulman to Mecca. Your St. Paul's shall kindle their devotion;
+your Westminster Abbey shall warm their patriotism; your
+Stratford-on-Avon and Abbotsford shall awaken in their bosoms a depth of
+emotion in which your own countrymen shall hardly be able to sympathize.
+Extraordinary physical advantages and the influence of genial
+institutions shall there give to the human race a rate of increase
+hitherto unparalleled; but the stream, however much it be widened and
+prolonged, shall retain the character of the fountain from which it
+first flowed. Every wave of population that gains upon that vast green
+wilderness shall bear with it the blood, the speech, and the books of
+England, and aid in transmitting to the generations that come after it,
+her arts, her literature, and her laws." If this had been revealed to
+him, would it not have required all the glow of his imagination and all
+the strength of his judgment to believe it? Let us who are seeing the
+fulfilment of this vision, utter the fervent prayer that no sullen
+clouds of coldness or estrangement may ever obscure these fair
+relations, and that the madness of man may never mar the benevolent
+purposes of God.
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL REYNOLDS HOLE
+
+
+WITH BRAINS, SIR!
+
+[Speech of Samuel Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester Cathedral, at a
+  banquet given in his honor by the Lotos Club, New York City, October
+  27, 1894. Frank R. Lawrence, the President of the Club, in introducing
+  Dean Hole recalled the fact that the Club had had the honor of
+  receiving Dean Stanley and Charles Kingsley.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--I can assure you that when I received your
+invitation, having heard so much of the literary, artistic and social
+amenities of your famous Club, I resembled in feelings, not in feature,
+the beautiful bride of Burleigh, when--
+
+ "A trouble weighed upon her,
+    And perplexed her, night and morn,
+  With the burthen of an honor
+    Unto which she was not born."
+
+I could have quoted the words of the mate in Hood's "Up the Rhine," when
+during a storm at sea a titled lady sent for him, and asked him if he
+could swim. "Yes, my lady," says he, "like a duck." "That being the
+case," says she, "I shall condescend to lay hold of your arm all night."
+"Too great an honor for the likes of me," says the mate. [Laughter.]
+
+Even when I came into this building--though I am not a shy man, having
+been educated at Brazenose College, and preposterously flattered
+throughout my life, most probably on account of my size,--I had not lost
+this sense of unworthiness; but your gracious reception has not only
+reassured me, but has induced the delicious hallucination that, at some
+period forgotten, in some unconscious condition, I have said something
+or done something, or written something, which really deserved your
+approbation. [Applause.] To be serious, I am, of course, aware why this
+great privilege has been conferred upon me. It is because you have
+associated me with those great men with whom I was in happy intercourse,
+that you have made my heart glad to-night.
+
+It has ever been my ambition to blend my life, as the great painter does
+his colors, "with brains, sir;" and I venture to think that such a
+yearning is a magnificent proof that we are not wholly destitute of this
+article, as when the poor wounded soldier exclaimed, on hearing the
+doctor say that he could see his brains: "Oh, please write home and tell
+father, for he has always said I never had any." [Laughter.] Be that as
+it may, my appreciation of my superiors has evoked from them a
+marvellous sympathy, has led to the formation of very precious
+friendships, and has been my elevator unto the higher abodes of
+brightness and freshness, as it is to-night.
+
+Yes, my brothers, it is delightful to dwell "with brains, sir,"
+condensed in books in that glorious world, a library--a world which we
+can traverse without being sick at sea or footsore on land; in which we
+can reach heights of science without leaving our easy-chair, hear the
+nightingales, the poets, with no risk of catarrh, survey the great
+battle-fields of the world unscathed; a world in which we are surrounded
+by those who, whatever their temporal rank may have been, are its true
+kings and real nobility, and which places within our reach a wealth more
+precious than rubies, "for all things thou canst desire are not to be
+compared with it." In this happy world I met Washington Irving, Fenimore
+Cooper, Hawthorne, Willis, Longfellow, Whittier and all your great
+American authors, historical, poetical, pathetic, humorous; and ever
+since I have rejoiced to hold converse with them. Nevertheless, it is
+with our living companions, with our fellow-men who love books as we do,
+that this fruition is complete, and so it comes to pass in the words of
+one whose name I speak with a full heart, Oliver Wendell Holmes, that "a
+dinner-table made up of such material as this is the last triumph of
+civilization over barbarism." [Applause.]
+
+We feel as our witty Bishop (afterward Archbishop) Magee described
+himself, when he said: "I am just now in such a sweet, genial
+disposition, that even a curate might play with me." [Great laughter.]
+We are bold to state with Artemus Ward, of his regiment composed
+exclusively of major-generals, that "we will rest muskets with anybody."
+
+ "Linger, I cried, O radiant Time, thy pow'r
+    Hath nothing else to give; life is complete,
+  Let but the happy present, hour by hour.
+    Itself remember and itself repeat."
+
+And yet one more quotation we are glad to make, wherewith to make some
+amends for the stupidity of him who quotes lines most appropriate, by
+Tennyson, from the "Lotos-Eaters," and repeated by one who has just
+crossed the Atlantic:--
+
+ "We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
+  Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething free
+  Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
+  Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
+  In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
+  On the hills, like gods together, careless of mankind."
+
+Now, gentlemen, let me give, "evermore thanks, the exchequer of the
+poor." [Long applause.]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+_OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Photogravure after a photograph from life_
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+WELCOME TO THE ALUMNI
+
+[Speech of Oliver Wendell Holmes as President of the day, at the annual
+  dinner of the Harvard Alumni Association, in Cambridge, July 19, 1860,
+  inaugurating the practice of public speaking at the "Harvard Dinners."
+  That year also took place the inauguration of President C. Felton, an
+  event to which the speaker alludes in his graceful reference to the
+  "goodly armful of scholarship, experience and fidelity" once more
+  filling the "old chair of office."]
+
+
+BROTHERS, BY THE SIDE OF HER WHO IS MOTHER OF US ALL, AND FRIENDS,
+WHOM SHE WELCOMES AS HER OWN CHILDREN:--The older sons of our
+common parent who should have greeted you from this chair of office,
+being for different reasons absent, it has become my duty to half fill
+the place of these honored, but truant, children to the best of my
+ability--a most grateful office, so far as the expression of kind
+feeling is concerned; an undesired duty, if I look to the comparisons
+you must draw between the government of the association existing _de
+jure_, and its government _de facto_. Your President [Robert C.
+Winthrop] so graces every assembly which he visits, by his presence, his
+dignity, his suavity, his art of ruling, whether it be the council of a
+nation, the legislature of a State, or the lively democracy of a
+dinner-table, that when he enters a meeting like this, it seems as if
+the chairs stood back of their own will to let him pass to the head of
+the board, and the table itself, that most intelligent of quadrupeds,
+the half reasoning mahogany, tipped him a spontaneous welcome to its
+highest seat, and of itself rapped the assembly to order. [Applause.]
+
+Your first Vice-President [Charles Francis Adams], whose name and
+growing fame you know so much better than his bodily presentment, has
+not been able to gratify your eyes and ears by showing you the
+lineaments and stirring you with the tones inherited from men who made
+their country or shaped its destinies. [Applause.] You and I have no
+choice therefore, and I must submit to stand in this place of eminence
+as a speaker, instead of sitting a happy listener with my friends and
+classmates on the broader platform beneath. Through my lips must flow
+the gracious welcome of this auspicious day, which brings us all
+together in this family temple under the benignant smile of our
+household divinities, around the ancient altar fragrant with the incense
+of our grateful memories.
+
+This festival is always a joyous occasion. It resembles a scattered
+family without making any distinction except that which age establishes,
+an aristocracy of silver hairs which all inherit in their turn, and none
+is too eager to anticipate. In the great world outside there are and
+must be differences of lot and position; one has been fortunate,
+another, toiling as nobly perhaps, has fallen in with adverse currents;
+one has become famous, his name stares in great letters from the
+hand-bills of the drama of his generation; another lurks in small type
+among the supernumeraries. But here we stand in one unbroken row of
+brotherhood. No symbol establishes a hierarchy that divides one from
+another; every name which has passed into our golden book, the triennial
+catalogue, is illuminated and emblazoned in our remembrance and
+affection with the purple and sunshine of our common Mother's hallowed
+past and hopeful future.
+
+We have at this time a twofold reason for welcoming the return of our
+day of festive meeting. The old chair of office, against whose uneasy
+knobs have rested so many well-compacted spines, whose uncushioned arms
+have embraced so many stately forms, over whose inheritance of cares and
+toils have ached so many ample brows, is filled once more with a goodly
+armful of scholarship, experience and fidelity. The President never
+dies. Our precious Mother must not be left too long a widow, for the
+most urgent of reasons. We talk so much about her maternity that we are
+apt to overlook the fact that a responsible _Father_ is as necessary to
+the good name of a well-ordered college as to that of a well-regulated
+household. As children of the College, our thoughts naturally centre on
+the fact that she has this day put off the weeds of her nominal
+widowhood, and stands before us radiant in the adornment of her new
+espousals. You will not murmur, that, without debating questions of
+precedence, we turn our eyes upon the new head of the family, to whom
+our younger brothers are to look as their guide and counsellor as we
+hope and trust through many long and prosperous years.
+
+Brothers of the Association of the Alumini! Our own existence as a
+society is so bound up with that of the College whose seal is upon our
+foreheads, that every blessing we invoke on our parent's head returns
+like the dew from Heaven upon our own. So closely is the welfare of our
+beloved Mother knitted to that of her chief counsellor and official
+consort, that in honoring him we honor her under whose roof we are
+gathered, at whose breast we have been nurtured, whose fair fame is our
+glory, whose prosperity is our success, whose lease of long life is the
+charter of our own perpetuity.
+
+I propose the health of the President of Harvard University: We greet
+our brother as the happy father of a long line of future alumni.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+DOROTHY Q.
+
+[Speech of Oliver Wendell Holmes at the banquet of the Boston
+  Merchants' Association at Boston, Mass., May 23, 1884, in honor of the
+  Hon. John Lowell.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--It was my intention, when I
+accepted the public invitation to be with you this evening, to excuse
+myself from saying a word. I am a professor emeritus, which means pretty
+nearly the same thing as a tired-out or a worn-out instructor. And I do
+seriously desire that, having during the last fifty years done my share
+of work at public entertainments, I may hereafter be permitted, as a
+post-prandial emeritus, to look on and listen in silence at the
+festivals to which I may have the honor of being invited--unless,
+indeed, I may happen to wish to be heard. [Applause.] In that case I
+trust I may be indulged, as an unspoken speech and an unread poem are
+apt to "strike in," as some complaints are said to, and cause inward
+commotions. [Applause.] Judge Lowell's eulogy will be on every one's
+lips this evening. His soundness, his fairness, his learning, his
+devotion to duty, his urbanity,--these are the qualities which have
+commended him to universal esteem and honor. [Applause.] I will not say
+more of the living; I wish to speak of the dead.
+
+In respectfully proposing the memory of his great-great-grandmother
+[laughter], I am speaking of one whom few if any of you can remember.
+[Laughter.] Yet her face is as familiar to me as that of any member of
+my household. She looks upon me as I sit at my writing-table; she does
+not smile, she does not speak; even the green parrot on her hand has
+never opened his beak; but there she is, calm, unchanging, in her
+immortal youth, as when the untutored artist fixed her features on the
+canvas. To think that one little word from the lips of Dorothy Quincy,
+your great-great-grandmother, my great-grandmother, decided the question
+whether you and I should be here to-night [laughter], in fact whether we
+should be anywhere [laughter] at all, or remain two bodiless dreams of
+nature! But it was Dorothy Quincy's "Yes" or "No" to Edward Jackson
+which was to settle that important matter--important to both of us,
+certainly--yes, Your Honor; and I can say truly, as I look at you and
+remember your career, important to this and the whole American
+community. [Applause.]
+
+The picture I referred to is but a rude one, and yet I was not ashamed
+of it when I wrote a copy of verses about it, three or four of which
+this audience will listen to for the sake of Dorothy's great-grandson. I
+must alter the pronouns a little, for this occasion only:--
+
+  Look not on her with eyes of scorn--
+  Dorothy Q. was a lady born;
+  Ay! since the galloping Normans came
+  England's annals have known her name;
+  And still to the three-hilled rebel town
+  Dear is that ancient name's renown,
+  For many a civic wreath they won,
+  The youthful sire and the gray-haired son.
+
+  O damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.!
+  Strange is the gift (we) owe to you!
+  Such a gift as never a king
+  Save to daughter or son might bring--
+  All (our) tenure of heart and hand,
+  All (our) title to house and land;
+  Mother and sister and child and wife
+  And joy and sorrow and death and life!
+
+  What if a hundred years ago
+  Those close-shut lips had answered "No!"
+  When forth the tremulous question came
+  That cost the maiden her Norman name,
+  And under the folds that look so still
+  The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill--
+  Should (we) be (we), or could it be
+  One-tenth (two others) and nine-tenths (we)?
+
+  Soft is the breath of a maiden's Yes:
+  Not the light gossamer stirs with less;
+  But never a cable that holds so fast
+  Through all the battles of wave and blast,
+  And never an echo of speech or song
+  That lives in the babbling air so long!
+  There were tones in the voice that whispered then
+  You may hear to-day in a hundred men.
+
+  O lady and lover, now faint and far
+  Your images hover--and here we are,
+  Solid and stirring in flesh and bone--
+  Edwards and Dorothys--all their own--
+  A goodly record for time to show
+  Of a syllable whispered so long ago.
+
+[Applause prolonged.]
+
+I give you: "The memory of Dorothy Jackson, born Dorothy Quincy, to
+whose choice of the right monosyllable we owe the presence of our
+honored guest and all that his life has achieved for the welfare of the
+community." [Great applause and cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.
+
+
+SONS OF HARVARD WHO FELL IN BATTLE
+
+[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the "Autocrat," at the
+  Harvard Alumni Dinner, at Cambridge, June 25, 1884.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ALUMNI:--Another day than
+this has been consecrated to the memories of the war. On that day we
+think not of the children of the university or the city, hardly, even,
+of the children whom the State has lost, but of a mighty brotherhood
+whose parent was our common country. To-day the college is the centre of
+all our feeling, and if we refer to the war it is in connection with the
+college, and not for its own sake that we do so. What then did the
+college do to justify our speaking of the war now? She sent a few
+gentlemen into the field, who died there becomingly. I know of nothing
+more. The great forces which ensured the North success would have been
+at work even if those men had been absent. Our means of raising money
+and troops would not have been less, I dare say. The great qualities of
+the race, too, would still have been there. The greatest qualities,
+after all, are those of a man, not those of a gentleman, and neither
+North nor South needed colleges to learn them.
+
+And yet--and yet I think we all feel that, to us, at least, the war
+would seem less beautiful and inspiring, if those few gentlemen had not
+died as they did. Look at yonder portrait[7] and yonder bust[8] and tell
+me if stories such as they commemorate do not add a glory to the bare
+fact that the strongest legions prevailed. So it has been since wars
+began. After history has done its best to fix men's thoughts upon
+strategy and finance, their eyes have turned and rested on some single
+romantic figure--some Sidney, some Falkland, some Wolfe, some Montcalm,
+some Shaw. This is that little touch of the superfluous which is
+necessary. Necessary as art is necessary, and knowledge which serves no
+mechanical end. Superfluous only as glory is superfluous, or a bit of
+red ribbon that a man would die to win.
+
+It has been one merit of Harvard College that it has never quite sunk to
+believing that its only function was to carry a body of specialists
+through the first stage of their preparation. About these halls there
+has always been an aroma of high feeling not to be found or lost in
+science or Greek--not to be fixed, yet all-pervading. And the warrant of
+Harvard College for writing the names of its dead graduates upon its
+tablets is not in the mathematics, the chemistry, the political economy
+which it taught them, but that, in ways not to be discovered, by
+traditions not to be written down, it helped men of lofty natures to
+make good their faculties. I hope and I believe that it will long give
+such help to its children. I hope and I believe that long after our
+tears for the dead have been forgotten, this monument to their memory
+will still give such help to generations to whom it is only a symbol--a
+symbol of man's destiny and power for duty, but a symbol also of that
+something more by which duty is swallowed up in generosity, that
+something more which led men like Shaw to toss life and hope like a
+flower before the feet of their country and their cause. [Cheers.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE JOY OF LIFE
+
+[Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a banquet in his honor
+  given by the Suffolk Bar Association, Boston, March 7, 1900, upon his
+  elevation to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Judicial Court of
+  Massachusetts. Justice Holmes, upon rising to the toast of the
+  presiding officer, was received with cheers, the entire company
+  rising.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN OF THE SUFFOLK BAR:--The kindness of this reception
+almost unmans me, and it shakes me the more when taken with a kind of
+seriousness which the moment has for me. As with a drowning man, the
+past is telescoped into a minute, and the stages are all here at once in
+my mind. The day before yesterday I was at the law school, fresh from
+the army, arguing cases in a little club with Goulding and Beaman and
+Peter Olney, and laying the dust of pleading by certain sprinklings
+which Huntington Jackson, another ex-soldier, and I managed to contrive
+together. A little later in the day, in Bob Morse's, I saw a real writ,
+acquired a practical conviction of the difference between assumpsit and
+trover, and marvelled open-mouthed at the swift certainty with which a
+master of his business turned it off.
+
+Yesterday I was at the law school again, in the chair instead of on the
+benches, when my dear partner, Shattuck, came out and told me that in
+one hour the Governor would submit my name to the council for a
+judgeship, if notified of my assent. It was a stroke of lightning which
+changed the whole course of my life.
+
+And the day before yesterday, gentlemen, was thirty-five years, and
+yesterday was more than eighteen years, ago. I have gone on feeling
+young, but I have noticed that I have met fewer of the old to whom to
+show my deference, and recently I was startled by being told that ours
+is an old bench. Well, I accept the fact, although I find it hard to
+realize, and I ask myself, what is there to show for this half lifetime
+that has passed? I look into my book in which I keep a docket of the
+decisions of the full court which fall to me to write, and find about a
+thousand cases. A thousand cases, many of them upon trifling or
+transitory matters, to represent nearly half a lifetime! A thousand
+cases, when one would have liked to study to the bottom and to say his
+say on every question which the law ever has presented, and then to go
+on and invent new problems which should be the test of doctrine, and
+then to generalize it all and write it in continuous, logical,
+philosophic exposition, setting forth the whole corpus with its roots in
+history and its justifications of expedience, real or supposed!
+
+Alas, gentlemen, that is life. I often imagine Shakespeare or Napoleon
+summing himself up and thinking: "Yes, I have written five thousand
+lines of solid gold, and a good deal of padding--I, who have covered the
+milky way with words which outshine the stars!" "Yes, I beat the
+Austrians in Italy and elsewhere; I made a few brilliant campaigns, and
+I ended in middle life in a _cul-de-sac_--I who had dreamed of a world
+monarchy and of Asiatic power!" We cannot live in our dreams. We are
+lucky enough if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts
+we can feel that it has been nobly done.
+
+Some changes come about in the process: changes not necessarily so much
+in the nature as in the emphasis of our interest. I do not mean in our
+wish to make a living and to succeed--of course, we all want those
+things--but I mean in our ulterior intellectual or spiritual interests,
+in the ideal part, without which we are but snails or tigers.
+
+One begins with a search for a general point of view. After a time he
+finds one, and then for a while he is absorbed in testing it, in trying
+to satisfy himself whether it is true. But after many experiments or
+investigations, all have come out one way, and his theory is confirmed
+and settled in his mind; he knows in advance that the next case will be
+but another verification, and the stimulus of anxious curiosity is gone.
+He realizes that his branch of knowledge only presents more
+illustrations of the universal principle; he sees it all as another case
+of the same old ennui, or the same sublime mystery--for it does not
+matter what epithets you apply to the whole of things, they are merely
+judgments of yourself. At this stage the pleasure is no less, perhaps,
+but it is the pure pleasure of doing the work, irrespective of further
+aims, and when you reach that stage you reach, as it seems to me, the
+triune formula of the joy, the duty and the end of life.
+
+It was of this that Malebranche was thinking when he said that, if God
+held in one hand truth and in the other the pursuit of truth, he would
+say: "Lord, the truth is for thee alone; give me the pursuit." The joy
+of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless
+way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this. The hell
+of the old world's literature is to be taxed beyond one's powers. This
+country has expressed in story--I suppose because it has experienced it
+in life--a deeper abyss of intellectual asphyxia or vital ennui, when
+powers conscious of themselves are denied their chance.
+
+The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one. I confess that
+altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal.
+With all humility, I think "Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
+thy might," infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love
+one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing,
+you must have all your will in a focus, you must not be thinking about
+yourself, and, equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor;
+you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird
+on the wing.
+
+The joy, the duty, and, I venture to add, the end of life. I speak only
+of this world, of course, and of the teachings of this world. I do not
+seek to trench upon the province of spiritual guides. But from the point
+of view of the world the end of life is life. Life is action, the use of
+one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it
+is the one end that justifies itself. Until lately the best thing that I
+was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind
+acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the
+artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But I think
+that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is
+a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are
+too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the
+chief work of civilization is just that it makes the means of living
+more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual
+efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd
+may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because
+more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer
+life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only
+question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of
+it.
+
+I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that
+floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the
+unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep,
+sub-conscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers. In
+the words of a touching negro song: "sometimes I's up, sometimes I's
+down, sometimes I's almost to the groun'," but these thoughts have
+carried me, as I hope they will carry the young men who hear me, through
+long years of doubt, self-distrust and solitude. They do now, for,
+although it might seem that the day of trial was over, in fact it is
+renewed each day. The kindness which you have shown me makes me bold in
+happy moments to believe that the long and passionate struggle has not
+been quite in vain. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+LORD HOUGHTON
+
+(RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES)
+
+
+YOUR SPEECH AND OURS
+
+[Speech of Lord Houghton, in response to William Cullen Bryant, at a
+  breakfast given in his honor at the Century Club, New York, October
+  17, 1875. William Cullen Bryant, President of the Club, presided, and
+  said in part: "Our guest, Lord Houghton, was not born a lord, but he
+  was born a poet, which I take to be something better. Some forty years
+  ago, I think it was, he wandered in Switzerland, Italy and Greece, and
+  the impressions made upon his mind are woven into his beautiful series
+  of poems published under the title of 'Memorials of Many Scenes.' At a
+  later period, perhaps ten years afterward, he traveled in Egypt and
+  the western coast of Asia, and returned, bringing with him a sheaf of
+  'Palm-Leaves,' a series of charming poems, inspired by the remarkable
+  places which he visited, and by the incidents of his journey. These
+  'palm-leaves,' let me say, have a perennial verdure, they are yet as
+  green as when they were gathered and still breathe Sabaean odors--the
+  spicy perfume of the Orient--what the old poet Donne calls 'the
+  almighty balm of the early East.' He is now a traveler in our
+  territory, a region almost without antiquities, but of sufficient
+  interest to attract his steps hither. He will doubtless see faults in
+  our social and political condition--the eyes of a stranger are quicker
+  to discern them than our own can be--but let us hope that he will
+  carry back to his native land the recollections of a cordial reception
+  among our people, such as I hope we are ever ready to accord to
+  personal worth, to genius, and to services rendered to the human race.
+  The only time I ever saw Dr. Bowring, which was some thirty years
+  since, when he was a member of Parliament, of the party called
+  Radical, is memorable with me on account of the eulogy of our guest,
+  which he uttered with much warmth and enthusiasm. He praised the
+  generosity of his sentiments and the largeness of his sympathies. 'At
+  his table,' he added, 'you meet with men of various differing
+  opinions; the only title to his hospitality and esteem is personal
+  merit.' The same rule of preference which he applied to the
+  individuals whom he admitted to his friendship, had governed him
+  throughout a long public life in the measures which he had supported.
+  His co-operation and efficient aid have been given to proceedings and
+  measures which contemplate the well-being of the people--to useful and
+  beneficial reforms. In their favor he steadily gave his vote and
+  raised his voice. In honoring him we, therefore, honor not only the
+  poet, but the philanthropist and the statesman. I propose, therefore,
+  the health of Lord Houghton."]
+
+
+MR. BRYANT AND GENTLEMEN:--In finding myself here now for the
+first time, I am agitated by conflicting emotions, by my pleasure in
+being among you, and by my regret at not having been here before.
+
+In alluding to my poetic experience, Mr. Bryant mentioned that I had
+passed many years of my early life in Italy, and while he was so doing
+there arose in my memory a little incident not inapplicable to my
+present position. I passed some time at Venice; and one summer evening,
+on the Piazza di San Marco, my attention was attracted by an old man,
+who walked up and down with a mingled air of wonder and delight, and
+who, after I had observed him for some moments, came and asked me in the
+Venetian dialect what streets he was to take toward a certain remote
+portion of the city. I said I was a foreigner, and that he, being a
+native of the place, must know its geography better than I could. He
+then told me that he was there for the first time. He had passed all his
+life in his own distinct world, there earning his daily bread, and
+occupied by its little local interests. At last a friend had told him
+that he must see the Place and Church of San Marco before he died, and
+put him in a boat and landed him there, and now he wanted to find his
+way home, charmed and contented.
+
+Gentlemen, I am in the position of that Venetian veteran, and shall
+return to my country, happy that I have at last found my way to this
+great place and habitation--the civitas of English-speaking people. Not
+that I have ever failed to regard this country in many senses as my own,
+from the time when I took moral comfort from the flight of Mr. Bryant's
+"Wild Fowl" across the ocean, and took the best lesson of life from the
+Psalm of Longfellow. Since then I have ever been with you in all your
+intellectual progress, and in the necessarily checkered course of your
+constitutional history, and never more than in the late solemn years, in
+all the national difficulties which you have so energetically, so
+persistently, and so humanely surmounted.
+
+In looking back to my impressions of those times, I sometimes think that
+my sympathy with you was not wholly unselfish, but that I felt that, if
+I had ever written anything which has a chance of a prolonged existence,
+I should wish it to be read, not by any distracted and impotent
+communities of British race, but by America, one and indivisible. And,
+gentlemen, this is not unnatural, for amid all the divisions or
+distractions of your history, your literature has ever been patriotic
+and national. Literature, in truth, has been to you a good and faithful
+emigrant, reproductive not only of all intellectual growth, but of the
+sympathies--the largest sympathies--which bind together man to man. It
+has settled among you every classic writer of British origin, and from
+the Continent it has brought to you Goethe, Schiller, and Heinrich
+Heine. It is also noticeable that by the side of these great
+colonizations of thought you have not refused to receive and to pass to
+your furthest Territories the humblest addition, the single volume of
+verse, the chance felicitous expression of combined thought and feeling,
+even some accidental refrain of song that had pleasantly caught the ear
+and gone to the heart of man.
+
+And this brings me to say to you one professional word respecting that
+art and the nature of poetry that you have been kind enough to connect
+with my name. The greater part of the verses I have written were that
+product of the lyrical period of youth which is by no means uncommon in
+modern civilization. It exhibits itself sometimes in the strangest
+manner, without connection with other culture, or even the most common
+intellectual opportunities. Of this I happen to have given to the world
+a signal instance in the volume I published of the poems of David Gray,
+a Scotch weaver-boy, who, without one advantage beyond the common
+education of his class, described all the nature within his ken in the
+highest poetic perfection, and passed away, leaving a most pathetic
+record of a short life of imaginative sensibility. You can contrast this
+simple and wayside flower of a faculty with such rich and complete
+cultivation as it can assume in the efflorescence of Tennyson or
+Swinburne; but in whatever form you find it, do not the less value the
+faculty itself. Permit me to say that in no condition of society can it
+be encouraged and fertilized more usefully than among yourselves. For
+not only will it bring with it calm and comfort amid all the
+superabundant activities, ambitions, and confusions of daily life, but
+it has also the regulative powers teaching men to divide the sphere of
+the imagination from that of practical life, and thus obviating the
+dangers that so often arise from the want of this distinction.
+
+There is no better preservative than the exercise of the poetic faculty
+from religious hallucinations, from political delusions, and I would say
+even from financial extravagances. Therefore, through the whole vast
+range of this new world, be on the watch to look out for and to
+encourage this great gift to man. Do not be too hard with any
+imperfections or absence of refinement which may accompany its
+exhibition. Do not treat it too critically or with too much scholastic
+censure. Recognize also its value on another ground--the extension and
+the perpetuation of our great common language--an interest not less dear
+to every one of us here present than to the future welfare of mankind:--
+
+ "Beyond the vague Atlantic deep,
+  Far as the farthest prairies sweep,
+  Where mountain wastes the sense appall
+  Where burns the radiant Western Fall,
+  One duty lies on old and young--
+    With filial piety to guard,
+    As on its greenest native sward,
+  The glory of the English tongue!
+
+ "That ample speech, that subtle speech,
+  Apt for the needs of all in each,
+  Strong to endure, yet prompt to bend
+  Wherever human feelings tend,
+  Preserve its force, expand its powers,
+    And through the maze of civil life,
+    In letters, commerce, e'en in strife,
+  Remember, it is yours and ours!"
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+BONDS OF NATIONAL SYMPATHY
+
+[Response of Lord Houghton to the address of Joseph H. Choate at the
+  farewell reception given in honor of Lord Houghton by the Union League
+  Club, New York City, November 23, 1875.]
+
+
+MR. CHOATE AND GENTLEMEN:--Before you spoke I had much
+difficulty to interpret to myself the meaning of my reception here. So
+unimportant as I know myself to have been before, in political and
+social life, I have been surprised at the manner in which I have been
+received in the United States of America. You, sir, have given an
+explanation of that problem which I am very thankful to receive. The
+habit of Americans to welcome Englishmen, whatever may be their
+position, in itself proves to me that you regard us as something above
+individuals, and that, somehow or other, you connect us in every way by
+imagination, if no other, as present with that great country over the
+Atlantic which was your mother, and which it has been the habit of many
+of your ancestors to call their home. [Applause.] Mr. Choate has alluded
+to certain events in my political life, which he says fully justify your
+kindness and remarkable sympathy of to-day, and on that matter, if there
+are to be any relations between myself and the Americans, upon that
+point I can say that I deserve credit. I do not say this with any
+affectation, because I understand fully your feelings upon that matter.
+I fully recognize, I completely comprehend, as man to man, that in that
+day of your greatest trouble, even the small voice that came over the
+great Atlantic was listened to with extreme pleasure and unexaggerated
+sympathy.
+
+But when I look to myself, I am bound to say I find extremely little
+merit in the matter. There was one ground of sympathy between you and
+the English people, which you had the holiest right to believe would
+have been absolute and overpowering. The English nation had put itself
+forward as the great opponent of slavery in the world. [Applause.] It
+had stated at the Congress of Vienna that the one point which England
+required as the _sine qua non_ was the abolition of the slave trade. For
+that purpose England not only asserted itself, but interfered up to the
+utmost limit, perhaps beyond the limits of the law of nations, with all
+the powers of the world. Therefore, you had a perfect right to believe,
+to suppose, that in a question, in a matter in which we were not only
+internationally but morally interested, the questions would be fully
+considered.
+
+Well, gentlemen, I cannot say that it was so. As an individual I have
+not the right to reproach my country upon that point. That was not my
+first feeling in the matter. I felt, I knew, slavery was doomed from the
+civilized world. My heart, my instincts, my sense of the well-being of
+every civilized state was against the continuance of that institution.
+[Applause.] I knew, though it was possible--aye, I would fain say
+probable--that the condition of the slave, under many conditions, under
+many circumstances, might be better than that of the free laborer of the
+world, that the condition of the slave owner was incompatible with the
+highest form of moral culture and highest ambition. I always think that
+question had political as well as moral and religious considerations,
+and that, through the unhappy condition of this continent, the question
+of slavery got so intermixed with the question of property that, however
+humane, however wise men were, yet nevertheless it would bring with it
+an incidental condition of cruelty abhorrent to mankind, and that,
+therefore, that institution could not continue to the end. [Applause.]
+
+But, making a clean breast of it, that was not the bottom of my
+sympathy. My sympathy with you comes, as Mr. Choate has said, by "an
+instinct unawares," and this was confirmed by any reasoning and any
+deductions I might have had. From the imagination of my earliest youth,
+from the sympathy of the most vivid time, and from the most logical look
+at the situation in my mature life, I came to the conclusion that the
+destiny of the present and the future world rests with great and
+undivided empires. [Applause.] I had lived to see Italy, out of its
+confusion of States, growing up into a great integrity, renewing the
+promises of the wonderful classic times and the glory of Rome renovated
+into a new and prosperous nation. I have lived to see, we have all lived
+to see, the same process taking place in Germany. In Germany,
+notwithstanding the greatest division, the most peculiar separation of
+religion and even of races, yet nevertheless that great German empire is
+coming forward as a monument of the civilization of the future world,
+and as the centre of all Europe against any form of Oriental barbarism.
+And I knew from the history of my own country that that was no new
+principle, but one we had always maintained. England never at any moment
+thought of giving up the principle of the integrity of its empire. You
+yourselves are the evidences of the energy with which we sustained it.
+[Prolonged applause.] And we had at our doors, we had within us, another
+nation, in many points alien to ourselves; of a different race largely,
+of a different religion almost generally; a nation which we had treated
+sometimes with kindness, sometimes with harshness, sometimes with
+justice, and many other times with injustice; but always on the
+principle of the integrity of the empire. [Applause.] And I could not
+see how an intelligent man could see what Italy was growing to, prophesy
+what Germany would become, and, knowing the difficulties of the present
+Ireland, how that man could wish to destroy the integrity of the United
+States. Fact and history were against him, and in addition to that I
+felt that--in favoring or in sustaining your separation, in allowing
+special and local sympathy to act upon me, instead of the great logic of
+historical truths--if I could have allowed myself to act in that line of
+sympathy which would have bound me to my countrymen, I should have felt
+I had belied the truth of history as well as, I believe, the foundation
+of general morality. [Great applause.]
+
+Therefore, gentlemen, I have little individual merit for whatever I may
+have said upon that matter. I tell you that that was the calculation,
+the best calculation of my own mind, that it was the simple result of
+the deduction of my own reasoning [applause], and if you have shown me
+gratitude on this matter I will not say that I have not felt in a
+certain sense it was not deserved, from the motives I have alluded to.
+And if, as some cynic has said, gratitude is nothing whatever but the
+means of securing favors to come, I can assure you that you have
+accomplished your object [laughter and applause], and if you have
+desired that, in any means which Providence has placed in my power, in
+any influence direct or indirect which I may exert, I shall speak as I
+have spoken and think as I have thought of the United States of America,
+you may be well sure that I will do so. [Applause.]
+
+On another occasion when I have been kindly received, I have spoken of
+my literary sympathy with this country. Every Englishman rightly looks
+to this country as he would with a sense of appeal to posterity. He
+feels that if he has said anything, if he has written anything, if he
+has touched any chord, if he has struck even any verbal assurance that
+pleases mankind, if you take it up you pass it on; it does not go from
+tongue to tongue in the little distant Anglia of Europe.
+
+I recognize that I have met in this country men whom I shall be glad to
+meet anywhere and with whose familiarity I have been honored. And I
+might say this, that if I were to compare the best men that I have met
+here with the best men that I have known in Europe, I should say simply
+this, that the men that I have found here seem to me as equal to the
+circumstances in which they have been placed, as intelligent in all
+their relations of life, as noble in their innermost impulses, as just
+in their expressions, as any I have ever met with in my intercourse with
+people in Europe. [Applause.] I have been honored with the familiarity
+of many distinguished men, I have been received with great kindness by
+your intelligent and able President. I had the fortune, the other day,
+to sit by the deathbed of that amiable, honest man, your Vice-President
+[Henry Wilson], in the Capitol at Washington, dying under the portrait
+of Jefferson. I have seen some of your able men with whom I have been
+intimate in Europe, and one whom you will allow me to mention above all
+others, a man whose career I witnessed during the great and stormy times
+of your troubles in England--Charles Francis Adams [long
+applause]--whose maintenance of your dignity was concurrent with a sense
+of the importance of good relations between England and America.
+
+Gentlemen, next year you will celebrate your Centennial, and I have been
+kindly asked by every person who wished me good-bye to come back to this
+Centennial. [Laughter.] As for the Centennial itself, I have no
+particular inclination to come back. I think it is quite right you
+should have your Centennial, but I do not quite see what an Englishman
+has to do with it. [Long laughter and applause.] It is a thing which a
+philosopher might almost make the foundation of a theory, that you who
+are going to have this magnificent celebration of the one hundredth year
+of your liberation from the horrible rule of England, at the same time
+accompany it with the warmest feelings toward the British nation.
+[Laughter and applause.] Now, if you will clearly understand that this
+Centennial is to be your last celebration of this kind, and that from
+that moment you become part of the great community of Europe, then I say
+it will be a very useful celebration and one which all the world will be
+ready to honor. Celebrating your independence, you call it. A very noble
+act at a very noble time! Your repulsion was fully justified by the
+folly and the stupidity and the ignorance of England.
+
+The causes of England and America are not different, but common to both.
+You have your own local difficulties, just as we have. You have your own
+religious difficulties, just as we have. Take a single instance. The
+question of local taxation--a very serious question with you, a question
+agitated in the great States. That question is one of the greatest
+importance that we are at this moment discussing in politics. It is a
+matter of great interest to us whether local taxation should be
+entrusted and commissioned to a body of persons specially appointed for
+that purpose by the Crown, or whether it should be entrusted to certain
+persons selected by the people. That will be one of the most important
+questions we shall have to consider in the next session or two of
+Parliament. It is said that there is great profusion, great waste, in
+our present arrangement of those matters, and that if our local
+expenditure were conducted by persons specially appointed for that
+purpose, it would be cheaper. I don't say more honestly, but more
+economically managed. This is a question that you are agitating at the
+present moment, and one that affects the politics of your great cities.
+
+Take again railroads. It is a question whether the railroad should be in
+the hands of the State or of private companies. We are talking about it
+every day. Our interest in rapid transit has been very much the same as
+yours. Our rapid transit has not only gone over certain unfortunate
+persons who stood in the way, but it has gone over ruined hopes and
+prostrated energies. There is hardly a question that I see agitated in
+American newspapers that, in one form or another, is not agitated with
+us. The act of Parliament which restored to England specie payments was
+met with exactly the same argument, exactly the same controversy,
+exactly the same speciousness as meet you in this country. We have
+followed you on the matter of popular education. You have been our
+teachers in that branch. We are at present following in your footsteps.
+[Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+JULIA WARD HOWE
+
+
+TRIBUTE TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+[Speech of Julia Ward Howe at the breakfast in celebration of the
+  seventieth birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, given by the publishers
+  of the "Atlantic Monthly," Boston, Mass., December 3, 1879. Mrs. Howe
+  sat at the right of Mr. Howells, then the editor of the "Atlantic,"
+  who presided at one end of the tables, with Mr. Emerson on his left.
+  Dr. Holmes sat on the right of Mr. Houghton, who presided at the other
+  end of the table, with Mrs. Stowe on his left. Mrs. Howe was called up
+  by the toast, "The girls we have not left behind us."]
+
+
+LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--One word in courtesy I must say in
+replying to so kind a mention as that which is made, not only of me, but
+of those of my sex who are so happy as to be present here to-day. I
+think, in looking on this scene, of a certain congress which took place
+in Paris more than a year ago, and it was called a congress of literary
+people, _gens de lettres_. When I heard that this was to take place I
+immediately bestirred myself to attend its sittings and went at once to
+the headquarters to find how I might do so. I then learned to my great
+astonishment that no women were to be included among these _gens de
+lettres_, that is, literary people. [Laughter.] Now, we have thought it
+a very modest phrase sometimes to plead that, whatever women may not be,
+they are people. [Laughter and applause.] And it would seem to-day that
+they are recognized as literary people, and I am very glad that you
+gentlemen have found room for the sisterhood to-day, and have found room
+to place them so numerously here, and I must say that to my eyes the
+banquet looks very much more cheerful than it would without them.
+[Applause.] It looks to me as though it had all blossomed out under a
+new social influence, and beside each dark stem I see a rose. [Laughter
+and applause.] But I must say at once that I came here entirely
+unprovided with a speech, and, not dreaming of one, yet I came provided
+with something. I considered myself invited as a sort of
+grandmother--indeed, I am, and I know a grandmother is usually expected
+to have something in her pocket. [Laughter and applause.] And I have a
+very modest tribute to the illustrious person whom we are met to-day to
+honor. With your leave I will read it. [Applause.]
+
+    Thou metamorphic god!
+  Who mak'st the straight Olympus thy abode,
+    Hermes to subtle laughter moving,
+    Apollo with serener loving,
+  Thou demi-god also!
+  Who dost all the powers of healing know;
+    Thou hero who dost wield
+    The golden sword and shield,--
+  Shield of a comprehensive mind,
+  And sword to wound the foes of human kind;
+
+    Thou man of noble mould!
+    Whose metal grows not cold
+  Beneath the hammer of the hurrying years;
+    A fiery breath doth blow
+    Across its fervid glow,
+  And still its resonance delights our ears;
+
+    Loved of thy brilliant mates,
+    Relinquished to the fates,
+  Whose spirit music used to chime with thine,
+    Transfigured in our sight,
+    Not quenched in death's dark night,
+  They hold thee in companionship divine.
+
+    O autocratic muse!
+    Soul-rainbow of all hues,
+  Packed full of service are thy bygone years;
+    Thy winged steed doth fly
+    Across the starry sky,
+  Bearing the lowly burthens of thy tears.
+
+    I try this little leap,
+    Wishing that from the deep,
+  I might some pearl of song adventurous bring.
+    Despairing, here I stop,
+    And my poor offering drop,--
+  Why stammer I when thou art here to sing?
+
+
+
+
+CLARK HOWELL
+
+
+OUR REUNITED COUNTRY
+
+[Speech of Clark Howell at the Peace Jubilee Banquet in Chicago, October
+  19, 1898, in response to the toast, "Our Reunited Country: North and
+  South."]
+
+
+MR. TOASTMASTER, AND MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN:--In the mountains of
+my State, in a county remote from the quickening touch of commerce, and
+railroads and telegraphs--so far removed that the sincerity of its
+rugged people flows unpolluted from the spring of nature--two
+vine-covered mounds, nestling in the solemn silence of a country
+churchyard, suggest the text of my response to the sentiment to which I
+am to speak to-night. A serious text, Mr. Toastmaster, for an occasion
+like this, and yet out of it there is life and peace and hope and
+prosperity, for in the solemn sacrifice of the voiceless grave can the
+chiefest lesson of the Republic be learned, and the destiny of its real
+mission be unfolded. So bear with me while I lead you to the
+rust-stained slab, which for a third of a century--since
+Chickamauga--has been kissed by the sun as it peeped over the Blue
+Ridge, melting the tears with which the mourning night had bedewed the
+inscription:--
+
+ "Here lies a Confederate soldier.
+      He died for his country."
+
+The September day which brought the body of this mountain hero to that
+home among the hills which had smiled upon his infancy, been gladdened
+by his youth, and strengthened by his manhood, was an ever memorable one
+with the sorrowing concourse of friends and neighbors who followed his
+shot-riddled body to the grave. And of that number no man gainsaid the
+honor of his death, lacked full loyalty to the flag for which he fought,
+or doubted the justice of the cause for which he gave his life.
+
+Thirty-five years have passed; another war has called its roll of
+martyrs; again the old bell tolls from the crude latticed tower of the
+settlement church; another great pouring of sympathetic humanity, and
+this time the body of a son, wrapped in the stars and stripes, is
+lowered to its everlasting rest beside that of the father who sleeps in
+the stars and bars.
+
+There were those there who stood by the grave of the Confederate hero
+years before, and the children of those were there, and of those present
+no one gainsaid the honor of the death of this hero of El Caney, and
+none were there but loved, as patriots alone can love, the glorious flag
+that enshrines the people of a common country as it enshrouds the form
+that will sleep forever in its blessed folds. And on this tomb will be
+written:--
+
+ "Here lies the son of a Confederate soldier.
+      He died for his country."
+
+And so it is that between the making of these two graves human hands and
+human hearts have reached a solution of the vexed problem that has
+baffled human will and human thought for three decades. Sturdy sons of
+the South have said to their brothers of the North that the people of
+the South had long since accepted the arbitrament of the sword to which
+they had appealed. And likewise the oft-repeated message has come back
+from the North that peace and good will reigned, and that the wounds of
+civil dissension were but as sacred memories. Good fellowship was wafted
+on the wings of commerce and development from those who had worn the
+blue to those who had worn the gray. Nor were these messages delivered
+in vain, for they served to pave the way for the complete and absolute
+elimination of the line of sectional differences by the only process by
+which such a result was possible. The sentiment of the great majority of
+the people of the South was rightly spoken in the message of the
+immortal Hill, and in the burning eloquence of Henry Grady--both
+Georgians--the record of whose blessed work for the restoration of peace
+between the sections becomes a national heritage, and whose names are
+stamped in enduring impress upon the affection of the people of the
+Republic.
+
+And yet there were still those among us who believed your course was
+polite, but insincere, and those among you who assumed that our
+professed attitude was sentimental and unreal. Bitterness had departed,
+and sectional hate was no more, but there were those who feared, even if
+they did not believe, that between the great sections of our greater
+government there was not the perfect faith and trust and love that both
+professed; that there was want of the faith that made the American
+Revolution a successful possibility; that there was want of the trust
+that crystallized our States into the original Union; that there was
+lack of the love that bound in unassailable strength the united
+sisterhood of States that withstood the shock of Civil War. It is true
+this doubt existed to a greater degree abroad than at home. But to-day
+the mist of uncertainty has been swept away by the sunlight of events,
+and there, where doubt obscured before stands in bold relief, commanding
+the admiration of the whole world, the most glorious type of united
+strength and sentiment and loyalty known to the history of nations.
+
+Out of the chaos of that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the
+vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach
+surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable--a
+new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its
+cheeks and the gleam of morning in its eyes. No one questioned that
+commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united
+its faltering provinces, maintaining the limit of its imperial
+jurisdiction by the power of commercial bonds and the majesty of the
+sword, until in its very vastness it collapsed. The heart of its people
+did not beat in unison. Nations may be made by the joining of hands, but
+the measure of their real strength and vitality, like that of the human
+body, is in the heart. Show me the country whose people are not at heart
+in sympathy with its institutions, and the fervor of whose patriotism is
+not bespoken in its flag, and I will show you a ship of state which is
+sailing in shallow waters, toward unseen eddies of uncertainty, if not
+to the open rocks of dismemberment.
+
+Whence was the proof to come, to ourselves as well as to the world, that
+we were being moved once again by a common impulse, and by the same
+heart that inspired and gave strength to the hands that smote the
+British in the days of the Revolution, and again at New Orleans; that
+made our ships the masters of the seas; that placed our flag on
+Chapultepec, and widened our domain from ocean to ocean? How was the
+world to know that the burning fires of patriotism, so essential to
+national glory and achievement, had not been quenched by the blood
+spilled by the heroes of both sides of the most desperate struggle known
+in the history of civil wars? How was the doubt that stood, all
+unwilling, between outstretched hands and sympathetic hearts, to be, in
+fact, dispelled?
+
+If from out the caldron of conflict there arose this doubt, only from
+the crucible of war could come the answer. And, thank God, that answer
+has been made in the record of the war, the peaceful termination of
+which we celebrate to-night. Read it in every page of its history; read
+it in the obliteration of party and sectional lines in the congressional
+action which called the nation to arms in the defence of prostrate
+liberty, and for the extension of the sphere of human freedom; read it
+in the conduct of the distinguished Federal soldier who, as the chief
+executive of this great Republic,[9] honors this occasion by his
+presence to-night, and whose appointments in the first commissions
+issued after war had been declared made manifest the sincerity of his
+often repeated utterances of complete sectional reconciliation and the
+elimination of sectional lines in the affairs of government. Differing
+with him, as I do, on party issues, utterly at variance with the views
+of his party on economic problems, I sanction with all my heart the
+obligation that rests on every patriotic citizen to make party second to
+country, and in the measure that he has been actuated by this broad and
+patriotic policy he will receive the plaudits of the whole people: "Well
+done, good and faithful servant."
+
+Portentous indeed have been the developments of the past six months; the
+national domain has been extended far into the Caribbean Sea on the
+south, and to the west it is so near the mainland of Asia that we can
+hear grating of the process which is grinding the ancient celestial
+empire into pulp for the machinery of civilization and of progress.
+
+In a very short while the last page of this war will have been written,
+except for the effect it will have on the future. Our flag now floats
+over Porto Rico, a part of Cuba, and Manila. It must soon bespeak our
+sovereignty over the island of Luzon, or possibly over the whole
+Philippine group. It will, ere long, from the staff on Havana's Morro,
+cast its shadow on the sunken and twisted frame of the Maine--a grim
+reminder of the vengeance that awaits any nation that lays unholy hands
+on an American citizen or violates any sacred American right. It has
+drawn from an admiring world unstinted applause for the invincible army,
+that under tropic suns, despite privations and disease, untrained but
+undismayed, has swept out of their own trenches and routed from their
+own battlements, like chaff before the wind, the trained forces of a
+formidable power. It has bodily stripped the past of lustre and
+defiantly challenged the possibilities of the future in the
+accomplishment of a matchless navy, whose deeds have struck the universe
+with consternation and with wonder.
+
+But speaking as a Southerner and an American, I say that this has been
+as naught compared to the greatest good this war has accomplished.
+Drawing alike from all sections of the Union for her heroes and her
+martyrs, depending alike upon north, south, east and west for her
+glorious victories, and weeping with sympathy with the widows and the
+stricken mothers wherever they may be, America, incarnated spirit of
+liberty, stands again to-day the holy emblem of a household in which the
+children abide in unity, equality, love and peace. The iron sledge of
+war that rent asunder the links of loyalty and love has welded them
+together again. Ears that were deaf to loving appeals for the burial of
+sectional strife have listened and believed when the muster guns have
+spoken. Hearts that were cold to calls for trust and sympathy have
+awakened to loving confidence in the baptism of their blood.
+
+Drawing inspiration from the flag of our country, the South has shared
+not only the dangers, but the glories of the war. In the death of brave
+young Bagley at Cardenas, North Carolina furnished the first blood in
+the tragedy. It was Victor Blue of South Carolina, who, like the Swamp
+Fox of the Revolution, crossed the fiery path of the enemy at his
+pleasure, and brought the first official tidings of the situation as it
+existed in Cuba. It was Brumby, a Georgia boy, the flag lieutenant of
+Dewey, who first raised the stars and stripes over Manila. It was
+Alabama that furnished Hobson--glorious Hobson--who accomplished two
+things the Spanish navy never yet has done--sunk an American ship, and
+made a Spanish man-of-war securely float.
+
+The South answered the call to arms with its heart, and its heart goes
+out with that of the North in rejoicing at the result. The demonstration
+lacking to give the touch of life to the picture has been made. The open
+sesame that was needed to give insight into the true and loyal hearts
+both North and South has been spoken. Divided by war, we are united as
+never before by the same agency, and the union is of hearts as well as
+hands.
+
+The doubter may scoff, and the pessimist may croak, but even they must
+take hope at the picture presented in the simple and touching incident
+of eight Grand Army veterans, with their silvery heads bowed in
+sympathy, escorting the lifeless body of the Daughter of the Confederacy
+from Narragansett to its last, long rest at Richmond.
+
+When that great and generous soldier, U. S. Grant, gave back to Lee,
+crushed, but ever glorious, the sword he had surrendered at Appomattox,
+that magnanimous deed said to the people of the South: "You are our
+brothers." But when the present ruler of our grand republic on awakening
+to the condition of war that confronted him, with his first commission
+placed the leader's sword in the hands of those gallant confederate
+commanders, Joe Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, he wrote between the lines in
+living letters of everlasting light the words: "There is but one people
+of this Union, one flag alone for all."
+
+The South, Mr. Toastmaster, will feel that her sons have been well
+given, that her blood has been well spilled, if that sentiment is to be
+indeed the true inspiration of our nation's future. God grant it may be
+as I believe it will.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+THE "ATLANTIC" AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS
+
+[Speech of William Dean Howells, as editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," at
+  the dinner given to John Greenleaf Whittier, at Boston, Mass.,
+  December 17, 1877, in celebration of the poet's seventieth birthday,
+  and in celebration also of the twentieth year of the magazine.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN, CONTRIBUTORS AND FRIENDS OF THE "ATLANTIC
+MONTHLY":--The serious moment has approached which sooner or later
+arrives at most banquets of the dinner-giving Anglo-Saxon race--a moment
+when each commensal, like the pampered sacrifice of the Aztecs, suddenly
+feels that the joys which have flattered him into forgetfulness of his
+fate are at an end, and that he must now gird himself for expiation. It
+is ordinarily a moment when the unprepared guest abandons himself to
+despair, and when even the more prophetic spirit finds memory forsaking
+it, or the treacherous ideas committed to paper withering away till the
+manuscript in the breast-pocket rustles sere and sad as the leaves of
+autumn. But let no one at this table be under a fearful apprehension.
+This were to little purpose an image of the great republic of letters,
+if the mind of any citizen might be invaded, and his right to hold his
+peace denied. Any gentleman being called upon and having nothing to say,
+can make his silent bow and sit down again without disfavor; he may even
+do so with a reasonable hope of applause. Reluctant orators, therefore,
+who are chafing under the dread of being summoned to stand and deliver
+an extorted eloquence, and who have already begun to meditate reprisals
+upon the person or the literature of the present speaker, may safely
+suspend their preparations; it shall not be his odious duty to molest
+them.
+
+We are met, gentlemen, upon the seventieth birthday of a man and poet
+whose fame is dear to us all, but whose modesty at first feared too much
+the ordeal by praise, to consent to his meeting with us. But he must
+soon have felt the futility of trying to stay away, of endeavoring to
+class himself with the absent, who are always wrong. There are renowns
+to which absence is impossible, and whether he would or no, Whittier
+must still have been in every heart. Therefore he is here in person, to
+the unbounded pleasure of those assembled to celebrate this day. I will
+leave him to the greetings of others, and for my own part will invite
+the goldenest silence of his sect to muse a fitting tribute to the verse
+in which a brave and beautiful and lofty life is enshrined.
+
+As to the periodical which unites us all, without rivalry, without
+jealousy, the publisher has already spoken, and where there is so much
+for the editor to say he cannot, perhaps, say too little. For twenty
+years it has represented, and may almost be said to have embodied,
+American letters. With scarcely an exception, every name known in our
+literature has won fame from its pages, or has added lustre to them; and
+an intellectual movement, full of a generous life and of a high ideal,
+finds its record there in vastly greater measure than in any or all
+other places. Its career is not only distinguished among American
+periodicals, but upon the whole is unique. It would not be possible, I
+think, to point to any other publication of its sort, which so long
+retained the allegiance of its great founders, and has added so
+constantly so many names of growing repute to its list of writers. Those
+who made its renown, as well as those whose renown it has made or is
+making, are still its frequent contributors, and even in its latest
+years have done some of their best work in it. If from time to time a
+valued "Atlantic" writer ceases to appear, he is sure, finally, to
+reappear; he cannot even die without leaving it a rich legacy of
+manuscript. All young writers are eager to ally their names with the
+great memories and presences on its roll of fame; its stamp gives a new
+contributor immediate currency; it introduces him immediately into the
+best public, the best company, the company of those Boston authors who
+first inspired it with the life so vigorous yet. It was not given us all
+to be born in Boston, but when we find ourselves in the "Atlantic" we
+all seem to suffer a sea-change, an aesthetic renaissance; a livelier
+literary conscience stirs in us; we have its fame at heart; we must do
+our best for Maga's name as well as for our own hope; we are naturalized
+Bostonians in the finest and highest sense. With greater reverence and
+affection than we can express, we younger and youngest writers for the
+Atlantic regard the early contributors whom we are so proud and glad to
+meet here, and it is with a peculiar sense of my own unworthiness that I
+salute them, and join the publishers in welcoming them to this board.
+
+I know very well the difference between an author whom the "Atlantic"
+has floated and an author who has floated the "Atlantic," and confronted
+with this disparity I have only an official courage in turning to invoke
+the poet, the wit, the savant whose invention gave the "Atlantic" its
+name, and whose genius has prospered an adventurous enterprise. If I did
+not name him I am sure the common consciousness would summon Dr. Holmes
+to his feet. I have felt authorized to hail the perpetual autocrat of
+all the "Breakfast Tables" as the chief author of the "Atlantic's"
+success, by often hearing the first editor of the magazine assert the
+fact. This generous praise of his friend--when in a good cause was his
+praise ever stinted?--might be spoken without fear that his own part
+would be forgotten. His catholic taste, his subtle sense of beauty, his
+hearty sympathy and sterling weight of character gave the magazine an
+impress which it has been the highest care to his successors to keep
+clear and bright. He imparted to it above all that purpose which I hope
+is forever inseparable from it, when in his cordial love of good
+literature he stretched a welcoming grasp of recognition to every young
+writer, East, West, North, or South, who gave promise of good work.
+Remembering his kindness in those days to one young writer, very
+obscure, very remote (whose promise still waits fulfilment), I must not
+attempt to praise him, lest grateful memories lead me into forbidden
+paths of autobiography; but when I name Mr. Lowell I am sure you will
+all look for some response to Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, a contributor
+whose work gave peculiar quality and worth to the numbers of the
+magazine, and whose presence here is a grateful reminder of one with
+whom he has been so long bound in close ties of amity.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY ELIAS HOWLAND
+
+
+RUSSIA
+
+[Speech of Henry E. Howland at a banquet given by the Chamber of
+  Commerce of the State of New York, April 28, 1893, to the Officers of
+  foreign and United States vessels escorting the Spanish caravels to
+  the harbor of New York City. The President of the Chamber of Commerce,
+  Alexander E. Orr, in introducing Judge Howland, said: "Gentlemen, our
+  next toast is 'Russia' and will be responded to by the Hon. Henry E.
+  Howland."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--The pleasing duty is assigned me
+of recognizing the largest and one of the famous powers of Europe,
+accompanied by the suggestion that my time is limited. The situation is
+like that of the clergyman who was sent for in great haste by a man who
+was very ill, and thought the end was approaching. He said to the
+minister, when he arrived: "I have been a great sinner, I am pretty
+sick, and I am afraid my time is short, and I want you to pray with me.
+You must be brief but fervent." [Laughter.]
+
+Most of us who sit at this table, judging from the opportunities I have
+had of hearing them discourse, fulfil the requirement of Mr. Disraeli's
+great traveller in that they have seen more than they have remembered
+and remembered more than they have seen. [Laughter.] But I doubt if in
+all their experiences they ever sat in a more genial and attractive
+company than this. We have here in this year of peace the chosen
+representatives of ten nations, with all the romance of the sea, the
+splendid histories and traditions of their countries, and their own
+personal distinction and fame to make them welcome and interesting.
+
+Already have you conquered the land, and from the time you effected a
+lodgment at Fortress Monroe until you are hull down on the horizon, on
+your homeward voyages, your progress will prove to have been a
+triumphant march into the hearts and homes of the people. [Applause.]
+You have stores of wisdom and most agreeable experiences to accumulate.
+Judging from press reports you may have thought you met a fair type of
+the girls of America at Hampton Roads. [Laughter.] Wait till the
+wonderful resources of this country in this its richest and unparalleled
+product are spread before you. [Laughter.] Then you will not wonder at
+the mysterious power of Helen of Troy, who set nations by the ears, or
+the fascination of the Queen of the Nile, who made heroes forget their
+duty and their homes. If you should take any for themselves, alone, we
+should commend your choice, and though parting with them reluctantly,
+should wish you God-speed. But if their money should be your object we
+are just now objecting to the exportation of gold and trying to maintain
+our reserves. [Laughter.]
+
+Whatever your nationality, you will find a large and prosperous
+contingent of it in this city, the majority of whose municipal officers,
+however, belong to that race which looks to Mr. Gladstone as its
+saviour, and believes that when an Irishman dies it's because there is
+an angel short. [Great laughter.] You will find here a wonderful power
+of brag which develops as you seek the setting sun. Some inquiring
+spirits will be moved to ask you what you think of this country, and, if
+you visit the World's Fair some adventurous person may ask your opinion
+of Chicago. It is needless to say that a favorable opinion cannot be too
+highly colored, and if tinted with vermilion, will conduce to the
+pleasure of your stay. [Laughter.] You will have little opportunity to
+admire the wonders of our natural scenery save at Niagara. You will be
+able to appreciate the reply of an American Naval officer to an English
+friend in Italy when each had been maintaining the superiority of his
+own country. Finally the grand spectacle of Mount Vesuvius in eruption,
+throwing its brilliant rays across the Bay of Naples, burst upon their
+astonished gaze.
+
+"Now, look at that," said the Englishman. "You haven't got anything in
+America that comes anywhere near that."
+
+"No," replied the Yankee, "we haven't got Vesuvius, but we have got a
+waterfall that could put that thing out in less than five minutes."
+[Laughter.]
+
+At Chicago your professional instinct will lead you to admire the
+magnificent turreted battleship which, in consequence of a convention
+with England that neither shall maintain a fleet upon the Great Lakes,
+is built upon piles, and of such substantial material that there are
+fears it cannot withstand the atmospheric concussion from the fire of
+the big Krupp gun. But I need not rehearse the experiences to come. You
+would weary in their telling. We shall keep you as long as possible and
+be loath to part with you. And if we have our way, your experience will
+be like that of the old lady, who was travelling on the underground
+railroad in London. Just as they were approaching a station, she said to
+a gentleman, in the compartment with her: "Will you assist me to alight
+at this station, sir? I am, as you see, rather stout, and I have a
+physical infirmity which makes it necessary for me to step out
+backwards, and every time I try to get out the guard bundles me back
+into the car, shouts 'All aboard,' shuts the door, and I have gone
+around this line three times already." [Great laughter.]
+
+At this gate of the continent we begin the pageant of the Columbian
+Exposition. By the cruel irony of fate the promoters and sponsor of this
+great display cannot have any hand in the Fair. The Spaniards have a
+proverb that you can't at the same time ring the bell and be in the
+procession [laughter]; and although you can make Chicago a seaport by
+Act of Congress, you cannot get a fleet of six thousand ton ironclads
+over 1,000 miles of land, even on the Chicago Limited, or the Empire
+Express. [Laughter.] And so we New Yorkers appropriate this as our
+private, peculiar, particular Exhibition; as Touchstone says, "A poor
+thing, sir, but our own."
+
+It is not given to many men in their experience to see such a sight as
+is now spread before us on the waters of the harbor of New York. The
+might and majesty of the great nations of the earth are here represented
+in their fleets which typify the country afloat, as the valor, the
+ability and the distinction of their officers represent that of their
+peoples. Former antagonists here float side by side; peace broods over
+the armored sides of battleships and the feverish lips of their guns
+speak only salutes of friendship and courtesy. It is a pity that it is
+not always so.
+
+Among the flags that float from the mastheads of the fleet in yonder
+harbor there is one--the blue St. Andrew's Cross--that represents an
+empire of over 8,000,000 square miles, of more diversified races than
+any other in Europe; that reaches from the Baltic to the Pacific--from
+the Arctic to the Black Sea; that receives the allegiance of 103,000,000
+of people, and from its great white throne on the shores of the Gulf of
+Finland directs the destinies of its subjects and shapes the policy of
+Europe. [Applause.]
+
+That flag is not unfamiliar in these waters. In the battle summer of
+1863--thirty years ago--while we were engaged in a life-and-death
+struggle for national existence and the preservation of the Union, it
+floated over the fleet of Admiral Lissoffski in this harbor--a signal of
+friendship, encouragement and protection against foreign interference,
+pending the settlement of the issues of our Civil War. No diplomatic
+declaration was made, no threat was uttered, no sign was given; we only
+knew the flag was there, and if it meant anything, that the power of one
+of the mightiest nations of Europe was behind it. We now know from what
+it saved us:--
+
+ "When darkness hid the starry skies,
+    In war's long winter night,
+  One ray still cheered our straining eyes,
+    The far-off Northern Light."
+
+No American who loves his country can forget that incident in our hour
+of agony, nor the friendly significance of that flag. It was an American
+captain who used the expression which has become historic, when he went
+to the relief of his English brother-in-arms at the storming of the
+Pei-Ho forts, that "blood is thicker than water," and while it courses
+in the veins of a loyal American, he will remember with grateful
+appreciation the sympathy and the moral support, more powerful than
+armed battalions or cruisers, of Alexander II, who, like our Lincoln,
+freed his serfs, and like him, while serving his people, fell by the
+hand of an assassin.
+
+Gentlemen, who serve His Imperial Majesty the Czar, we salute you and
+your flag under whatever skies or on whatever sea it floats. We remind
+you that we are not ungrateful. The best we have is yours; the Nation
+presents arms as you pass in review, and as our borders approach each
+other in the frozen zone so when we meet you here:--
+
+ "Though our hearts were dry as the shell on the sand,
+    They would fill like the goblet I hold in my hand."
+
+ "Bleak are our shores in the blast of December,
+    Fettered and chill is the rivulet's flow,
+  Throbbing and warm are the hearts that remember
+    Who was our friend when the world was our foe.
+
+ "Fires of the North, in eternal communion
+    Blend your broad flashes with evening's bright star,
+  God bless the Empire that loves our great Union!
+    Strength to her people! Long life to the Czar!"
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+OUR ANCESTORS AND OURSELVES
+
+[Speech of Henry E. Howland, President of the New England Society in the
+  City of New York, at their ninety-fourth annual dinner, New York,
+  December 22, 1899.]
+
+
+FELLOW-MEMBERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--It is my agreeable
+duty to receive this weary, way-worn band of Pilgrims upon the occasion
+of their 279th landing upon these bleak and arid shores, and, like
+Samoset on the occasion of your first arrival, to welcome you to the
+scanty fare and the privations and sufferings that are incident to this
+ledge of the old Plymouth Rock. [Applause.]
+
+The traditions of the early entertainment of Massasoit and his warriors
+at Plymouth, lasting several days, to cement a friendship which was
+never broken, when heavy drafts were made upon the little stock of New
+England rum, imported Hollands, bear's meat and Indian corn, have here
+been renewed to such an extent that, like them, we doubtless feel that
+the "earth is ours and the fulness thereof." [Laughter.] Though, if
+Plymouth Rock and the Waldorf-Astoria are synonymous terms for fulness,
+we should think that the latter was the more synonymous of the two.
+[Laughter.] The surroundings of the two occasions may differ--velvet
+carpets, groaning tables, genial temperature and electric lights are an
+excellent substitute for log floors, a restricted larder, the icy chill
+and the winter stars. The grim, stern Pilgrim with the austere face and
+peaked hat, and the lean, wild, loping Indian are here supplanted by a
+company whose well-rounded figures and genial faces reflect the
+assurance of the possession of sky-scraping buildings, pipe lines,
+through lines, warehouses, well-stuffed deposit vaults and comfortable
+bank accounts [laughter], upon whom smile from the boxes the blessings
+which, like those of Providence, come from above [applause] and cause us
+to echo the sentiment unconsciously expressed by the lady who was
+distributing tracts in the streets of London. She handed one to a
+cabman; he glanced at it, handed it back, touched his hat and politely
+said: "Thank you, lady, I am a married man." [Laughter.] She looked
+nervously at the title, which was, "Abide with me" [laughter], and
+hurriedly departed. Under this inspiration we agree with the proverb of
+the Eastern sage: "To be constant in love to one is good; to be constant
+to many is great." [Laughter.] But we must remember, while the critical
+eyes of our households are upon us, that our halos will never be too
+small for our heads. [Laughter.]
+
+Under these favoring conditions we celebrate the glories of our
+ancestors, the unparalleled results of their achievements, and
+ourselves. I hope you will find that the only defect in my perfunctory
+remarks as the presiding officer will be their brevity.
+
+Remembering some past occurrences on occasions like this, we agree with
+the pupil who was asked by his teacher, "What is the meaning of
+elocution?" and he answered: "It is the way people are put to death in
+some States." [Laughter.] But with this array of speakers before you,
+full of unwonted possibilities, you will not wonder if I feel like the
+undertaker in Sixth Avenue who displayed a sign in his window: "It is a
+pleasure to show goods." [Laughter.]
+
+The Society has shared in the all-pervading prosperity which illumines
+the land with a prospect of its indefinite continuance. It numbers 1,504
+members, and its invested funds aggregate the sum of $108,750. It has
+been liberal in its charitable contributions; it has resisted all
+attempts like those made against some of our large life insurance
+companies to compel it to distribute its surplus [laughter], and,
+refuting the statement of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, who said that
+the "chief duty of trustees was to commit judicious breaches of trust,"
+it has imitated the stern integrity of that bank cashier who upon a warm
+day sat down on the neighborly side of a sheet of postage stamps, and
+had to go home and make a change of clothing before he could get his
+books to balance. [Laughter.] And, taking warning from the slogan of the
+Bryanized Democracy, which caused a quotation from a message of one of
+our modern statesmen that "a public office is a public trust," to be met
+with the cry "Down with the trusts," our treasurer carefully avoids
+handling United States nickels, for they bear the motto "In God We
+Trust," and the Society might be met with the same attack and come into
+disrepute on that account. [Laughter.]
+
+In these days, when the Populist, fusionist, and demagogue is
+endeavoring, like Mrs. Partington, to sweep back the ocean tide of
+prosperity with a broom, clogging the wheels of industry and seeking by
+legislative enactment to reverse the laws of nature and of political
+economy, which are immutable by Divine decree, we can commend to them
+the answer of an examiner of a young man who applied for admission to
+the bar. He failed utterly in questions upon contracts, partnership,
+corporation law, commercial paper and real estate, and was told so.
+"Well," he said, "won't you try me on the statutes? I am pretty strong
+on them." "Well, what's the use," the examiner replied, "when some d--n
+fool Legislature may repeal all you know." [Laughter and applause.]
+
+Forty-seven members have died during the year. The list is entirely made
+up of men distinguished in all the pursuits of life--who wrote their
+names in bright characters upon the history of the City and State, and
+whose memory will always remain as a precious legacy and an example to
+those who succeed them. Fourteen had passed the Psalmist's limit of
+life, and nine had passed their eightieth year. In it are enrolled the
+names of William H. Appleton, the honored head of the great publishing
+firm known wherever the English language is spoken, to whose reputation
+he contributed so much by his clear intelligence, breadth of views and
+spotless character.
+
+Isaac H. Bailey, for several years the President of this Society, an
+honorable merchant and a trusted public officer.
+
+William Dowd, the treasurer of the Society for fifteen years;
+distinguished in finance and the management of large corporate
+interests, and endeared to a host of friends by the charm of his genial
+nature.
+
+Gen. George S. Greene, the oldest living graduate of the West Point
+Military Academy, who rendered valiant and distinguished service on many
+battle-fields of the Civil War, who was the faithful and efficient head
+of the Croton Aqueduct Board for many years; was represented in the
+military service of his country by several distinguished sons and, until
+his death, in his ninety-eighth year, retained all his faculties
+undimmed--a soldier and a citizen of whom his country was justly proud.
+[Applause.]
+
+Roswell P. Flower, an honored Governor of this State, eminent as a
+philanthropist and financier, a leader among strong men.
+
+William H. Webb, a pioneer shipbuilder, with a name famous wherever
+American commerce extended, a rugged, iron man who stood four square to
+all the winds of heaven, generous and tender-hearted as a child, who for
+forty-five years never failed in his attendance at the dinners of this
+Society, and who left a reputation for philanthropy and public spirit
+unsurpassed in this city of generous giving.
+
+John G. Moore, John Brooks, Edward H. R. Lyman, Edward A. Quintard, Dr.
+Charles Inslee Pardee, and all the others to whom the limit of time will
+not allow a tribute worthy of their honorable lives and work.
+
+We do well to recall upon such occasions as this, as an inspiration, the
+story of the emigration of our Pilgrim ancestors to America, involving,
+as it does, the whole modern development, diffusion and organization of
+English liberty, which lives and breathes and burns in legend and in
+song. It is unparalleled in the annals of the world, in the majesty of
+its purpose and the poverty of its means, the weakness of the beginning
+and the grandeur of the result. It is unparalleled in classic or modern
+history, in its exhibition of courage, patience, persistence,
+steadfastness in devotion to principle. Beginning with the hasty flight
+from Lincolnshire to Holland, the peaceful life in exile, the perilous
+ocean voyage in a crazy craft in mid-winter, the frail settlement at
+Plymouth--a shred of the most tenacious life in Europe--floating over
+the waste of waters and clinging on the bleakest edge of America, beset
+by Indians, wild beasts and disease, starving, frozen and dying, remote
+from succor and beyond the knowledge of their kin, like a seed from the
+Old World floated to the New by ocean currents, containing the elements
+which, like the mustard seed, should yield a hundred fold and overspread
+and dominate a continent, until the prophecy familiar to the Pilgrims
+should be fulfilled: "The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose,
+a little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a great nation."
+[Applause.]
+
+The Archbishop and Ministers of King James, who drove these men and the
+26,000 who followed them, the flower of the English Puritans, from
+England, like Louis XIV, when he sent the Huguenots into exile by the
+revocation of the Edict of Nantes, furnished an example to that master
+of the school where the Eton system of flogging prevailed. On a Saturday
+morning the delinquents were called up to be flogged. One of the boys
+inquired, "What am I to be punished for, sir?" "I don't know, but your
+name is down on the list, and I shall have to go through with it," and
+the flogging was administered. The boy made such a fuss that the master
+looked over the list on his return to his rooms, to see whether he had
+made a mistake, and found that he had whipped the confirmation class.
+[Laughter.]
+
+They brought the foundation of a free people, they converted the
+wilderness of a continent, they established the New England home, rich
+only in piety, education, liberty, industry and character, from which
+has gone out the best inspiration of the Republic they forecast.
+
+There have been times in the later history of the country when the
+Puritan was not altogether popular, and the feeling entertained toward
+him and his descendants was expressed like that at a Liberal meeting in
+Scotland, where the proceedings were being opened by prayer, and the
+reverend gentleman prayed fervently that "the Liberals might hang a'
+thegither." He was interrupted by a loud and irreverent "Amen" from the
+back of the hall. "Not, O Lord," went on the clergyman, "in the sense
+which that profane scoffer would have ye to understand, but that they
+may hang thegither in accord and concord." "I dinna care so much what
+kind of a cord it is," struck in the voice, "sae lang as it is a strong
+cord." [Laughter.]
+
+Fortunately for them, and perhaps for the world, opinions differed
+enough to give them a chance. "You can't always tell," said a man, at
+the end of a discussion, "what one's neighbors think of him." "I came
+mighty near knowing once," said a citizen, with a reminiscent look, "but
+the jury disagreed." [Laughter.] But with the Puritans, when discussion
+ceased and other arguments began, the result was like that when the lady
+said to her clergyman, who was paying her an afternoon call, of her
+little boy, who bore the marks of a struggle: "Johnny has been a bad
+little boy to-day; he has been fighting and has got a black eye." "So I
+see," said the clergyman. "Come into the next room with me, Johnny, and
+I will pray with you." "You had better go home and pray with your own
+little boy, he has got two black eyes." [Laughter.]
+
+The forty-one families who came in the "Mayflower," and the thousand of
+English Puritans who came in the next decade, are not entitled to all
+the credit for the development of the country, for there were others of
+their kind in Virginia, and, unlike the Boers of the Transvaal, they
+gave later comers a show. [Laughter and applause.] The process of
+appropriation by one people of a country, even if they are the first
+settlers, can be carried too far even for advantage to them or to
+inspire credulity in its possibility. A returned traveller, relating his
+adventures, said: "The most remarkable experience I ever had occurred a
+short time ago in Russia. I was sleighing on the Steppes, miles from my
+destination, when, to my horror, I found I was pursued by a pack of
+wolves; I fired blindly into the pack, killing one of them, and, to my
+relief, saw the others stop to devour him; after doing this, however,
+they still came on. I repeated the shot, with the same result, and each
+shot gave me an opportunity to whip up my horses. Finally there was only
+one wolf left, yet on it came with its fierce eyes glaring in
+anticipation of a good hot supper." "Hold on, there," said a man who had
+been listening, "by your way of reckoning, that last wolf must have had
+the rest of the pack inside of him." [Laughter.] "Well," said the
+traveller, "now I remember it, he did wobble a bit." [Laughter.]
+
+It was wise in our forefathers to welcome those who, like them, were
+pioneers in the wilderness, to give them equal rights and to assimilate
+them into American citizenship. The qualities of which we boast in our
+Pilgrim ancestors still linger with their descendants, though among
+75,000,000 of people there may not be enough to go around. The
+expectation of it would be what Dr. Johnson said of a man who had
+married his third wife, as the "triumph of hope over experience."
+[Laughter.] But we must, on occasions like this, make some assumptions,
+like the lady of whom a friend said: "She puts on a good deal of style
+now she has a box at the opera." "Good gracious," said the other lady,
+"the woman must put on something when she goes to the opera."
+[Laughter.]
+
+Too many, it is true, deserve to be under the suspicion expressed by the
+market-man who was exhibiting his _array_ of "newly-laid eggs, fresh
+eggs, and plain eggs," to a young housekeeper, who finally asked, as to
+the latter: "Are these eggs really fresh?" "Well, madam," he replied,
+"we call them Saturday night eggs; they've tried all the week to be
+good." [Laughter.] And we are so compromising and tender in dealing with
+doubtful subjects that we follow the advice given to a man who asked how
+to tell a bad egg: Well, if you have anything to tell to a bad egg you
+had better break it gently. [Laughter.] Some have that kind of a
+conscience which was described by a small boy as the thing that makes
+you feel sorry when you get found out, and their idea of commercial
+integrity was expressed by the man who said, proudly, "At last I can
+look the world in the face as an honest man. I owe no one anything; the
+last claim against me is outlawed." Some aim high, but from the result
+they must have shut their eyes when they fired, and although as a Nation
+we pride ourselves upon our common sense, so that we can truly say not
+every man is made a fool of, the observer of men and things might say
+every man has the raw material in him. [Laughter.]
+
+But seriously speaking, we abate in no degree the claim that the best
+traditions of our forefathers have not degenerated in these modern days.
+Our hearts beat with a quicker throb at the recollection of the
+achievements of these last pregnant years; the eye lights with
+enthusiasm at the sight of the flag whose fluttering folds have
+witnessed such scenes of danger and inspired such daring deeds, and our
+voices shout in unison of acclaim the achievements of what a wondering
+African called "the angry Saxon race." [Applause.]
+
+The people have stood for humanity, honesty, order and progress. Its
+representatives in civil life have obeyed their behests. The American
+Regular has shown in his stern resolve, his self-control, his obedience
+to orders, his contempt of danger, that while he leads a forlorn hope in
+war, he is the advance guard of liberty and justice, law and order,
+peace and happiness. [Applause.]
+
+ "No State'll call him noble son,
+    He ain't no lady's pet;
+  But let a row start anyhow,
+    They'll send for him, you bet.
+  He packs his little knapsack up
+    And starts off in the van,
+  To start the fight, and start it right,
+    The Regular Army man."
+
+[Applause.]
+
+The gallant officers who, true to the spirit of the service, stood up on
+the firing line in Cuba and the Philippines, charging heights, wading
+rivers and storming the trenches at the head of their men, have shed new
+glory upon the American Army, and none more illustriously than that
+splendid soldier, Major-General Henry W. Lawton [prolonged applause],
+who, after a distinguished and brilliant service of nearly forty years
+in two wars, and continuous Indian fighting, has received the soldier's
+summons on the field of battle, and given with his life his last pledge
+of devotion to his country. The flag that covers him never shrouded a
+finer soldier or a more typical American. [Applause.]
+
+ "Close his eyes; his work is done!
+    What to him is friend or foeman,
+  Rise of moon or set of sun,
+    Hand of man or kiss of woman?
+
+ "As man may he fought his fight,
+     Proved his truth by his endeavor--
+   Let him sleep in solemn night,
+     Sleep forever and forever."
+
+Such men have their counterparts in the very pink and flower of the
+chivalry of England, who face their foe standing, and are now charging
+full front and fearlessly into the storm of shot and shell that awaits
+them, deeming it, in the language of young Hubert Hervey, "a grand thing
+to die for the expansion of the Empire." [Applause.]
+
+The pride of England in its navy, is justly matched by that of every
+American in his own. [Applause.] Its record, from the days of John Paul
+Jones to those of Dewey and Sampson [applause and cheers], is
+unsurpassed in the history of the world. During these hundred glorious
+years, its whole personnel, from Admiral to blue-jacket, has left upon
+the pages of history a shining story, stainless, brilliant and undying,
+of honor, skill, devotion and daring that stirs the heart because
+inspiring and ennobling. The English poet might justly say:--
+
+ "The spirit of our fathers
+    Shall start from every wave;
+  For the deck it was their field of fame,
+    And ocean was their grave."
+
+And the American can as justly reply:--
+
+ "Know that thy highest dwells at home, there art
+    And loyal inspiration spring;
+  If thou would'st touch the universal heart,
+    Of thine own country sing."
+
+Remembering its glorious past, its happy, peaceful, prosperous
+present--for it is the happiest land the sun shines upon--and the
+auspicious omens for the bright opening future, I ask you to pledge with
+me its representative head, the Commander-in-Chief of its Army and Navy,
+the President of the United States. [Toast drunk standing.]
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
+
+
+SCIENCE AND ART
+
+[Speech of Thomas H. Huxley at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy,
+  London, May 5, 1883. Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Academy,
+  said in introducing him: "With science I couple the name under which
+  we know one of the most fearless, keen and lucid intellects which have
+  ever in this country grappled with the problems of natural science and
+  set them solved before us, the name of Professor Huxley [cheers], a
+  name known far and wide wherever the pregnant science of biology is
+  studied, and through the vehicle of other tongues besides that strong
+  and trenchant English with which he is wont to strike his thoughts so
+  vigorously home."]
+
+
+SIR FREDERIC LEIGHTON, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, MY LORDS AND
+GENTLEMEN:--I beg leave to thank you for the extremely kind and
+appreciative manner in which you have received the toast of Science. It
+is the more grateful to me to hear that toast proposed in an assembly of
+this kind, because I have noticed of late years a great and growing
+tendency among those who were once jestingly said to have been born in a
+pre-scientific age to look upon science as an invading and aggressive
+force, which if it had its own way would oust from the universe all
+other pursuits. I think there are many persons who look upon this new
+birth of our times as a sort of monster rising out of the sea of modern
+thought with the purpose of devouring the Andromeda of art. And now and
+then a Perseus, equipped with the shoes of swiftness of the ready
+writer, with the cap of invisibility of the editorial article, and it
+may be with the Medusa-head of vituperation, shows himself ready to try
+conclusions with the scientific dragon. Sir, I hope that Perseus will
+think better of it [laughter]; first, for his own sake, because the
+creature is hard of head, strong of jaw, and for some time past has
+shown a great capacity for going over and through whatever comes in his
+way; and secondly, for the sake of justice, for I assure you, of my own
+personal knowledge that if left alone, the creature is a very debonair
+and gentle monster. [Laughter.] As for the Andromeda of art, he has the
+tenderest respect for that lady, and desires nothing more than to see
+her happily settled and annually producing a flock of such charming
+children as those we see about us. [Cheers.]
+
+But putting parables aside, I am unable to understand how anyone with a
+knowledge of mankind can imagine that the growth of science can threaten
+the development of art in any of its forms. If I understand the matter
+at all, science and art are the obverse and reverse of Nature's medal,
+the one expressing the eternal order of things, in terms of feeling, the
+other in terms of thought. When men no longer love nor hate; when
+suffering causes no pity, and the tale of great deeds ceases to thrill,
+when the lily of the field shall seem no longer more beautifully arrayed
+than Solomon in all his glory, and the awe has vanished from the
+snow-capped peak and deep ravine, then indeed science may have the world
+to itself, but it will not be because the monster has devoured art, but
+because one side of human nature is dead, and because men have lost the
+half of their ancient and present attributes. [Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
+
+
+THE MUSIC OF WAGNER
+
+[Speech of Robert G. Ingersoll at the banquet given in New York City,
+  April 2, 1891, by the Liederkranz Society to Edmund C. Stanton,
+  director of German Opera in New York, and Anton Seidl, orchestral
+  conductor. William Steinway presided, and called upon Robert Ingersoll
+  to speak to the toast, "Music, Noblest of the Arts."]
+
+
+MR. TOAST-MASTER:--It is probable that I was selected to speak
+about music, because, not knowing one note from another, I have no
+prejudice on the subject. All I can say is, that I know what I like,
+and, to tell the truth, I like every kind, enjoy it all, from the
+hand-organ to the orchestra.
+
+Knowing nothing of the science of music, I am not always looking for
+defects, or listening for discords. As the young robin cheerfully
+swallows whatever comes, I hear with gladness all that is played.
+
+Music has been, I suppose, a gradual growth, subject to the law of
+evolution; as nearly everything, with the possible exception of
+theology, has been and is under this law.
+
+Music may be divided into three kinds: First, the music of simple time,
+without any particular emphasis--and this may be called the music of the
+heels; second, music in which time is varied, in which there is the
+eager haste and the delicious delay, that is, the fast and slow, in
+accordance with our feelings, with our emotions--and this may be called
+the music of the heart; third, the music that includes time and
+emphasis, the hastening and the delay, and something in addition, that
+produces not only states of feeling, but states of thought. This may be
+called the music of the head,--the music of the brain.
+
+Music expresses feeling and thought, without language. It was below and
+before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. Beneath the
+waves is the sea--above the clouds is the sky.
+
+_ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL Photogravure after a photograph from life_
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Before man found a name for any thought, or thing, he had hopes and
+fears and passions, and these were rudely expressed in tones.
+
+Of one thing, however, I am certain, and that is, that Music was born of
+love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have
+been uttered a strain of music. Possibly some mother, looking in the
+eyes of her babe, gave the first melody to the enraptured air.
+
+Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we
+feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are
+translated into music. Music is the sunshine--the climate--of the soul,
+and it floods the heart with a perfect June.
+
+I am also satisfied that the greatest music is the most marvellous
+mingling of Love and Death. Love is the greatest of all passions, and
+Death is its shadow. Death gets all its terror from Love, and Love gets
+its intensity, its radiance, its glory and its rapture from the darkness
+of Death. Love is a flower that grows on the edge of the grave.
+
+The old music, for the most part, expresses emotion, or feeling, through
+time and emphasis, and what is known as melody. Most of the old operas
+consist of a few melodies connected by unmeaning recitative. There
+should be no unmeaning music. It is as though a writer should suddenly
+leave his subject and write a paragraph consisting of nothing but a
+repetition of one word like "the," "the," "the," or "if," "if," "if,"
+varying the repetition of these words, but without meaning,--and then
+resume the subject of his article.
+
+I am not saying that great music was not produced before Wagner but I am
+simply endeavoring to show the steps that have been taken. It was
+necessary that all the music should have been written, in order that the
+greatest might be produced. The same is true of the drama. Thousands and
+thousands prepared the way for the supreme dramatist, as millions
+prepared the way for the supreme composer.
+
+When I read Shakespeare, I am astonished that he has expressed so much
+with common words, to which he gives new meaning; and so when I hear
+Wagner, I exclaim: Is it possible that all this is done with common
+air?
+
+In Wagner's music there is a touch of chaos that suggests the infinite.
+The melodies seem strange and changing forms, like summer clouds, and
+weird harmonies come like sounds from the sea brought by fitful winds,
+and others moan like waves on desolate shores, and mingled with these,
+are shouts of joy, with sighs and sobs and ripples of laughter, and the
+wondrous voices of eternal love.
+
+Wagner is the Shakespeare of Music.
+
+The funeral march for Siegfried is the funeral music for all the dead.
+Should all the gods die, this music would be perfectly appropriate. It
+is elemental, universal, eternal.
+
+The love-music in Tristan and Isolde is, like Romeo and Juliet an
+expression of the human heart for all time. So the love-duet in "The
+Flying Dutchman" has in it the consecration, the infinite self-denial,
+of love. The whole heart is given; every note has wings, and rises and
+poises like an eagle in the heaven of sound.
+
+When I listen to the music of Wagner, I see pictures, forms, glimpses of
+the perfect, the swell of a hip, the wave of a breast, the glance of an
+eye. I am in the midst of great galleries. Before me are passing the
+endless panoramas. I see vast landscapes with valleys of verdure and
+vine with soaring crags, snow-crowned. I am on the wide seas, where
+countless billows burst into the whitecaps of joy. I am in the depths of
+caverns roofed with mighty crags, while through some rent I see the
+eternal stars. In a moment the music becomes a river of melody, flowing
+through some wondrous land; suddenly it falls in strange chasms, and the
+mighty cataract is changed to seven-hued foam.
+
+Great music is always sad, because it tells us of the perfect; and such
+is the difference between what we are and that which music suggests,
+that even in the vase of joy we find some tears.
+
+The music of Wagner has color, and when I hear the violins, the morning
+seems to slowly come. A horn puts a star above the horizon. The night,
+in the purple hum of the bass, wanders away like some enormous bee
+across wide fields of dead clover. The light grows whiter as the violins
+increase. Colors come from other instruments, and then the full
+orchestra floods the world with day.
+
+Wagner seems not only to have given us new tones, new combinations, but
+the moment the orchestra begins to play his music, all the instruments
+are transfigured. They seem to utter the sounds that they have been
+longing to utter. The horns run riot; the drums and cymbals join in the
+general joy; the old bass viols are alive with passion; the 'cellos
+throb with love; the violins are seized with a divine fury, and the
+notes rush out as eager for the air as pardoned prisoners for the roads
+and fields.
+
+The music of Wagner is filled with landscapes. There are some strains,
+like midnight, thick with constellations, and there are harmonies like
+islands in the far seas, and others like palms on the desert's edge. His
+music satisfies the heart and brain. It is not only for memory; not only
+for the present, but for prophecy.
+
+Wagner was a sculptor, a painter in sound. When he died, the greatest
+fountain of melody that ever enchanted the world, ceased. His music will
+instruct and refine forever.
+
+All that I know about the operas of Wagner I have learned from Anton
+Seidl. I believe that he is the noblest, tenderest and most artistic
+interpreter of the great composer that has ever lived.
+
+
+
+
+SIR HENRY IRVING
+
+
+LOOKING FORWARD
+
+[Speech of Henry Irving[10] at a banquet given in his honor, London,
+  July 4, 1883, in view of his impending departure for a professional
+  tour of America. The Lord Chief Justice of England, John Duke
+  Coleridge, occupied the chair.]
+
+    [Illustration: _MENU CARD Photogravure after a design by Thompson
+    Willing_
+
+    Through the courtesy of the Lotus Club, we are enabled to reproduce
+    this typical dinner card, especially drawn and engraved for a
+    complimentary banquet to Sir Henry Irving. The original card is
+    about three times the size of this reproduction.
+
+
+    DINNER TO
+
+    SIR HENRY IRVING
+
+    GIVEN BY THE
+
+    LOTOS CLUB
+
+    SATURDAY OCT 28
+
+    MDCCCXCIX]
+
+
+
+MY LORD CHIEF JUSTICE, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I cannot
+conceive a greater honor entering into the life of any man than the
+honor you have paid me by assembling here to-night. To look around this
+room and scan the faces of my distinguished hosts, would stir to its
+depths a colder nature than mine. It is not in my power, my lords and
+gentlemen, to thank you for the compliment you have to-night paid me.
+
+ "The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
+  Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel."
+
+Never before have I so strongly felt the magic of those words; but you
+will remember it is also said in the same sentence, "Give thy thoughts
+no tongue." [Laughter.] And gladly, had it been possible, would I have
+obeyed that wise injunction to-night. [Renewed laughter.]
+
+The actor is profoundly influenced by precedent, and I cannot forget
+that many of my predecessors have been nerved by farewell banquets for
+the honor which awaited them on the other side of the Atlantic; but this
+occasion I regard as much more than a compliment to myself: I regard it
+as a tribute to the art which I am proud to serve and I believe that
+feeling will be shared by the profession to which you have assembled to
+do honor. [Cheers.] The time has long gone by when there was any need to
+apologize for the actor's calling. ["Hear! Hear!"] The world can no
+more exist without the drama than it can without its sister art, music.
+The stage gives the readiest response to the demand of human nature to
+be transported out of itself into the realms of the ideal--not that all
+our ideals on the stage are realized--none but the artist knows how
+immeasurably he may fall short of his aim or his conception,--but to
+have an ideal in art and to strive through one's life to embody it, may
+be a passion to the actor as it may be to the poet.
+
+Your lordship has spoken most eloquently of my career. Possessed of a
+generous mind and a high judicial faculty, your lordship has been
+to-night, I fear, more generous than judicial. But if I have in any way
+deserved commendation, I am proud that it was as an actor that I won it.
+As the director of a theatre my experience has been short, but as an
+actor I have been before the London public for seventeen years; and on
+one thing I am sure you will all agree--that no actor or manager has
+ever received from that public more generous and ungrudging
+encouragement and support. [Cheers.]
+
+Concerning our visit to America, I need hardly say that I am looking
+forward to it with no common pleasure. It has often been an ambition
+with English actors to gain the good-will of the English-speaking race,
+a good-will which is right heartily reciprocated towards our American
+fellow-workers, when they gratify us by sojourning here. Your God-speed
+would alone assure me a hearty welcome in any land. But I am not going
+amongst strangers; I am going amongst friends, and when I, for the first
+time, touch American ground, I shall receive many a grip of the hand
+from men whose friendship I am proud to possess. [Cheers.] Concerning
+our expedition the American people will no doubt exercise an independent
+judgment--a prejudice of theirs and a habit of long standing [laughter],
+as your lordship has reminded us, by the fact that to-day is the fourth
+of July, an anniversary rapidly becoming an English institution. Your
+lordship is doubtless aware, as to-night has so happily proved, that the
+stage has reckoned amongst its staunchest supporters many great and
+distinguished lawyers. There are many lawyers, I am told, in America,
+and as I am sure that they all deserve to be judges, I am in hopes that
+they will materially help me to gain a favorable verdict from the
+American people. [Cheers and laughter.]
+
+I have given but poor expression to my sense of the honor you have
+conferred upon me, and upon the comrades associated with me in this our
+enterprise--an enterprise which, I hope, will favorably show the method
+and discipline of a company of English actors. On their behalf I thank
+you, and I also thank you on behalf of the lady who has so adorned the
+Lyceum stage, and to whose rare gifts your lordship has paid so just and
+gracious a tribute. The climax of the favor extended to me by my
+countrymen has been reached to-night. You have set upon me a burden of
+responsibility, a burden which I gladly and proudly bear. The memory of
+to-night will be to me a sacred thing, a memory which will, throughout
+my life, be ever treasured, a memory which will stimulate me to further
+endeavor, and encourage me to loftier aim. [Loud and continued cheers.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE DRAMA
+
+[Speech of Sir Henry Irving at the fourteenth annual dinner of the
+  Playgoer's Club, London, February 14, 1898. The toast of "The Drama"
+  was proposed by B. W. Findon, and Sir Henry Irving was called upon to
+  respond.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--It is five years since I had the
+pleasure of sitting at your hospitable board and listening to that
+delightfully soothing and digestive eloquence with which we medicine one
+another after dinner. [Laughter.] In the course of those five years I
+daresay we have had many differences of opinion. The playgoer does not
+always agree with the player, still less with that unfortunate object,
+the poor actor-manager. But whatever you may have said of me in this
+interval, and in terms less dulcet, perhaps, than those which your
+chairman has so generously employed, it is a great satisfaction to me to
+feel that I still retain your esteem and good-will. In a certain sense
+you are the manager's constituents. You cannot eject him from the
+office, perhaps, with that directness which distinguishes the
+Parliamentary operations. But you can stay away from the theatre, and so
+eject his play. [Laughter.] On the whole that is a more disconcerting
+process than the fiercest criticism. One can always argue with the
+critics, though on the actor's part I know that is gross presumption.
+[Laughter.] But you cannot argue with the playgoer who stays away.
+
+I am not making any specific accusations--only remarking that it is
+staying-power which impresses the importance of the Playgoer's Club upon
+the managerial mind. Moreover, to meet you like this has the effect of a
+useful tonic. I can strongly recommend it to some gentlemen who write to
+the newspapers. [Laughter.] In one journal there was a long
+correspondence--the sort of thing we generally get at one season of the
+year--about the condition of the stage, and a well-known writer who, I
+believe, combines the function of a dramatic critic with the
+responsibility of a watch-dog to the Navy, informed his readers that the
+sad decadence of the British Drama was due to the evils of party
+government. That is certainly an original idea; but I fancy that if the
+author were to unfold it to this company, he would be told that he had
+mistaken the Playgoer's Club for the War Office or the Admiralty. Still
+we ought to be grateful to the man who reveals a perfectly fresh reason
+for the eternal decline of the drama, though we may not, perhaps,
+anticipate any revolution in theatrical amusements even from the most
+thorough-going reform of the British Constitution.
+
+In the public correspondence to which I have referred, a good deal was
+said about the need for a dramatic conservatoire. If such an institution
+could be rooted in this country, I have no doubt that it might yield
+many advantages. Years ago I ventured to suggest that the municipal
+system might be applied to the theatre, as it is on the Continent,
+though I do not observe that this is yet a burning question in the
+county council politics, or that any reforming administrator has
+discovered that the drama ought to be laid on, like gas or water.
+[Laughter.] With all our genius for local government we have not yet
+found, like some Continental peoples, that the municipal theatre is as
+much a part of the healthy life of the community as the municipal
+library or museum. ["Hear! hear!"] Whether that development is in store
+for us I do not know, but I can imagine certain social benefits that
+would accrue from the municipal incorporation of a dramatic
+conservatoire. It might check the rush of incompetent persons into the
+theatrical profession. Some persons who were intended by Nature to adorn
+an inviolable privacy are thrust upon us by paragraphers and
+interviewers, whose existence is a dubious blessing--[laughter]--until
+it is assumed by censors of the stage that this business is part and
+parcel of theatrical advertisement.
+
+Columns of this rubbish are printed every week, and many an actor is
+pestered to death for tit-bits about his ox and his ass and everything
+that is his. [Laughter.] Occasionally you may read solemn articles about
+the insatiable vanity of the actor, which must be gratified at any cost,
+as if vanity were peculiar to any section of humanity. But what this
+organized gossip really advertises is the industry of the gentlemen who
+collect it, and the smartness of the papers in which it is circulated.
+"We learn this," "We have reason to believe"--such forms of intolerable
+assurance give currency too often to scandalous and lying rumors which I
+am sure responsible journalism would wish to discourage. But this, I
+fear, is difficult, for contradiction makes another desirable paragraph,
+and it is all looked upon as desirable copy. [Laughter.]
+
+Of course, gentlemen, the drama is declining--it always has been
+declining since the time of Roscius and beyond the palmy days when the
+famous Elephant Raja was "starred" over the head of W. C. Macready, and
+the real water tank in the Cataract of the Ganges helped to increase the
+attractions of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. But we ourselves are
+evidently in a parlous state at the present day, when actors vainly
+endeavor to struggle through twenty lines of blank verse--when we are
+told mechanical effects and vast armies of supers make up the production
+of historical plays--when pathological details, we are told, are always
+well received--when the "psychonosological" (whatever that may
+be)--[laughter], is invariably successful--and when Pinero and Grundy's
+plays do not appeal to men of advanced thought, as I read the other day.
+
+In all the lament about the decline of the drama there is one recurring
+note: the disastrous influence of long runs. If the manager were not a
+grossly material person, incapable of ideals, he would take off a
+successful piece at the height of its popularity and start a fresh
+experiment. [Laughter.] But he is sunk in the base commercialism of the
+age, and, sad to relate, he has the sympathies of the dramatic author,
+who wants to see his piece run say a hundred nights, instead of twenty.
+I don't know how this spirit of greed is to be subdued, though with the
+multiplication of Play-houses, long runs may tend to become rare. A
+municipal subsidy or an obliging millionaire might enable a manager to
+vary his bill with comparative frequency, when he has persuaded the
+dramatic author that the run of a play till the crack of doom is
+incompatible with the interest of art. [Laughter.] I cannot help
+suspecting that the chief difficulty of a manager, under even the most
+artistic and least commercial conditions, will always be, not to check
+the inordinate proportions of success, but to secure plays which may
+succeed at all.
+
+I hope you will not accuse me of taking a too despondent view of the
+drama, for believe me, I do not. To be sure, we sometimes hear that
+Shakespeare is to be annihilated, and that the poet's intellect has been
+overrated. And lately a reverend gentleman at Hampstead announced his
+intention of putting down the stage altogether. [Laughter.] The
+atmosphere of Hampstead seems to be intellectually intoxicating; at any
+rate it has a rather stimulating effect on a certain kind of dogmatic
+mind. This intolerance has been very eloquently rebuked by a
+distinguished man who is an ornament of the Church of England. It is
+Dean Farrar who says that these pharisaical attacks on the stage are
+inspired only by "concentrated malice." Well, the periodical
+misunderstanding to which the stage is exposed need cause but little
+disquiet. I have no doubt it will survive its many adventures, and that
+it will owe not a little of its tenacious vitality to your unflagging
+sympathy and hearty and generous encouragement. [Cheers.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE FUNCTION OF THE NEWSPAPER
+
+[Speech of Sir Henry Irving, as Chairman, at the thirty-fifth
+  anniversary dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, London, May 21, 1898.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--When I received the great compliment of an
+invitation to occupy this chair, I was conscious of a certain ironical
+fitness in my position. The politician and the actor divide between
+them the distinction of supplying the most constant material for the
+most intimate and searching vigilance of the newspaper press.
+[Laughter.] So when this great corporation of the newspaper press fund
+gives its annual dinner, what more natural and fitting than a politician
+or an actor in the chair, who illustrates in his person and in his own
+fortunes both the appreciation and the discipline which it is the
+function of the press so liberally to bestow? I can imagine that when
+such a chairman happens to be a pretty old stager like myself, there may
+be journalists in such a distinguished company as this who will look at
+him with the moistened eye of emotional reminiscence and murmur: "Ah, it
+was upon that man I fleshed my maiden pen!" [Laughter.] Thoughts like
+these shed the mellowing influence of time over the volumes of press
+cuttings which no actor's library is without. I have heard of public men
+who say they never read the newspapers. That remark has been attributed
+to a bishop, and perhaps there are kinds of abstinence quite easy to
+bishops but difficult to other mortals. [Laughter.] If it were possible
+for a man whose doings are considered worthy of public notice to avoid
+the newspaper, he could scarcely hope to make his friends practice the
+same denial. Even a bishop who is not inquisitive must occasionally meet
+deans and chapters who are. [Laughter.] There's the rub. You may not
+read the newspapers, but as soon as you scent the morning air you know
+whether those proverbial little birds who spread the news with such
+alacrity, are chirping about yourself, and the first feathered
+acquaintance that you hit upon is generously eager to share with you the
+crumb picked from a newspaper with a special flavor for your own palate.
+
+Gentlemen, I mention this, not by way of complaint, but simply to
+illustrate the futility of that philosophy which fondly imagines that
+the newspaper can be ignored. But I am chiefly conscious to-night of the
+debt of gratitude we all owe to the press. The newspaper--say what you
+will of it--is the immediate recorder and interpreter of life. Morning
+and evening it offers us that perpetual stimulus which makes the zest of
+living. Be your interests what they may, though you abstract your mind
+from the tumult of affairs and devote it to art or science, you cannot
+open a newspaper without the sensation of laying your hand upon the
+throbbing pulse of the world. And it has throbbed within but a few days,
+throbbed with a widespread grief at the passing of a great man [Mr.
+Gladstone], a great statesman, a great and noble figure in productive
+and national life, who for more than half a century has helped largely
+to mould the destinies of the nation and the world. [Loud cheers.]
+Gentlemen, in a newspaper, at a glance, you are in touch with the
+elemental forces of nature--war, pestilence and famine; you are
+transported by this printed sheet, as it were the fairy carpet of the
+Arabian, from capital to capital, from the exultation of one people to
+the bitter resentment and chagrin of another. You behold on every scale
+every quality of humanity, everything that piques the sense of mystery,
+everything that inspires pity, dread, or anger. It is a vast and
+ever-changing panorama of the raw material of art and literature.
+[Cheers.]
+
+Well, there are some complaints, gentlemen, that the raw material is
+more generally interesting than the artistic product. The newspaper is a
+dangerous competitor of books, and those of us who write plays and
+produce them may wish that the circulation of a great daily journal
+would repeat itself at the box-office. [Laughter.] But it is no use
+protesting against rivalry, if it be the rivalry of life, and the
+gentlemen of the press who are engaged in stage-managing and drama
+which, after all, is the real article, must always command more
+spectators than the humble artists who seek truth in the garb of
+illusion. I cannot sufficiently admire the enterprise of these great
+newspapers which keep the diary of mankind. In time of war their
+representatives are in the thick of danger; and though he may subscribe
+to the _dictum_, so familiar to playgoers, that the pen is mightier than
+the sword, the war correspondent is always ready to give lessons to the
+enemy with the less majestic weapon. ["Hear! hear!"] In our own military
+annals no little glory shines on the names of civilians who, in the
+faithful discharge of duty to a multitude of readers, gave their lives
+as truly for their country as if they had died in the Queen's uniform.
+There are veteran campaigners of the press still amongst us, one of the
+most distinguished of whom is my old and valued friend, Sir William
+Russell [cheers], the vice-president of this fund, by whom I have the
+pleasure of being seated to-night. I say there are many veterans of the
+press whose services to the British Army will not be forgotten, though
+they never set a squadron in the field. I have heard it said that in
+diplomacy the press is sometimes indiscreetly ahead of events
+[laughter], but you must remember that nothing is so characteristic of
+the modern spirit as the art of publishing things before they happen.
+Nowadays all the world is on tiptoe, and the soul of journalism must be
+prophetic, because it has to do for a curious and wide-eyed public what
+was done for a much simpler generation by the alchemists and the
+astrologer. We ought to be thankful that this somewhat perilous business
+is conducted, on the whole, with so much discretion and breadth of mind.
+We have no less admiration, gentlemen, for the judgment of our press
+than for the enterprise which is born of competition, and, although that
+judgment has often to be framed under conditions which demand almost
+breathless rapidity, it does not always bear unfavorable comparison with
+the protracted meditation of the philosophic recluse. [Cheers.]
+
+But there is one thing which the ubiquitous energies of the press cannot
+command, and that is immunity for its members from the chances of evil
+fortune, from sickness and decay. ["Hear! Hear!"] I suppose there is no
+profession which makes such heavy calls upon the bodily and mental vigor
+of its servants as the profession of the journalist. Whoever nods, he
+must be always fresh and alert. Whoever is content with the ideas of
+yesterday, the journalist must be equipped with the ideas of to-morrow.
+In the course of my life it has been my privilege to number many
+brilliant journalists amongst my dearest friends, and I sorrowfully call
+to mind now more than one undaunted spirit who has suffered the
+penalties of overtaxed strength. It is in these cases that this fund
+should be of special benefit. It is in your power to give that timely
+help which saves the exhausted brain and restores the broken nerve. I
+stand to-night in a place which has been occupied by many distinguished
+advocates of this fund--advocates who have spoken with eloquence to
+which I can make no pretension. But I would earnestly impress upon you
+this thought, than which no plea can be more eloquent--remember that
+whatever you may give out of goodness of heart, from the memories of old
+comradeship, from the thousand and one associations which bind together
+fellow-workers in various arts and callings, remember that it may be the
+means some day of snatching from the last despond some one whose hand
+you have pressed in friendship, and whose voice has an echo in your
+hearts. I ask you to drink "Prosperity to the Newspaper Press Fund."
+[Loud cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+RICHARD CLAVERHOUSE JEBB
+
+
+LITERATURE AND ART
+
+[Speech of Richard Claverhouse Jebb, professor in the University of
+  Cambridge, in responding to the toast, "The Interests of Literature,"
+  coupled, according to custom, with "The Interests of Science," at the
+  banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 4, 1885. Sir Frederic
+  Leighton, President of the Academy, said in introducing him: "I invite
+  you to join me in a tribute, never wanting at this table, to science
+  and to letters. With literature I connect the name of a guest whom his
+  grateful country has brought from the far banks of the Clyde to our
+  table to-night--one among the very foremost and most elegant of our
+  scholars; and a speaker on whose lips we trace, though Latin has been
+  the chief vehicle of his oratory, a savor of those Attic orators with
+  whom his name is associated in our minds--Professor Jebb."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, MY LORDS, AND
+GENTLEMEN:--In responding for the second part of the toast, which
+has been so eloquently proposed and so graciously received, I trust that
+I shall have the indulgence of this distinguished company if the words
+in which the response is tendered are simple and few. It is now just a
+hundred years since the earliest occupant of the presidential chair
+which Sir Frederic Leighton so brilliantly adorns, in addressing the
+students of the Royal Academy, counseled them to practice "the
+comparison of art with art, and of all arts with the nature of man."
+
+Among the various fields in which literature works, there is none,
+perhaps, in which the reciprocal influence of art and literature can be
+more vividly apprehended than in the province of classical study, and
+especially in the domain of those pursuits which are conversant with the
+life and thought of ancient Greece. The inheritor of a shapeless
+mythology and a rude tradition, Homer emerges as the first artist in
+European poetry, giving clear outline and beautiful form to types of
+godhead and heroism. The successor to schools which had rather combated
+than conquered their material, Phidias, is recalled as the first poet in
+European art, creating a visible embodiment for the Homeric vision of
+those imperial brows which made Olympus to tremble at their nod.
+
+England has no Academy of Letters. All the more, perhaps, is it
+desirable that our literature should be penetrated by those regulative
+lessons of form, those suggestions of a spiritual harmony, which emanate
+from an Academy such as this ["Hear! Hear!"]--from a true and noble
+Academy of arts. It has never been better with art, it has never been
+better with literature than when each has been most willing to receive
+the highest teachings of the other, acknowledging the bond of an eternal
+sisterhood in that Hellenic message for which Keats has found an English
+voice,--"Beauty is truth, truth beauty." [Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH JEFFERSON
+
+
+MY FARM IN JERSEY
+
+[Speech of Joseph Jefferson at a dinner given by the Authors' Club, in
+  honor of the tenth anniversary of its founding, New York, February 28,
+  1893. Edward Eggleston acted as chairman. On rising to speak, Mr.
+  Jefferson received an enthusiastic greeting.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--I need not say how I thank you for this generous
+greeting. I am very glad that your worthy chairman has defined my
+position. I knew I was a guest, but I did not know I was an
+author--however, I will begin my remarks here because I think it is
+appropriate at an Authors' Club to quote from so able and so lovely a
+man as Charles Lamb. Charles Lamb has said that the world is divided
+into two classes, those who are born to borrow and those who are born to
+lend, and if you happen to be of the latter class, why, do it
+cheerfully. Now the world seems to be divided into two other classes,
+those who are always anxious to make speeches and those who are not. If
+of the latter one, you are rather uncertain of yourself, as I am now,
+and you have to make a speech, why, do it cheerfully. [Applause.]
+
+Making a speech cheerfully and making a cheerful speech are two very
+different matters. [Laughter and applause.] You know how dangerous it is
+for any man to wander away from the legitimate paths of his profession.
+I fear I have been over-impertinent; I have even been rude enough to
+exhibit my pictures, impertinent enough to write a book. I have become
+an author of one book and the authors have kindly admitted me and
+invited me to their board. To-morrow night, or after to-morrow night, I
+presume that the orators will invite me to their board. [Applause.] I am
+almost ashamed of my presumption, and it would serve me very right if I
+failed to-morrow night. That will teach me better and I shall extend the
+field of my operation no further, I assure you.
+
+But it is curious that there is one path in which the actor always
+wanders--he always likes to be a land-owner. It is a curious thing that
+the actors of England and--of course in the olden times you must
+remember that we had none but English actors in this country,--and as
+soon as they came here, they wanted to own land. They could not do it in
+England. The elder Booth owned a farm at Bellaire. Thomas Cooper, the
+celebrated English tragedian, bought a farm near Philadelphia, and it is
+a positive fact that he is the first man who ever owned a fast trotting
+horse in America. He used to drive from the farm to rehearsal at the
+theatre, and I believe has been known on some occasions, when in
+convivial company, even to drive out at night afterwards. [Laughter.]
+Following and emulating the example of my illustrious predecessors I
+became a farmer. I will not allude to my plantation in Louisiana; my
+overseer takes care of that. I have not heard from him lately but I am
+told he takes very good care of it. [Laughter.] I trust there was no
+expression of distrust on my part. But I allude to my farm in New
+Jersey. I have not been so successful as Mr. Burroughs, but I was
+attracted by a townsman and I bought a farm in New Jersey. I went out
+first to examine the soil. I told the honest farmer who was about to
+sell me this place that I thought the soil looked rather thin; there was
+a good deal of gravel. He told me that the gravel was the finest thing
+for drainage in the world. I told him I had heard that, but I had always
+presumed that if the gravel was underneath it would answer the purpose
+better. He said: "Not at all; this soil is of that character that it
+will drain both ways," by what he termed I think catepillary attraction.
+[Laughter.] I bought the farm and set myself to work to increase the
+breadth of my shoulders, to help my appetite, and so forth, about work
+of a farm. I even went so far as to emulate the example set by Mr.
+Burroughs, and split the wood. I did not succeed at that. Of course, as
+Mr. Burroughs wisely remarks, the heat comes at both ends; it comes when
+you split the wood and again when you burn it. But as I only lived at my
+farm during the summer time, it became quite unnecessary in New Jersey
+to split wood in July, and my farming operations were not successful.
+
+We bought an immense quantity of chickens and they all turned out to be
+roosters [laughter]; but I resolved--I presume as William Nye says about
+the farm--to carry it on; I would _carry_ on that farm as long as my
+wife's money lasted. [Laughter.] A great mishap was when my Alderney
+bull got into the greenhouse. There was nothing to stop him but the
+cactus. He tossed the flower-pots right and left. Talk about the flowers
+that bloom in the spring,--why, I never saw such a wreck, and I am fully
+convinced that there is nothing that will stop a thoroughly well-bred
+bull but a full-bred South American cactus. [Laughter.] I went down to
+look at the ruins and the devastation that this animal had made, and I
+found him quietly eating black Hamburg grapes. I don't know anything
+finer than black Hamburg grapes for Alderney bulls. A friend of mine,
+who was chaffing me for my farming proclivities, said: "I see you have
+got in some confusion here. It looks to me from seeing that gentleman
+there--that stranger in the greenhouse--that you are trying to raise
+early bulls under glass." [Laughter.]
+
+Well, I will not tire you with these experiences. I can only
+congratulate Mr. Burroughs upon his success, and I beg that you will
+sympathize with me upon my failure; and now then allow me to conclude my
+crude remarks by thanking you for the very kind manner in which you have
+listened to my remarks and my experiences. I assure you--they are all of
+them true. And I thank you, sir, for your kind introduction, which I am
+afraid I do not deserve. And so, gentlemen, I wish you success and
+happiness, and long life to your honorable Club. [Long-continued
+applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+IN MEMORY OF EDWIN BOOTH
+
+[Speech of Joseph Jefferson at the annual banquet held on Founders'
+  Night at the Players' Club, New York City, December 30, 1893. This was
+  the first time that Mr. Jefferson, the newly-elected President, spoke
+  to his fellow-players in his official capacity.]
+
+
+FELLOW-PLAYERS:--Founders' Night should be of joy, unshaded by
+the slightest tinge of gloom. I know this, but how can I speak to-night
+without a loving reference to the one whose gift we now hold--a gift in
+which our children and theirs for many generations will take pride,
+delight and comfort. It would be a twice-told tale to rehearse the
+career of Edwin Booth. You are as familiar with it as I am. But there
+are incidents in his early life that may interest you, and possibly that
+no one but myself could tell you.
+
+An early remembrance of the stage brings before me the figure of the
+elder Booth. When I was but five years of age I acted the Duke of York
+to his Richard III. You may think it strange that I remember this
+circumstance; but even a child as young as I was could not have stood in
+the presence of this superb and magnetic actor without being indelibly
+impressed with the scene. His son, Edwin, was then just born. We first
+met when he was a handsome youth of sixteen. A lithe and graceful
+figure, buoyant in spirits, and with the loveliest eyes I ever looked
+upon. We were friends from the first, and it is a comfort to me to know
+that our friendship lasted nearly half a century, unbroken by a single
+act or word. His early performances upon the stage did not give much
+promise, and there were grave fears that he had not inherited the genius
+of his father. But after the death of that father young Booth's friends
+and the public were suddenly startled by the news from across the
+Continent that a new star had arisen, not in the East, but in the West,
+and was wending its way homeward.
+
+In 1854 I became the stage manager for Henry C. Jarrett in Baltimore.
+That gentleman is a member of our Club and now stands before me. He one
+day brought a young girl who had been given to his care and placed her
+in mine--a beautiful child, but fifteen years of age. Her family, a most
+estimable one, had met with some reverse, and she had decided to go upon
+the stage to relieve them from the burden of her support, and possibly
+to contribute to the comfort of her father. This loving duty she
+faithfully performed. She lived in my family as the companion of my wife
+for three years, and during that time became one of the leading
+actresses of the stage. One morning I said to her: "To-morrow you are to
+rehearse Juliet to the Romeo of our new and rising young tragedian." At
+this distance I can scarcely say whether I had or had not a premonition
+of the future, but I knew at the conclusion of that rehearsal that Edwin
+Booth and Mary Devlin would soon be man and wife; and so it came about,
+for at the end of the week he came to me in the green-room, with his
+affianced bride by the hand, and with a quaint smile they fell upon
+their knees in a mock-heroic manner, as though acting a scene in the
+play, and said: "Father, your blessing," to which I replied in the same
+mock-heroic vein, extending my hands like the old Friar: "Bless you, my
+children!" Shortly they were married. We know that his life was filled
+with histrionic triumphs and domestic bereavements.
+
+May I not speak here of this gift of the Players? It is comparatively
+easy for those who are rocked in a golden cradle, and who at their birth
+are endowed with great wealth, to dispense their bounty. I do not desire
+to disparage the generosity of the rich. Those of our land have done
+much good, are now freely dispensing their wealth, and will continue to
+do so; but we must remember that the fortune of Edwin was not inherited.
+The walls within which we stand, the art, the library, and the comforts
+that surround us, represent a life of toil and travel, sleepless nights,
+tedious journeys and weary work; so that when he bestowed upon us this
+Club it was not his wealth only, but it was himself that he gave.
+
+But a few years ago he was (though rich in genius) poor in pocket. He
+had been wealthy, and had seen the grand dramatic structure he had
+reared taken from him and devastated. His reverse of fortune was from no
+fault of his own, but from a confiding nature. When he again, by
+arduous toil, accumulated wealth, one would have supposed that the
+thoughts of his former reverses would have startled him and that he
+would have clutched his newly-acquired gold and garnered it to himself,
+fearful lest another stroke of ill-fortune should fall upon him. But
+instead of making him a coward it gave him courage. It did not warp his
+mind or steel his heart against humanity. No sterility settled upon him.
+His wrongs seemed to have fertilized his generosity, and here we behold
+the fruit.
+
+When the stranger comes here and asks us for the monument of Edwin Booth
+we can say: "Look around you." For some time past he had looked forward
+calmly to his dissolution. One year ago to-night in this room, and at
+this very hour, he said to me the memorable words: "They drink to my
+health to-night, Joe. When they meet again, it will be to my memory."
+
+Two years ago last autumn, we walked on the sea beach together, and with
+a strange and prophetic kind of poetry, he likened the scene to his own
+failing health, the falling leaves, the withered sea-weed, the dying
+grass upon the shore, and the ebbing tide that was fast receding from
+us. He told me that he felt prepared to go, for he had forgiven his
+enemies, and could even rejoice in their happiness. Surely this was a
+grand condition in which to step from this world across the threshold to
+the next!
+
+
+
+
+LORD KITCHENER
+
+
+THE RELIEF OF KHARTUM
+
+[Speech of Horatio Herbert, Lord Kitchener, at a banquet given by the
+  Lord Mayor of London, at the Mansion House, London, November 4, 1898,
+  in celebration of the campaign in the Sudan and the successful
+  recovery of Khartum from the Dervishes, thereby avenging the death of
+  General Gordon. Lord Salisbury, in a brilliant speech, proposed the
+  health of Lord Kitchener, to which the latter replied with the speech
+  that follows.]
+
+
+MY LORD MAYOR, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, MY LORDS AND
+GENTLEMEN:--It is not easy for me to find words to express the
+gratitude I feel for the manner in which the toast proposed by Lord
+Salisbury has been received by this magnificent audience, or for the too
+kind and too flattering words in which it has been recommended to your
+notice. Such a recognition by such an audience is more than sufficient
+recompense for any services which it may have been my good fortune to
+render. But, my lords and gentlemen, I am fully aware that it is not in
+my individual capacity but as representing the Anglo-Egyptian army that
+this great honor has been done me. [Cheers.] It is to the excellent and
+devoted services of the troops that the success of the campaign is due.
+A general would have been indeed incapable who failed to lead such men
+to victory; for it was not only, nor even principally, on the day of
+battle, that the great qualities of these troops were displayed. The
+cheerful endurance and soldier-like spirit with which they bore long
+delay during the Sudan summer, between the battle of Atbara and the
+advance on Omdurman, was as high a test of discipline and efficiency as
+the endurance exhibited in the long marches, or the courage shown at
+the trenches at Atbara or on the plains of Omdurman. [Cheers.]
+
+A man may be proud indeed whose good fortune has placed him in command
+of troops capable of deeds like these. And remember, my lords and
+gentlemen, I include in this not merely the British army but the
+Egyptian army also. [Loud cheers.] For, proud as I may well be of having
+commanded the British troops in the Sudan, I am no less proud of having
+as Sirdar led the Egyptian and Sudanese troops to victory, side by side
+with men of my own race and blood. It is on behalf of those and the
+combined forces that are absent as well as those that are present that I
+desire to tender you our sincere thanks for the great honor you have
+done us. It has been contended and in former days with some
+plausibility, that the material from which the Egyptian army is
+recruited is not capable of being made into good soldiers, but we in the
+Egyptian army never held that view; we felt confidence in our men, and
+that confidence has been justified. We tested them at Gemeizeh, Tokar,
+Toski, Ferkeh, and Abu Hamed, and were not disappointed; and under the
+circumstances, perhaps the most competent military critics, the
+Dervishes [laughter] showed no disposition to underrate the fighting
+power of our men. And when the _role_ was changed and from the defensive
+we were able to take the offensive they soon acquired that respect for
+the Egyptian soldiers that all good troops engender in the minds of
+their opponents. [Cheers.]
+
+I had to give the Egyptian army arduous work. They had to construct the
+railway; they had to build gunboats, and sailing craft through the
+dangerous cataracts, they had to be on incessant fatigues, moving stores
+and cutting wood for the steamers. It may be fairly said that had it not
+been for the work of the Egyptian army the British troops could not have
+reached Omdurman without far greater suffering and loss of life, and it
+was not only in these pioneer duties that the Egyptian army
+distinguished themselves, for when they came in contact with the enemy
+their discipline, steadiness and courage were prominently displayed. At
+Ferkeh, and at Abu Hamed, they, with the Sudanese troops, turned the
+Dervishes out of their positions. At Atbara, they were not behind their
+British comrades, and at Omdurman, when Macdonald's brigade repulsed the
+fierce and determined attacks that were brought against them, I am sure
+that the thought occurred to the mind of every officer in the British
+brigades, who saw it: "We might have done it as well; we could not have
+done it better." ["Hear! Hear!"] And how was this obtained? By good
+training, good discipline and mutual confidence between officers and
+men. It was on these lines that the army was formed and organized under
+Sir Evelyn Wood and Sir Francis Grenfell, and I, with the assistance of
+the finest body of officers that the British army can produce, have
+merely followed in their footsteps, and developed the principles that
+they had already laid down.
+
+There is one other point to which I would like to refer before bringing
+a speech which may have already been too long ["No! No!"] to a
+conclusion. In this great commercial centre it may be of interest if I
+allude to the financial side of the campaign. Although the accounts have
+not yet been absolutely closed, you may take it as very nearly accurate
+that during the two and a half years' campaign, extra military credits
+to the amount of two and a half millions have been expended. In this sum
+I have included the recent grant that has been made for the extension of
+the railway from Atbara to Khartum, the work on which is already on
+hand. Well, against this large expenditure we have some assets to show.
+We have, or shall have, 760 miles of railway, properly equipped with
+engines, rolling stock, and a track with bridges in good order. I must
+admit that the railway stations and waiting-rooms are somewhat
+primitive, but then we do not wait long in the Sudan. [Laughter.] Well,
+for this running concern I do not think that L3,000 a mile will be
+considered too high a value. This represents two and a half millions out
+of the money granted, and for the other quarter of a million, we have
+2,000 miles of telegraph lines, six new gunboats, besides barges and
+sailing craft, and--the Sudan. [Laughter and cheers.]
+
+Of course the railway did not cost me L3,000 a mile to construct, and
+many other heavy charges for warlike stores, supplies and transport on
+our long line of communication, including sea transports of troops from
+England and elsewhere had to be made; but however it was done the
+result remains the same. We have freed the vast territories of the Sudan
+from the most cruel tyranny the world has ever known, and we have
+hoisted the Egyptian and British flags at Khartum, never, I hope, to be
+hauled down. I have again to thank you, my Lord Mayor, for the great
+honor done us on this occasion. I have only one regret which, I feel
+sure, is shared by all present, and which has been given expression to
+by Lord Rosebery and Lord Salisbury, and that is, that Lord Cromer, who
+has supported me during the last two and a half years, is not here to
+support me to-night and to receive in person the thanks to which he is
+so justly entitled, and which, I am sure, you would willingly have
+given. [Loud cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+ANDREW LANG
+
+
+PROBLEM NOVELS
+
+[Speech of Andrew Lang at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy,
+  London, May 6, 1894. This speech on some of the aspects of modern
+  fiction was delivered by Mr. Lang in response to the toast "The
+  Interests of Literature," regularly proposed on these occasions. The
+  President of the Academy, Sir Frederic Leighton, said in introducing
+  Mr. Lang: "Your Royal Highness, My Lords and Gentlemen: Let us drink
+  to the honor of science and of letters. If of the latter it may be
+  affirmed without fear that few things are more often misapprehended
+  than their true relation to art, it is not less certain that no body
+  of men are more than artists responsive to their stimulating force.
+  How closely science, which is knowledge, is interwoven on many sides
+  with art, it is needless here to say. In the name of letters I have to
+  call upon one of the most versatile of their votaries, a man whose
+  nimble intellect plays with luminous ease round many and various
+  subjects; delicate as a poet, acute and picturesque as a critic, a
+  sparkling journalist, no one has pursued with more earnest and more
+  fruitful zeal the graver study of the birth and evolution of natural
+  myths than Mr. Andrew Lang, to whom I turn for response."]
+
+
+YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MR. PRESIDENT, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--He
+to whom it falls or rather on whom falls the task of replying for
+English literature may well feel ground to dust by the ponderous honor.
+Who can be the representative of such a Parnassian constituency of
+divine poets, philosophers, romancers, historians, from Beowulf to the
+last new novel? The consciousness is crushing. The momentary
+representative feels himself to be like Mr. Chevy Slyme "the most
+littery fellow in the world," who is over-borne like the bride of the
+Lord of Burleigh--
+
+ "By the burden of an honor
+   Unto which she was not born."
+
+Naturally he flies to thoughts which whisper of humility. He finds them
+easily. In the first place literature is but a very insignificant flake
+on the foam of the wave of the world. As Mr. Pepys reminds us, most
+people please themselves "with easy delights of the world, eating,
+drinking, dancing, hunting, fencing," and not with book learning. Easy
+he calls them! I wish they were:--
+
+ "I cannot eat but little meat,
+  My stomach is not good."
+
+Still less can I dance or hunt. Yet to the general public these things
+come easier than reading; and their good-humored contempt keeps us poor
+"littery gents" in our proper place and frame of mind. I have lately
+read somewhere about a man of letters who conceived himself to be the
+idol of the great and good-natured American people. They sent him the
+kindest letters, they invited him to lecture, but ah! when his
+publishers' accounts came in, he found there "To American sales: six and
+twopence!" [Laughter.] Here is matter for mortification!
+
+Again, one is not so much to speak for English literature as to speak
+about it; one is not a representative but a reporter; we critics are but
+the cagots or despised pariah class in the world of letters. If we ever
+give in to the belief that we might attempt something creative, we, like
+the insects celebrated by the poet, "have lesser" critics upon our backs
+to bite us [laughter] and to remind us of our limitations. Our function
+in the game is like that of the scorers and umpires at Lords or the
+Oval; men of accurate intellectual habit, and incorruptible integrity
+from whom not much is to be expected with bat or ball. We are not to do
+anything "off our own bats." For these reasons I only talk humbly of
+literature as an interested professional observer. When the philosopher
+Square spoke of religion, he meant the true religion, and when he said
+the true religion he indicated the Protestant religion, and by the
+Protestant religion he meant the religion of the Church of England. In
+the same way if I venture a few remarks on English literature I mean
+modern English literature, and by modern English literature I mean
+modern English novels.
+
+We are indeed quite destitute of poets. As Henry V is said by a French
+chronicler to have ennobled all his army on the eve of Agincourt, so
+perhaps it might be well to make all our poets poets-laureate
+[laughter]--there must be a sip for each of them in the butt of malmsey
+or sack. But when the general public says "literature" the general
+public means fiction.
+
+Now, though I have some optimistic remarks to end with, it does appear
+to myself that the British novel suffers from diverse banes or curses.
+The first is the spread of elementary education. Too many naturally
+non-literary people of all ranks are now goaded into acquiring a
+knowledge of the invention of Cadmus. When nobody could read, except
+people whose own literary nature impelled them to learn, better books
+were written, because the public, if relatively few, was absolutely fit.
+Secondly, these new educated people insist on our national cursed
+"actuality." They live solely in the distracted moment, whereas true
+literature lives in the absolute; in the past that perhaps never was
+present, and that is eternal; "lives in fantasy."
+
+Shakespeare did not write plays about contemporary problems. The Greek
+dramatists deliberately chose their topics in the tales of Troy and
+Thebes and Atreus's line. The very Fijians, as Mr. Paisley Thomson
+informs us, "will tell of gods and giants and canoes greater than
+mountains and of women fairer than the women of these days, and of
+doings so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall apart." They do
+not deal with "problems" about the propriety of cannibalism or the
+casuistry of polygamy [Laughter.] The Athenians fined for his
+_modernite_ the author of a play on the fall of Miletus because he
+reminded them of their misfortunes. But many of our novelists do nothing
+but remind us of our misfortunes. Novels are becoming tracts on parish
+councils, free love and other inflammatory topics [laughter], and the
+reason of this ruin is that the vast and the naturally non-literary
+majority can now read, and of course can only read about the actual,
+about the noisy wrangling moment. This is the bane of the actual.
+
+Of course I do not maintain that contemporary life is tabooed against
+novelists, but if novels of contemporary life are to be literature, are
+to be permanent, that life must either be treated in the spirit of
+romance and fantasy as by Balzac and the colossally fantastic Zola; or
+in the spirit of humor as by Charles de Bernard, Fielding, Thackeray,
+Dickens. The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all
+in one stodgy sandwich [laughter] produces no permanent literature,
+produces but temporary "Tracts for the Times."
+
+Fortunately we have among us many novelists--young ones luckily--who are
+true to the primitive and eternal Fijian canons of fiction. [Laughter.]
+We have Oriental romance from the author of "Plain Tales from the
+Hills." We have the humor and tenderness--certainly not Fijian I
+admit--which produced the masterpiece, "A Window in Thrums." We have the
+adventurous fancy that gives us "A Gentleman of France," "The Master of
+Ballantrae," "Micah Clarke," "The Raiders," "The Prisoner of Zenda," and
+the truly primeval or troglodyte imagination which, as we read of a
+fight between a knob-nosed Kaffir dwarf and a sacred crocodile, brings
+us in touch with the first hearers of Heracles's or Beowulf's or
+Grettir's deeds, "so strange that the jaws of the listeners fall apart."
+Thus we possess outlets for escape from ourselves and from to-day. We
+can still dwell now and then in the same air of pleasure as our fathers
+have breathed since the days of Homer.
+
+Such are the rather intolerant ideas of a bookworm who by no means
+grudges the pleasure which other readers receive from what does not
+please him to enthusiasm. And pleasure, not edification, is the end of
+all art. We are all pleased when we write; the public of one enthusiast
+every author enjoys, and the literary men who depreciate the joys of
+their own art or profession may not be consciously uncandid, but they
+are decidedly perverse. [Laughter and applause.]
+
+
+
+
+WILFRID LAURIER
+
+
+CANADA
+
+[Speech of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Premier of Canada, at a banquet given by
+  the Imperial Institute to the Colonial Premiers, London, June 18,
+  1897, on the occasion of Her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee. The Prince of
+  Wales presided. In introducing Sir Wilfrid Laurier, he said:
+  "Gentlemen, this is not the time nor is it necessary to allude to the
+  loyalty of our great colonies. We have heard what has been spoken here
+  to-night, and we shall hear still more. We know that our colonies look
+  toward the mother country with affection; and in the hour of need and
+  danger I feel convinced that they will always come forward to our
+  assistance. [Cheers.] During the remarkable record reign of Her
+  Majesty the Queen great changes have occurred. When she came to the
+  throne, there were only thirty-two colonies; now there are sixty-five.
+  [Cheers.] As Lord Lansdowne has said we have met here in times of
+  peace. God grant that it may last, but should the occasion come when
+  our national flag is endangered I have but little doubt, gentlemen,
+  that the colonies will unite like one man to maintain what exists and
+  what I hope will remain forever as integral parts of the British
+  Empire. It is now my pleasant duty to propose the toast of the
+  evening: 'Our Guests the Colonial Premiers.' We welcome them as
+  ourselves. We hope that their stay here may not be made in any way
+  irksome to them. I feel sure that no one will be more grateful than
+  the Queen herself to see that these gentlemen have come here on the
+  invitation of the Colonial Office to do honor to a great epoch in our
+  history. This toast we connect with the health of the Hon. Wilfrid
+  Laurier. I now beg you with all the honors to drink this toast--'Our
+  Guests, I may say, our friends, the Colonial Premiers.'"]
+
+
+YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--The toast which
+your Royal Highness has just proposed in such graceful terms is one
+which is important at all times and opens a subject which at the present
+time perhaps more than at any other engrosses and absorbs the minds of
+all thinking men. ["Hear! Hear!"] During the few days in which my
+colleagues and myself have had the privilege to be in England, we have
+had hourly evidences that the Colonies at the present moment occupied no
+small part in the affections of the people of England. [Cheers.] Sir,
+Colonies were born to become nations. In my own country, and perhaps
+also in England, it has been observed that Canada has a population which
+in some instances exceeds, in many others, rivals the populations of
+independent nations, and it has been said that perhaps the time might
+come when Canada might become a nation of itself. My answer is this
+simply: Canada is a nation. [Cheers.] Canada is free, and freedom is its
+nationality. Although Canada acknowledges the suzerainty of a Sovereign
+Power, I am here to say that independence can give us no more rights
+than we have at present. ["Hear! Hear!"]
+
+Lord Lansdowne has spoken of a day when perhaps our Empire might be in
+danger. England has proved at all times that she can fight her own
+battles, but if a day were ever to come when England was in danger, let
+the bugle sound, let the fires be lit, on the hills and in all parts of
+the Colonies, though we might not be able to do much, whatever we can do
+shall be done by the Colonies to help her. [Cheers.] From all parts of
+this country since I have been here, both in conversation and in
+letters, I have been asked if the sentiments of the French population of
+Canada were characterized by absolute loyalty towards the British
+Empire. I have been reminded that feuds of race are long and hard to
+die, and that the feuds of France--the land of my ancestors--with
+England have lasted during many generations. Let me say at once that
+though it be true that the wars of France and England have their place
+in history, it was the privilege of the men of our generation to see the
+banners of France and England entwined together victoriously on the
+banks of the Alma, on the heights of Inkerman, and on the walls of
+Sebastopol. [Cheers.]
+
+It is true that during the last century and the century before, a long
+war, a long duel, I might call it, was waged between England and France
+for the possession of North America, but in the last battle that took
+place on the plains of Abraham, both generals, the one who won and the
+one who failed, fell. If you go to the city of Quebec, you will see a
+monument erected in commemoration of that battle. What is the character
+of that monument? Monuments to record victories are not scarce in
+England or in France; but such a monument as this which is in Quebec, I
+do not think you will find in any other part of the world, for it is a
+monument not only to him who won but also to him who failed. [Cheers.]
+It is a monument dedicated to the memory of Wolfe and Montcalm, and the
+dedication, which is one of the noblest and best of the kind, not only
+for the sentiments which it records but also as a literary expression,
+is as follows: "_Mortem virtus communem famam historia monumentum
+posteritas dedit_." Here is a monument to the two races equal in fame,
+courage, and glory, and that equality exists at the present time in
+Canada. In this you have the sentiments of my countrymen--we are equal
+to-day with those who won on the battle-field on the plains of Abraham.
+It is by such acts that England has won the hearts of my
+fellow-countrymen; it is by such acts that she can ever claim our
+loyalty. Your Royal Highness, let me now thank you from the bottom of my
+heart for the kind words you have just spoken. Your Royal Highness has
+been kind enough to remind us that at one time in its earlier day you
+visited Canada. Many changes have taken place since that time, but let
+me assure your Royal Highness there has been no change in the loyalty of
+the people of Canada. [Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+FRANK R. LAWRENCE
+
+
+THE FUTURE OF NEW YORK
+
+[Speech of Frank R. Lawrence at the fourth annual dinner given by the
+  Poughkeepsie District Members of the Holland Society of New York,
+  October 3, 1893. The banquet was held in commemoration of the relief
+  of the Siege of Leyden, 1574. J. William Beekman, the President of the
+  Holland Society, said: "Gentlemen, we will now proceed to the next
+  regular toast. It is of interest to all: 'New York, the child of New
+  Amsterdam--Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.' I call upon
+  Mr. Frank R. Lawrence, President of the Lotos Club, to respond to that
+  toast."]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN OF THE HOLLAND SOCIETY:--Under any circumstances it
+would be difficult to follow the distinguished master of the art [Horace
+Porter] who has just taken his seat, but when to his glowing words is
+added the diffidence inspired by this illustrious company, the
+difficulty of the succeeding speaker is great indeed.
+
+Mr. President, I am like the needy knife-grinder, when asked for his
+tale: "Story--God bless you, I have none to tell, sir,"--and must beg
+you to accept from me a few disjointed sentences instead of a more
+formal speech. Indeed, it is not entirely clear to me which side of the
+question suggested by the text I am to take; I do not entirely know
+whether I am expected to prove the truth or to expose the falsehood of
+the old proverb which adorns your menu, and it is commonly the case with
+sayings that are supposed to represent the wisdom of the ages, that the
+one may as readily be established as the other. It might be suggested by
+one of sceptical mind that the saying that "as the twig is bent the
+tree's inclined," may not be literally true as applied to this company
+and this occasion; on the contrary, might it not be true that if your
+early Dutch ancestors could come back and gaze for a moment upon this
+sumptuous banquet and these gorgeous surroundings, their first impulse,
+in accordance with the frugal simplicity of their lives and their
+habits, would be to repudiate it, and repudiate their descendants, with
+reprehension and with horror? [Laughter.] And would they not straightway
+proceed, had they the power, to enact such sumptuary laws as should
+confine you all henceforth and for evermore, to the same simple fare
+upon which they and their children throve a couple of centuries ago?
+
+Yet, Mr. President, by whatever strange process of evolution the simple
+festivities of the first settlers upon this island may have grown into
+an occasion so distinguished as this, I conceive that, after all, the
+adage which you quote is well applied and has a serious meaning; for
+despite the lapse of time and the introduction of new races of men, New
+York is the child of Nieuw Amsterdam--and how the child has outgrown the
+parent!
+
+I believe it to be true, sir, that New York to-day bears more traces of
+the less than fifty years of Dutch government than of the more than one
+hundred years of British rule which followed. New York is, indeed,
+erected upon the foundation of Nieuw Amsterdam; yet how impossible to
+compare the New York of to-day with the original settlement established
+by your forefathers. As well might we compare the great gathering of the
+navies of the world which occurred in the Hudson River a year ago with
+the first expedition sent hither by their High Mightinesses the
+States-General two hundred and fifty years before. New York to-day,
+grown up from the Nieuw Amsterdam of a former generation, is a great
+emporium and a mighty city. To appreciate the greatness and the
+swiftness of its growth, we must recall that since this century began
+its population has increased more than twenty-fold. When this city and
+its vicinity shall once more have doubled their inhabitants, the result
+will be the formation of almost the largest mass of people congregated
+upon the globe. [Applause.]
+
+Contemplating these marvellous changes, past and to come, our
+reflections are not all pleasant. Often do we regret with Washington
+living the passing away of the Arcadian simplicity which once prevailed
+upon this island. Often do we recall his plaintive words, applied to
+this very community: "Let no man congratulate himself when he beholds
+the child of his bosom or the city of his birth increasing in magnitude
+and importance." Yet mournful reflections over the passing away of
+childhood's days have small place in the ceaseless activity of modern
+life. New York can no more again become the happy village whose
+departure Irving laments, than the river which nears the ocean can turn
+back and again become a tiny stream. Like a man approaching his prime,
+it must go forward to its destiny--and what a destiny seems to await our
+city! As the nineteenth century--greatest of periods known to man--draws
+to a close, and opens the way for its successor which we expect will be
+rich with broader and greater and higher achievements still than the
+century of our birth, what a future seems to await our city of New York!
+Is it not manifest destiny that old Nieuw Amsterdam, the present New
+York, should become a greater city than any on the earth to-day? And it
+seems to me, sir, that it is in a very large measure, indeed, to the
+rugged industry--to the sturdy honesty--to the indomitable will of your
+Dutch ancestors,--to the spirit which animated William the Silent, to
+the spirit and the qualities which sustained the early Dutch settlers
+upon this island, Wouter Van Twiller and Peter Stuyvesant and the men of
+their generation, that we and our children must look, to maintain civic
+virtue, to foster commercial enterprise, and to make the city of New
+York in the twentieth century the metropolis of the civilized world.
+[Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM E. H. LECKY
+
+
+THE ARTISTIC SIDE OF LITERATURE
+
+[Speech of William B. H. Lecky at the annual banquet of the Royal
+  Academy, London, May 5, 1888. Sir Frederic Leighton, the President of
+  the Academy, said in introducing him: "In connection with 'Letters,' I
+  turn to yet another son of that many-gifted sister island [This toast
+  was coupled with that of "Science," to which John Tyndall was called
+  upon to respond.] on which all Englishmen must heartily invoke the
+  blessings of prosperity and of peace restored [cheers], to a man whose
+  subtle and well-balanced mind has delighted, now in tracing through
+  the centuries the growth of the spirit of Rationalism, now in
+  following the history of morals in Europe, through the first eight
+  centuries of our era, and more lately in illuminating the great page
+  of English history in the century which precedes our own, Mr. William
+  Edward Lecky."]
+
+
+YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN: I cannot but
+remember that the last time I heard this toast proposed in this room the
+task which now devolves upon me was discharged by that true poet and
+great critic whose recent loss all England is deploring. In few respects
+did Mr. Arnold render a greater service to Literature than by the stress
+he always placed upon the importance of its artistic side--upon that
+"grand style," as he loved to call it, which the very last words he
+uttered in public were employed in extolling. It was not without a
+sound, critical instinct that he dwelt on it, for it is, I think, on
+this side, that contemporary literature is apt to be weakest. A great
+wave of German influence has swept over English literature, and however
+admirable may be the German intellect in its industry and its
+thoroughness, in its many-sided sympathies, and in its noble love for
+truth, it will hardly be claimed for it, even by its greatest admirers,
+that it is equally distinguished for its sense of the beauty of form or
+for the great art of perspective or proportion. [Cheers.]
+
+Whether it be owing to this cause, or to the reaction from the
+brilliantly pictorial literature of Macaulay and his contemporaries, or
+to the excessive predominance of the critical spirit, or to some other
+more subtle or far-reaching cause, I know not; but I cannot but think
+that we find in contemporary literature some want of the freshness, the
+simplicity, or the directness of the great literatures of the past.
+History is apt to resolve itself into archeology or politics. In poetry
+or fiction we find more traces of the mind that dissects and analyzes
+than of the mind that embodies and creates. Passion itself assumes the
+aspects or affects the subtleties of metaphysics, and much of our modern
+literary art bears a strong resemblance to a school of painting which
+seems very popular beyond the Channel, in which all definite forms and
+outlines seem lost under vague masses of luminous but almost unorganized
+color.
+
+And yet, though this be true of a large part of our literature, we have
+still great painters among us. It would be idle, it would be, perhaps,
+invidious, for me to mention names, many of which will rise unbidden to
+your minds; but it is not, I think, out of place to remind you that it
+is since the doors of the last Academy exhibition closed that the
+illustrious historian [Kinglake] of the Crimean war has completed that
+noble historic gallery, hung with battlepieces as glowing and as
+animated, with portraits as vivid and as powerful, as any that have
+adorned these walls. And if it be said that this great master of
+picturesque English was reared in the traditions of a more artistic age,
+I would venture to point to a poem which has been but a few weeks in the
+world, but which is destined, if I am not much mistaken, to take a more
+prominent place in the literature of its time--poem which among many
+other beauties contains pictures of the old Greek mythology that are
+worthy to compare even with those with which you, Mr. President, have so
+often delighted us. I refer to "The City of Dreams," by Robert Buchanan.
+["Hear! Hear!"] While such works are produced in England, it cannot, I
+think, be said that the artistic spirit in English literature is very
+seriously decayed. [Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+FITZHUGH LEE
+
+
+THE FLAG OF THE UNION FOREVER
+
+[Speech of General Fitzhugh Lee at a dinner given by the Friendly Sons
+  of St. Patrick and the Hibernian Society of Philadelphia, at the city
+  of Philadelphia, September 17, 1887. The occasion of the dinner was
+  the one hundredth anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of
+  the United States. General Lee, then Governor of Virginia, was the
+  guest of Governor Beaver at the dinner. The Chairman, Hon. Andrew G.
+  Curtin [Pennsylvania's war governor], in introducing General Lee said:
+  "We have here to-day a gentleman whom I am glad to call my friend,
+  though during the war he was in dangerous and unpleasant proximity to
+  me. He once threatened the Capitol of this great State. I did not wish
+  him to come in, and was very glad when he went away. He was then my
+  enemy and I was his. But, thank God, that is past; and in the
+  enjoyment of the rights and interests common to all as American
+  citizens, I am his friend and he is my friend. I introduce to you,
+  Governor Fitzhugh Lee."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE HIBERNIAN SOCIETY:--I am very
+glad, indeed, to have the honor of being present in this Society once
+more; as it was my good fortune to enjoy a most pleasant visit here and
+an acquaintance with the members of your Society last year. My
+engagements were such to-day that I could not get here earlier; and just
+as I was coming in Governor Beaver was making his excuses because, as he
+said, he had to go to pick up a visitor whom he was to escort to the
+entertainment to be given this evening at the Academy of Music. I am the
+visitor whom Governor Beaver is looking for. He could not capture me
+during the war, but he has captured me now. I am a Virginian and used to
+ride a pretty fast horse, and he could not get close enough to me.
+[Laughter.]
+
+By the way, you have all heard of "George Washington and his little
+hatchet." The other day I heard a story that was a little variation
+upon the original, and I am going to take up your time for a minute by
+repeating it to you. It was to this effect: Old Mr. Washington and Mrs.
+Washington, the parents of George, found on one occasion that their
+supply of soap for the use of the family at Westmoreland had been
+exhausted, and so they decided to make some family soap. They made the
+necessary arrangements and gave the requisite instructions to the family
+servant. After an hour or so the servant returned and reported to them
+that he could not make that soap. "Why not," he was asked, "haven't you
+all the materials?" "Yes," he replied, "but there is something wrong."
+The old folks proceeded to investigate, and they found they had actually
+got the ashes of the little cherry tree that George had cut down with
+his hatchet, and there was no lye in it. [Laughter.]
+
+Now, I assure you, there is no "lie" in what I say to you this
+afternoon, and that is, that I thank God for the sun of the Union which,
+once obscured, is now again in the full stage of its glory; and that its
+light is shining over Virginia as well as over the rest of this country.
+We have had our differences. I do not see, upon reading history, how
+they could well have been avoided, because they resulted from different
+constructions of the Constitution, which was the helm of the ship of the
+Republic. Virginia construed it one way. Pennsylvania construed it in
+another, and they could not settle their differences; so they went to
+war, and Pennsylvania, I think, probably got a little the best of it.
+[General laughter.]
+
+The sword, at any rate, settled the controversy. But that is behind us.
+We have now a great and glorious future in front of us, and it is
+Virginia's duty to do all that she can to promote the honor and glory of
+this country. We fought to the best of our ability for four years; and
+it would be a great mistake to assume that you could bring men from
+their cabins, from their ploughs, from their houses and from their
+families to make them fight as they fought in that contest unless they
+were fighting for a belief. Those men believed that they had the right
+construction of the Constitution, and that a State that voluntarily
+entered the Union could voluntarily withdraw from it. They did not fight
+for Confederate money. It was not worth ten cents a yard. They did not
+fight for Confederate rations--you would have had to curtail the demands
+of your appetite to make it correspond with the size and quality of
+those rations. They fought for what they thought was a proper
+construction of the Constitution. They were defeated. They acknowledged
+their defeat. They came back to their father's house, and there they are
+going to stay. But if we are to continue prosperous, if this country,
+stretching from the Gulf to the lakes and from ocean to ocean, is to be
+mindful of its own best interests, in the future, we will have to make
+concessions and compliances, we will have to bear with each other and to
+respect each other's opinions. Then we will find that that harmony will
+be secured which is as necessary for the welfare of States, as it is for
+the welfare of individuals. [Applause.]
+
+I have become acquainted with Governor Beaver--I met him in Richmond.
+You could not make me fight him now. If I had known him before the war,
+perhaps we would not have got at it. If all the Governors had known each
+other, and if all the people of different sections had been known to
+each other, or had been thrown together in business or social
+communication, the fact would have been recognized at the outset, as it
+is to-day, that there are just as good men in Maine as there are in
+Texas, and just as good men in Texas as there are in Maine. Human nature
+is everywhere the same; and when intestine strifes occur, we will
+doubtless always be able by a conservative, pacific course to pass
+smoothly over the rugged, rocky edges, and the old Ship of State will be
+brought into a safe, commodious, Constitutional harbor with the flag of
+the Union flying over her, and there it will remain. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+SIR FREDERIC LEIGHTON
+
+
+VARIETY IN BRITISH ART
+
+[Speech of Sir Frederic Leighton, as President of the Royal Academy, at
+  the banquet held by that society, May 5, 1894. This speech followed
+  upon that of Dr. Mandell Creighton, Bishop of Peterborough, who had
+  proposed the "Prosperity of the Royal Academy," and the health of the
+  President.]
+
+
+MY LORD BISHOP:--I thank you for the appreciative tone in which
+you have spoken of art in general and of English art in particular. The
+kind terms in which you have commended this institution and its work to
+this distinguished assembly must have gratified my colleagues as much as
+it has gratified me, and we thank you most warmly. I would also
+gratefully acknowledge the lenient words you have addressed to the
+occupant of this chair. More fortunate than last year at this season, I
+have to note to-day the loss of one only among the acting members of
+this body--that of a sculptor of much repute, whose first steps in art
+were taken under the stimulating guidance of a powerful artist, whose
+name is a just boast to the green island which gave him birth--John
+Henry Foley. Less vigorous, no doubt, than his eminent master, Charles
+Bell Birch, he yet imparted to his works great life and spirit, and the
+charm of a facile and picturesque execution, and, even in this day of
+renovation and growing strength in the practice of that stately art,
+sculpture in this country will miss him in its ranks. ["Hear! Hear!"]
+From amongst the honorary retired Associates of this body another
+sculptor, W. F. Woodington, has been removed by death--an artist whom,
+for many years, age and infirmity had withdrawn altogether from public
+ken. The work of his vigorous prime may still be appreciated on the base
+of the Nelson column of Trafalgar Square.
+
+But whilst our active ranks have suffered diminution by one death only
+within the year, two justly conspicuous men have fallen in the wider
+field of English art, both of them men of marked and distinctive
+personality--both painters, both, to me, deeply interesting. One of
+them, Albert Moore, an unbending upholder of the sufficiency in art of
+whatever is nobly decorative, was a devoted student of the severer
+graces of Hellenic art, and married in his works spontaneous and supple
+gesture with forms of chaste sobriety, clothing them in delicately
+harmonious tones, of which the studied arrangement announced to the
+first glance the refined idiosyncrasy of his artistic temper. ["Hear!
+Hear!"]
+
+How great a psychological contrast is offered to the placid charm of
+these works by the fervor of those of the artist whom I have next to
+name, an artist of strong intellectual bent and steeped in human
+sympathies, the originator of the movement which startled humdrum people
+forty or more years ago, and produced a most interesting phase of
+English art! I speak of Ford Madox Brown, who recently passed away in
+the fulness of respected years and in the unabated intensity of his
+convictions. I am not here to defend in every point the nature of those
+convictions; I am not wholly at one with them. Ardently admired by many,
+stimulating and highly interesting to a still larger circle of the
+intelligent, who did not, perhaps, wholly follow his doctrine, he was
+not altogether acceptable to the wider and less cultured public, which
+so largely influences the creation of that empty and fickle thing called
+popularity; for there was that in his work which was apt to rouse the
+uneasy dread of the not usual, which mostly marks the middling mind. But
+this, I fearlessly affirm, apart from his technical endowments and rare
+vividness of dramatic vision, in the work of no English hand burns a
+more ardent sympathy with human emotion or is revealed a more subtle
+observation of the outward signs and gestures by which these emotions
+are conveyed. [Cheers.]
+
+The artistic memories which associate themselves in our mind with Madox
+Brown and his concentrated energies, bring vividly before us, as we look
+upon the walls of this exhibition, or glance in thought over the wide
+area of contemporary production in England, the changes which two-score
+years have wrought in the character and tendencies of art in this
+country. As we wander through these--I rejoice to say, more than ever
+catholic and hospitable--galleries, within which the still young unfold,
+this year, so much vitality and promise--and, gentlemen, to us, the old,
+there is, believe me, no gladder sight or one more full of comfort--we
+are struck, not with a concentration of aim or purpose in the school,
+but rather with a radiation and scattering of effort in innumerable
+directions. No one, I think, can fail to observe the extraordinary
+differences of mood and manner shown in the works which have found equal
+shelter on these walls, and the wide multiplicity of individual
+personalities which they proclaim. In the range of figure painting, for
+instance, what variety of subject as well as of temper meets us! We see,
+not historic or domestic scenes alone; not alone scenes in which the
+rhythmic dream of beauty and of style is aimed at; but works also, not a
+few, of purely imaginative character--fanciful, mythological,
+allegorical, symbolic--amongst which latter, one especially, I think, is
+dominant in its powerful originality and the weird charm of its
+decorative pomp. In the region of landscape, no less, every mood is
+touched, and every association evoked, from the infinite solemnity of
+the silent Arctic solitudes to the infinite sweetness of a Surrey
+homestead nestling within its sheltered nook, or the laughter of the
+flower-fields of the Alps in June. What various temperament, too, we
+note in the expressional use of tone and color--here vivid and
+vibratory; there grave and soberly subdued.
+
+In sculpture, again, though the display is numerically small, there are
+amongst various good works some that are salient. I will name one by a
+late alumnus of these schools, which has passed into the hands of the
+nation, and, in another room, the dazzling sketch of a monument deeply
+pathetic in its occasion, and of which this country will, I believe, be
+justly and lastingly proud. On all hands then, in sum, we are conscious
+of Life. With it, we are aware in much of the art of the day of a
+certain feverish tentativeness, groping, as it were, sometimes after a
+new spirit, sometimes after a repristination of the old in a modern
+form; but everywhere, I repeat, we see Life. And, gentlemen, to those
+who, like myself, believe in the necessary triumph of the high over the
+less high, in the eventual sure survival of the wholesome and the
+strong, and in the falling away and withering of the vicious or the
+morbid, this sign is the most welcome, the most inspiriting, and the
+most hopeful sign of all. [Loud cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES GODFREY LELAND
+
+
+HANS BREITMANN'S RETURN
+
+[Speech of Charles G. Leland at a dinner given in his honor by the Lotos
+  Club, New York, January 31, 1880. Mr. Leland had just returned from a
+  sojourn of eleven years abroad. Whitelaw Reid, the President of the
+  Club, introduced Mr. Leland, and said in part: "Well, his long exile
+  is over. With a true Philadelphian's fear of envious and jealous New
+  York, he stayed abroad till they started a Pennsylvania line of
+  steamers for him, and so smuggled him past Manhattan Island and into
+  the Quaker City direct. Captured as he is to-night, I will not abuse
+  his modesty by eulogy, yet this much I venture to say, and it is the
+  eulogy the true humorist and the true man of letters will most highly
+  prize. He deserves all the grateful honor we can pay him because he
+  has made substantial additions to the sum of human enjoyment in the
+  world. I give you the health of Mr. Leland, and with it our best
+  wishes for his long life and prosperity to the end."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--I have been asked several times
+since my return what struck me most, after an eleven years' absence, and
+I should say it is the fact that I am remembered. It has never struck me
+so forcibly as this evening. I have been for eleven years over the sea;
+I have returned like the proverbial story, somewhat worn, perhaps, but
+still accepted, and I am very much gratified that it is so. Time passes
+so rapidly, and especially here in New York, that to be remembered after
+so long an absence is especially gratifying.
+
+I met in Europe a Mr. Boyd, whose family two centuries before had
+resided in Ireland. Mr. Boyd thought one day that he would go back and
+visit his relatives, and so he went back and met with an Irish cousin.
+"Ah, Cousin Boyd," said his relative, "I am glad to see you, and though
+you have not been here for more than two hundred years, still I can
+easily trace the illegant resemblance." [Laughter.] Gentlemen, you seem
+inclined to trace the resemblance. I am still known, and that has
+touched me more than anything.
+
+But I am not altogether so great a stranger to New York. To be sure, I
+was born in Philadelphia; that cannot be denied; but I have also lived
+in New York. I was a long time in New York, and, indeed, was a
+freeholder of the city. I once owned a piece of property here, on which
+a Dutchman planted his cabbages but never paid any rent--and I never
+asked him for any; finally I gave a man eighty dollars to take the
+property off my hands altogether. I also voted in New York; and in this
+I fared better than in freeholding, for I voted for Abraham Lincoln at
+his first election. [Applause.]
+
+I have also been a business man in New York. I started "Vanity Fair,"
+with Charles Browne [Artemus Ward] as an assistant, and I remember how I
+used to suggest the subjects to him, and how he used to write out the
+series of articles which have since become so widely known. The "Revue
+des Deux Mondes" recently gave a detailed account of the manner in
+which I brought out Artemus Ward, in which by far too much credit was
+given to me and too little to him. But this was all done in New York,
+and you will give me some credit for having aided such a man as Artemus
+Ward. But I am growing gossipy. I say all this, however, just to show
+that I have some claim to call myself a New Yorker. I was here for a
+long time, and here some of my best work was done. But what can I say to
+thank you for the kind manner in which you have received me?
+
+Before I left London a gentleman said to me: "The two greatest honors of
+your country are to get a degree from Harvard, and to be a guest of the
+Lotos Club;" for you must know that they talk a great deal about you.
+[Laughter.] This was said to me by an English gentleman of letters, for,
+as I said, you are extremely well known over there, and your hospitality
+is so celebrated that to have received the stamp of it is to be
+distinguished.
+
+I said it was very strange, but the last thing that happened to me
+before leaving America was to receive the degree of A. M. from
+Cambridge, but I did not venture to aspire to the other one. And now the
+first thing that happens to me on my return is to receive your
+invitation. Gentlemen, ambition can no further go. [Laughter.] As Horace
+says, a man may change his skies, but not his disposition, and I wish to
+show you that I have not forgotten my manners while abroad; and, in this
+connection, that a good speech should have a short answer. A very
+excellent speech preceded mine. I have made my answer altogether too
+long. Thanking you from my heart, for your courteous kindness, I now take
+my seat. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+ABRAHAM LINCOLN
+
+
+CENTRAL IDEAS OF THE REPUBLIC
+
+[Fragment of a speech of Abraham Lincoln at the Republican banquet in
+  Chicago, December 10, 1856. The rest of this speech, if it was ever
+  reported, is presumably no longer extant, as it is not published in
+  any collection of Lincoln's speeches.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--We have another annual presidential message. Like a
+rejected lover making merry at the wedding of his rival, the President
+felicitates himself hugely over the late presidential election. He
+considers the result a signal triumph of good principles and good men,
+and a very pointed rebuke of bad ones. He says the people did it. He
+forgets that the "people," as he complacently calls only those who voted
+for Buchanan, are in a minority of the whole people by about four
+hundred thousand votes--one full tenth of all the votes. Remembering
+this, he might perceive that the "rebuke" may not be quite as durable as
+he seems to think--that the majority may not choose to remain
+permanently rebuked by that minority.
+
+The President thinks the great body of us Fremonters, being ardently
+attached to liberty, in the abstract, were duped by a few wicked and
+designing men. There is a slight difference of opinion on this. We think
+he, being ardently attached to the hope of a second term, in the
+concrete, was duped by men who hate liberty every way. He is the
+cat's-paw. By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to
+eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as
+unfit for further use. As the fool said of King Lear, when his daughters
+had turned him out of doors, "He's a shelled peascod."
+
+So far as the President charges us with a desire to "change the
+domestic institutions of existing States," and of "doing everything in
+our power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral authority,"
+for the whole party on belief, and for myself on knowledge, I pronounce
+the charge an unmixed and unmitigated falsehood.
+
+Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public
+opinion can change the government practically just so much. Public
+opinion, on any subject, always has a central idea, from which all its
+minor thoughts radiate. That central idea in our political public
+opinion at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be,
+the equality of men. And although it has always submitted patiently to
+whatever of inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity,
+its constant working has been a steady progress toward the practical
+equality of all men. The late presidential election was a struggle by
+one party to discard that central idea and to substitute for it the
+opposite idea that slavery is right in the abstract, the workings of
+which as a central idea may be the perpetuity of human slavery and its
+extension to all countries and colors. Less than a year ago the Richmond
+"Enquirer," an avowed advocate of slavery regardless of color, in order
+to favor his views, invented the phrase "State equality," and now the
+President, in his message, adopts the "Enquirer's" catch-phrase, telling
+us the people "have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all
+the States of the Union as States." The President flatters himself that
+the new central idea is completely inaugurated; and so indeed it is, so
+far as the mere fact of a presidential election can inaugurate it. To us
+it is left to know that the majority of the people have not yet declared
+for it, and to hope that they never will. All of us who did not vote for
+Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand.
+But in the late contest we were divided between Fremont and Fillmore.
+Can we not come together for the future? Let every one who really
+believes, and is resolved, that free society is not and shall not be a
+failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the past contest he
+has done only what he thought best--let every such one have charity to
+believe that every other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be
+bygones; let past differences as nothing be; and with steady eye on the
+real issue, let us reinaugurate the good old central ideas of the
+Republic. We can do it. The human heart is with us: God is with us. We
+shall again be able not to declare that "all States as States are
+equal," nor yet that "all citizens as citizens are equal," but to renew
+the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more,
+"that all men are created equal." [Applause.]
+
+[Illustration: _FANEUIL HALL_
+
+_Photogravure after a photograph_
+
+This historic "Cradle of Liberty" yields to no building in America, save
+perhaps Independence Hall, in interest. Faneuil Hall, in Boston, was
+built in 1740, by Peter Faneuil, a wealthy merchant, and presented to
+the town for a town-hall and market uses, to which it has been devoted
+ever since. In 1761 it was injured by fire, but was rebuilt by the town
+in the following year. In 1805 it was considerably enlarged and
+improved. During the troublous times which preceded the Revolution, it
+was the scene of most exciting public meetings; and the great patriot
+orators of that day sounded from this platform the stirring notes that
+gave the chief impulse of patriotism to the whole country.]
+
+
+
+
+HENRY CABOT LODGE
+
+
+THE BLUE AND THE GRAY
+
+[Speech of Henry Cabot Lodge, delivered at a banquet complimentary to
+  the Robert E. Lee Camp of Confederate Veterans, of Richmond, Va.,
+  given in Faneuil Hall, Boston, June 17, 1887. The Southerners were
+  visiting Boston as the special guests of the John A. Andrew Post 15,
+  Department of Massachusetts, Grand Army of the Republic. At the
+  banquet Commander William B. Daley, of Post 15, presided. On either
+  side of the presiding officer were seated, Col. A. L. Phillips,
+  commander of the visiting camp, ex-Solicitor Gen. Goode of Virginia,
+  the Hon. George D. Wise of Virginia, Governor Ames of Massachusetts.
+  Mr. Lodge [now United States Senator from Massachusetts] responded to
+  the toast, "The Blue and the Gray."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN:--To such a toast, sir, it would seem perhaps most
+fitting that one of those should respond who was a part of the great
+event which it recalls. Yet, after all, on an occasion like this, it may
+not be amiss to call upon one who belongs to a generation to whom the
+Rebellion is little more than history, and who, however insufficiently,
+represents the feelings of that and the succeeding generations as to our
+great Civil War. I was a boy ten years old when the troops marched away
+to defend Washington, and my personal knowledge of that time is confined
+to a few broken but vivid memories. I saw the troops, month after month,
+pour through the streets of Boston. I saw Shaw go forth at the head of
+his black regiment, and Bartlett, shattered in body but dauntless in
+soul, ride by to carry what was left of him once more to the
+battle-fields of the Republic. I saw Andrew, standing bareheaded on the
+steps of the State House, bid the men God-speed. I cannot remember the
+words he said, but I can never forget the fervid eloquence which brought
+tears to the eyes and fire to the hearts of all who listened. I
+understood but dimly the awful meaning of these events. To my boyish
+mind one thing alone was clear, that the soldiers as they marched past
+were all, in that supreme hour, heroes and patriots. Amid many changes
+that simple belief of boyhood has never altered. The gratitude which I
+felt then I confess to to-day more strongly than ever. But other
+feelings have in the progress of time altered much. I have learned, and
+others of my generation as they came to man's estate have learned, what
+the war really meant, and they have also learned to know and to do
+justice to the men who fought the war upon the other side.
+
+I do not stand up in this presence to indulge in any mock
+sentimentality. You brave men who wore the gray would be the first to
+hold me or any other son of the North in just contempt if I should say
+that, now it was all over, I thought the North was wrong and the result
+of the war a mistake, and that I was prepared to suppress my political
+opinions. I believe most profoundly that the war on our side was
+eternally right, that our victory was the salvation of the country, and
+that the results of the war were of infinite benefit to both North and
+South. But however we differed, or still differ, as to the causes for
+which we fought then, we accept them as settled, commit them to history,
+and fight over them no more. To the men who fought the battles of the
+Confederacy we hold out our hands freely, frankly, and gladly. To
+courage and faith wherever shown we bow in homage with uncovered heads.
+We respect and honor the gallantry and valor of the brave men who fought
+against us, and who gave their lives and shed their blood in defence of
+what they believed to be right. We rejoice that the famous general whose
+name is borne upon your banner was one of the greatest soldiers of
+modern times, because he, too, was an American. We have no bitter
+memories to revive, no reproaches to utter. Reconciliation is not to be
+sought, because it exists already. Differ in politics and in a thousand
+other ways we must and shall in all good-nature, but let us never differ
+with each other on sectional or State lines, by race or creed.
+
+We welcome you, soldiers of Virginia, as others more eloquent than I
+have said, to New England. We welcome you to old Massachusetts. We
+welcome you to Boston and to Faneuil Hall. In your presence here, and at
+the sound of your voices beneath this historic roof, the years roll
+back and we see the figure and hear again the ringing tones of your
+great orator, Patrick Henry, declaring to the first Continental
+Congress, "The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New
+Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an
+American." A distinguished Frenchman, as he stood among the graves at
+Arlington, said, "Only a great people is capable of a great civil war."
+Let us add with thankful hearts that only a great people is capable of a
+great reconciliation. Side by side, Virginia and Massachusetts led the
+colonies into the War for Independence. Side by side they founded the
+government of the United States. Morgan and Greene, Lee and Knox,
+Moultrie and Prescott, men of the South and men of the North, fought
+shoulder to shoulder, and wore the same uniform of buff and blue--the
+uniform of Washington.
+
+Your presence here brings back their noble memories, it breathes the
+spirit of concord, and unites with so many other voices in the
+irrevocable message of union and good-will. Mere sentiment all this,
+some may say. But it is sentiment, true sentiment, that has moved the
+world. Sentiment fought the war, and sentiment has re-united us. When
+the war closed, it was proposed in the newspapers and elsewhere to give
+Governor Andrew, who had sacrificed health and strength and property in
+his public duties, some immediately lucrative office, like the
+collectorship of the port of Boston. A friend asked him if he would take
+such a place. "No," said he; "I have stood as high priest between the
+horns of the altar, and I have poured out upon it the best blood of
+Massachusetts, and I cannot take money for that." Mere sentiment, truly,
+but the sentiment which ennobles and uplifts mankind. It is sentiment
+which so hallows a bit of torn, stained bunting, that men go gladly to
+their deaths to save it. So I say that the sentiment manifested by your
+presence here, brethren of Virginia, sitting side by side with those who
+wore the blue, has a far-reaching and gracious influence, of more value
+than many practical things. It tells us that these two grand old
+commonwealths, parted in the shock of the Civil War, are once more side
+by side as in the days of the Revolution, never to part again. It tells
+us that the sons of Virginia and Massachusetts, if war should break
+again upon the country, will, as in the olden days, stand once more
+shoulder to shoulder, with no distinction in the colors that they wear.
+It is fraught with tidings of peace on earth and you may read its
+meaning in the words on yonder picture, "Liberty and Union, now and
+forever, one and inseparable."
+
+
+
+
+JOHN DAVIS LONG
+
+
+THE NAVY
+
+[Speech of John D. Long, Secretary of the Navy, at the banquet of the
+  Fall Festival Celebration, Chicago, October 9, 1899. The Secretary was
+  introduced by the toast-master, Hon. Melville E. Stone, to speak in
+  response to the toast, "The Navy."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--Your toast to the Navy is all the
+more a compliment because you are a thousand miles from the sea. It
+signifies the place that the Navy has in the hearts of all the people
+and how much they all alike share its glories. It has always been dear
+to the American heart, and has contributed some of the most brilliant
+pages in American history; but its exploits during the recent war have
+given it a stronger and broader hold than ever before. Besides, it is
+not a department which pertains to any section of the country nor to any
+class among the people; it is one of the fundamental elements of
+American popular growth. It is as much the product of our schools, our
+homes, and common life, as is the shop of the mechanic, the warehouse of
+the merchant, the harvest of the farmer. Jack hails from the inland
+hamlet as well as from the seaport town.
+
+The Admiral commanding one of our great squadrons, winning a victory
+unprecedented in naval history, is the son of a prominent financial
+business man; another, the son of an Irish laborer, working in a ditch
+by his father's side, went from it to the Naval academy. Every
+congressional district in the Union is represented there by its cadet.
+
+The result is that the splendid body of naval officers who to-day so
+highly command the confidence and admiration of the people are
+themselves the immediate representatives of the people, and of their
+common intelligence, spirit and standards. Our late antagonist had
+officers and men of undoubted bravery. But in education, versatility,
+ability to plan and do, and to meet emergencies: in short, in what Mrs.
+Stowe called "faculty," our superiority was such that the battle was won
+the moment it began.
+
+In this connection I remind myself that in Congress the Naval Committees
+of the Senate and House are made up also of men from all parts of our
+common country. That great branch of our government which nurses the
+Navy and provides for it is also representative of all the people.
+Indeed, your own great city, with all its tremendous commercial and
+industrial interests, has contributed a member of that committee, who
+has put his heart into our naval development, rendered signal service in
+that behalf, and by his recent voluntary study of naval affairs abroad
+has prepared himself for still more valuable work--your able
+representative in Congress, and my good friend, George Edmund Foss.
+
+I can the more properly, gentlemen, join with you in your appreciation
+of the Navy because, although its head, I am yet only temporarily
+connected with it and can look at it from the outside. I sometimes
+think, however, that the great public, applauding the salient merits,
+overlook others which are quite as deserving.
+
+You cheer for the men behind the guns; you give swords and banquets here
+and there to an Admiral--and both most richly deserve the tribute--but
+remember that all up and down the line there are individuals whose names
+never got to your ears--or, if so, are already half forgotten--who have
+earned unfading laurels. No man in the Navy has rendered such service,
+however great, that others were not ready to fill the place and do as
+well. The Navy is full of heroes unknown to fame. Its great merit is the
+professional spirit which runs through it; the high sense of duty, the
+lofty standards of service to which its hearts are loyal and which make
+them all equal to any duty.
+
+Who sings the praises of the chiefs of the naval stations and bureaus of
+the Navy department, who wept that there were no battles and glory for
+them; and who, remaining at their departmental posts, made such
+provision for the fitting out, the arming, the supplying, the feeding,
+the coaling, the equipping of your fleets that the commanding officer
+on the deck had only to direct and use the forces which these, his
+brothers, had put in his hands?
+
+Who repeats the names of the young officers who pleaded for Hobson's
+chance to risk his life in the hull and hell of the Merrimac? Who
+mentions the scores of seamen who begged to be of the immortal seven who
+were his companions in that forlorn hope?
+
+In the long watch before Santiago the terror of our great battleships
+was the two Spanish torpedo-boat destroyers, those swift, fiendish
+sharks of the sea, engines of death and destruction, and yet, when the
+great battle came, it was the unprotected Gloucester, a converted yacht,
+the former plaything and pleasure-boat of a summer vacation, which,
+without hesitation or turning, attacked these demons of the sea and sunk
+them both. I have always thought it the most heroic and gallant
+individual instance of fighting daring in the war. It was as if some
+light-clad youth, with no defence but his sword, threw himself into the
+arena with armored gladiators and by his dash and spirit laid them low.
+And yet who has given a sword or spread a feast to that purest flame of
+chivalrous heroism, Richard Wainwright?
+
+Who recalls all the still more varied services of our Navy--its exploits
+and researches in the interest of science, its stimulus to international
+commerce, its surveys in foreign harbors, its charting of the sea and
+marking of the pathway of the merchant marine, its study of the stars,
+its contributions--in short, to all the interests of an enlightened and
+progressive country?
+
+May I suggest, therefore, that with this broader view of our Navy, as
+not an outside conception of our institutions, but an integral part of
+them, it is a partial conception that criticises its recent development
+and its continued developments in the future? It has not only given
+dignity and variety of service and strength to your government, but
+think how it is linked in with all your industrial interests, with the
+employment of large bodies of labor, with the consumption of all sorts
+of material stimulating marine construction, building docks, and
+contributing to this business activity and prosperity which are the
+features of this thrifty town. It is not too much to predict that the
+development of our navy is the beginning also of a new era of our
+merchant marine, in maritime construction, and, hence, in maritime
+transportation, of the American bottom carrying the American flag again
+on all the oceans of the globe.
+
+In the war with Spain our fleet was ordered to Manila because there was
+a Spanish fleet there, and every military interest demanded its capture
+or destruction. When that was done, every military interest required,
+not that our fleet be withdrawn, but that our hand on the enemy's throat
+should there remain until his surrender. When that surrender came, and
+with it the transfer of the sovereignty of those islands from Spain to
+the United States, every consideration demanded that the President
+should hold them up, not toss them into the caldron of anarchy, and when
+violence began should restore order, yet stretching out always in his
+hands the tender and opportunity for peace and beneficent government
+until Congress in its wisdom shall determine what their future status
+shall be. What more, or what less, should he do and do his duty?
+[Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+SETH LOW
+
+
+THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
+
+[Speech of Seth Low at the 112th annual banquet of the Chamber of
+  Commerce of the State of New York, May 11, 1880. George W. Lane, the
+  second vice-President of the Chamber, presided, and called upon Mr.
+  Low to respond to the tenth regular toast: "The Chamber of Commerce of
+  the State of New York--its Past, Present, and Future."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE:--If the
+historian wished to convey to your minds some idea of the antiquity of
+this Chamber, he would scarcely do it, I think, by saying it was founded
+in 1768. So few besides the reporters would personally recollect those
+times. He would rather tell you that it dates back to an epoch when each
+absentee from the annual dinner was fined five shillings sterling for
+the offence. Think of that! How eloquently it seems to tell us that
+there was no Delmonico in those days. I can understand how a people that
+punished such a slight to commerce in such a way, would rebel at stamp
+acts and other burdens of the sort. The Revolution itself seems to get a
+new interpretation from this early custom of the Chamber. [Laughter.]
+
+But, perhaps, a better way of making vivid to this generation the age of
+this body, would be to say that it dates back to a time when New York
+actually had a foreign commerce of its own, carried on chiefly under the
+American flag. It sounds like a fairy tale to one who counts the ensigns
+in our harbor now, to be told that tradition speaks of a day when the
+Stars and Stripes floated over a larger fleet of common carriers on the
+highways of the world--at least, so far as American business was
+concerned--than even that omnipresent banner of St. George. Strange, is
+it not, that a nation which surpasses all others in its use of machinery
+on the land, should have been content to yield up the sea, almost
+without a struggle, to the steamships of the older world? Events over
+which we have had no control have had much to do with it, I know; but is
+a single misused subsidy to keep us off the sea forever, or so long as
+the dominion of the steamship lasts? Are we to wait until England can
+build our steamers for us, and hear her say, as we run up the Stars and
+Stripes to the mast-head of the ship which she has built: "See, Brother
+Jonathan, how cheap these subsidies which I have given all these years
+enable me now to build for you!" It may be we must wait for this, but
+let us hope for a happier consummation. Nevertheless, Mr. Chairman, this
+Chamber does date back to the time when we had a commerce of our own.
+[Applause.]
+
+In glancing over our old records, it is interesting to see what a
+perennial source of discussion in this body have been the pilots of the
+port. They have been mentioned, I think, even the past year. The first
+formal reference to the pilots appears in 1791, and the minutes ever
+since teem with memorials, protests, bills, measures, conferences and
+the like.
+
+A story is told of a Chinese pilot, who boarded the vessel of a captain
+who had never been on the China coast before, and who asked the captain
+one hundred dollars for his fee. The captain demurred, and the
+discussion waxed warm, until the white head of an old China merchant
+appeared in the companion-way, and caught the pilot's eye, when he cut
+the dispute short by crying out: "Hi-ya! G'long olo Foxee! ten dollar
+can do!" [Laughter and applause.]
+
+I apprehend there is much wisdom in this appeal. In the olden days, the
+complaint against our pilotage system was not only that it was costly,
+but that it was inefficient; and so even more costly in the losses of
+vessels and cargoes than in fees. But, after half a century of contest,
+the present system was reached in 1853, and it is, beyond dispute,
+acknowledged by underwriters and by merchants that, as a system, it has
+worked well--uncommonly well. If, therefore, the present dispute between
+the merchants and the pilots be, as I understand that it is, in all its
+vital points a dispute as to fees, I recommend to the merchants and to
+the pilots the Chinese method of adjustment--by compromise. Do not let
+us expose to the hazard of legislative interference a system which is
+not likely to be bettered, and which gives us certainly efficient
+pilotage, because we cannot all at once get by compromise a reduction in
+our favor quite equal to what we think our due. [Applause.]
+
+But what can I say, Mr. Chairman, of the Chamber of to-day? The subject
+is full, very full, of interest and of other good things. "May good
+digestion wait on appetite, and health on both." It is curious to see,
+all along the history of the Chamber, how coming events have cast their
+shadows before. In 1837 the Chamber petitioned Congress to improve the
+navigation at Hell Gate; in 1846 they approved a report suggesting as
+feasible a railroad across the continent to the Pacific; and in 1852
+they asked Congress to remove the mint from Philadelphia, intimating
+pretty plainly that Philadelphia was too insignificant a place to enjoy
+so great a luxury. The first two achievements have been accomplished.
+The mint is almost due in Wall Street. Let Philadelphia hear and
+tremble. [Applause.]
+
+When I think, Mr. Chairman, of the influence the Chamber wields, and of
+the influence it ought to wield, it seems to me one thing of all others
+should be avoided. The Chamber ought never to be put upon record in an
+important matter until full discussion upon fair notice has preceded
+action, whenever this is possible. Sometimes I have thought the action
+of the Chamber was somewhat the result of chance, even with reference to
+questions of great importance. If the Chamber is to continue free, as in
+the main it has been free, from being used for personal ends, and at the
+same time is to exert an influence at all commensurate with its power as
+a representative of commercial New York, the action of the Chamber ought
+to be the result of intelligent discussion. I would only suggest one
+definite thing. Why might not the notice of each monthly meeting state
+the items of unfinished business that may come up, and also give notice,
+so far as possible, of the matters to be submitted by the Executive
+Committee? The attendance at our meetings would be better, I am sure, if
+men knew when matters of interest to them were to be discussed.
+
+Glancing towards our future, I seem to see the day when Judge Fancher
+shall sit in a telephone exchange and receive his testimony in ghastly
+whispers from unseen mouths when the president of the Chamber shall
+take the ayes and nays of a meeting whose component parts are sitting in
+a thousand counting rooms in this city. But I never can seem to see the
+day when the annual dinner can be conducted by the members except
+face-to-face. At all events, we can wait till Edison perfects the
+electric light, before asking him to make a dinner available with
+Delmonico fifteen miles away. [Laughter and cheers.]
+
+In 1861 the Pacific Mail Steamship Line was petitioned for, or, at
+least, a mail line on the Pacific, between the United States and the
+Orient world, and that, while the nation was engaged in a mighty
+struggle for its life. The Pacific Mail Line to the East, the Pacific
+Railroad across the continent, the superb government buildings at
+Washington,--all constructed, in whole or in part, while the nation
+seemed to be strained to its utmost by the demands of a civil
+war,--these things are to me among the mightiest evidences of the faith
+of the men of those days who, while the present seemed to be surcharged
+with duties and burdens for their hands, still laid hold upon the future
+with such powerful grasp. Are we, of the Chamber of Commerce, worthy of
+the blessings that have come down to us out of the glorious past? If we
+wish to be, we must live partly for the future as did they.
+
+We need a building of our own, commodious, and in some way proportioned
+to the great interests we represent. We need a fire-proof building for
+the safe-keeping of our records. Once already in our history our seal
+has been returned to us from an obscure shop in London. Our Charter was
+rescued from an old trunk in the Walton house on Pearl Street, and our
+historic paintings were only discovered after long loss, as the result
+of the fire of 1835. The Chamber of Commerce is standing now at the door
+of Congress, and asks them to sell at public auction the site of the old
+Post Office, for not less than three hundred thousand dollars and to pay
+to the Chamber from the proceeds of the sale the sum of fifty thousand
+dollars, originally subscribed, in the main, by members of the Chamber
+when that site was purchased from the General Government a few years
+ago. It is the purpose of the Chamber to buy this plot, and to build
+there a building worthy of itself and of this great city. [Applause.]
+But so far we ask in vain.
+
+The House Committee of Ways and Means has reported our bill favorably,
+but Congress does nothing. The Chamber wants this plot, not so much
+because of the fifty thousand dollars it has of _quasi_ interest in it,
+but because of its eligibility. The Chamber believes it deserves well of
+this community and of the nation, and, so believing, it asks of Congress
+the passage of this bill.
+
+I look back over the past twenty years, and I find the Chamber of
+Commerce has been always alive to encourage gallantry, to reward
+conspicuous service, and to relieve distress. Eighteen hundred thousand
+dollars--almost two millions of dollars--has been given by this Chamber
+in these twenty years. The money has not all come from members of the
+Chamber, but the Chamber has always been recognized as the fitting
+leader and minister in this city in deeds of public spirit. [Cheers.]
+
+In 1858 it celebrated the completion of the first Atlantic cable, by
+giving medals of gold, with generous impartiality, to the officers of
+the British ship "Agamemnon" and the American ship "Niagara" alike. And
+in 1866 it feasted the distinguished and persevering American citizen
+whose pluck and courage, with reference to this cable, no disaster and
+no faint-heartedness anywhere could dismay.
+
+In 1861, in token of gratitude and of patriotic admiration, the Chamber
+placed a medal of bronze upon the breast of every officer and private
+who sustained the national honor in the defense of Fort Sumter and Fort
+Pickens.
+
+In 1862 it sprang to the relief of famished Lancashire; in 1865 our own
+sufferers in East Tennessee and in Savannah partook of its bounty; and
+in 1871 the bread cast upon the waters by Rochambeau and Lafayette, a
+hundred years before, returned through the ministry of the Chamber in an
+abundant harvest to the war-stricken plains of unhappy France.
+
+In 1865 the Chamber honored itself by giving testimonials to the
+officers and crew of the "Kearsarge."
+
+In 1866 it presented to the widow of a Southern officer in the United
+States Navy several historic swords, sending with them a purse, "in
+recognition of the valuable services rendered to our country by the
+father and son, and as a token that gratitude for fidelity to the flag
+of the Union is an abiding sentiment with the citizens of New York,
+descending from generation to generation."
+
+The cities of Troy, Portland, Richmond, Chicago, three of them when
+swept by fire, and Richmond when cast into gloom by the fall of the
+State Capitol, all in turn have realized, through the prompt action of
+the Chamber, the large brotherliness of commercial New York.
+
+And, finally, in 1876, at Savannah, and in 1878, through the whole
+southwestern district of the country, and again in 1879 at Memphis, the
+contributions made through the Chamber of Commerce gave substantial
+relief to the distressed victims of yellow fever. Thus has the Chamber
+contributed to promote a union of hearts throughout the broad expanse of
+this great Union of States. Thus has the Chamber done what it could to
+show that the spirit of commerce is a large and a liberal spirit, too
+large to be bounded by the lines that divide nations. Thus has the
+Chamber shown itself not unworthy of the Empire State of the New World.
+May the future of the Chamber be in every respect worthy of the past.
+[Loud applause,]
+
+
+
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
+
+
+HARVARD ALUMNI
+
+[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at
+  Cambridge, Mass., June 30, 1875. Mr. Lowell was the presiding
+  officer.]
+
+
+BRETHREN OF THE ALUMNI:--It is, I think, one of the greatest
+privileges conferred upon us by our degree that we can meet together
+once a year in this really majestic hall [Memorial Hall], commemorative
+of our proudest sorrows, suggestive only of our least sordid ambitions;
+that we can meet here to renew our pledge of fealty to the ancient
+mother who did so much for the generations that have gone before us, and
+who will be as benign to those who, by-and-by, shall look back and call
+us fathers. The tie that binds us to our college is one of the purest,
+since it is that which unites us also with our youth; it is one of the
+happiest, for it binds us to the days when we looked forward and not
+backward, for in hope there is nothing to regret, while in retrospect
+there is a touch of autumn and a premonition of winter.
+
+In this year of centennials, when none of us would be surprised if a
+century plant should blossom in our back yard [laughter], when I myself
+am matured, as I look to complete my second centennial on Saturday
+afternoon [laughter and applause], there is a kind of repose, as it
+seems to me, in coming back here to sit in the lap of this dear old
+nurse who is well on toward her three hundred, and who will certainly
+never ask any of us to celebrate her centennial either in prose or
+verse. To this college our Revolution which we are celebrating this year
+is modern. And I think also one of the great privileges which she
+confers upon us is that she gives us a claim of kindred still with the
+mother country--a claim purely intellectual and safe from the
+embitterment of war or the jealousies of trade. It was an offshoot of
+Cambridge and Oxford that was planted on the banks of the Charles, and
+by men from Cambridge and Oxford; and when I visited those renowned
+nurseries of piety, scholarship, and manliness of thought, my keenest
+pleasure in the kindness I received was the feeling that I owed the
+greater part of it to my connection with Harvard, whom they were pleased
+to acknowledge as a plant not unworthy of the parent stock. [Applause.]
+
+In their halls I could not feel myself a stranger, and I resented the
+imputation of being a foreigner when I looked round upon the old
+portraits, all of whom were my countrymen as well as theirs, and some of
+whom had been among our founders and benefactors. In this year of
+reconciliations and atonements, too, the influence of college
+associations is of no secondary importance as a bond of union. On this
+day, in every State of our more than ever to be united country, there
+are men whose memories turn back tenderly and regretfully to those
+haunts of their early manhood. Our college also, stretching back as it
+does toward the past, and forward to an ever-expanding future, gives a
+sense of continuity which is some atonement for the brevity of life.
+These portraits that hang about us seem to make us contemporaries with
+generations that are gone, and the services we render her will make us
+in turn familiar to those who shall succeed us here. There is no way so
+cheap of buying what I may call a kind of mitigated immortality,--mean
+by that an immortality without the pains and penalty attached commonly
+to it, of being dug up once in fifty years to have your claims
+reconsidered [laughter]--as in giving something to the college.
+[Applause.] Nay, I will say in parenthesis, that even an intention to
+give it secures that place of which I have spoken. [Laughter.] I find in
+the records of the college an ancestor of my own recorded as having
+intended to give a piece of land. He remains there forever with his
+beneficent intention. It is not certain that he didn't carry it out. The
+land certainly never came to me, or I should make restitution. [Laughter
+and applause.]
+
+Consider, for example, William Pennoyer; how long ago would he have sunk
+in the tenacious ooze of oblivion, not leaving rack nor even rumor of
+himself behind. No portrait of him exists, and no living descendant, so
+far as I know, and yet his name is familiar with all of us who are
+familiar with the records of the college, and he always presents himself
+to our imaginations in the gracious attitude of putting his hand into
+his pocket. [Laughter.] And tell me, if you please, what widow of a
+London alderman ever insured her life with so sure return or perdurable
+interest as Madame Holden. Even the bodiless society, _pro propaganda
+fide,_ is reincorporated forever in the perpetuity of our gratitude. It
+is the genteelest of immortalities, as the auctioneer would call it, the
+immortality of perfect seclusion.
+
+The value of such an association as this as a spur to honorable exertion
+is also, as it seems to me, no small part of its benefit. Leigh Hunt,
+says, somewhere, that when he was writing an essay he always thought of
+certain persons and said to himself, "A will like this, B will rub his
+hands at that"; and it is safe to say that any graduate of this college
+would prefer the suffrages of his brethren here to those of any other
+public. And when any of the sons of Harvard who has done her honor and
+his country upright service, meets us here on this day, it is not only a
+fitting recognition, but a powerful incentive, that he receives in the
+"Well done" of our plaudits. I had hoped that we should have heard
+to-day the voice of one graduate of Harvard who sits almost immediately
+upon my right. [Charles Francis Adams.] I will not press upon his
+modesty, but I will ask you to bear witness once more that Peace hath
+her victories, and more renowned than war [long continued applause]; and
+honor with me those truly durable years of service and that of victory,
+which if it hath not so loud an echo as that of the battle-field, will
+be seen to have a longer one. [Renewed and loud applause.] It appears to
+me that there is nothing more grateful to the human heart than this
+appreciation of cultivated men. If it be not the echo of posterity, it
+was something more solid and well-pleasing. But better and more
+wholesome than even this must it be, I should think, for men spending
+their lives in the dusty glare of public life, to come back once a year
+to our quiet shades and be, as Dr. Holmes has so delightfully sung,
+plain Bill and Joe again. It must renew and revive in them the early
+sweetness of their nature, the frank delight in simple things which
+makes so large a part of the better happiness of life.
+
+But, gentlemen, I will not longer detain you with the inevitable
+suggestions of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from
+under him who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy
+foot of a cockney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace.
+I had a kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be
+unable to fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely
+here with a tablet in the wall before me inscribed: _Guilielmo Roberto
+Ware, Henrico Van Brunt, optime de Academia meritis, eo quod facundiam
+postprandialem irritam fecerunt._ I hope you understood my Latin
+[laughter], and I hope you will forgive me the antiquity of my
+pronunciation [laughter]; but it is simply because I cannot help it.
+Then on a blackboard behind me I could have written in large letters the
+names of our guests who should make some brief dumb show of
+acknowledgment. You, at least, with your united applause, could make
+yourselves heard. If brevity ever needed an excuse, I might claim one in
+the fact that I have consented at short notice to be one of the
+performers in our domestic centennial next Saturday, and poetry is not a
+thing to be delivered on demand without an exhausting wear upon the
+nerves. When I wrote to Dr. Holmes and begged for a little poem, I got
+the following answer, which I shall take the liberty of reading. I don't
+see the Doctor himself in the hall, which encourages me to go on:--
+
+     "MY DEAR JAMES:--Somebody has written a note in your name
+     requesting me to furnish a few verses for some occasion which he
+     professed to be interested in. I am satisfied, of course, that it
+     is a forgery. I know you would not do such a thing as to ask a
+     brother rhymer, utterly exhausted by his centennial efforts, to
+     endanger his health and compromise his reputation by any damnable
+     iteration of spasmodic squeezing. [Laughter.] So I give you warning
+     that some dangerous person is using your name, and taking advantage
+     of the great love I bear you, to play upon my feelings. Don't think
+     for a moment that I hold you in any way responsible for this note,
+     looking so nearly like your own handwriting as for a single instant
+     to deceive me, and suggest the idea that I would take a passage for
+     Europe in season to avoid all the college anniversaries."
+
+I readily excused him, and I am sure you will be kind enough to be
+charitable to me, gentlemen.
+
+I know that one of the things which the graduates of the college look
+forward to with the most confident expectation and pleasure is the
+report of the President of the University. [Applause.] I remember that
+when I was in the habit of attending the meetings of the faculty, some
+fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was very much struck by the fact that
+almost every matter of business that required particular ability was
+sure to gravitate into the hands of a young professor of chemistry. The
+fact made so deep an impression upon me that I remember that I used to
+feel, when our war broke out, that this young professor might have to
+take the care of one of our regiments, and I know that he would have led
+it to victory. And when I heard that the same professor was nominated
+for President, I had no doubt of the result which all of us have seen to
+follow. I give you, gentlemen, the health of President Eliot of Harvard
+College. [Applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+NATIONAL GROWTH OF A CENTURY
+
+[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at
+  Cambridge, Mass., June 28, 1876. Mr. Lowell, as President of the
+  Alumni Association, occupied the chair.]
+
+
+BRETHREN:--Though perhaps there be nothing in a hundredth year
+to make it more emphatic than those years which precede it and which
+follow it, and though the celebration of centennials be a superstitious
+survival from the time when to count ten upon the fingers was a great
+achievement in arithmetic, and to find the square of that number carried
+with it something of the awe and solemnity which invests the higher
+mathematics to us of the laity, yet I think no wise man can be
+indifferent to any sentiment which so profoundly and powerfully affects
+the imagination of the mass of his fellows. The common consent of
+civilized mankind seems to have settled on the centennial commemoration
+of great events as leaving an interval spacious enough to be impressive,
+and having a roundness of completion in its period. We, the youngest of
+nations, the centuries to us are not yet grown so cheap and commonplace
+as to Napoleon when he saw forty of them looking in undisguised
+admiration upon his army, bronzed from their triumphs in Italy. For my
+own part I think the scrutiny of one age is quite enough to bear without
+calling in thirty-nine others to its assistance. [Applause.]
+
+It is quite true that a hundred years are but as a day in the life of a
+nation, are but as a tick of the clock to the long-drawn aeons in which
+this planet hardened itself for the habitation of man, and man
+accommodated himself to his habitation; but they are all we have, and we
+must make the best of them. Perhaps, after all, it is no such great
+misfortune to be young, especially if we are conscious at the time that
+youth means opportunity, and not accomplishment. I think that, after
+all, when we look back upon a hundred years through which the country
+has passed, the vista is not so disheartening as to the indigestive
+fancy it might at first appear. If we have lost something of that
+Arcadian simplicity which the French travellers of a hundred years ago
+found here,--perhaps because they looked for it, perhaps because of
+their impenetrability by the English tongue,--we have lost something
+also of that self-sufficiency which is the mark as well of provincials
+as of barbarians, and which is the great hindrance to all true
+advancement. It is a wholesome symptom, I think, if we are beginning to
+show some of that talent for grumbling which is the undoubted heirloom
+of the race to which most of us belong. [Laughter and applause.] Even
+the Fourth-of-July oration is edging round into a lecture on our
+national shortcomings, and the proud eagle himself is beginning to have
+no little misgiving at the amplitude between the tips of his wings.
+[Laughter.]
+
+But while it may be admitted that our government was more decorously
+administered one hundred years ago, if our national housekeeping of
+to-day is further removed from honest business principles, and therefore
+is more costly, both morally and financially, than that of any other
+Christian nation, it is no less true that the hundredth year of our
+existence finds us in the mass very greatly advanced in the refinement
+and culture and comfort that are most operative in making a country
+civilized and in keeping it so. [Applause.] When we talk of decline of
+public and private virtue I think that we forget that that better former
+day was a day of small communities and of uneasy locomotion, when public
+opinion acted more directly and more sharply, was brought to bear more
+convincingly upon the individual than is possible now. But grant that
+though the dread of what is said and thought be but a poor substitute
+and makeshift for conscience,--that austere and sleepless safeguard of
+character, which, if not an instinct, acquires all the attributes of an
+instinct, and whose repeated warnings make duty at least an unconscious
+habitude,--after all, this outside substitute is the strongest motive
+for well-doing in the majority of our race, and men of thought and
+culture should waste no opportunity to reinforce it by frankness in
+speaking out invidious truths, by reproof and by warning. I, for one,
+greatly doubt whether our national standard of right and wrong has been
+really so much debased as we are sometimes tempted to think [applause];
+and whether the soft money of a sentimental sort of promises to pay has
+altogether driven out the sterling coin of upright purpose and
+self-denying fulfilment. [Applause.] I could wish that this belief,
+almost, provided it did not mislead us into prophesying smooth things,
+were more general among our cultivated class; for the very acceptance of
+such a belief tends in large measure toward its accomplishment. No finer
+sentence has come down to us from antiquity, no higher witness was ever
+borne to the quality of a nation, than in that signal of Nelson's:
+"England expects every man to do his duty." [Applause.]
+
+Brethren, I thought on this occasion of the centennial celebration of
+our independence it was fit that some expression should go forth from us
+that should in some measure give contradiction to the impression that
+the graduates of Harvard College take a pessimistic view of their
+country and its institutions. [Applause.] Certainly I know that it is
+not true, and I wish to have that sentiment expressed here. Our college
+takes no official part in celebrating the nation's first completed
+century; she who is already half-way through her third has become too
+grave for these youthful elations. [Laughter.] But she does not forget
+that in Samuel and John Adams, Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jr., and John
+Hancock, she did her full share toward making such a commemoration
+possible. [Applause.] As in 1776, so in 1876, we have sent John Adams to
+represent us at Philadelphia, and, perhaps with some prescience of what
+the next century is to effect, we have sent with him Madame Boylston as
+his colleague [applause]; and it may be that Alma Mater in this has
+possibly shown a little feminine malice, for it is to a silent congress
+that she is made her deputy. [Laughter and applause.] And in the hundred
+years since we asserted for ourselves a separate place and proper name
+among the nations, our college has been no palsied or atrophied limb in
+the national organization. To the jurisprudence, to the legislation, the
+diplomacy, the science, the literature, the art of the country, her
+contribution has certainly not fallen short of its due proportion. Our
+triennial catalogue is hung thick with our trophies from many fields. I
+may say in parenthesis, gentlemen, brethren of the alumni, that I am
+glad the July number of the "North American Review" is not yet
+published. In the January number there was so disheartening a report of
+everything--I am glad to say our religion is excepted, we have grown
+perhaps in grace--but we had no science, we had none of this and none of
+the other.
+
+Brethren, we whom these dumb faces on the wall make in imagination the
+contemporaries of eight generations of men, let us remember, and let us
+inculcate on those who are to fill the places that so soon shall know us
+no more, let us remember, I say, that if man seem to survive himself and
+to be mutely perpetuated in these fragile semblances, it is only the
+stamp of the soul that is eternally operative; it is only the image of
+ourselves that we have left in some sphere of intellectual or moral
+achievement, that is indelible, that becomes a part of the memory of
+mankind, reproductive and beneficent, inspiring and admonitory.
+
+But, brethren, as Charles Lamb said of Coleridge's motto, _Sermoni
+propriori_, this is more proper for a sermon than for a dinner-table.
+But birthdays, after all, gentlemen, are serious things; and as the
+chance of many more of them becomes precarious, and the approaching
+birthday of the nation begets in all of us, I should hope, something of
+a grave and meditative mood, it would be an indecorum to break in upon
+it too suddenly with the licensed levity of festival. You are waiting to
+hear other voices, and I trust my example of gravity may act rather as a
+warning than as precedent to those who are to follow me.
+
+Brethren, at our table there is always one toast, that by custom and
+propriety takes precedence of all others. It is, I admit, rather an
+arduous task to pay the most many-sided man a different compliment year
+after year, and the President of the University must pardon me for
+saying that he gives a good deal of trouble to the President of the
+Alumni, as he is apt to do in the case of inefficient persons generally.
+[Laughter and applause.] One eminent quality, however, I can illustrate
+in a familiar Latin quotation, which, with your permission, I will put
+in two ways, thus securing, I should hope, the understanding of the
+older and younger among you: "_Justum et tenacem propositi virum_." [Mr.
+Lowell evoked considerable laughter by pronouncing the Latin according
+to the continental method.] I give you the health of President Eliot.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE STAGE
+
+[Speech of James Russell Lowell at a breakfast given to American actors
+  at the Savage Club, London, August, 1880. Charles Dickens [the son of
+  the novelist] occupied the post of chairman and called upon Mr. Lowell
+  to respond to the toast proposed in his honor: "The Health of the
+  American Minister."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--In listening to the kind words and
+still more in hearing the name of the gentleman who was kind enough to
+propose the toast to which I am replying, I cannot help recalling the
+words of one of your English poets:--
+
+ "Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand,
+  And the sound of a voice that is still!"
+
+I was honored with the acquaintance, in some sort, I may say, with the
+friendship of the father of the gentleman who proposed my name, and
+before saying anything further you will allow me to remark that my
+countrymen are always ready to recognize the hereditary claims when
+based upon hereditary merit. ["Hear! Hear!"]
+
+Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to me to be here, but in some sense I
+regard it also as a kind of duty to be present on any occasion when the
+star-spangled banner and the red cross of England hang opposite each
+other, in friendly converse. May they never hang opposite each other in
+any other spirit. [Cheers.] I say so because I think it is the duty of
+any man who in any sense represents one of the English-speaking races,
+to be present on an occasion which indicates, as this does, that we are
+one in all those great principles which lie at the basis of civilized
+society--never mind what the form of government may be.
+
+As I sat here, gentlemen, endeavoring to collect my thoughts and finding
+it, I may say, as difficult as to make a collection for any other
+charitable occasion [laughter], I could not help thinking that the
+Anglo-Saxon race--if you will allow me to use an expression which is
+sometimes criticised--that the Anglo-Saxon race has misinterpreted a
+familiar text of Scripture and reads it: "Out of the fulness of the
+mouth the heart speaketh." I confess that if Alexander, who once offered
+a reward for a new pleasure, were to come again upon earth, I should
+become one of the competitors for the prize, and I should offer for his
+consideration a festival at which there were no speeches. [Laughter.]
+The gentlemen of your profession have in one sense a great advantage
+over the rest of us. Your speeches are prepared for you by the cleverest
+men of your time or by the great geniuses for all time. You can be witty
+or wise at much less expense than those of us who are obliged to fall
+back upon our own resources. Now I admit that there is a great deal in
+the spur of the moment, but that depends very much upon the flank of the
+animal into which you dig it. There is also a great deal in that
+self-possessed extemporaneousness which a man carries in his pocket on a
+sheet of paper. It reminds one of the compliment which the Irishman paid
+to his own weapon, the shillalah, when he said: "It's a weapon which
+never misses fire." But then it may be said that it applies itself more
+directly to the head than to the heart. I think I have a very capital
+theory of what an after-dinner speech should be; we have had some
+examples this afternoon and I have made a great many excellent ones
+myself; but they were always on the way home, and after I had made a
+very poor one when I was on my legs. [Laughter.] My cabman has been the
+confidant of an amount of humor and apt quotations and clever sayings
+which you will never know, and which you will never guess. But something
+in what has been said by one of my countrymen recalls to my mind a
+matter of graver character. As a man who has lived all his life in the
+country, to my shame be it said I have not been an habitual
+theatre-goer. I came too late for the elder Kean. My theatrical
+experience began with Fanny Kemble--I forget how many years ago, but
+more than I care to remember--and I recollect the impression made upon
+me by her and by her father. I was too young to be critical; I was young
+enough to enjoy; but I remember that what remained with me and what
+remains with me still of what I heard and saw, and especially with
+regard to Charles Kemble, was the perfection of his art. It was not his
+individual characteristics--though of course I remember those--it was
+the perfection of his art. My countryman has alluded to the fact that at
+one time it was difficult for an actor to get a breakfast, much more to
+have one offered to him; and that recalls to my mind the touching words
+of the great master of your art, Shakespeare, who in one of his sonnets
+said:--
+
+ "O for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
+    The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
+  That did not better for my life provide
+    Than public means, which public manners breeds:
+  Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
+    And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
+  To what it works in, like the dyer's hand."
+
+Certainly the consideration in which the theatrical profession is held
+has risen greatly even within my own recollection. It has risen greatly
+since the time when Adrienne Lecouvreur was denied burial in that
+consecrated ground where rakes and demireps could complete the
+corruption they had begun on earth; and this is due to the fact that it
+is now looked upon not only by the public in general but by the members
+of your profession as a fine art. It is perfectly true that the stage
+has often lent itself, I will not say to the demoralization of the
+public, but to things which I think none of us would altogether approve.
+This, however, I think has been due, more to the fact that it not only
+holds up the mirror to nature, but that the stage is a mirror in which
+the public itself is reflected. And the public itself is to blame if the
+stage is ever degraded. [Cheers.]
+
+It has been to men of my profession, perhaps, that the degradation has
+been due, more than to those who represent their plays. They have
+interpreted, perhaps in too literal a sense, the famous saying of Dryden
+that
+
+    "He who lives to write, must write to live."
+
+But I began with the Irishman's weapon and I shall not forget that among
+its other virtues is its brevity, and as in the list of toasts which are
+to follow I caught the name of a son of him who was certainly the
+greatest poet, though he wrote in prose, and who perhaps possessed the
+most original mind that America has given to the world, I shall, I am
+sure, with your entire approbation make way for the next speaker.
+[Applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+COMMERCE
+
+[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the second annual dinner of the
+  London Chamber of Commerce, January 29, 1883. H. C. E. Childers,
+  Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in the chair. The company included
+  representatives of the English-speaking race in every part of the
+  world. On the chairman's left sat James Russell Lowell, United States
+  Minister. In proposing "The Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom
+  and of the Whole World," he delivered the following speech.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I was a few moments ago
+discussing with my excellent friend upon the left what a diplomatist
+might be permitted to say, and I think the result of the discussion was
+that he was left to his choice between saying nothing that had any
+meaning or saying something that had several [laughter]; and as one of
+those diplomatists to whom the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs
+alluded a short time ago, I should rather choose the latter course,
+because it gives one afterwards a selection when the time for
+explanation comes round. [Laughter.]
+
+I shall not detain you long, for I know that there are speakers both on
+the right and on the left of me who are impatient to burst the bud; and
+I know that I have not been selected for the pleasant duty that has been
+assigned to me for any merits of my own. [Cries of dissent.] You will
+allow me to choose my own reason, gentlemen. I repeat, I have not been
+chosen so much for my own merits as for the opportunity afforded you of
+giving expression to your kindness and good feeling towards the country
+I represent--a country which exemplifies what the colonies of England
+may come to if they are not wisely treated. [Laughter and cheers.]
+Speaking for myself and for one or two of my compatriots whom I see here
+present, I should certainly say that that was no unpleasant destiny in
+itself. But I do not, nor do my countrymen, desire that those great
+commonwealths which are now joined to England by so many filial ties
+should ever be separated from her.
+
+I am asked to-night to propose the "Chambers of Commerce of the United
+Kingdom and of the World," and I might, if the clock did not warn me
+against it--["Go on!"] if my own temperament did not stand a little in
+the way--I might say to you something very solemn on the subject of
+commerce. I might say how commerce, if not a great civilizer in itself,
+had always been a great intermediary and vehicle of civilization. I
+might say that all the great commercial States have been centres of
+civilization, and centres of those forces which keep civilization from
+becoming stupid. I do not say which is the _post_ and which the _propter_
+in this inference; but I do say that the two things have been almost
+invariably associated.
+
+One word as to commerce in another relation which touches me more
+nearly. Commerce and the rights and advantages of commerce, ill
+understood and ignorantly interpreted, have often been the cause of
+animosities between nations. But commerce rightly understood is a great
+pacificator; it brings men face to face for barter. It is the great
+corrector of the eccentricities and enormities of nature and of the
+seasons, so that a bad harvest and a bad season in England is a good
+season for Minnesota, Kansas, and Manitoba.
+
+But, gentlemen, I will not detain you longer. It gives me great pleasure
+to propose, as the representative of the United States, the toast of
+"The Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom and of the Whole World,"
+with which I associate the names of Mr. C. M. Norwood, M. P.,
+vice-president of the Associated Chambers of the United Kingdom, and the
+Hon. F. Strutt, president of the Derby Chamber. [Cheers.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+AFTER-DINNER SPEAKING
+
+[Speech of James Russell Lowell at a banquet given to Sir Henry Irving,
+  London, July 4, 1883, in view of his impending departure for a
+  professional tour of America. Lord Coleridge, Lord Chief Justice of
+  England, occupied the chair. The toast, "Literature, Science, and
+  Art," was proposed by Viscount Bury, and Mr. Lowell was called upon to
+  respond for Literature. Professor Tyndall replied on behalf of
+  Science, and Alma Tadema for Art.]
+
+
+MY LORD COLERIDGE, MY LORDS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--I confess
+that my mind was a little relieved when I found that the toast to which
+I am to respond rolled three gentlemen, Cerberus-like, into one
+[laughter], and when I saw Science pulling impatiently at the leash on
+my left, and Art on my right, and that therefore the responsibility of
+only a third part of the acknowledgment has fallen to me. You, my lord,
+have alluded to the difficulties of after-dinner oratory. I must say
+that I am one of those who feel them more keenly the more after-dinner
+speeches I make. [Laughter.] There are a great many difficulties in the
+way, and there are three principal ones, I think. The first is the
+having too much to say, so that the words, hurrying to escape, bear down
+and trample out the life of each other. The second is when, having
+nothing to say, we are expected to fill a void in the minds of our
+hearers. And I think the third, and most formidable, is the necessity of
+following a speaker who is sure to say all the things you meant to say,
+and better than you, so that we are tempted to exclaim, with the old
+grammarian, "Hang these fellows, who have said all our good things
+before us!" [Laughter.]
+
+Now the fourth of July has several times been alluded to, and I believe
+it is generally thought that on that anniversary the spirit of a certain
+bird known to heraldic ornithologists--and I believe to them alone--as
+the spread eagle, enters into every American's breast, and compels him,
+whether he will or no, to pour forth a flood of national self-laudation.
+[Laughter and cheers.] This, I say, is the general superstition, and I
+hope that a few words of mine may serve in some sort to correct it. I
+ask you, if there is any other people who have confined their national
+self-laudation to one day in the year. [Laughter.] I may be allowed to
+make one remark as to a personal experience. Fortune has willed it that
+I should see as many--perhaps more--cities and manners of men as
+Ulysses; and I have observed one general fact, and that is, that the
+adjectival epithet which is prefixed to all the virtues is invariably
+the epithet which geographically describes the country that I am in. For
+instance, not to take any real name, if I am in the kingdom of Lilliput,
+I hear of the Lilliputian virtues. I hear courage, I hear common sense,
+and I hear political wisdom called by that name. If I cross to the
+neighboring Republic Blefusca--for since Swift's time it has become a
+Republic--I hear all these virtues suddenly qualified as Blefuscan.
+[Laughter.]
+
+I am very glad to be able to thank Lord Coleridge for having, I believe
+for the first time, coupled the name of the President of the United
+States with that of her Majesty on an occasion like this. I was struck,
+both in what he said, and in what our distinguished guest of this
+evening said, with the frequent recurrence of an adjective which is
+comparatively new--I mean the word "English-speaking." We continually
+hear nowadays of the "English-speaking race," of the "English-speaking
+population." I think this implies, not that we are to forget, not that
+it would be well for us to forget, that national emulation and that
+national pride which is implied in the words "Englishman" and
+"American," but the word implies that there are certain perennial and
+abiding sympathies between all men of a common descent and a common
+language. [Cheers.] I am sure, my lord, that all you said with regard to
+the welcome which our distinguished guest will receive in America is
+true. His eminent talents as an actor, the dignified--I may say the
+illustrious--manner in which he has sustained the traditions of that
+succession of great actors who, from the time of Burbage to his own,
+have illustrated the English stage, will be as highly appreciated there
+as here. [Cheers.]
+
+And I am sure that I may also say that the chief magistrate of England
+will be welcomed by the bar of the United States, of which I am an
+unworthy member, and perhaps will be all the more warmly welcomed that
+he does not come among them to practise. He will find American law
+administered--and I think he will agree with me in saying ably
+administered--by judges who, I am sorry to say, sit without the
+traditional wig of England. [Laughter.] I have heard since I came here
+friends of mine gravely lament this as something prophetic of the decay
+which was sure to follow so serious an innovation. I answered with a
+little story which I remember hearing from my father. He remembered the
+last clergyman in New England who still continued to wear the wig. At
+first it became a singularity and at last a monstrosity; and the good
+doctor concluded to leave it off. But there was one poor woman among his
+parishioners who lamented this sadly, and waylaying the clergyman as he
+came out of church she said, "Oh, dear doctor, I have always listened to
+your sermon with the greatest edification and comfort, but now that the
+wig is gone all is gone." [Laughter.] I have thought I have seen some
+signs of encouragement in the faces of my English friends after I have
+consoled them with this little story.
+
+But I must not allow myself to indulge in any further remarks. There is
+one virtue, I am sure, in after-dinner oratory, and that is brevity; and
+as to that I am reminded of a story. [Laughter.] The Lord Chief Justice
+has told you what are the ingredients of after-dinner oratory. They are
+the joke, the quotation, and the platitude; and the successful
+platitude, in my judgment, requires a very high order of genius. I
+believe that I have not given you a quotation, but I am reminded of
+something which I heard when very young--the story of a Methodist
+clergyman in America. He was preaching at a camp meeting, and he was
+preaching upon the miracle of Joshua, and he began his sermon with this
+sentence: "My hearers, there are three motions of the sun. The first is
+the straightforward or direct motion of the sun; the second is the
+retrograde or backward motion of the sun; and the third is the motion
+mentioned in our text--'the sun stood still.'" [Laughter.]
+
+Now, gentlemen, I don't know whether you see the application of the
+story--I hope you do. The after-dinner orator at first begins and goes
+straight forward--that is the straightforward motion of the sun. Next he
+goes back and begins to repeat himself--that is the backward motion of
+the sun. At last he has the good sense to bring himself to the end, and
+that is the motion mentioned in our text, as the sun stood still. [Great
+laughter, in the midst of which Mr. Lowell resumed his seat.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+"THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE"
+
+[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the annual Ashfield Dinner at
+  Ashfield, Mass., August 27, 1885,--the harvest-time festival in behalf
+  of Sanderson Academy, given for several years under the leadership of
+  Charles Eliot Norton and George William Curtis, long summer residents
+  in this country town. Mr. Lowell had recently returned from his post
+  as Minister to England; and he was presented to the literary gathering
+  by Professor Norton, President of the day. Professor Norton closed his
+  eloquent words of introduction as follows: "On our futile laurels he
+  looks down, himself our highest crown.--Ashfield speaks to you to-day,
+  and the welcome is your own to New England."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--I cannot easily escape
+from some strength of emotion in listening to the words of my friend who
+has just sat down, unless I receive it on the shield which has generally
+been my protection against many of the sorrows and some of the hardships
+of life. I mean the shield of humor, and I shall, therefore, take less
+seriously than playfully the portrait that he has been kind enough to
+draw of me. It reminds me of a story I once heard of a young poet, who
+published his volume of verses and prefixed to it his own portrait drawn
+by a friendly artist. The endeavor of his life from that time forward
+was to look like the portrait that his friend had drawn. [Applause.] I
+shall make the same endeavor.
+
+It is a great pleasure to me to come here to-day, not only because I
+have met some of the oldest friends of my life, but also that after
+having looked in the eyes of so many old English audiences I see face to
+face a new English one, and when I looked at them I was reminded of a
+family likeness and of that kinship of blood which unites us. When I
+look at you I see many faces that remind me of faces I saw on the other
+side of the water, and I feel that whether I speak there or here I am
+essentially speaking to one people. I am not going to talk about myself,
+and I am not going to make a speech. I have spoken so often for you on
+the other side of the water that I feel as though I had a certain claim,
+at least, to be put on the retired list. But I could not fail to observe
+a certain distrust of America that has peeped out in remarks made,
+sometimes in the newspapers, sometimes to myself, as to whether a man
+could live eight years out of America, without really preferring Europe.
+It seems to me to imply what I should call a very unworthy distrust in
+the powers of America to inspire affection. I feel to-day, in looking in
+your faces, somewhat as I did when I took my first walk over the hills
+after my return, and the tears came into my eyes as I was welcomed by
+the familiar wayside flowers, the trees, the birds that had been my
+earliest friends.
+
+It seems to me that those who take such a view quite miscalculate the
+force of the affection that a man feels for his country. It is something
+deeper than a sentiment. If there were anything deeper, I should say it
+was something deeper than an instinct. It is that feeling of
+self-renunciation and of identification with another which Ruth
+expressed when she said: "Entreat me not to leave thee nor to depart
+from following after thee, for whither thou goest I will go: where thou
+livest I will live, and where thou diest there will I die also." That,
+it seems to me, is the instinctive feeling that a man has. At the same
+time, this does not exclude the having clear eyes to see the faults of
+one's country. I think that, as an old President of Harvard College said
+once to a person who was remonstrating with him: "But charity, doctor,
+charity." "Yes, I know; but charity has eyes and ears and won't be made
+a fool of." [Laughter.]
+
+I notice a good many changes in coming home, a few of which I may,
+perhaps, be allowed to touch upon. I notice a great growth in luxury,
+inevitable, I suppose, and which may have good in it--more good,
+perhaps, than I can see. I notice, also, one change that has impressed
+me profoundly, and when I hear that New England is drawing away, I
+cannot help thinking to myself how much more prosperous the farms look
+than they did when I was young; how much more neat is the farming, how
+much greater the attention to what will please the eye about the farm,
+as the planting of flowers and trimming the grass, which seems to me a
+very good sign. I had an opportunity, by a strange accident, of becoming
+very intimate with the outward appearance of New England during my youth
+by going about when a little boy with my father when he went on
+exchanges. He always went in his own vehicle, and he sometimes drove as
+far west as Northampton. I do not wish to detain you on this point,
+except as it interested me and is now first in my mind.
+
+While I was in England I had occasion once to address them on the
+subject of Democracy, and I could not help thinking when I came up here
+that I was coming to one of its original sources, for certain it is that
+in the village community of New England, in its "plain living and high
+thinking," began that social equality which afterwards developed on the
+political side into what we call Democracy. And Democracy--while surely
+we cannot claim for it that it is perfect--yet Democracy, it seems to
+me, is the best expedient hitherto invented by mankind, not for
+annihilating distinctions and equalities, for that is impossible, but,
+so far as it is humanly possible, for compensating them. Here in our
+little towns in the last century, people met without thinking of it on a
+high table-land of common manhood. There was no sense of presumption
+from below, there was no possibility of condescension from above,
+because there was no above and below in the community. Learning was
+always respected in the clergyman, in the doctor, in the squire, the
+justice of the peace, and the rest of the community. This made no
+artificial distinction.
+
+I observe, also, that our people are getting over their very bad habit
+with regard to politics, for Democracy, you must remember, lays a
+heavier burden on the individual conscience than any other form of
+government; and I have been glad to observe that we have been getting
+over that habit of thinking that our institutions will go of
+themselves. Now it seems to me that there is no machine of human
+construction, or into which the wit of man has entered, that can go of
+itself without supervision, without oiling; that there are no wheels
+which will revolve without our help, except the great wheel of the
+constellations or that great circle of the sun's which has its hand upon
+the dial plate, and which was made by a hand much less fallible than
+ours.
+
+It also pleases me very much to see a friend whose constancy, whose
+faith, and whose courage have done so much more than any other man's to
+bring about that reform [great applause], though when I speak of civil
+service reform the friend who stands at our elbow on all these occasions
+will suggest to me a certain parallel, that is, that as Mr. Curtis is
+here to-day and I am here to-day, it reminds one of the temperance
+lecturer who used to go about carrying with him an unhappy person as the
+awful example [great laughter], and it may have flickered before some of
+your minds that I was the "awful example" of the very reform I had
+preached. However, I say that it is to me a very refreshing thing to
+find that this old happy-go-lucky feeling about our institutions has a
+very good chance of passing away.
+
+One thing which always impressed me on the other side of the water as an
+admirable one, and as one which gave them a certain advantage over us,
+is the number of men who train themselves specifically for politics, for
+government. We are apt to forget, over here, that the art of governing
+men, as it is the highest, so it is the most difficult, of all arts. We
+are particular how our boots are made, but about our constitutions we
+"trust in the Lord," without even, as Cromwell advised, keeping our
+powder dry. We commit the highest destinies of this Republic, which some
+of us hope bears the hope of the world in her womb--to whom? Certainly
+not always to those who are most fit on any principle of natural
+selection: certainly, sometimes to those who are most unfit on any
+principle of selection,--and this is a very serious matter, for if you
+will allow me to speak with absolute plainness, no country that allows
+itself to be governed for a moment by its blackguards is safe.
+[Applause.] That was written before the United States of America
+existed. It is one of the truths of human nature and of destiny. If I
+were a man who had any political aspiration,--which, thank Heaven, I
+have not,--if I had any official aspiration--which, thank Heaven, also,
+I have not,--I should come home here, and when I first met an American
+audience I should say to them: My friends, America can learn nothing of
+Europe; Europe must come to school here. You have the tallest monument,
+you have the biggest waterfall, you have the highest tariff of any
+country in the world. [Great laughter and applause.] I would tell you
+that the last census showed that you had gained so many millions, as if
+the rabbits did not beat us in that way of multiplication, as if it
+counted for anything! It seems to me that what we make of our several
+millions is the vital question for us.
+
+I was very much interested in what Prof. Stanley Hall said. I am heretic
+enough to have doubted whether our common schools are the panacea we
+have been inclined to think them. I was exceedingly interested in what
+he said about the education which a boy gained on the hills here. It
+seems to me we are going to fall back into the easy belief that because
+our common schools teach more than they used--and in my opinion much
+more than they ought--we can dispense with the training of the
+household. When Mr. Harrison [J. P. Harrison, author of "Some Dangerous
+Tendencies in American Life," one of the preceding speakers] was telling
+us of the men who were obliged to labor without hope from one end of the
+day to the other, and one end of the year to the other, he added, what
+is quite true--that, perhaps, after all, they are happier than that very
+large class of men who have leisure without culture, and whose sole
+occupation is either the killing of game or the killing of time--that is
+the killing of the most valuable possession that we have.
+
+But I will not detain you any longer for, as I did say, I did not come
+here to make a speech, and I did not know what I was going to say when I
+came. I generally, on such occasions, trust to the spur of the moment,
+and sometimes the moment forgets its spur. [Laughter and applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+LITERATURE
+
+[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the annual banquet of the Royal
+  Academy, London, May 1, 1886, in response to the toast, "The Interests
+  of Literature." The President of the Academy, Sir Frederic Leighton,
+  said, in introducing Mr. Lowell: "In the name of letters, of English
+  letters, in the broadest sense, I rejoice to turn, not for the first
+  time at this table, to one who counts among the very foremost of their
+  representatives. As a poet richly endowed, as a critic most subtle and
+  penetrating, among humorists the most genial, as a speaker not
+  surpassed--who shall more fittingly rise in the name of Literature
+  than Mr. Russell Lowell, whom I welcome once more to this country, as
+  one not led to it to-day by mere hap and chance of diplomatic need,
+  but drawn, I would fain believe, as by the memory of many friends."]
+
+
+YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN:--I think that I
+can explain who the artist might have been who painted the reversed
+rainbow of which the Professor[11] has just spoken. I think, after
+hearing the too friendly remarks made about myself, that he was probably
+some artist who was to answer for his art at a dinner of the Royal
+Society; and, naturally, instead of painting the bow of hope, he painted
+the reverse, the bow of despair. [Laughter.] When I received your
+invitation, Mr. President, to answer for "Literature," I was too well
+aware of the difficulties of your position not to know that your choice
+of speakers must be guided much more by the necessities of the occasion
+than by the laws of natural selection. [Laughter and cheers.] I
+remembered that the dictionaries give a secondary meaning to the phrase
+"to answer for," and that is the meaning which implies some expedient
+for an immediate necessity, as, for example, when one takes shelter
+under a tree from shower he is said to make the tree answer for shelter.
+[Laughter.] I think even an umbrella in the form of a tree has certainly
+one very great advantage over its artificial namesake--viz., that it
+cannot be borrowed, not even for the exigencies for which the instrument
+made of twilled silk is made use of, as those certainly will admit who
+have ever tried it during one of those passionate paroxysms of weather
+to which the Italian climate is unhappily subject. [Laughter.]
+
+I shall not attempt to answer for Literature, for it appears to me that
+Literature, of all other things, is the one which most naturally is
+expected to answer for itself. It seems to me that the old English
+phrase with regard to a man in difficulties, which asks: "What is he
+going to do about it?" perhaps should be replaced in this period of
+ours, when the foundations of everything are being sapped by universal
+discussion, with the more pertinent question: "What is he going to say
+about it?" ["Hear! Hear!" and laughter.] I suppose that every man sent
+into the world with something to say to his fellow-men could say it
+better than anyone else if he could only find out what it was. I am sure
+that the ideal after-dinner speech is waiting for me somewhere with my
+address upon it, if I could only be so lucky as to come across it. I
+confess that hard necessity, or, perhaps I may say, too soft good
+nature, has compelled me to make so many unideal ones that I have almost
+exhausted my natural stock of universally applicable sentiment and my
+acquired provision of anecdote and allusion. I find myself somewhat in
+the position of Heine, who had prepared an elaborate oration for his
+first interview with Goethe, and when the awful moment arrived could
+only stammer out that the cherries on the road to Weimar were uncommonly
+fine. [Laughter.]
+
+But, fortunately, the duty which is given to me to-night is not so
+onerous as might be implied in the sentiment that has called me up. I am
+consoled, not only by the lexicographer as to the meaning of the phrase
+"to answer for," but also by an observation of mine, which is, that
+speakers on an occasion like this are not always expected to allude
+except in distant and vague terms to the subject on which they are
+specially supposed to talk.
+
+Now, I have a more pleasing and personal duty, it appears to me, on this
+my first appearance before an English audience on my return to England.
+It gives me great pleasure to think that, in calling upon me, you call
+upon me as representing two things which are exceedingly dear to me, and
+which are very near to my heart. One is that I represent in some sense
+the unity of English literature under whatever sky it may be produced;
+and the other is that I represent also that friendliness of feeling,
+based on a better understanding of each other, which is growing up
+between the two branches of the British stock. [Cheers.] I could wish
+that my excellent successor here as American Minister could fill my
+place to-night, for I am sure that he is as fully inspired as I ever was
+with a desire to draw closer the ties of friendship between the mother
+and the daughter, and could express it in a more eloquent and more
+emphatic manner than even I myself could do--at any rate in a more
+authoritative manner.
+
+For myself, I have only to say that I come back from my native land
+confirmed in my love of it and in my faith in it. I come back also full
+of warm gratitude for the feeling that I find in England; I find in the
+old home a guest-chamber prepared for me, and a warm welcome. [Cheers.]
+Repeating what his Royal Highness the Commander-in-Chief has said, that
+every man is bound in duty, if he were not bound in affection and
+loyalty, to put his own country first, I may be allowed to steal a leaf
+out of the book of my adopted fellow-citizens in America; and while I
+love my native country first, as is natural, I may be allowed to say I
+love the country next best which I cannot say has adopted me, but which,
+I will say, has treated me with such kindness, where I have met with
+such universal kindness from all classes and degrees of people, that I
+must put that country at least next in my affection.
+
+I will not detain you longer. I know that the essence of speaking here
+is to be brief, but I trust that I shall not lay myself open to the
+reproach that in my desire to be brief I have resulted in making myself
+obscure. [Laughter.] I hope I have expressed myself explicitly enough;
+but I would venture to give another translation of Horace's words, and
+say that I desire to be brief, and therefore I efface myself. [Laughter
+and cheers.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT
+
+[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the dinner of the Incorporated
+  Society of Authors, London, July 25, 1888, given to the "American Men
+  and Women of Letters" who happened to be in London on that date.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--I confess that I rise
+under a certain oppression. There was a time when I went to make an
+after-dinner speech with a light heart, and when on my way to the dinner
+I could think over my exordium in my cab and trust to the spur of the
+moment for the rest of my speech. But I find as I grow older a certain
+aphasia overtakes me, a certain inability to find the right word
+precisely when I want it; and I find also that my flank becomes less
+sensitive to the exhilarating influences of that spur to which I have
+just alluded. I had pretty well made up my mind not to make any more
+after-dinner speeches. I had an impression that I had made quite enough
+of them for a wise man to speak, and perhaps more than it was profitable
+for other wise men to listen to. [Laughter.] I confess that it was with
+some reluctance that I consented to speak at all to-night. I had been
+bethinking me of the old proverb of the pitcher and the well which is
+mentioned, as you remember, in the proverb; and it was not altogether a
+consolation to me to think that that pitcher, which goes once too often
+to the well, belongs to the class which is taxed by another proverb with
+too great length of ears. [Laughter.] But I could not resist. I
+certainly felt that it was my duty not to refuse myself to an occasion
+like this--an occasion which deliberately emphasizes, as well as
+expresses, that good feeling between our two countries which, I think,
+every good man in both of them is desirous to deepen and to increase. If
+I look back to anything in my life with satisfaction, it is to the fact
+that I myself have, in some degree, contributed--and I hope I may
+believe the saying to be true--to this good feeling. [Applause.]
+
+You alluded, Mr. Chairman, to a date which gave me, I must confess, what
+we call on the other side of the water "a rather large contract." I am
+to reply, I am to answer to Literature, and I must confess that a
+person like myself, who first appeared in print fifty years ago, would
+hardly wish to be answerable for all his own literature, not to speak of
+the literature of other people. But your allusion to sixty years ago
+reminded me of something which struck me as I looked down these tables.
+
+Sixty years ago the two authors you mentioned, Irving and Cooper, were
+the only two American authors of whom anything was known in Europe, and
+the knowledge of them in Europe was mainly confined to England. It is
+true that Bryant's "Water-Fowl" had already begun its flight in immortal
+air, but these were the only two American authors that could be said to
+be known in England. And what is even more remarkable, they were the
+only American authors at that time--there were, and had been, others
+known to us at home--who were capable of earning their bread by their
+pens. Another singular change is suggested to me as I look down these
+tables, and that is the singular contrast they afford between the time
+when Johnson wrote his famous lines about those ills that assail the
+life of the scholar, and by the scholar he meant the author--
+
+    "Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol."
+
+And I confess when I remember that verse it strikes me as a singular
+contrast that I should meet with a body of authors who are able to offer
+a dinner instead of begging one; that I have sat here and seen "forty
+feeding like one," when one hundred years ago the one fed like forty
+when he had the chance. [Laughter.]
+
+You have alluded also, in terms which I shall not qualify, to my own
+merits. You have made me feel a little as if I were a ghost revisiting
+the pale glimpses of the moon, and reading with considerable wonder my
+own epitaph. But you have done me more than justice in attributing so
+much to me with regard to International Copyright. You are quite right
+in alluding to Mr. Putnam, who, I think, wrote the best pamphlet that
+has been written on the subject; and there are others you did not name
+who also deserve far more than I do for the labor they have expended and
+the zeal they have shown on behalf of International Copyright,
+particularly the secretaries of our international society--Mr. Lathrop
+and Mr. G. W. Green. And since I could not very well avoid touching upon
+the subject of International Copyright, I must say that all American
+authors without exception have been in favor of it on the moral ground,
+on the ground of simple justice to English authors. But there were a
+great many local, topical considerations, as our ancestors used to call
+them, that we were obliged to take into account, and which, perhaps, you
+do not feel as keenly here as we did. But I think we may say that the
+almost unanimous conclusion of American authors latterly has been that
+we should be thankful to get any bill that recognized the principle of
+international copyright, being confident that its practical application
+would so recommend it to the American people that we should get
+afterwards, if not every amendment of it that we desire, at least every
+one that is humanly possible. I think that perhaps a little injustice
+has been done to our side of the question; I think a little more heat
+has been imported into it than was altogether wise. I am not so sure
+that our American publishers were so much more wicked than their English
+brethren would have been if they had had the chance. [Laughter.] I
+cannot, I confess, accept with patience any imputation that implies that
+there is anything in our climate or in our form of government that tends
+to produce a lower standard of morality than in other countries. The
+fact is that it has been partly due to a certain--may I speak of our
+ancestors as having been qualified by a certain dulness? I mean no
+disrespect, but I think it is due to the stupidity of our ancestors in
+making a distinction between literary property and other property. That
+has been at the root of the whole evil.
+
+I, of course understand, as everybody understands, that all property is
+the creature of municipal law. But you must remember that it is the
+conquest of civilization, that when property passes beyond the
+boundaries of that _municipium_ it is still sacred. It is not even yet
+sacred in all respects and conditions. Literature, the property in an
+idea, has been something that it is very difficult for the average man
+to comprehend. It is not difficult for the average man to comprehend
+that there may be property in a form which genius or talent gives to an
+idea. He can see it. It is visible and palpable, this property in an
+idea when it is exemplified in a machine, but it is hardly so
+apprehensible when it is subtly interfused in literature. Books have
+always been looked on somewhat as _ferae naturae_, and if you have ever
+preserved pheasants you know that when they fly over your neighbor's
+boundaries he may take a pot shot at them. I remember that something
+more than thirty years ago Longfellow, my friend and neighbor, asked me
+to come and eat a game pie with him. Longfellow's books had been sold in
+England by the tens of thousands, and that game pie--and you will
+observe the felicity of its being a game pie, _ferae naturae_ always you
+see--was the only honorarium he had ever received from this country for
+reprinting his works.
+
+I cannot help feeling as I stand here that there is something especially--I
+might almost use a cant word and say monumentally--interesting in a meeting
+like this. It is the first time that English and American authors, so
+far as I know, have come together in any numbers, I was going to say
+to fraternize, when I remembered that I ought perhaps to add to
+"sororize." We, of course, have no desire, no sensible man in
+England or America has any desire, to enforce this fraternization at the
+point of the bayonet. Let us go on criticising each other; it is good for
+both of us. We Americans have been sometimes charged with being a little
+too sensitive; but perhaps a little indulgence may be due to those who
+always have their faults told to them, and the reference to whose virtues
+perhaps is sometimes conveyed in a foot-note in small print. I think that
+both countries have a sufficiently good opinion of themselves to have a
+fairly good opinion of each other. They can afford it; and if difficulties
+arise between the two countries, as they unhappily may,--and when you
+alluded just now to what De Tocqueville said in 1828 you must remember that
+it was only thirteen years after our war,--you must remember how long it
+has been to get in the thin end of the wedge of International Copyright;
+you must remember it took our diplomacy nearly one hundred years to enforce
+its generous principle of the alienable allegiance, and that the greater
+part of the bitterness which De Tocqueville found in 1828 was due to the
+impressment of American seamen, of whom something like fifteen hundred
+were serving on board English ships when at last they were delivered.
+These things should be remembered, not with resentment but for
+enlightenment. But whatever difficulties occurred between the two
+countries, and there may be difficulties that are serious, I do not
+think there will be any which good sense and good feeling cannot settle.
+[Applause.]
+
+I think I have been told often enough to remember that my countrymen are
+apt to think that they are in the right, that they are always in the
+right; that they are apt to look at their side of the question only.
+Now, this conduces certainly to peace of mind and imperturbability of
+judgment, whatever other merits it may have. I am sure I do not know
+where we got it. Do you? I also sympathize most heartily with what has
+been said by the chairman with regard to the increasing love for England
+among my countrymen. I find on inquiry that they stop longer and in
+greater numbers every year in the old home, and feel more deeply its
+manifold charms. They also are beginning to feel that London is the
+centre of the races that speak English, very much in the sense that Rome
+was the centre of the ancient world. And I confess that I never think of
+London, which I also confess that I love, without thinking of that
+palace which David built, sitting in hearing of a hundred
+streams--streams of thought, of intelligence, of activity. And one other
+thing about London, if I may be allowed to refer to myself, impresses me
+beyond any other sound I have ever heard, and that is the low, unceasing
+roar that one hears always in the air. It is not a mere accident, like
+the tempest or the cataract, but it is impressive because it always
+indicates human will and impulse and conscious movement, and I confess
+that when I hear it I almost feel that I am listening to the roaring
+loom of time. A few words more. I will only say this, that we, as well
+as you, have inherited a common trust in the noble language which, in
+its subtle compositiveness, is perhaps the most admirable instrument of
+human thought and human feeling and cunning that has ever been
+unconsciously devised by man. May our rivalries be in fidelity to that
+trust. We have also inherited certain traditions, political and moral,
+and in doing our duty towards these it seems to me that we shall find
+quite enough occupation for our united thought and feeling.
+[Long-continued applause.]
+
+
+
+
+JOHN LOWELL
+
+
+HUMORS OF THE BENCH
+
+[Speech of Judge John Lowell at a banquet given by the Boston Merchants'
+  Association in Boston, May 23, 1884, in his honor, upon his retirement
+  from the bench of the United States Circuit Court.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--I hardly know why I am here. I suppose I must have
+decided some case in favor of our honored chairman. But, then, if every
+one in whose favor I have decided a case should give me a dinner I
+should have some thousands to eat, if I could live long enough.
+
+I observe that in your invitation to me you say very little, if
+anything, about any judicial qualities which I may have displayed in
+office, but you do mention my courtesy and patience. You are right.
+There are better judges here to-night than I ever was; but in courtesy
+and consideration, which I learned at my mother's knee, I hope I have
+not been surpassed. I have received several compliments of the same
+kind. I will tell you one story about that.
+
+I was sitting one day up in court. The jury had just gone out, when a
+very nice looking young man came up. His hair was a little short, I
+believe, but I didn't notice it particularly. Said he, "Good-morning,
+Jedge." "Good morning." "You don't remember me?" he said. "Your
+countenance is familiar to me," I said, "but it does not impress itself
+on my memory." Said he: "Four years ago to-day you sentenced me to four
+years' imprisonment in the State prison." I suppose it ought to have
+been five, I don't know. He said: "I got out to-day, and I thought I
+would make my first call on you." [Laughter. A voice: "That was his
+courtesy."] True; and mine then came in. Said I: "Many happy returns of
+the day." [Great laughter and applause.] He took it very kindly and
+went off. I haven't seen him since.
+
+I might have resigned some time ago. I was waiting to be turned out.
+[Laughter.] I got tired of waiting. I will tell you how that is now. My
+great-grandfather was judge of the District Court, appointed by
+Washington; then he was made circuit judge by Adams. Well, Adams made a
+good many circuit judges, and they were all Federalists; and when the
+Democrats--they called themselves Republicans--all the same, you know
+[laughter]--when the Republicans came in they abolished the court to get
+rid of the judges. They made a circuit court here about nineteen years
+ago, and they appointed my friend Shepley the first judge. I told him if
+the Democrats only got in soon enough he would go the way of my
+grandfather. He admitted it. When I was appointed I expected the same
+thing. In fact, some of our prominent Democrats told me so. I said, "All
+right, bring on your bear. Bring on your Democratic President." So I
+waited for that Democratic President about eight years. I got tired of
+waiting. That is the only reason I resign now. [Laughter and applause.]
+
+You take things so good-naturedly I will tell you one or two more
+stories. One of the principal difficulties we have is in serving on the
+jury. The members of the Merchants' Association always presented me with
+a certificate showing that they were members of the Ancient and
+Honorable Artillery Company.[12] [Laughter.] But a man who was not a
+house guard came into my private office one day just as the jury was
+about to be impanelled. Said he: "Judge, I hear you live out of town."
+Said I: "Yes." Said he: "I guess you burn kerosene. You don't have
+electric lights or anything of that kind? Well," said he, "if you will
+let me off this jury I will give you the darnedest nice can of kerosene
+ever you see." Said I: "Young man, I see in your mind the exact virtues
+which would be most useful,--a justice and probity which will make you
+serve the country most admirably as a juryman." So he served. I don't
+know but that if it had been a barrel it might have been different.
+[Great laughter.]
+
+Another tried the intimidation dodge. He says: "Jedge, I have been
+exposed to the small-pox, and expect it to break out every minute." Said
+I: "Break!" [Laughter.] He broke into the jury box and served his
+country well, and had no incapacitating disease that I ever heard of.
+
+I don't know that there is much of anything else, except that I would
+give some advice. I am going to draw up some rules for my successor, and
+the first one will be: "Always decide in favor of the Merchants'
+Association." When there are two Merchants' Associations together, in
+different interests, then you must do like that jury in Kennebec county.
+There was a jury there which was very prompt and satisfactory. When they
+got through, the judge said: "Gentlemen, I thank you very much for the
+very satisfactory character of your verdicts, for the great promptness
+with which they have been rendered, without a single disagreement." The
+foreman returned thanks for the compliment, and said that the jury had
+escaped the delays and disagreements to which his Honor had referred, by
+always tossing up a copper as soon as they had retired, and abiding by
+the result of the throw.
+
+One word in a more serious vein. I wish to express, in closing, my
+profound gratification that my efforts to do my duty simply and
+industriously should have met with your approval, and my gratitude for
+its public and spontaneous expression. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+LORD LYTTON
+
+(SIR EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON)
+
+
+MACREADY AND THE ENGLISH STAGE
+
+[Speech of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton at a public dinner given to William
+  C. Macready, London, March 1, 1851, on the occasion of the tragedian's
+  withdrawal from the stage. Lord Lytton, in proposing the toast of the
+  evening, delivered the following speech.]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--When I glance through this vast hall, and feel how
+weak and indistinct is my voice, I feel that I must frankly throw myself
+upon your indulgence, and entreat your most patient and courteous
+attention while I approach that subject which unites to-day an assembly
+so remarkable for the numbers and distinction of those who compose it.
+We are met to do honor to an eminent man, who retires into private life
+after those services to the public which are most felt at the moment we
+are about to lose them. There are many among you far better qualified
+than I am to speak critically of the merits of Mr. Macready as an actor,
+but placed as I am in this chair, I feel that I should justly disappoint
+you if I did not seek to give some utterance to those sentiments of
+admiration of which you have made me the representative.
+
+Gentlemen, this morning I read in one of the literary journals, some
+qualifying remarks as to the degree of Mr. Macready's genius; and now,
+as I recognize here many who are devoted to literature and art, I will
+ask them if I am not right in this doctrine--that the true measure of
+the genius of an artist is the degree of excellence to which he brings
+the art that he cultivates. Judge of Mr. Macready by this test, and how
+great is that genius that will delight us no more; for it is because it
+has so achieved what I will call the symmetry of art that its height and
+its breadth have been often forgotten. We know that it is the uneven
+and irregular surface that strikes us as the largest, and the dimensions
+of a genius, like those of a building, are lost in the justness of its
+proportions; and therefore it is that in recalling the surpassing
+excellence of our guest as an artistical performer, one is really at a
+loss to say in what line of character he has excelled the most. The
+Titanic grandeur of Lear, the human debasement of Werner, the frank
+vivacity of Henry V, the gloomy and timorous guilt of King John, or
+that--his last--personation of Macbeth, in which it seemed to me that he
+conveyed a more correct notion of what Shakespeare designed than I can
+recollect to have read in the most profound of the German critics; for I
+take it, what Shakespeare meant to represent in Macbeth was the kind of
+character which is most liable to be influenced by a belief in
+supernatural agencies--a man who is acutely sensitive to all
+impressions, who has a restless imagination more powerful than his will,
+who sees daggers in the air and ghosts in the banquet-hall, who has
+moral weakness and physical courage, and who--as our guest represented
+him--alternates perpetually between terror and daring--a trembler when
+oppressed by his conscience, and a warrior when defied by his foe. But
+in this and in all that numberless crowd of characters which is too
+fresh in your memories for me to enumerate, we don't so much say "How
+well this was spoken," or "How finely that was acted," but we feel
+within ourselves how true was the personation of the whole.
+
+Gentlemen, there is a word that is often applied to artists and to
+authors, and I think we always apply it improperly when we speak of a
+superior intellect--I mean the word "versatile." Now, I think the proper
+word is "comprehensive." The man of genius does not vary and change,
+which is the meaning of the word versatile, but he has a mind
+sufficiently expanded to comprehend variety and change. If I can succeed
+in describing the circle, I can draw as many lines as I please from the
+centre straight to the circumference, but it must be upon the
+condition--for that is the mathematical law--that all these lines shall
+be equal, one to the other, or it is not a circle that I describe. Now,
+I do not say our guest is versatile; I say that he is comprehensive; and
+the proof that he has mastered the most perfect form of the
+comprehensive faculty is this--that all the lines he has created within
+the range of his art are equal the one to the other. And this,
+gentlemen, explains to us that originality which even his detractors
+have conceded to him.
+
+Every great actor has his manner as every great writer has his style.
+But the originality of our guest does not consist in his manner alone,
+but in his singular depth of thought. He has not only accomplished the
+obvious and essential graces of the actor--the look, the gesture, the
+intonation, the stage play--but he has placed his study far deeper. He
+has sought to penetrate into the subtlest intentions of the poet, and
+made poetry itself the golden key to the secrets of the human heart. He
+was original because he never sought to be original but to be truthful;
+because, in a word, he was as conscientious in his art as he is in his
+actions. Gentlemen, there is one merit of our guest as an actor upon
+which, if I were silent, I should be indeed ungrateful. Many a great
+performer may attain to a high reputation if he restrains his talents to
+acting Shakespeare and the great writers of the past; but it is
+perfectly clear that in so doing he does not advance one inch the
+literature of his time. It has been the merit of our guest to recognize
+the truth that the actor has it in his power to assist in creating the
+writer. He has identified himself with the living drama of his period,
+and by so doing, he has half created it. Who does not recollect the
+rough and manly vigor of Tell, the simple grandeur of Virginius or the
+exquisite sweetness and dignity and pathos with which he invested the
+self-sacrifice of Ion; and who does not feel that but for him, these
+great plays might never have obtained their hold upon the stage, or
+ranked among those masterpieces which this age will leave to posterity?
+And what charm and what grace, not their own, he has given to the lesser
+works of an inferior writer, it is not for me to say.
+
+But, gentlemen, all this, in which he has sought to rally round him the
+dramatic writers of his time, brings me at once from the merits of the
+actor to those of the manager. I recall, gentlemen, that brief but
+glorious time when the drama of England appeared suddenly to revive and
+to promise a future that should be worthy of its past; when by a union
+of all kindred arts, and the exercise of a taste that was at once
+gorgeous and severe, we saw the genius of Shakespeare properly embodied
+upon our stage, though I maintain that the ornament was never superior
+to the work. Just remember the manner in which the supernatural agency
+of the weird sisters was made apparent to our eye, in which the magic
+Isle of Prospero rose before us in its mysterious and haunted beauty,
+and in which the knightly character of the hero of Agincourt received
+its true interpretation from the pomp of the feudal age, and you will
+own you could not strip the scene of these effects without stripping
+Shakespeare himself of half the richness and depth of his conceptions.
+But that was the least merit of that glorious management. Mr. Macready
+not only enriched the scene, but he purified the audience; and for the
+first time since the reign of Charles II, a father might have taken his
+daughters to a public theatre with as much safety from all that could
+shock decorum as if he had taken them to the house of a friend. And for
+this reason the late lamented Bishop of Norwich made it a point to form
+the personal acquaintance of Mr. Macready, that he might thank him, as a
+prelate of the Church, for the good he had done to society.
+
+Gentlemen, I cannot recall that period without a sharp pang of indignant
+regret, for if that management had lasted some ten or twelve years, I
+know that we would have established a permanent school for actors--a
+fresh and enduring field for dramatic poetry and wit--while we should
+have educated an audience up to feel that dramatic performances in their
+highest point of excellence had become an intellectual want that could
+no more be dispensed with than the newspaper or review. And all this to
+be checked or put back for ages to come! Why? Because the public did not
+appreciate the experiment! Mr. Macready has told us that the public
+supported him nobly, and that his houses overflowed. Why then? Because
+of the enormous rent and exactions, for a theatre which even in the most
+prosperous seasons, make the exact difference between profit and loss.
+Gentlemen, it is not now the occasion to speak of remedies for that
+state of things. Remedies there are, but they are for legislation to
+effect. They involve considerations with regard to those patents which
+are secured to certain houses for the purpose of maintaining in this
+metropolis the legitimate drama, and which I fear, have proved the main
+obstacle to its success.
+
+But these recollections belong to the past. The actor--the manager--are
+no more. Whom have we with us to-day? Something grander than actor, or
+manager: to-day we have with us the man. Gentlemen, to speak of those
+virtues which adorn a home, and are only known in secret, has always
+appeared to me to be out of place upon public occasions; but there are
+some virtues which cannot be called private, which accompany a man
+everywhere, which are the essential part of his public character, and of
+these it becomes us to speak, for it is to these that we are met to do
+homage. I mean integrity, devotion to pure ends, a high ambition, manly
+independence, and honor that never knew a stain. Why should we disguise
+from ourselves that there are great prejudices to the profession of an
+actor? Who does not know that our noble guest has lived down every one
+such prejudice, not falling into the old weakness of the actor, and for
+which Garrick could not escape the sarcasm of Johnson, of hankering
+after the society and patronage of the great? The great may have sought
+in him the accomplished gentleman, but he has never stooped his bold
+front as an Englishman to court any patronage meaner than the public, or
+to sue for the smile with which fashion humiliates the genius it
+condescends to flatter. And therefore it is that he has so lifted up
+that profession to which he belongs into its proper rank amid the
+liberal arts; and therefore it is, that in glancing over the list of our
+stewards we find every element of that aristocracy upon which he has
+never fawned uniting to render him its tribute of respect. The ministers
+of foreign nations--men among the noblest of the peers of
+England--veterans of those professions of which honor is the
+lifespring--the chiefs of literature and science and art--ministers of
+the Church, sensible of the benefits he has bestowed upon society in
+banishing from the stage what had drawn upon it the censure of the
+pulpit--all are here and all unite to enforce the truth, the great
+truth, which he leaves to those who come after him--that let a man but
+honor his calling, and the calling will soon be the honor of the man.
+
+Gentlemen, I cannot better sum up all I would say than by the words
+which the Roman orator applied to the actor of his day; and I ask you if
+I may not say of our guest as Cicero said of Roscius--"He is a man who
+unites yet more of virtues than of talents, yet more of truth than of
+art, and who, having dignified the scene by the various portraitures of
+human life, dignifies yet more this assembly by the example of his own."
+
+Gentlemen, the toast I am about to propose to you is connected with many
+sad associations but not to-day. Later and longer will be cherished
+whatever may be sad of these mingled feelings that accompany this
+farewell--later, when night after night we shall miss from the play-bill
+the old familiar name, and feel that one source of elevated delight is
+lost to us forever. To-day let us rejoice that he whom we prize and
+admire is no worn-out veteran retiring to a rest he can no longer
+enjoy--that he leaves us in the prime of his powers, with many years to
+come, in the course of nature, of that dignified leisure for which every
+public man must have sighed in the midst of his triumphs, and though we
+cannot say of him that his "way of life is fall'n into the sere, the
+yellow leaf," yet we can say that he has prematurely obtained "that
+which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of
+friends;" and postponing for this night all selfish regret, not thinking
+of the darkness that is to follow, but of the brightness of the sun that
+is to set, I call upon you to drink with full glasses and full hearts,
+"Health, happiness and long life to William Macready."
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+FAREWELL TO CHARLES DICKENS
+
+[Speech of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton at a farewell banquet given to
+  Charles Dickens, London, November 2, 1867, prior to his departure on a
+  reading tour in the United States. In giving the toast of the evening,
+  Lord Lytton, the chairman, delivered the following speech.]
+
+
+MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I now approach the toast which is
+special to the occasion that has brought together a meeting so numerous
+and so singularly distinguished. You have paid the customary honors to
+our beloved sovereign, due not only to her personal virtues, but to that
+principle of constitutional monarchy in which the communities of Europe
+recognize the happiest mode of uniting liberty with order, and giving to
+the aspirations for the future a definite starting-point in the
+experience and the habits of the past. You are now invited to do honor
+to a different kind of royalty, which is seldom peacefully acknowledged
+until he who wins and adorns it ceases to exist in the body, and is no
+longer conscious of the empire which his thoughts bequeath to his name.
+Happy is the man who makes clear his title-deeds to the royalty of
+genius while he yet lives to enjoy the gratitude and reverence of those
+whom he has subjected to his sway. Though it is by conquest that he
+achieves his throne, he at least is a conqueror whom the conquered
+bless; and the more despotically he enthralls, the dearer he becomes to
+the hearts of men.
+
+Seldom, I say, has that kind of royalty been quietly conceded to any man
+of genius until his tomb becomes his throne, and yet there is not one of
+us now present who thinks it strange that it is granted without a murmur
+to the guest whom we receive to-night. It has been said by a Roman poet
+that Nature, designing to distinguish the human race from the inferior
+animals by that faculty of social progress which makes each combine with
+each for the aid and defence of all, gave to men _mollissima
+corda_,--hearts the most accessible to sympathy with their fellow kind;
+and hence tears,--and permit me to add, and hence laughter,--became the
+special and the noblest attributes of humanity. Therefore it is humanity
+itself which obeys an irresistible instinct when it renders homage to
+one who refines it by tears that never enfeeble, and by a laughter that
+never degrades.
+
+You know that we are about to intrust our honored countryman to the
+hospitality of those kindred shores in which his writings are as much
+"household words" as they are in the homes of England. And if I may
+presume to speak as a politician, I should say that no time could be
+more happily chosen for his visit; because our American kinsfolk have
+conceived, rightly or wrongfully, that they have some cause of complaint
+against ourselves, and out of all England we could not have selected an
+envoy more calculated to allay irritation and to propitiate good-will.
+
+In the matter of good-will there is a distinction between us English and
+the Americans which may for a time operate to our disadvantage; for we
+English insist upon claiming all Americans as belonging to our race, and
+springing from the same ancestry as ourselves, and hence the idea of any
+actual hostility between them and us shocks our sense of relationship;
+and yet in reality a large and very active proportion of the American
+people derives its origin from other races besides the Anglo-Saxon.
+German and Dutch and Celtic forefathers combine to form the giant family
+of the United States; but there is one cause forever at work to cement
+all these varieties of origin, and to compel the American people, as a
+whole, to be proud as we are of their affinity with the English race.
+What is that cause? What is that agency? Is it not that of one language
+in common between the two nations? It is in the same mother tongue that
+their poets must sing, that their philosophers must reason, that their
+orators must argue upon truth or contend for power.
+
+I see before me a distinguished guest, distinguished for the manner in
+which he has brought together all that is most modern in sentiment with
+all that is most scholastic in thought and language; permit me to say,
+Mr. Matthew Arnold. I appeal to him if I am not right when I say that it
+is by a language in common that all differences of origin sooner or
+later we are welded together--that Etruscans, and Sabines, and Oscans,
+and Romans, became one family as Latins once, as Italians now? Before
+that agency of one language in common have not all differences of
+ancestral origin in England between Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans,
+melted away; and must not all similar differences equally melt away in
+the nurseries of American mothers, extracting the earliest lessons of
+their children from our own English Bible, or in the schools of
+preceptors who must resort to the same models of language whenever they
+bid their pupils rival the prose of Macaulay and Prescott, or emulate
+the verse of Tennyson and Longfellow? Now, it seems to me that nothing
+can more quicken the sense of that relationship which a language in
+common creates, than the presence and voice of a writer equally honored
+and beloved in the old world and in the new; and I cannot but think that
+where-ever our American kinsfolk welcome that presence, or hang
+spell-bound on that voice, they will feel irresistibly how much of
+fellowship and unison there is between the hearts of America and
+England. So that when our countrymen quits their shores he will leave
+behind him many a new friend to the old fatherland which greets them
+through him so cordially in the accents of the mother tongue. And in
+those accents what a sense of priceless obligations--obligations
+personal to him and through him to the land he represents--must steal
+over his American audience! How many hours in which pain and sickness
+have changed into cheerfulness and mirth beneath the wand of this
+enchanter! How many a combatant beaten down in the battle of life--and
+nowhere is the battle of life more sharply waged than in the
+commonwealth of America--has caught new hope, new courage, new force
+from the manly lessons of this unobtrusive teacher!
+
+Gentlemen, it is no wonder that the rising generation of people who have
+learned to think and to feel in our language, should eagerly desire to
+see face to face the man to whose genius, from their very childhood,
+they have turned for warmth and for light as instinctively as young
+plants turn to the sun. But I must not forget that it is not I whom you
+have come to hear; and all I might say, if I had to vindicate the fame
+of our guest from disparagement or cavil, would seem but tedious and
+commonplace when addressed to those who know that his career has passed
+beyond the ordeal of contemporaneous criticism, and that in the applause
+of foreign nations it has found a foretaste of the judgment of
+posterity. I feel as if every word that I have already said had too long
+delayed the toast which I now propose: "A prosperous voyage, health and
+long life, to our illustrious guest and countryman, Charles Dickens."
+
+
+
+
+HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
+
+
+SPIRIT OF NEW ENGLAND LITERATURE
+
+[Speech of Hamilton W. Mabie at the ninety-first annual dinner of the
+  New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1896. Henry
+  E. Howland, vice-President of the Society, presided and introduced the
+  speaker as follows: "There is no person better qualified to speak upon
+  any literary subject than the editor of a great paper. He scans the
+  whole horizon of literature, and his motto is: 'Where the bee sups
+  there sup I.' As a gentleman eminently fitted to speak upon the
+  literature of New England or any kindred subject, I have the pleasure
+  of introducing to you Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, of 'The Outlook.'"]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--When one has the army and navy
+behind him, he is impelled to be brief. And when one has a subject which
+needs no interpreter, when one has a theme the very recital of the
+details of which recalls the most splendid chapter in our intellectual
+history, one feels that any words would be impertinent. We are indebted
+to New England, in the first place, for giving us a literature. I know
+it has been questioned in Congress, why anybody should want a
+literature; but if the spiritual rank of a people is to be determined by
+depth and richness of life, and if the register of this life of a people
+is its art, and especially its art in books, then no country is
+reputable among the nobler countries unless it has produced a
+literature; and we are, therefore, indebted to New England for
+literature. Not the greatest we shall produce, but a literature
+continuous from the first settlement of the colonies. It is a very
+significant fact that the three men before the Revolution whom we may
+call literary men were men born in New England--Benjamin Franklin, who
+is too well known to all of you for comment; John Woolman, of whose work
+Charles Lamb said: "Woolman's writings should be learned by heart;" and
+that great theologian, who wrote in a stately style, Jonathan Edwards.
+After the Revolution I have but to call the roll of those names which
+are the glory of New England--Hawthorne, the man of finest literary gift
+who has yet appeared upon this continent; Longfellow, with his tender
+touch; Holmes, with his three o'clock wit, as some one has called it,
+the man who was always awake; Lowell, with his rich culture and his
+passionate loyalty to all that was best in life and art; and the
+historians of the country, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, and Francis
+Parkman, with his splendid record of patient and tireless energy. And
+then we have the New England writers of the second generation in Edmund
+Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
+Charles Dudley Warner, John Fiske, and Henry James; and we have also a
+third generation.
+
+The most striking characteristic of the older, as of the younger, New
+England literature is its deep and beautiful humanism, the closeness of
+its touch upon experience, the warmth of its sympathy with men and women
+in contact with the great movement of life. Growing out of such a soil,
+it could hardly have been otherwise, for New England represents, not an
+abstraction, but a commanding faith in personality, the clear
+self-realization of a man whose obligation goes straight to God, and to
+whom God's word travels like an arrow's flight. In one form or another,
+all the New England writers deal with this theme; they are concerned,
+not with abstractions, but with the hopes and fears and temptations of
+man. Hawthorne is absorbed in the problem of the return of a man's deed,
+or of his ancestors' deed upon himself; Lowell cares supremely for
+nobility and freedom of impulse, act and deed; Whittier for truth and
+spiritual fellowship; Emerson, for the reality of spiritual force and
+meaning in common duties and ordinary relations; Longfellow, for the
+tenderness and purity of childhood, the sweetness and fragrance of
+family relations, the charm of historic association; Holmes, for the
+endless paradox and surprise which are in human thought and conduct;
+Brooks, for the abundance of man's life and the fulness of its spiritual
+possibilities; Curtis, for a public life at once pure, free, rich and
+stable. For all these writers organization and institutions had great
+interest, but they cared primarily for the men whose history these
+institutions represent. The quays at Geneva are massive and shine at
+night like a constellation; but our interest centres in the river which
+rushes between them from the Alps to the sea. This is a democratic note,
+but there is another quite as distinct and characteristic--the note of
+buoyant cheerfulness, faith in God and man.
+
+There is a ringing tone in the literature of New England which is not
+only a protest against any form of oppression, but a challenge to fate.
+That courage came from faith in the divine order of life. And that
+buoyant courage and cheerfulness were possible because these writers
+kept life and art in harmony. There was no schism between ideal and
+action in them. They not only followed the vision in spirit; they lived
+in the light of it. They illustrated that unity of life without which
+there is no God. They kept in the way of growth and truth and
+inspiration because they lived wisely. We do not half value their
+splendid sanity. A manly and noble moral health was theirs. They rang
+true to every moral appeal. They were not only men of letters, but they
+were also gentlemen, and they have associated literature in the thought
+of the country with dignity, culture and beauty of life--Emerson's
+unworldliness, Lowell's loyalty to truth, and Curtis's splendid
+rectitude, as enduring as the granite, are of lasting value to the
+higher life of the nation.
+
+Their courage and buoyancy were of higher value than we yet understand.
+Faith is absolutely essential in a great democratic society. When we
+cease to believe in God we cease to believe in man, and when our faith
+in man goes, democracy becomes a vast, irrational engine of tyranny and
+corruption. In the last analysis democracy rests in the belief that
+there is something of the divine in every man, and that through every
+life there shines a glimpse of the eternal order. For Government rests,
+not in the will of the majority, but on the will of God; and democracy
+is but a vaster surface upon which to discover the play of that will. It
+follows from these characteristics that the real significance of the New
+England writers lies not in what they did, but in what they
+unconsciously predicted. Clear and ringing as are the notes they struck,
+these notes are prelusive; they suggest the great _motifs_, but they do
+not completely unfold them; they could not, for the time was not yet
+ripe; they announced the principle of individuality, and they sang the
+great idea of nationality; but the depth and richness of national life
+was not theirs to express. That vast life rises more and more into the
+national consciousness, but its Homer or Dante or Shakespeare has not
+appeared--probably cannot appear for a long time to come. That life is
+too wide and still too inharmonious for clear expression. Its very
+richness postpones the day of its ultimate expression; but when the hour
+is ripe it will embody an ideal as significant as any in history, with
+illustration more varied and vital. We are still the victims of our
+continent; we shall one day be its masters.
+
+One of the oldest drawings in the world is on the side of a cave in
+France, and represents a man fleeing naked and defenceless from a great
+serpent--man still in bondage to material conditions. One of the most
+stirring of modern scenes is that in which Siegfried waits at the mouth
+of the cavern--leaves rustling, light shimmering, birds singing about
+him. The glory of youth is on him and the beauty of the world about him;
+but he cannot understand what the sounds mean. Then comes the struggle,
+the victory, the revelation of song and light; and the hero passes
+swiftly up the heights, where, encircled with flame, sleeps the soul of
+his strength. In some other day, when the continent is tamed and we have
+struck to the heart that materialism which is our only real foe, we,
+too, shall climb the heights of achievement, and we shall stand face to
+face with that ideal which is now so dim and remote. Then comes the poet
+of the real new world--the world of opportunity, of sacrifice, of
+unselfish freedom of the larger art and diviner life. And when that day
+comes and the great poet sings and the great writer speaks, we shall
+hear faint and far the sounds of those old voices of New England; not so
+vast as the later music, but as pure and harmonious and true. We shall
+understand how they made the later music possible; how they have made
+possible the fulfilment of the prediction of one of their own number:
+between Shakespeare in the cradle and Shakespeare in "Hamlet" there was
+needed but an interval of time, and the same sublime condition is all
+that lies between the America of toil and the America of art.
+[Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+DONALD SAGE MACKAY
+
+
+THE DUTCH DOMINE
+
+[Speech of Rev. Dr. D. Sage Mackay at the eleventh annual dinner of the
+  Holland Society of New York, January 15, 1896. The President, Dr. D.
+  B. St. John Roosa, said in introducing the speaker: "Before I announce
+  the next toast I want to remark that one of our distinguished
+  speakers, a Huguenot, said at the St. Nicholas dinner, that it was
+  such a particularly good dinner, that there were such particularly
+  good speeches, and that very few of them had been made by Dutchmen.
+  But now we shall have a gentleman who represents the profession we all
+  delight to honor, and who will delineate the next regular toast:--
+
+     'The Dutch. Domine: guide, philosopher, and friend,
+      A man he was to all the country dear.'
+
+"I have the pleasure of introducing a gentleman who wishes he had been
+born a Dutchman but who is not entitled, I suppose, to that great honor,
+as he is to many others deservedly showered upon him--the Rev. Dr. D.
+Sage Mackay."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--I will confess, at the outset
+here to-night, that when by the courtesy of your Committee I was asked
+to respond to this sentiment, which so poetically and yet so truly
+enshrines the memory of the old Dutch Domine, that I felt somewhat in
+the condition in which a member of the Glasgow Fire Brigade found
+himself some years ago. One night, being on duty, he had the misfortune
+to fall asleep, and to insure his comfort before doing so he had
+divested himself of his heavy overalls. About midnight the alarm bell
+rang. He staggered to his feet, and in the condition of a man suddenly
+aroused from sleep drew on the overalls so that back was front and front
+was back. In the excitement of the moment he forgot all about his
+abnormal condition. Coming down the staircase of the burning building he
+had the misfortune to slip and fall heavily to the ground, in a heap of
+cinders. His companions eagerly asked him if he was hurt. "No," he
+replied, with true Scotch canniness. "No, chaps, I canna' say I am
+hurt, but eh, sirs, I maun hae got an awfu' twist." [Laughter.] And so,
+sir, when I, unfortunately to-night, a Scotchman born and bred, was
+asked to reply to the toast "The Dutch Domine," I felt that in the
+arrangements of the evening there was something of a twist. [Laughter.]
+And yet, if twist it may be called, it was only on the surface.
+
+After a happy experience in the Dutch ministry, and after enjoying for a
+second time the hospitality of this honorable Society, I know nowhere
+where a Scotchman can feel himself so at home as in the genial
+influences of Dutch custom and Dutch tradition. [Applause.] We gladly
+echo all these patriotic and inspiring sentiments which have fallen from
+the lips of the speakers to-night. We believe that Dutch influences have
+salted America, but we Scotchmen have got the idea somehow that Scotland
+was leavening if not salting Holland for a hundred years before that
+exodus to these shores took place. [Laughter.]
+
+General Morgan, on one occasion, in discussing the fighting qualities of
+the soldiers of different nations, came to the conclusion that in many
+respects they were about the same, with one notable exception. "After
+all," he said, "for the possession of the ideal quality of the soldier,
+for the grand essential, give me the Dutchman--he starves well."
+[Laughter.] And, no doubt, when provisions are scarce, no man can afford
+to starve better than he, for the simple reason that when provisions are
+plentiful no man can manage to eat better. [Laughter.]
+
+I feel like mentioning as the first quality of the Dutch Domine to-night
+the possession of a good digestion. I myself have fared so well on Dutch
+fare for these last two or three years that I feel I could almost claim
+to be a Dutchman, very much as a man once claimed to be a native of a
+certain parish in Scotland. He was being examined by counsel. Counsel
+asked him, "Were you born here?" "Maistly, your honor," was the reply.
+"What do you mean by 'maistly'? Did you come here when you were a
+child?" "Na, I didna' cam here when I was a chiel," he replied. "Then
+what do you mean by 'maistly,' if you have not lived here most of your
+life?" counsel asked. "Weel, when I cam here I weighed eighty pun, and
+now I weigh three hundred, so that I maun be maistly a native."
+[Laughter.] So, perhaps, that "maistly" may be the claim to be a
+Dutchman which some of us may make, if we go on.
+
+The sentiment to which I have been asked to respond is one which I doubt
+not will strike a responsive chord in the memories of most of you
+Hollanders here to-night. Across the vanished years will come back the
+picture of the old Dutch village, nestling in some sheltered nook behind
+the Hudson, and there in the old-fashioned pulpit arises the quaint,
+once well-loved face and form of the Domine, with big, dome-shaped head,
+full mouth and nose, marked with lines of humor, the fringe of white
+whiskers, and underneath, around the throat, the voluminous folds of the
+white choker, a kind of a combination of a swaddling-band and a
+winding-sheet, suggestive of birth or death, as the occasion demanded.
+[Laughter.] So he appeared an almost essential feature in the landscape,
+as year in and out he ministered in unassuming faithfulness to the needs
+of his people. By the bedside of the dying, or in the home of the widow,
+a comforter and friend; in the stirring days of revolutionary struggle,
+a leader and patriot, and sometimes a martyr too; in the social
+gatherings around the great open fireplace in the long dark nights, pipe
+in hand, a genial companion, so in every walk of life, in scenes
+gladsome or sad, the old Domine was a constant presence, an influence
+for righteousness, moulding his people in that simplicity of life and
+independence of spirit, which in all times have been preeminent as
+features in the Dutch character. Into the homespun of common life, he
+wove the threads of gold, revealing by life and precept that type of
+religion which is not "too bright and good for human nature's daily
+food."
+
+What were some of the distinctive features in the character of the old
+Domine? Pre-eminently, we remember him for his wide and genial humanity,
+as a man strong in his convictions yet generous in his sympathies,
+faithful in his denunciation of sin yet holding outstretched hands of
+brotherhood to the weak and tempted. In a parish near by to where my
+grandfather was settled, there had been three ministers, one after the
+other in quick succession. The old beadle compared them to a friend
+something after this fashion: "The first yin was a mon, but he was na' a
+meenister; the second yin was a meenister, but he was na' a mon; but the
+third was neither a mon nor a meenister." [Great laughter.] But the
+Dutch Domine was at once a man and a minister. The official never
+overshadowed the man, neither did the humanity of the man degrade the
+sacred office. All strong character is the union of two opposite
+qualities, and in the Dutch minister I trace the harmonious presence of
+two elements not often found in one personality. On the one hand there
+was a rigid adherence to his own church and creed, so that to the
+orthodox Dutch mind, whatever may happen elsewhere, heaven will be
+peopled by Reformed Dutchmen, and in the celestial hymn-book an appendix
+will be found for the Heidelberg Catechism and liturgical forms of the
+Dutch Church [laughter]; but on the other hand, with this loyalty to his
+own creed, there was a generous tolerance towards the view of others, a
+broad-minded charity, expressed in thought and life, towards those whose
+standpoint in religion differed from his own. In reality, your old
+Domine had, and I venture to say, has, little sympathy with that narrow
+ecclesiasticism, which in effect claims a monopoly in religion and would
+practically hand over the salvation of the race to the hands of a close
+corporation. Now, whence did it come; where did he learn this
+steadfastness to his own principles, yet this generosity towards the
+convictions of other men, which has been so eloquently dwelt on to-night
+as a cardinal feature of the American character through the leavening
+power of Dutch influence? It came, gentlemen, as part of his birthright.
+We have been told that to study and appreciate Dutch character and Dutch
+history we must keep in view what has been called the geographical
+factor, that constant war with the elements, which trained the Dutchman
+to patience, to endurance, and to self-mastery. So, in studying the
+Dutch Domine, you must keep in view the historic factor out of which he
+and his church have come. I make no extravagant claim for the old Dutch
+Church of New Amsterdam and New York, when I say she stands to-day for a
+great and a splendid tradition in American life. She enshrines within
+her history facts and forces which have been woven into the texture of
+her most enduring institutions. Out of the darkness of persecution she
+came, bearing to these shores the precious casket of civil and religious
+liberty. When with prophetic vision she gazed across the Western sea,
+and saw the red dawn of a new day glow upon the waters, that dawn but
+reflected the red blood that dripped like sacramental wine from her
+robes--the blood of martyrdom poured forth for that sacred trophy of
+liberty of conscience which it is your privilege and mine to hand on to
+the generations yet to come. For full forty years, the Dutch Church was
+the only religious institution on this island, and who in these early
+times, when the great ideas for which America stands to-day were in
+their formative stage, guided in the light of truth the young country to
+a larger conception of her destiny? Not only from the standpoint of
+religion, but from the standpoint of education, the Dutch Church and her
+clergy were a mighty factor in the evolution of the great twin truths of
+civil and religious liberty. To the Dutch Church we owe it, that
+liberty, in the reaction from old-world despotism, was not allowed to
+degenerate into license. To them we owe it that freedom of conscience
+was impressed not merely as a right to be claimed, but as a duty to be
+safe-guarded, and, need I say?--this sense of personal duty and
+responsibility in respect of the rights of conscience is the note above
+all others that we have to strike in our nation's life to-day.
+[Applause.]
+
+Gentlemen, in the old country, among others, I have looked at the
+monument of your noble old Dutch Admiral, Tromp, and there it says,
+"Unconquered by the English, he ceased to triumph only when he ceased to
+live," and I take these words, the epitaph of the old hero, not indeed
+as the epitaph of Dutch influence--that will never die--but as the ideal
+of Dutch character in this country in the years to come. Let it cease to
+triumph only when it ceases to live; let it seek to lead onward and
+upward to a diviner freedom this country, whose history is the evolution
+of the great God-given idea--civil and religious liberty. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+ALEXANDER C. MACKENZIE
+
+
+MUSIC
+
+[Speech of Sir Alexander C. Mackenzie at the annual banquet of the Royal
+  Academy, London, May 4, 1895. The toast to "Music," to which Sir
+  Alexander C. Mackenzie responded, was coupled with that of the "Drama"
+  for which Arthur W. Pinero spoke. Sir John Millais, who proposed the
+  toast, said: "I have already spoken for both Music and the Drama with
+  my brush. I have painted Sterndale Bennett, Arthur Sullivan, Irving,
+  and Hare."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN:--I
+am aware that there are some of my most distinguished colleagues now
+present whose claims to the honor of replying to your amiable words far
+exceed my own. But I also know that they will not grudge me that
+distinction and none of them would appreciate it more than myself, whom
+you have elected to mention in connection with your toast. I only hope
+that my companion, the brilliant representative of the Drama, may be
+inclined to forgive me for taking precedence of him, for his art had
+already attained a state of perfection while ours was still lisping on a
+feeble tibia to the ill-balanced accompaniment of some more sonorous
+instrument of percussion. It was all we had to offer at the time, but I
+am sure that since then we have steadily improved. But even then we were
+accustomed to ring up the curtain, and so I look upon myself as a mere
+overture or prelude to the good thing, the word-painting, which will
+follow. ["Hear! Hear!"] Let me assure him that the composer knows no
+greater delight than when he is called upon to combine his art with that
+of the dramatic author, even should our most divinely-inspired moments
+be but faintly conveyed to the audience through the medium of
+the--otherwise excellent but still metropolitan--under ground
+orchestras at our disposal. My only regret is that none of us were
+permitted to accompany the fascinating heroine of his latest work
+through the play. Some correspondingly alluring music has doubtless been
+lost to the world.
+
+On the last occasion that the toast of Music was responded to in this
+room, it was remarked that popularity was not without its drawbacks. I
+fear, sir, there are not many of us who are actually groaning under the
+oppressive weight of over-popularity--at least not to any very alarming
+extent. [Cheers.] But I may permit myself to say that while the
+popularity of music itself is undeniable, it is not so equally obvious
+that the fact is an absolutely unmixed blessing; perhaps the very
+familiarity which it undoubtedly enjoys subjects it more than any other
+art to the fitful temper of fashion--to rash and hastily-formed
+judgments--as well as to the humors of self-complacent guides whose
+dicta all too frequently prove the dangerous possession of a very small
+allowance of real knowledge.
+
+"Academic" is, I believe, sir, the winged word in daily use to mark
+those of us who may still cling to the effete and obsolete belief that
+music remains a science, difficult of acquirement and not either a toy
+art, or a mere nerve titillater. We are not, sir, by any means ashamed
+to bear the stigma of being academic; on the contrary, we feel it a
+genuine compliment--gratifying because, although perhaps unintentionally
+it implies that we have acquired the possession of "that one thing"
+which (as Wilhelm Meister was informed by the venerable Three) "no child
+brings into the world with him,"--that is, "reverence"--reverence for
+our great past as well as, I hope, a due estimation of the vigorous
+activity of the present. So our sweet-natured muse smiles benignly upon
+the impish gambols of the "new boy" who has the supreme advantage of not
+having been to school, for any appreciable length of time at least, and
+who seems to derive considerable satisfaction from his endeavors to
+improve the education of those who have never left it. [Laughter.]
+
+We are sometimes instructed that English Purcell (whose glorious memory
+our musicians mean to honor in a few months), that German Bach ought to
+be considerably touched up to suit the altered requirements of the day,
+and that the rich hues of romantic Weber--nay, even of his giantship the
+great Beethoven himself--are fading visibly and rapidly. Far be it from
+the academics to undervalue the great significance of "modernity." Our
+musical palette, the orchestra, has in our own time been enriched by the
+addition of many brilliant colors. Music has become, if possible, still
+more closely allied with and indebted for inspiration to each and all of
+the sister arts: while the peremptory and ever-increasing demand upon
+the dexterity as well as the intellectual grasp of the executant has
+brought into the field such an array of splendid artist interpreters as
+possibly the world has never before seen. ["Hear! Hear!"] What the
+effect produced by audible performance of the works of the great
+past-masters in music may be upon the ricketty understandings is
+difficult even to guess at. The healthily trained student, however, to
+whom the preservation of the history of his art is still of some
+consequence, shows that the word "perishable" has positively no meaning
+to him so long as tough paper and honest leather hold together. To him
+those noble scores can never become dumb, sealed, or silent books; he
+has only to reach them down and, reading, hear them speak--each master
+in the language of his own time--in living notes, as glowing now as when
+they were first penned.
+
+It is not without some diffidence, sir, that I allude before sitting
+down to that time when our own English music had a high and most
+honorable place among the arts of the nations--because, alas! that
+recollection necessarily compels the remembrance of a subsequent and too
+prolonged period of decayed fortunes. But I must allow myself to say a
+few words in recognition of the efforts of the three of our native
+contemporary composers, who never tire in the endeavor to reclaim the
+lost ground. For, within very recent years, much has been achieved which
+has been helpful towards the recapture of the position, towards the
+recovery of the old-time renown. That "artist corps" may perhaps not be
+a very numerous company and besides it is without doubt, in the words of
+a popular lyrical humorist, a somewhat "nervous, shy, low-spoken" little
+band, which is content to wait and work incessantly in the service of
+its national music. Generous in acknowledgment of the efforts of all
+who assist its onward progress, it has already done much, can and will
+do more. I said advisedly "national music" because its members, hailing
+as they do from all the subdivisions of this country, are no doubt, with
+so many widely differing musical characteristics by birthright, that it
+is not at all unreasonable even for the most modest among them--and this
+virtue still attaches to some, I should say, to all, of them--build
+great hopes of a definitely distinct British music, such as you, Sir
+John [Millais], doubtless had in your mind when you honored our art by
+proposing this toast; such our very best painters would willingly hail
+and acknowledge; such as your own Academy would welcome in that genial
+manner which for many years past it has so generously taught us to
+expect. [Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM CHARLES MACREADY
+
+
+FAREWELL TO THE STAGE
+
+[Speech of William C. Macready at a farewell banquet given in his honor,
+  London, March 1, 1851, on the occasion of his retirement from the
+  stage. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton acted as chairman. He said:
+  "Gentlemen, I cannot better sum up all I would say than by the words
+  which the Roman orator applied to the actor of his day, and I ask you
+  if I may not say of our guest as Cicero said of Roscius, 'He is a man
+  who unites yet more of virtues than of talents, yet more of truth than
+  of art, and who, having dignified the scene by various portraitures of
+  human life, dignifies yet more this assembly by the example of his
+  own.' [Great applause.] Gentlemen, the toast I am about to propose to
+  you is connected with many sad associations, but not to-day. Later and
+  long will be cherished whatever may be sad of these mingled feelings
+  that accompany this farewell,--later when night after night we shall
+  miss from the play-bill the old familiar name, and feel that one
+  source of elevated delight is lost to us forever. ["Hear! Hear!"]
+  To-day let us only rejoice that he whom we so prize and admire is no
+  worn-out veteran retiring to a rest he can no longer enjoy
+  [cheers]--that he leaves us in the prime of his powers, with many
+  years to come, in the course of nature, of that dignified leisure for
+  which every public man must have sighed in the midst of his triumphs;
+  and though we cannot say of him that his 'way of life is fall'n with
+  the sere, the yellow leaf,' yet we can say that he has prematurely
+  obtained 'that which should accompany old age, as honor, love,
+  obedience, troops of friends'--[cheers]--and postponing for this night
+  all selfish regrets, not thinking of the darkness that is to follow,
+  but of the brightness of the sun that is to set, I call upon you to
+  drink with full glasses and full hearts, health, happiness, and long
+  life to William Macready."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--I rise to thank you, I should say
+to attempt to thank you, for I feel the task is far beyond my power.
+What can I say in reply to all that the kindly feeling of my friend has
+dictated? I have not the skill to arrange and address in attractive
+language the thoughts that press upon me, and my incompetency may
+perhaps appear like a want of sensibility to your kindness, for we are
+taught to believe that out of the heart's fulness the mouth speaks. But
+my difficulty, let me assure you, is a contradiction to this moral.
+[Cheers.] I have to thank my friend, your distinguished chairman, for
+proposing my health to you and for the eloquence--may I not add the
+brilliant fancy, with which he has enriched and graced his subject. But
+that we may readily expect from him, who in the wide and discursive
+range of his genius touches nothing that he does not adorn. ["Hear!" and
+cheers.] I have to thank you for the cordiality and--if I may without
+presumption say so,--the enthusiasm with which the compliment proposed
+has been received, and for the honor--never to be forgotten--that you
+have conferred on me, by making me your guest to-day.
+
+Never before have I been so oppressed with a sense of my deficiency as
+at this moment, looking on this assemblage of sympathizing friends
+crowded here to offer me a spontaneous testimony of their regard. I
+observe among you many who for years have been the encouraging
+companions of my course; and there are present too those who have
+cheered even my very earliest efforts. To all who have united in this
+crowning tribute, so far beyond my dues or expectations--my old friends,
+friends of many years, who welcomed me with hopeful greeting in the
+morning of my professional life, and to younger ones who now gather
+round to shed more brightness on my setting, I should wish to pour forth
+the abundant expression of my gratitude. [Loud cheers.] You are not, I
+think, aware of the full extent of my obligations to you. Independent of
+the substantial benefits due to the liberal appreciation of my
+exertions, my very position in society is determined by the stamp which
+your approbation has set upon my humble efforts. [Cheers.] And let me
+unhesitatingly affirm that without undervaluing the accident of birth or
+titular distinction, I would not exchange the grateful pride of your
+good opinion which you have given me the right to cherish, for any favor
+or advancement that the more privileged in station could receive. [Great
+cheering.]
+
+I really am too much oppressed, too much overcome to attempt to detain
+you long; but with the reflection and under the conviction that our
+drama, the noblest in the world, can never lose its place from our
+stage while the English language lasts, I will venture to express one
+parting hope--that the rising actors may keep the loftiest look, may
+hold the most elevated views of the duties of their calling. ["Hear!
+Hear!" and cheers.] I would also hope that they will strive to elevate
+their art, and also to raise themselves above the level of the player's
+easy life, to public regard and distinction by a faithful ministry to
+the genius of our incomparable Shakespeare. [Cheers.] To effect this
+creditable purpose, they must bring resolute energy and unfaltering
+labor to their work; they must be content "to scorn delights, and live
+laborious days;" they must remember that whate'er is excellent in art
+must spring from labor and endurance:--
+
+                                "Deep the oak,
+ Must sink in stubborn earth its roots obscure
+ That hopes to lift its branches to the sky."
+
+This, gentlemen, I can assure you, was the doctrine of our own Siddons,
+and of the great Talma; and this is the faith I have ever held as one of
+their humblest disciples. [Applause.]
+
+Of my direction of the two patent theatres on which my friend has so
+kindly dilated, I wish to say but little. The preamble of their patents
+recites as a condition of their grant, that the theatres shall be
+instituted for the promotion of virtue and to be instructive to the
+human race. I think those are the words. I can only say that it was my
+ambition to the best of my ability to obey that injunction ["Hear!
+Hear!"] and believing in the principle that property has its duties as
+well as its rights, I conceived that the proprietors should co-operate
+with me. [General cries of "Hear!"] They thought otherwise, and I was
+reluctantly compelled to relinquish on disadvantageous terms my
+half-achieved enterprise. Others will take up this uncompleted work, and
+if inquiry were set on foot for one best qualified to undertake the task
+I should seek him in the theatre which, by eight years' labor, he has
+from the most degraded condition raised high in public estimation, not
+only as regards the intelligence and respectability of his audiences,
+but by the learned and tasteful spirit of his productions. [Cheers.]
+
+Gentlemen, I shall not detain you longer. All that I could desire and
+far more than I ever could expect you have conferred upon me in the
+honor you have done me to-day. It will be a memory that must remain as
+an actual possession to me and mine, which nothing in life can take from
+us. The repetition of thanks adds little to their force, and therefore,
+deeply as I am already obliged to you, I must draw still further on your
+indulgence. You have had faith in my zeal for your service; you will, I
+am sure, continue that faith in my gratitude, for the value you have set
+upon it. With a heart more full than the glass I hold, I return you my
+most grateful thanks, and have the honor of drinking all your healths.
+[Mr. Macready who had displayed considerable emotion during some
+portions of his address, then resumed his seat amid enthusiastic
+cheering.]
+
+
+
+
+JUSTIN McCARTHY
+
+
+IRELAND'S STRUGGLE
+
+[Speech of Justin McCarthy at a dinner given in his honor, New York
+  City, October 2, 1886. When the speaking began, Judge Browne, who
+  presided, asked the audience to drink the health of Justin McCarthy,
+  the guest of the evening, with this quotation from Thomas Moore:--
+
+ "Here's the Poet who drinks; here's the warrior who fights;
+  Here's the statesman who speaks in the cause of men's rights;
+         Charge! hip, hip, hurrah! hurrah!"
+
+Continuing, Judge Browne said: "We feel it a proud privilege to be
+  permitted to gather and do honor to one who has done honor to our name
+  and nation in a foreign land. When the great leader of the Irish
+  people was bidding you good-by at the other side of the water, he said
+  that the aid you had rendered him and his colleagues had largely
+  helped to advance the interests of Ireland in her onward march to
+  freedom. Our knowledge of you enables us to indorse that statement.
+  [Applause.] What you have written in one of our city papers has shown
+  us step by step the progress of the Home Rule movement. That great
+  work has been accomplished by the Irish leader there can be no doubt.
+  I witnessed it personally a few short weeks ago, when standing in the
+  strangers' gallery in the House of Commons, I saw a handful of Irish
+  members under the leadership of Parnell withstand the assaults of six
+  hundred English members. [Applause.] It was an awe-inspiring sight.
+  When one remembers that within the four walls of that small building
+  that group of Englishmen were making laws for three hundred millions
+  of people, and that the representatives of a nation numbering only
+  five millions were enabled to keep them in check at the bidding of
+  Parnell, I was struck with astonishment. Not only have the Irish
+  people Parnell with them now, but they have Gladstone [applause], and
+  more than half of the English people; and we have in addition Justin
+  McCarthy [prolonged applause], and with this continuation of moral
+  force we are certain to win Home Rule for Ireland soon. Gentlemen, I
+  give you the health of our guest, Justin McCarthy."]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN, FRIENDS, ALL:--I am very sure you will believe that
+I speak with the utmost sincerity when I say that, although much in the
+habit of addressing public meetings of various kinds, friendly and
+hostile, I really do feel somewhat embarrassed in rising to address this
+entirely friendly meeting to-night. The warmth and the kindness of your
+reception, many of you Irishmen, some of you Americans, does surprise
+and does, to a great extent, overpower me. Judge Browne, your chairman,
+has regretted the absence of Eugene Kelly. I myself regret his absence
+on personal and on public grounds; on personal grounds for his sake, and
+still more, as I am rather selfish, for my own sake. [Applause.] For his
+sake because ill health keeps him away, and for my own sake because I
+have never yet had the chance of meeting him, and had finally hoped that
+here to-night I should have the pleasure of making his acquaintance. I
+should not complain very much for myself after all, for the worthy
+gentleman who fills the place of Mr. Kelly so ably--I mean Judge Browne
+[applause]--has said more complimentary things of me than I really
+deserve before a gathering so influential and so representative as this.
+
+Upon the great political questions which interest me, and which interest
+you, I shall perhaps have occasion to say a few words, perhaps more than
+a few words Monday night, and I hope to see many of the gentlemen who
+are now here present then, and if they be wavering on the question of
+Home Rule I am nearly certain they will go away stanch disciples of
+justice to Ireland, in a legislative sense, at all events. [Applause.]
+There may be some among you who do not entirely agree with me upon my
+views regarding the relations between England and Ireland. Some may
+regard me with more favor as a writer of books than as an expounder of
+Home Rule for Ireland. [Cries of "No! No!"] I will therefore regard this
+occasion as a welcome given by you to me personally, and shall not go
+into any political question whatever. Regarding myself, I may assume
+this much, at least, that the question of Home Rule for Ireland is now
+universally regarded in America as one of those questions bound up with
+the great cause of civilization and of progress, and I entirely agree
+with the chairman when he said that the Irish people in this struggle do
+not entertain any feelings of hate or enmity for the English people.
+[Applause.] I may say sincerely that I would not have joined the
+agitation if it had been selfish and merely for the sake of Ireland
+alone, and not, as it has been, a movement for the advancement of
+freedom and enlightened ideas among other struggling nations of the
+earth. [Applause.]
+
+I have said over and over again, in England as well as in Ireland, that
+the cause that I was advocating was one of interest and of the most
+vital importance to England as well as to Ireland. [Applause.] Many
+years ago I heard Mr. Bright deliver a great speech in the House of
+Commons in favor of a French commercial treaty. He wound up that great
+speech by saying that the adoption of that treaty would be a policy of
+justice to England, and of mercy to France. I call the policy that I and
+my colleagues in the English Parliament are identified with, a policy of
+justice to Ireland and of mercy to England. [Applause.] I call it a
+policy of mercy to England because it is a policy which shall bury
+forever the rancor of centuries that has existed between Irishmen and
+Englishmen; a policy which will change things so far that Ireland,
+instead of being the enemy at the gate shall be the friend at the gate,
+who, if need be, can speak with some effect to the enemy from without.
+After a long, a very long and a very bitter agitation, we now at last
+are within reach of the consummation of our hopes. [Applause.]
+
+I am glad indeed to receive from an audience in this city, composed as
+it is of many nationalities, such a hearty endorsement of the policy
+which I and my people have carried out in struggling to give Ireland her
+rights. I see here the Irish harp and the American stars and stripes.
+Long and forever may these flags wave side by side. [Prolonged
+applause.] How shall we distinguish between Irishmen and Americans? Are
+the echoes which resound in this hall Irish or American echoes? [Cries
+of "Both! Both!"] The voices that speak are Irish certainly, but the
+roof, the walls that give back the sound are American. [Applause.] May
+we not therefore claim the indistinguishable unity of nationality, of
+sentiment, and of feeling?
+
+I should be ungrateful, indeed, gentlemen, did I not express my warm
+acknowledgments for this greeting which you have given me--this hearty
+Irish welcome. I shall never forget the words of warmth which you have
+spoken to myself personally and the expressions of encouragement which
+you have given to my people and my cause. I shall tell my friends when
+I go back, that among the best supporters we have upon this side are
+Americans and Irish-Americans who believe firmly in the justice of
+Ireland's cause and of the determined yet peaceable, strictly peaceable,
+character of the struggle which Ireland's representatives are making for
+the re-establishment of her Parliament in College Green. [Prolonged
+applause.]
+
+
+
+
+ALEXANDER KELLY McCLURE
+
+
+AN EDITORIAL RETROSPECT
+
+[Speech of Colonel A. K. McClure, editor of the "Philadelphia Times,"
+  delivered at a banquet at Philadelphia, December 9, 1896,
+  commemorating the fiftieth year of his connection with the press of
+  Pennsylvania. Governor Daniel H. Hastings, in introducing the guest of
+  the evening, concluded by saying: "I said in the beginning that he is
+  the Nestor of Pennsylvania journalism. Yes, like the King of Pylos, in
+  Grecian legend of the siege of Troy, he is the oldest of the living
+  chieftains. Forney, Morton, McMichael and most of the pioneers of our
+  modern journalism are gone. McClure has been to Pennsylvania what
+  Horace Greeley was to New York journalism. Dana, of the 'Sun,' and
+  McClure, of the 'Times,' are the links connecting the present with the
+  past of American journalism. To-night the roses of friendship and
+  fraternity are growing upon the walls that separate us in our
+  life-work, and we are here to join in our congratulations and good
+  wishes to him in whose honor we meet--Colonel Alexander K. McClure."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN:--I cannot express the measure of my grateful
+appreciation of this imposing greeting, so exceptional alike in welcome,
+in numbers, and in distinction. I accept it as a tribute to the
+matchless progress made by our newspapers during the present generation,
+rather than a personal tribute to an humble member of the profession,
+whose half century of editorial labor furnishes the occasion for leading
+men of State and Nation to pay homage to American journalism, now the
+great forum of our free institutions.
+
+The duties and responsibilities of journalism are largely defined by
+their environment, and there may be fitness in this occasion to refer to
+the political, business, social and moral conditions under which the
+Juniata "Sentinel" was founded fifty years ago, in contrast with the
+greatly changed conditions which confront the journals of to-day. The
+people of Juniata county were a well-to-do class, adapted to the
+primitive conditions in which they lived. The enervating blight of
+luxury and the despair of pinching want were strangers in their midst.
+They believed in the church, in the school, in the sanctity of home, in
+integrity between man and man. Christianity was accepted by them as the
+common law, sincerely by many and with a respect akin to reverence by
+all; and that beautiful humanity that springs from the mingled
+dependence and affection of rural neighborly ties, ever taught that the
+bruised reed should not be broken. They had no political convulsions
+such as are common in these days. Even a sweeping political revolution
+would not vary the party majority over a hundred in the few thousands of
+votes they cast, and excepting in the white heat of national contests,
+their personal affections often outweighed their duties to party. Public
+vices and public wrongs in local administration were rarely known, and
+there was little to invite the aggressive features which are so
+conspicuous in modern journalism. Ministers mingled freely with the
+every-day life of their flocks and were exemplars of simplicity,
+frugality and integrity, and the lawyer who hoped to be successful
+required first of all to command the confidence of the community in his
+honesty. The ballot and the jury-box were regarded as sacred as the
+sacrament itself, and the criminal courts had usually little to do
+beyond the cases of vagrant offenders. Business was conducted as a rule
+without the formality of contracts, and those whose lives justly
+provoked scandal were shunned on every side. This community possessed
+the only real wealth the world can give--content; and the local
+newspaper of that day, even under the direction of a progressive
+journalist, could be little more than a commonplace chronicler of
+current events.
+
+The most satisfactory newspaper work I have ever done, I mean the most
+satisfactory to myself, was during the first few months after I founded
+the "Sentinel." There was pardonable boyish pride in seeing my name
+given with studied prominence as editor and proprietor, and the reading
+of my own editorials was as soothing as the soft, sweet strains of music
+on distant waters in summer evening time. They were to my mind most
+exquisite in diction and logic, and it was a source of keen regret that
+they were so "cabined, cribbed, and confined" within the narrowest
+provincial lines, whereby the world lost so much that it greatly
+needed. I knew that there were others, like Chandler, Gales, Greeley,
+Ritchie, Prentice, and Kendall, who were more read and heeded, but I was
+consoled by the charitable reflection that entirely by reason of
+fortuitous circumstance they were known and I was not. Then to me life
+was a song with my generously self-admired newspaper as the chorus.
+There came rude awakenings, of course, from those blissful dreams as the
+shock of editorial conflict gradually taught me that journalism was one
+unending lesson in a school that has no vacations.
+
+I have pleasant memories also of the intimate personal relations between
+the village editor and his readers. Most of them were within a radius of
+a few miles of the publication office, and all the influences of social
+as well as political ties were employed to make them enduring patrons.
+With many of them the question of sparing from their scant income three
+cents a week for a county paper, was one that called for sober thought
+from year to year, and it often required a personal visit and earnest
+importunity to hold the hesitating subscriber. I well remember the case
+of a frugal farmer of the Dunker persuasion who was sufficiently
+public-spirited to subscribe for the "Sentinel" for six months, to get
+the paper started, but at the end of that period he had calculated the
+heavy expenses of gathering the ripening harvest and decided to stop his
+paper for a while. I need not say that he was enthusiastically
+confronted with many reasons why a man of his intelligence and influence
+should not be without the county newspaper, but he yielded only to the
+extent of further considering the matter with his wife. He returned in a
+few days and spread sunshine around the editorial chair by saying that
+his wife had decided to continue for another six months, as the paper
+would be very handy in the fall for tying up her apple-butter crocks.
+
+A few years after I had settled down in this quiet community to devote
+my life to journalism, a shrill, weird voice was heard in the beautiful
+valley of the Juniata as the iron horse made his first visit to us with
+his train of cars. It was welcome music as it echoed over the foothills
+of the Alleghenies, and entirely new to nearly all who heard it. With
+the railway came the telegraph, the express, and the advent of the
+daily newspaper among the people. In a single year the community was
+transformed from its sedate and quiet ways into more energetic,
+progressive, and speculative life. It was a new civilization that had
+come to disturb the dreams of nearly a century, and it rapidly extended
+its new influences until it reached the remotest ends of the little
+county, and with this beneficent progress of civilization came also the
+vices which ever accompany it, but against which the civilization itself
+is ever fortified by the new factors called into requisition to
+strengthen its restraining power. While advancing the better attributes
+of mankind it has left unrest in the shop, the field, the forest, and
+the mine, where there was content in other days, but that unrest is the
+inevitable attendant of our matchless strides in the most enlightened
+civilization of the age, and it will ever present new problems for our
+statesmanship.
+
+It should be remembered that while Philadelphia had then two journals of
+national fame under the direction of such accomplished editorial writers
+as Joseph R. Chandler and Morton McMichael, there was not a daily
+newspaper in this city, or in the State, that had a circulation of
+5,000, excepting only the "Ledger," then a penny journal almost unknown
+outside of the city. Even the New York "Tribune" and the New York
+"Herald" then relatively quite as distinguished as national journals as
+they are to-day, did not have a daily circulation of over 15,000. There
+are several daily journals now published in Philadelphia, each of which
+circulates more newspapers every day than did all the great dailies of
+New York and Pennsylvania combined, fifty years ago. There were then
+successful penny papers in New York and Pittsburg as well as
+Philadelphia, but the penny journal of that day was only a local
+newspaper in its way, and was unfelt as a political factor.
+
+Contrast the business, political, moral, and social conditions which
+confront the journalism of this great city to-day, and none can fail to
+appreciate the greatly magnified duties and responsibilities of the
+journalist of this age. In this City of Brotherly Love, with the highest
+standard of average intelligence in any community of like numbers of the
+world, and the only great city to be found on the continent that is
+distinctively American in its policy, how sharp is the contrast between
+the civilization met by the Juniata "Sentinel" fifty years ago and the
+civilization that is met by the Philadelphia journalist of to-day?
+Public wrongs ever appear like huge cancers on the body politic, and the
+swarms of the idle and vicious, with the studied crimes of those who
+would acquire wealth without earning it, are a constant menace to the
+social order and the safety of person and property, and demand the
+utmost vigilance on the part of the faithful public journal. Continued
+political power under all parties becomes corrupt and demoralized, and
+it is not uncommon for apparently reputable political leaders of all
+parties and organized crime to make common cause for public plunder. The
+business and social conditions are also radically changed, and with
+these the fearless journalists of to-day must deal with courage and
+fidelity. From what was many years ago regarded, and with some reason,
+as the license of the public press, has grown up the well-defined duty
+of reputable journalism to maintain with dignity and firmness its
+mission as public censor, and to-day in Philadelphia, as in all the
+leading centres of the country, American journalism is not only the
+great educator of the people, but it is the faithful handmaid of law and
+order and of public and private morals. Like all great callings, from
+which even the sacredness of the pulpit is not exempt, there are those
+who bring persistent dishonor upon journalism, and pervert its powers to
+ambition and greed; but discounted by all its imperfections, it is
+to-day the greatest of our great factors in maintaining the best
+attributes of our civilization and preserving social order and the
+majesty of law; and the duties of the journalist to-day in our great
+cities have reached a standard of dignity and magnitude of which even
+the wildest enthusiast of fifty years ago could not have dreamed.
+
+Such is the revolution wrought in journalism within a single active
+lifetime. The newspaper is no longer a luxury. From being confined to
+the few, as it was half a century ago, the daily newspaper is now in
+almost every home in the great States of the Union, and the grave
+responsibility of journalism may be appreciated when it is remembered
+that the newspaper to-day is the greatest educator of the people who are
+to maintain our free institutions. Widely as our schools have extended
+until they are accessible to the humblest of the land, the newspaper as
+an educator reaches vastly more people than all the colleges and schools
+of the nation. It is read not only by the men and women of mature years,
+but it begins its offices as teacher in the home circle as soon as the
+child becomes a pupil in the school, and it is constantly although
+imperceptibly moulding the minds of millions of our youths of all
+classes and all conditions, and it has no vacations in its great work.
+It not only aids the more intelligent to a sound exercise of judgment on
+questions of public interest, but it is ever quickening the impulses and
+shaping the aims of those who are most easily impressed, and during the
+important period of life when the character of men and women is formed.
+
+I have long held that the responsible direction of a widely read and
+respected daily newspaper is the highest trust in our free government. I
+do not thus speak of it to claim for it honors which may be questioned,
+but I speak of it to present the oppressive responsibilities which rest
+upon those who are to-day educating a nation of 70,000,000 of people,
+under a government where every citizen is a sovereign, and where the
+people hold in their own hands the destiny of the greatest Republic of
+the world. Presidents, Cabinets, Senators, and Representatives come and
+play their parts on the public stage and pass away--the few to be
+remembered, the many to be forgotten--and political parties are created
+and perish as new necessities and new conditions arise in the progress
+of our free institutions. In my own day there have been created four new
+political organizations which attained national importance, all of which
+have elected Governors in Pennsylvania, and two of which have elected
+Presidents of the United States, but three of them exist to-day only in
+history. They are the Anti-Masonic, the Whig, the American, and the
+Republican parties. Thus while rulers and the parties which call them to
+power, come and go in the swift mutations of American politics, the
+newspaper survives them all, and continues in its great career
+regardless of the success or defeat of men or political organizations.
+
+To seek promotion in civil trust from the editorial chair of an
+influential newspaper, is to sacrifice the grander opportunity and
+responsibility for the unsatisfying fame of official distinction. It is
+the mission of the newspaper to create Presidents and other rulers; to
+judge them when in power; to sustain them when they have been faithful
+and efficient in the discharge of public duties, and to defeat them when
+they are forgetful of the public welfare. In the discharge of these
+important duties the newspaper must, above all, be free from the
+suspicion of seeking individual advantage and it can be so only by
+accepting its trust as highest of all and more enduring than all. Great
+editors have been presumably honored by conferring upon them high
+official positions in recognition of party services, but no editor in
+the entire history of American journalism who has made his newspaper
+secondary to political ambition, has written any other record than
+failure as both editor and statesman.
+
+My brethren of the press need not be reminded of the often painful
+duties which come to the fearless editor. They must ever remember that
+"faithful are the wounds of a friend," and no class of teachers so
+well-known that:--
+
+ "Forgiveness to the injured does belong,
+  But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."
+
+Few, very few indeed, outside of the editorial sanctum ever learn how
+the surges of ambition, in all its varied and fantastic phases from the
+noblest to the meanest, assail and often vex journalistic duties. The
+public know not of the many gifted men who must thus at times be saved
+from themselves, and an editorial retrospect of half a century presents
+a sad record of the newspaper work of making bricks without straw.
+Justly excepting the comparatively few public men who tower over
+mediocrity in public place, journalism gives the position and fashions
+the fame of most of them. It is not done arbitrarily nor from choice, as
+public and political necessities are often paramount with journalists,
+as with others, in awarding public honors; but with all its exactions
+and responsibilities, which are ever magnified by the greater
+opportunities for usefulness, there is no calling that brings richer
+compensation for fidelity to duty. The consciousness that each day the
+editor whose readers are numbered by hundreds of thousands, may greatly
+aid in making the world better than it was in the passing yesterday, is
+a constant inspiration to the best efforts, and it is especially
+gratifying that even in the many and at times impassioned conflicts of
+journalistic dispute, the rugged and sharp-angled walls which divide us
+are ever so beautiful and fragrant with the flowers of good-fellowship,
+as is impressively taught by this assembly.
+
+Thus charged with the highest of civil trusts in the most enlightened
+government of the earth, the editor must be honored or dishonored here
+by the measure of his fidelity to his exceptional duties, and must be so
+judged in the hereafter, when the narrow pathway of life that divides
+past and future eternities has been traversed. We come when bidden, we
+know not whence; we go when bidden, we know not whither; but each and
+all have duties to themselves, to their homes, to their country, and to
+the common brotherhood of man, which when performed with the
+faithfulness that human infirmities will permit, must greatly brighten
+the brief and often fretful journey from the cradle to the grave.
+Friends, in this evening twilight of my journalistic work, so sweetly
+mellowed by the smiling faces, young and old, about me, I answer your
+generous greeting with the gratitude that can perish only when the
+gathering shadows shall have settled into the night that comes to purple
+the better morn.
+
+
+
+
+ST. CLAIR McKELWAY
+
+
+SMASHED CROCKERY
+
+[Speech of St. Clair McKelway before the National Society of China
+  Importers, New York City, February 6, 1896.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND FRIENDS:--The china I buy abroad is marked
+"Fragile" in shipment. That which I buy at home is marked: "Glass--This
+Side Up With Care." The foreign word of caution is fact. The American
+note of warning is fiction--with a moral motive. The common purpose of
+both is protection from freight fractors and baggage smashers. The
+European appeals to knowledge. The American addresses the imagination.
+The one expresses the truth. The other extends it. Neither is entirely
+successful. The skill and care of shippers cannot always victoriously
+cope with the innate destructiveness of fallen human nature. There is a
+great deal of smashed crockery in the world.
+
+You who are masters in the art of packing things and we whose vocation
+is the art of putting things, both have reason to know that no pains of
+placing or of preparation will guarantee freight or phrases, plates or
+propositions, china of any kind or principles of any sort, from the
+dangers of travel or from the tests of time. Your goods and our wares
+have to take their chances in their way across the seas, throughout the
+land and around the world. You lose some of yours merely in handling.
+The defects of firing cannot be always foreseen. The intrusion of
+inferior clay cannot be always prevented. The mere friction of contact
+may produce bad nicks. Nor is the fineness nor the excellence of the
+product an insurance against mishaps. From your factories or stores your
+output is at the mercy of carriers without compunction, and in our
+homes it is exposed to the heavy hands of servants without sentiment.
+The pleasure of many a dinner is impaired by the fear or the
+consciousness that inapt peasants are playing havoc with the treasures
+of art on which the courses are served.
+
+If, however, the ceramic kingdom is strewn with smashed crockery, how
+much more so are the worlds of theology, medicine, politics, society,
+law, and the like. No finer piece of plate was ever put forth than the
+one inscribed: "I will believe only what I know." It was for years
+agreeable to the pride and vanity of the race. It made many a fool feel
+as if his forehead was lifted as high as the heavens, and that at every
+step he knocked out a star. When, however, the discovery was made that
+this assumption to displace deity amounted to a failure to comprehend
+nature, some disappointment was admitted. He who affected by searching
+to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree
+pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the
+grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother
+among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing
+society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He
+"who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a
+conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest
+doubts and the shortest creed on record. Agnosticism is part of the
+smashed crockery of the moral universe.
+
+Nor is the smug and confident contention: "Medicine is a science, one
+and indivisible," so impressive and undented as it was. Sir Astley
+Cooper in his plain, blunt way is reported to have described his own
+idea of his own calling as "a science founded on conjecture and improved
+by murder." The State of New York has rudely stepped in and legally and
+irrevocably recognized three schools of medicine and will recognize a
+fourth or a fifth as soon as it establishes itself by a sufficient
+number of cures or in a sufficient number of cemeteries. Medical
+intolerance cannot be legislated out of existence, but it has no further
+recognition in legislation. A common and considerable degree of general
+learning is by the State required of all intending students of medicine.
+An equal and extended degree of professional study is required. An
+identical measure of final examination with state certification and
+state licensure is required. The claim that men and women must die
+_secundum artem_ in order to have any permit to live here or to live
+hereafter, has gone to the limbo of smashed crockery in the realm of
+therapeutics. The arrogant pretension that men must die _secundum artem_
+has been adjourned--_sine die_. And the State which prescribes uniform
+qualifications among the schools will yet require uniform consultations
+between them in the interest of the people whom they impartially prod
+and concurrently purge with diversity of methods, but with parity of
+price.
+
+Other long impressive and long pretty plaques have also been
+incontinently smashed. One was lovingly lettered: "Once a Democrat,
+always a Democrat." Another was inscribed: "Unconditional
+Republicanism." In the white light of to-day the truth that an
+invariable partisan is an occasional lunatic becomes impressively
+apparent. Party under increasing civilization is a factor, not a fetish.
+It is a means, not an end. It is an instrument, not an idol. Man is its
+master, not its slave. Not that men will cease to act on party lines.
+Party lines are the true divisional boundary between schools of thought.
+No commission is needed to discover or to establish those lines. They
+have made their own route or course in human nature. The bondage from
+which men will free themselves is bondage to party organizations. Those
+organizations are combinations for power and spoils. They are feudal in
+their form, predatory in their spirit, military in their methods, but
+they necessarily bear no more relation to political principles than
+Italian banditti do to Italian unity, or the men who hold up railway
+trains do to the laws of transportation. Party slavery is a bad and
+disappearing form of smashed crockery.
+
+The smashed crockery of society and of law could also be remarked. Our
+fathers' dictum, that it is the only duty of women to be charming,
+deserves to be sent into retirement. It is no more their duty to be
+charming than it is the duty of the sun to light, or the rose to
+perfume, or the trees to cast a friendly shade. A function is not a
+duty. In the right sense of the word it is a nature or a habit. It is
+the property of women and it is their prerogative to be charming, but if
+they made it a duty, the effort would fail, for the intention would be
+apparent and the end would impeach the means. Indeed, the whole theory
+of the eighteenth century about women has gone to the limbo of smashed
+crockery. It has been found that education does not hurt her. It has
+been discovered that learning strengthens her like a tonic and becomes
+her like a decoration. It has been discovered that she can compete with
+men in the domain of lighter labor, in several of the professions, and
+in not a few of the useful arts. The impression of her as a pawn, a
+property or a plaything, came down from paganism to Christianity and was
+too long retained by the Christian world. There is even danger of excess
+in the liberality now extended to her. The toast, "Woman, Once Our
+Superior and Now Our Equal," is not without satire as well as
+significance. There must be a measurable reaction against the ultra
+tendency in progress which has evolved the New Woman, as the phrase is.
+I never met one and I hope I never shall. The women of the present, the
+girls of the period, the sex up-to-date, will more than suffice to
+double our joys and to treble our expenses. The new fads, as well as the
+old fallacies, can be thrown among the smashed crockery of demolished
+and discarded misconceptions.
+
+I intended to say much about the smashed crockery of the lawyers. I
+intended to touch upon the exploded claim that clients are their slaves,
+witnesses theirs for vivisection, courts their playthings, and juries
+their dupes. More mummery has thrived in law than in even medicine or
+theology. The disenchanting and discriminating tendency of a realistic
+age has, however, somewhat reformed the bar. Fluency, without force, is
+discounted in our courts. The merely smart practitioner finds his
+measure quickly taken and that the conscientious members of his calling
+hold him at arm's length. Judges are learning that they are not rated
+wise when they are obscure, or profound when they are stupid, or
+mysterious when they are reserved. Publicity is abating many of the
+abuses both of the bench and the bar. It will before long, even in this
+judicial department, require both rich and poor to stand equal before
+the bar of justice. The conjugal complications of plutocrats will not be
+sealed up from general view by sycophantic magistrates, while the
+matrimonial infelicities of the less well-to-do are spread broad on the
+records. The still continuing scandals of partitioning refereeships
+among the family relatives of judges will soon be stopped and the shame
+and scandal of damage suits or of libel suits, without cause, maintained
+by procured and false testimony and conducted on sheer speculation, will
+be brought to an end. The law is full of rare crockery, but it is also
+replete with crockery that ought to be smashed. Much bad crockery in it
+has been smashed and much more will be, if necessary, by the press,
+which is itself not without considerable ceramic material that could be
+pulverized with signal benefit to the public and to the fourth estate.
+
+But why am I talking about smashed crockery when I am told that it is
+the very life of your trade? Were crockery imperishable this would be
+the last dinner of your association. Your members would be eating cold
+victuals at area doors, passed to you on the plates you have made, by
+the domestics whose free and easy carelessness is really the foundation
+of your fortunes. You want crockery to be smashed, because the more
+smash the more crockery and the more crockery the more output, and the
+more output the more revenue, and the more revenue the more Waldorf
+dinners, and the more Waldorf dinners the more opportunity for you to
+make the men of other callings stand and deliver those speeches, which I
+like to hear, and in the hope of hearing which I now give way.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+TRIBUTE TO MARK TWAIN
+
+[Speech of St. Clair McKelway at a dinner given in honor of Samuel L.
+  Clemens [Mark Twain] by the Lotos Club, New York City, November 2,
+  1900. The President of the Lotos, Frank R. Lawrence, introduced Dr.
+  McKelway as the man whose wondrous use of adjectives has converted to
+  his opinion many doubters throughout this city and country.]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND FRIENDS:--Years ago we here sought to hold up
+Mark Twain's hands. Now we all feel like holding up our own, in
+congratulation of him and of ourselves. Of him because his warfare is
+accomplished. Of ourselves because he has returned to our company. If it
+was a pleasure to know him then, it is a privilege and an honor to know
+him now. He has fought the good fight. He has kept the faith. He is
+ready to be offered up, but we are not ready to have him offered up. For
+we want the Indian summer of his life to be long, and that to be
+followed by a genial winter, which, if it be as frosty as his hair,
+shall also be as kindly as his heart. [Applause.]
+
+He has enough excess and versatility of ability to be a genius. He has
+enough quality and quantity of virtues to be a saint. But he has
+honorably transmuted his genius into work, whereby it has been brought
+into relations with literature and with life. And he has preferred warm
+fellowship to cold perfection, so that sinners love him and saints are
+content to wait for him. May they wait long. [Applause.]
+
+I think he is entitled to be regarded as the Dean of America's humor;
+that he is entitled to the distinction of being the greatest humorist
+this nation ever had. I say this with a fair knowledge of the chiefs of
+the entire corps, from Francis Hopkinson and the author of "Hasty
+Pudding," down to Bill Nye and Dooley. None of them would I depreciate.
+I would greatly prefer to honor and hail them all for the singular
+fittedness of their gifts to the needs of the nation in their times.
+Hopkinson and Joel Barlow lightened the woes of the Revolution by the
+touch of nature that makes the whole world grin. Seba Smith relieved the
+Yankee sense of tension under the impact of Jacksonian roughness, by
+tickling its ribs with a quill. Lieutenant Derby turned the searchlight
+of fun on the stiff formalities of army posts, on the raw conditions of
+alkali journalism and on the solemn humbugs of frontier politics. James
+Russell Lowell used dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy
+or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England
+conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic,
+satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of
+contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy
+and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life
+and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the
+coveted treasures of primeval nature. Charles F. Browne made "Artemus
+Ward" as well known as Abraham Lincoln in the time the two divided the
+attention of the world. Bill Nye singed the shams of his day, and Dooley
+dissects for Hinnissey the shams of our own. Nor should we forget Eugene
+Field, the beatifier of childhood; or Joel Chandler Harris, the fabulist
+of the plantation; or Ruth McEnery Stuart, the coronal singer of the
+joys and hopes, the loves and the dreams of the images of God in ebony
+in the old South, ere it leaped and hardened to the new.
+
+To these, love and honor. But to this man honor's crown of honor, for he
+has made a mark none of the others has reached. Few of them have
+diversified the delights to be drawn from their pages of humor. They
+have, as humorists, in distinction to the work of moralists, novelists,
+orators and poets, in which the rarest among them shine, they have as
+humorists, in the main, worked a single vein. And some of them were
+humorists for a purpose, a dreary grind that, and some of them were only
+humorists for a period as well as for a purpose. The purpose served, the
+period passed, the humor that was of their life a thing apart, ceased.
+'Tis Clemens' whole existence! [Applause.]
+
+As Bacon made all learning his province, so Mark Twain has made all life
+and history his quarry, from the Jumping Frog to the Yankee at Arthur's
+Court; from the inquested petrifaction that died of protracted exposure
+to the present parliament of Austria; from the Grave of Adam to the
+mysteries of the Adamless Eden known as the league of professional
+women; from Mulberry Sellers to Joan of Arc, and from Edward the Sixth
+to Puddin'head Wilson, who wanted to kill his half of the deathless dog.
+
+Nevada is forgiven its decay because he flashed the oddities of its
+zenith life on pages that endure. California is worth more than its
+gold, because he showed to men the heart under its swagger. He annexed
+the Sandwich Islands to the fun of the nation long before they were put
+under its flag. Because of him the Missouri and the Mississippi go not
+unvexed to the sea, for they ripple with laughter as they recall Tom
+Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, poor Jim, and the Duke. Europe, Asia Minor,
+and Palestine are open doors to the world, thanks to this Pilgrim's
+Progress with his "Innocents Abroad." Purity, piety and pity shine out
+from "Prince and Pauper" like the eyes of a wondering deer on a
+torch-lighted night from a wooded fringe of mountain and of lake.
+
+But enough of what I fear is already too much. In expressing my debt to
+him, I hope I express somewhat at least of yours. I cannot repay him in
+kind any more than I could rival him. None of us can. But we can render
+to him a return he would like. With him we can get our way to reality,
+and burn off pretence as acid eats its way to the denuded plate of the
+engraver. We can strip the veneer of convention from style, and
+strengthen our thought in his Anglo-Saxon well of English undefiled. We
+can drop seeming for sincerity. We can be relentless toward hypocrisy
+and tender to humanity. We can rejoice in the love of laughter, without
+ever once letting it lead us to libertinism of fancy. We can reach
+through humor the heart of man. We can make exaggeration the scourge of
+meanness and the magnifier of truth on the broad screen of life. By
+study of him, the nothing new under the sun can be made fresh and
+fragrant by the supreme art of putting things. Though none of us can
+handle his wand, all of us can be transformed by it into something
+different from and finer than our dull selves. That is our delight, that
+is our debt, both due to him, and long may he remain with us to
+brighten, to broaden and to better our souls with the magic mirth and
+with the mirthful magic of his incomparable spell. [Applause.]
+
+[Illustration: REPRODUCTIONS OF MURAL DECORATIONS FROM THE LIBRARY
+OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON
+
+"_PATRIOTISM_"
+
+_Photo-engraving in colors after an original painting by George W.
+Maynard_
+
+
+This is from a series of eight panels, representing "The
+Virtues"--Fortitude, Justice, Patriotism, Courage, Temperance, Prudence,
+Industry, and Concord. Each figure is about five and a half feet high
+clad in drapery, and standing out on a solid red background. The style
+is Pompeiian, the general tone is somewhat like marble, but relieved by
+a touch of color. "Patriotism" is represented as feeding an eagle, the
+emblem of America, from a golden bowl, symbolizing the nourishment given
+by this Virtue to the spirit of the nation.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM McKINLEY
+
+
+OUR COUNTRY
+
+[Speech of President McKinley, in response to the toast "Our Country,"
+  at the Peace Jubilee banquet in the Auditorium, Chicago, October 19,
+  1898. The President was introduced by Hon. Franklin MacVeagh, in the
+  following words: "Since Washington, with the exception of Lincoln, no
+  President has carried upon his shoulders such grave responsibilities
+  or met such heavy demands upon his judgment, forbearance and wisdom as
+  President McKinley. [Great applause.] And no President, not even
+  Lincoln, has more willingly endured for his people, or has more
+  trusted in the people, or has sought more high-mindedly to interpret
+  and carry out the sober thought and ultimate will of the nation.
+  [Applause.] He has a reward in the affection and confidence of the
+  people. [Applause] It is this eminent President and this eminently
+  patriotic man who will now address you on the subject of 'Our
+  Country.'" It was several minutes before the cheering had subsided
+  sufficiently to enable President McKinley to make his voice heard.]
+
+
+MR. TOAST-MASTER AND GENTLEMEN:--It affords me gratification to
+meet the people of the city of Chicago and to participate with them in
+this patriotic celebration. Upon the suspension of hostilities of a
+foreign war, the first in our history for over half a century, we have
+met in a spirit of peace, profoundly grateful for the glorious
+advancement already made, and earnestly wishing in the final termination
+to realize an equally glorious fulfillment. With no feeling of
+exultation, but with profound thankfulness, we contemplate the events of
+the past five months. They have been too serious to admit of boasting or
+vain-glorification. They have been so full of responsibilities,
+immediate and prospective, as to admonish the soberest judgment and
+counsel the most conservative action.
+
+This is not the time to fire the imagination, but rather to discover, in
+calm reason, the way to truth, and justice, and right, and when
+discovered to follow it with fidelity and courage, without fear,
+hesitation, or weakness. [Applause.]
+
+The war has put upon the nation grave responsibilities. Their extent was
+not anticipated and could not have been well foreseen. We cannot escape
+the obligations of victory. We cannot avoid the serious questions which
+have been brought home to us by the achievements of our arms on land and
+sea. We are bound in conscience to keep and perform the covenants which
+the war has sacredly sealed with mankind. Accepting war for humanity's
+sake, we must accept all obligations which the war in duty and honor
+imposed upon us. The splendid victories we have achieved would be our
+eternal shame and not our everlasting glory if they led to the weakening
+of our original lofty purpose or to the desertion of the immortal
+principles on which the national government was founded, and in
+accordance with whose ennobling spirit it has ever since been faithfully
+administered.
+
+The war with Spain was undertaken not that the United States should
+increase its territory, but that oppression at our very doors should be
+stopped. This noble sentiment must continue to animate us, and we must
+give to the world the full demonstration of the sincerity of our
+purpose. Duty determines destiny. Destiny which results from duty
+performed may bring anxiety and perils, but never failure and dishonor.
+Pursuing duty may not always lead by smooth paths. Another course may
+look easier and more attractive, but pursuing duty for duty's sake is
+always sure and safe and honorable. It is not within the power of man to
+foretell the future and to solve unerringly its mighty problems.
+Almighty God has His plans and methods for human progress, and not
+infrequently they are shrouded for the time being in impenetrable
+mystery. Looking backward we can see how the hand of destiny builded for
+us and assigned us tasks whose full meaning was not apprehended even by
+the wisest statesmen of their times.
+
+Our colonial ancestors did not enter upon their war originally for
+independence. Abraham Lincoln did not start out to free the slaves, but
+to save the Union. The war with Spain was not of our seeking, and some
+of its consequences may not be to our liking. Our vision is often
+defective. Short-sightedness is a common malady, but the closer we get
+to things or they get to us the clearer our view and the less obscure
+our duty. Patriotism must be faithful as well as fervent; statesmanship
+must be wise as well as fearless--not the statesmanship which will
+command the applause of the hour, but the approving judgment of
+posterity. [Applause.]
+
+The progress of a nation can alone prevent degeneration. There must be
+new life and purpose, or there will be weakness and decay. There must be
+broadening of thought as well as broadening of trade. Territorial
+expansion is not alone and always necessary to national advancement.
+There must be a constant movement toward a higher and nobler
+civilization, a civilization that shall make its conquests without
+resort to war and achieve its greatest victories pursuing the arts of
+peace.
+
+In our present situation duty--and duty alone--should prescribe the
+boundary of our responsibilities and the scope of our undertakings. The
+final determination of our purposes awaits the action of the eminent men
+who are charged by the executive with the making of the treaty of peace,
+and that of the Senate of the United States, which, by our constitution,
+must ratify and confirm it. We all hope and pray that the confirmation
+of peace will be as just and humane as the conduct and consummation of
+the war. When the work of the treaty-makers is done the work of the
+lawmakers will begin. The one will settle the extent of our
+responsibilities; the other must provide the legislation to meet them.
+The army and navy have nobly and heroically performed their part. May
+God give the executive and congress wisdom to perform theirs.
+[Applause.]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE FUTURE OF THE PHILIPPINES
+
+[Speech of William McKinley at the eleventh annual banquet of the Home
+  Market Club, Boston, Mass., February 16, 1899. William B. Plunkett,
+  President of the Club, said in introducing the President of the United
+  States: "Not the Home Market Club, not the city of Boston, not
+  Massachusetts only, but all New England give you greeting of welcome,
+  Mr. President. In our retrospective of the year past we would give
+  full meed of honor and praise to the President who so nobly met and so
+  faithfully discharged the grave responsibilities of that great office,
+  and thanksgiving to the Divine Providence that sustained him. In such
+  hands, under such guidance, we may safely trust the future of our
+  Republic. I have the great honor to present to you the beloved
+  President of the United States, William McKinley." The enthusiasm
+  displayed when the President was introduced was tremendous. In it all
+  he remained to all appearances calm and collected, as he stood and
+  silently acknowledged the reception.]
+
+
+MR. TOAST-MASTER AND GENTLEMEN:--I have been deeply and
+profoundly moved by this manifestation of your good-will and confidence
+and impressed by the expressions of good-will from the Governor of your
+great Commonwealth [Roger Wolcott] as well as from the chief executive
+[Josiah Quincy] of the capital city of your State. No one stands in this
+magnificent presence, listening to the patriotic strains from choir and
+band, without knowing what this great audience was thinking about. It
+was thinking, it is thinking this moment, of country, because they love
+it and have faith in themselves and in its future. I thank the Governor
+of Massachusetts, I thank the Mayor of the city of Boston, for their
+warm and generous words of welcome, offered in behalf of this people to
+me in your presence to-night.
+
+The years go quickly. It seems not so long, but it is in fact six years
+since it was my honor to be a guest of the Home Market Club. Much has
+happened in the intervening time. Issues which were then engaging us
+have been settled or put aside for larger and more absorbing ones.
+Domestic conditions have improved and are generally satisfactory.
+
+We have made progress in industry and have realized the prosperity for
+which we have been striving. We had four long years of adversity, which
+taught us some lessons which will never be unlearned and which will be
+valuable in guiding our future action. We have not only been successful
+in our financial and business affairs, but have been successful in a war
+with a foreign power, which has added great glory to American arms and a
+new chapter to American history.
+
+I do not know why in the year 1899 this republic has unexpectedly had
+placed before it mighty problems which it must face and meet. They have
+come and are here and they could not be kept away. Many who were
+impatient for the conflict a year ago, apparently heedless of its larger
+results, are the first to cry out against the far-reaching consequences
+of their own act. Those of us who dreaded war most and whose every
+effort was directed to prevent it, had fears of new and grave problems
+which might follow its inauguration.
+
+The evolution of events which no man could control has brought these
+problems upon us. Certain it is that they have not come through any
+fault on our own part, but as a high obligation, and we meet them with
+clear conscience and unselfish purpose, and with good heart resolve to
+undertake their solution.
+
+War was declared in April, 1898, with practical unanimity by the
+Congress, and, once upon us, was sustained by like unanimity among the
+people. There had been many who had tried to avert it, as, on the other
+hand, there were many who would have precipitated it at an earlier date.
+In its prosecution and conclusion the great majority of our countrymen
+of every section believed they were fighting in a just cause, and at
+home or at sea or in the field they had part in its glorious triumphs.
+It was the war of an undivided nation. Every great act in its progress,
+from Manila to Santiago, from Guam to Porto Rico, met universal and
+hearty commendation. The protocol commanded the practically unanimous
+approval of the American people. It was welcomed by every lover of peace
+beneath the flag. [Applause.]
+
+The Philippines, like Cuba and Porto Rico, were intrusted to our hands
+by the war, and to that great trust, under the providence of God and in
+the name of human progress and civilization, we are committed. It is a
+trust we have not sought; it is a trust from which we will not flinch.
+The American people will hold up the hands of their servants at home to
+whom they commit its execution, while Dewey and Otis and the brave men
+whom they command will have the support of the country in upholding our
+flag where it now floats, the symbol and assurance of liberty and
+justice. [Applause.]
+
+What nation was ever able to write an accurate programme of the war upon
+which it was entering, much less decree in advance the scope of its
+results? Congress can declare war, but a higher power decrees its bounds
+and fixes its relations and responsibilities. The President can direct
+the movements of soldiers on the field and fleets upon the sea, but he
+cannot foresee the close of such movements or prescribe their limits. He
+cannot anticipate or avoid the consequences, but he must meet them. No
+accurate map of nations engaged in war can be traced until the war is
+over, nor can the measure of responsibility be fixed till the last gun
+is fired and the verdict embodied in the stipulations of peace.
+
+We hear no complaint of the relations created by the war between this
+Government and the islands of Cuba and Porto Rico. There are some,
+however, who regard the Philippines as in a different relation; but
+whatever variety of views there maybe on this phase of the question,
+there is universal agreement that the Philippines shall not be turned
+back to Spain. No true American consents to that. Even if unwilling to
+accept them ourselves, it would have been a weak evasion of manly duty
+to require Spain to transfer them to some other Power or Powers, and
+thus shirk our own responsibility. Even if we had had, as we did not
+have, the power to compel such a transfer, it could not have been made
+without the most serious international complications. Such a course
+could not be thought of. And yet had we refused to accept the cession of
+them we should have had no power over them, even for their own good. We
+could not discharge the responsibilities upon us until these islands
+became ours, either by conquest or treaty. There was but one
+alternative, and that was either Spain or the United States in the
+Philippines. The other suggestions--first, that they should be tossed
+into the arena of contention for the strife of nations; or, second, be
+left to the anarchy and chaos of no protectorate at all--were too
+shameful to be considered. [Applause.]
+
+The treaty gave them to the United States. Could we have required less
+and done our duty?
+
+Could we, after freeing the Filipinos from the domination of Spain, have
+left them without government and without power to protect life or
+property or to perform the international obligations essential to an
+independent State? Could we have left them in a state of anarchy and
+justified ourselves in our own consciences or before the tribunal of
+mankind? Could we have done that in the sight of God or man?
+
+Our concern was not for territory or trade or empire, but for the people
+whose interests and destiny, without our willing it, had been put in our
+hands. It was with this feeling that from the first day to the last not
+one word or line went from the Executive in Washington to our military
+and naval commanders at Manila or to our Peace Commissioners at Paris,
+that did not put as the sole purpose to be kept in mind, first after the
+success of our arms and the maintenance of our own honor, the welfare
+and happiness and the rights of the inhabitants of the Philippine
+islands. Did we need their consent to perform a great act for humanity?
+We had it in every aspiration of their minds, in every hope of their
+hearts. Was it necessary to ask their consent to capture Manila, the
+capital of their islands? Did we ask their consent to liberate them from
+Spanish sovereignty or to enter Manila Bay and destroy the Spanish
+sea-power there? We did not ask these; we were obeying a higher moral
+obligation which rested on us and which did not require anybody's
+consent. We were doing our duty by them, as God gave us the light to see
+our duty, with the consent of our own consciences and with the approval
+of civilization. Every present obligation has been met and fulfilled in
+the expulsion of Spanish sovereignty from their islands, and while the
+war that destroyed it was in progress we could not ask their views. Nor
+can we now ask their consent. Indeed, can any one tell me in what form
+it could be marshaled and ascertained until peace and order, so
+necessary to the reign of reason, shall be secured and established? A
+reign of terror is not the kind of rule under which right action and
+deliberate judgment are possible. It is not a good time for the
+liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and
+government to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down
+their rescuers.
+
+We have now ended the war with Spain. The treaty has been ratified by
+the votes of more than two-thirds of the Senate of the United States and
+by the judgment of nine-tenths of its people. No nation was ever more
+fortunate in war or more honorable in its negotiations in peace. Spain
+is now eliminated from the problem. It remains to ask what we shall now
+do. I do not intrude upon the duties of Congress or seek to anticipate
+or forestall its action. I only say that the treaty of peace, honorably
+secured, having been ratified by the United States, and, as we
+confidently expect, shortly to be ratified in Spain, Congress will have
+the power, and I am sure the purpose, to do what in good morals is right
+and just and humane for these peoples in distant seas.
+
+It is sometimes hard to determine what is best to do, and the best thing
+to do is oftentimes the hardest. The prophet of evil would do nothing
+because he flinches at sacrifice and effort, and to do nothing is
+easiest and involves the least cost. On those who have things to do
+there rests a responsibility which is not on those who have no
+obligations as doers. If the doubters were in a majority, there would,
+it is true, be no labor, no sacrifice, no anxiety, and no burden raised
+or carried; no contribution from our ease and purse and comfort to the
+welfare of others, or even to the extension of our resources to the
+welfare of ourselves. There would be ease, but alas! there would be
+nothing done.
+
+But grave problems come in the life of a nation, however much men may
+seek to avoid them. They come without our seeking; why, we do not know,
+and it is not always given us to know; but the generation on which they
+are forced cannot avoid the responsibility of honestly striving for
+their solution. We may not know precisely how to solve them, but we can
+make an honest effort to that end, and if made in conscience, justice,
+and honor, it will not be in vain.
+
+The future of the Philippine Islands is now in the hands of the American
+people. Until the treaty was ratified or rejected the Executive
+department of this government could only preserve the peace and protect
+life and property. That treaty now commits the free and enfranchised
+Filipinos to the guiding hand and the liberalizing influences, the
+generous sympathies, the uplifting education, not of their American
+masters, but of their American emancipators. No one can tell to-day what
+is best for them or for us. I know no one at this hour who is wise
+enough or sufficiently informed to determine what form of government
+will best subserve their interests and our interests, their and our
+well-being.
+
+If we knew everything by intuition--and I sometimes think that there are
+those who believe that if we do not, they do--we should not need
+information; but, unfortunately, most of us are not in that happy state.
+This whole subject is now with Congress; and Congress is the voice, the
+conscience and the judgment of the American people. Upon their judgment
+and conscience can we not rely? I believe in them. I trust them. I know
+of no better or safer human tribunal than the people. [Applause.]
+
+Until Congress shall direct otherwise, it will be the duty of the
+Executive to possess and hold the Philippines, giving to the people
+thereof peace and order and beneficent government, affording them every
+opportunity to prosecute their lawful pursuits, encouraging them in
+thrift and industry, making them feel and know that we are their
+friends, not their enemies, that their good is our aim, that their
+welfare is our welfare, but that neither their aspirations nor ours can
+be realized until our authority is acknowledged and unquestioned.
+
+That the inhabitants of the Philippines will be benefited by this
+Republic is my unshaken belief. That they will have a kindlier
+government under our guidance, and that they will be aided in every
+possible way to be a self-respecting and self-governing people is as
+true as that the American people love liberty and have an abiding faith
+in their own government and in their own institutions. No imperial
+designs lurk in the American mind. They are alien to American sentiment,
+thought and purpose. Our priceless principles undergo no change under a
+tropical sun. They go with the flag. They are wrought in every one of
+its sacred folds and are inextinguishable in its shining stars.
+
+ "Why read ye not the changeless truth,
+  The free can conquer but to save."
+
+If we can benefit these remote peoples, who will object? If in the years
+of the future they are established in government under law and liberty,
+who will regret our perils and sacrifices? Who will not rejoice in our
+heroism and humanity? Always perils, and always after them safety;
+always darkness and clouds, but always shining through them the light
+and the sunshine; always cost and sacrifice, but always after them the
+fruition of liberty, education and civilization.
+
+I have no light or knowledge not common to my countrymen. I do not
+prophesy. The present is all-absorbing to me, but I cannot bound my
+vision by the blood-stained trenches around Manila, where every red
+drop, whether from the veins of an American soldier or a misguided
+Filipino, is anguish to my heart; but by the broad range of future
+years, when that group of islands, under the impulse of the year just
+passed, shall have become the gems and glories of those tropical seas; a
+land of plenty and of increasing possibilities; a people redeemed from
+savage indolence and habits, devoted to the arts of peace, in touch with
+the commerce and trade of all nations, enjoying the blessings of
+freedom, of civil and religious liberty, of education and of homes, and
+whose children and children's children shall for ages hence bless the
+American Republic because it emancipated and redeemed their fatherland
+and set them in the pathway of the world's best civilization.
+[Long-continued applause and cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM B. MELISH
+
+
+THE LADIES
+
+[Speech of William B. Melish at a banquet given in honor of the Grand
+  Encampment of Knights Templars of the United States, by the Templars
+  of Pennsylvania, at Pittsburg, Pa., 1898. Colonel Melish, of
+  Cincinnati, Ohio, was assigned the toast, "Our ladies."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--Once in three years it falls to
+the lot of a few, a happy few, of us budding blossoms of the official
+corps of the Grand Encampment to be discovered by a triennial committee,
+and distinguished by having our names printed on the banquet lists, and
+told that we are to sit among the elect at the big centre table, and to
+respond to certain toasts. With all the vanity of man we gladly accept,
+and care little what the toast may be. So, when the Pittsburg Committee
+asked me to select my topic, I rashly said "any old thing," and they
+told me I was to talk about the ladies. Then I regretted that I had said
+"any old thing." [Laughter.] In vain I told them I knew but little of
+the subject, delightful though it be, and that what I did know I dare
+not tell in this presence. The Chairman unearthed some ancient Templar
+landmark of the Crusaders Hopkins and Gobin, about "a Knight's duty is
+to obey," hence as the poet says:--
+
+ "When a woman's in the case,
+  You know all other things give place."
+
+Last Sunday when the Grand Master, and all the Grand officers, save
+possibly the Grand Prelate, made their _triennial_ appearance in church,
+I picked up a book in the pew I was in, and was impressed with the
+opening chapters of a story called "The Book of Genesis." It is the
+first mention made of one who was entitled to be called the "first
+lady in the land." I read that the Creator "saw everything that he had
+made and behold it was very good," and he rested. Then He made man and
+said He was good--and He rested. He then made woman out of the rib of a
+man, but no mention is made of His remarks, or of His resting--in fact
+there has been no rest for mankind ever since. [Laughter.] The first
+lady was called woman--"because she was taken out of man," and twenty
+centuries look down upon us, and we realize that what she has taken out
+of man is a plenty. As the poet Moore pleasantly remarks:--
+
+ "Disguise our bondage as we will
+ 'Tis woman, woman rules us still."
+
+For two thousand years the Order of Knighthood has been endeavoring to
+ameliorate and elevate the condition of womankind. Among savages they
+are beasts of burden, among barbarians and Mohammedans they are toys or
+slaves, but among us, thanks to American manhood, they have our love and
+respect, they have all our rights, all our money, and, in these days of
+tailor-made garments, they have nearly all our clothes; and we smile and
+smile, and wonder what next? [Laughter.]
+
+Is it surprising that a sedate, sober-minded, slightly bald-headed,
+middle-aged Templar Knight, "used only to war's alarms [laughter] and
+not to woman's charms," should be at a loss what to say on an occasion
+like this, or to do justice to such a subject? It is delightful to have
+the ladies here. Like Timon of Athens we can truly say:--
+
+   "You have, fair ladies,
+ Set a fair fashion to our entertainment,
+ Which was not half so beautiful and kind."
+
+In the presence of the bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and warm red lips of
+the ladies it might be possible to work up to the proper degree of
+enthusiasm in the short time allotted me, if it were not for the stony
+glare of one which says "Beware, I am here!" [Laughter.] Now, in my
+innocence, I presumed that poets were the fellows who had prepared all
+the pretty things to say about the dear girls, but I find a variety of
+opinions expressed. That good old Masonic bard, Bobby Burns, says:--
+
+ "And nature swears, the lovely dears,
+    Her noblest work she classes, O;
+  Her 'prentice hand she tried on man
+    An' then she made the lasses, O."
+
+But you will note that Dame Nature swears this, and she is not a
+competent witness, as she had nothing to do with the little surgical
+episode when Brother Adam lost his rib. [Laughter.] Lord Lyttleton gave
+our sisters good advice, as follows:--
+
+ "Seek to be good, but aim not to be great,
+  A woman's noblest station is Retreat,
+  Her fairest virtues fly from public sight,
+  Domestic worth that shuns too strong a light."
+
+Another English authority named "Howe," in his "Advice to Wives,"
+says:--
+
+ "A wife, domestic, good and pure
+  Like snail should keep within her door,
+  But not, like snail, with silver track
+  Place all her wealth upon her back."
+
+But who in these latter days would preach the heresies of those
+old-fashioned fellows to the hundreds of ladies present, plumed in all
+the titles and distinctions of the hundred and one woman's clubs of
+to-day, which they represent. Perish the thought!
+
+Woman is being emancipated. She is enthroned in the sun, crowned with
+stars, and, trampling beneath her dainty feet the burnt-out moon, emblem
+of a vanished despotism that denied her the companionship of her
+husband, questioned her immortality, locked her up in the harem, or
+harnessed her to the plough. A hundred years from now, if she does a
+man's work, she will be paid a man's wages [applause], and some of us
+will not have to work for a living, but can go to our clubs in peace,
+take our afternoon naps, and be ready in the evening to get Mamma's
+slippers ready when she comes home from the office. [Laughter.]
+
+But the problem for to-night is how to consider the various relations
+which women bear to us weak, frail men--as mother or mother-in-law, as
+sweetheart or wife. We are somewhat in the predicament of the green
+bridegroom at Delmonico's who said: "Waiter, we want dinner for two."
+"Will ze lady and ze gentleman haf table d'hote or a la carte?" "Oh,
+bring us some of both, with lots of gravy on 'em!" Oh, ye Knights! Take
+the advice of the philosopher who is talking to you, and be on the best
+of terms with your mother-in-law. [Laughter.] Only get her on your side,
+and you have a haven to fly to when all others fail to appreciate you,
+and when some one of the others feels appointed a special agent to tell
+you about it. Now, it isn't everybody that knows this, and I commend it
+to you. [Laughter.]
+
+Some men are like the two darkies I heard discussing the question of
+what a man should do if he were in a boat on a wide river, with his
+mother and his wife, and the boat should sink, and he could only save
+one woman. "Johnson," said Billy Rice, "who would you save, yo' mudder
+or yo' wife?" Johnson thought and said: "Billy! I would save my mudder.
+I could get anudder wife, but where under the blue canopy of hebben
+could I get anudder dear old mudder?" "But look here, Billy! 'Spose you
+was in de boat, in de middle of de river, wid yo' wife and yo'
+mudder-in-law?" "Oh, what a cinch!"--said Billy. "And de boat,"
+continued Johnson, "was to strike a snag and smash to pieces, and
+eberybody go into de water, who would you save?" "My wife, dar! my
+mudder-in-law dar! and de boat strike a snag?" "Yes!" "I would save de
+snag," said Billy. "I could get anudder wife, I might den have anudder
+mudder-in-law, but where under de blue canopy of hebben could I find
+anudder dear, thoughtful old snag?" [Laughter.]
+
+It has been well said that "all a woman has to do in this world is
+contained within the duties of a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a
+mother." She has sustained at least one of these relations to even the
+poorest of us; but I wonder if there is a man here to-night so miserably
+abject and forlorn and God-forsaken as not, some time in his life, to
+have been able to regard her in the delightful relation of sweetheart? I
+hope not. I would rather he had had a dozen, than no sweetheart at all.
+The most unselfish devotion we may ever know is that of our mother; a
+sweet affection is that of our sisters, a most tender love is that of
+our daughters, but the love and affection we all want, and without which
+we are never satisfied, is that of the sweethearts who reward our
+devotion--out of all proportion to our deserts--by becoming our wives
+and the mothers of our daughters. [Applause.]
+
+It is not less the pleasure than the duty of every man to have a
+sweetheart--I was almost tempted to say, the more, the merrier--and the
+sooner he makes one of his sweethearts his wife, the better for him. If
+he is a "woman-hater," or professes to be (for, as a matter of fact,
+there is no such anomaly as a genuine "woman-hater" at liberty in this
+great and glorious country), let him beware, as I believe with
+Thackeray, that a "woman, with fair opportunities, and without an
+absolute hump, may _marry_ whom she likes. [Laughter.] Only let us be
+thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don't
+know their own power." As the poet--what's-his-name--so beautifully and
+feelingly and touchingly observes:--
+
+ "Oh, woman, in our hours of ease,
+  Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,"--
+ "But seen too oft, familiar with her face,
+  We first endure, then pity, then embrace."
+
+Next to God, we are indebted to woman for life itself, and then for
+making it worth living. To describe her, the pen should be dipped in the
+humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered
+from the wings of a butterfly. There is one in the world who feels for
+him who is sad a keener pang than he feels for himself; there is one to
+whom reflected joy is better than that which comes direct; there is one
+who rejoices in another's honor more than in her own; there is one upon
+whom another's transcendent excellence sheds no beam but that of
+delight; there is one who hides another's infirmities more faithfully
+than her own; there is one who loses all sense of self in the sentiment
+of kindness, tenderness, and devotion to another--that one is she who is
+honored with the holy name of wife. [Applause.] With the immortal
+Shakespeare we may say:
+
+ "Why, man, she is mine own;
+  And I as rich in having such a jewel,
+  As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl,
+  The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold."
+
+I can do no greater justice to my subject, the occasion, and myself,
+than by closing with the words of Shelley: "Win her and wear her if you
+can. She is the most delightful of God's creatures. Heaven's best gift;
+man's joy and pride in prosperity; man's support and comfort in
+affliction." I drink her health. God bless her. [Prolonged applause.]
+
+
+
+
+NELSON APPLETON MILES
+
+
+THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
+
+[Speech of Major-General Nelson A. Miles at a banquet given in his honor
+  by more than seven hundred of the most distinguished citizens of New
+  York City, November 11, 1898. While the last course was being served,
+  a unique procession made the round of the hall. It was headed by three
+  figures, one fifer and two drummers, attired to represent the famous
+  painting called "Spirit of '76." These three were followed by a
+  procession bearing miniature ships of war manufactured of various
+  confections. Joseph H. Choate was Chairman of the banquet.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--
+
+ "Joyfully dear is the homeward track,
+  If we are but sure of a welcome back."
+
+Such a generous reception has been extended to me to-night as few are
+permitted to enjoy, and I should be wanting in gratitude did I not
+appreciate the sentiment expressed in this cordial greeting. I should be
+vain indeed to ascribe it to myself, or for a moment to accept it solely
+as a personal tribute. As an expression of appreciation of the gallant
+troops which I have the honor to command, it is accepted in behalf of
+the living and for them I thank you, as well as for those whose lips are
+forever silent and whose heroism and sacrifice I know are here
+remembered and revered.
+
+This reception is to me doubly gratifying, for I am delighted to return
+once more to the shores of the Great Republic and also to be welcomed by
+the men of the great Empire State and by those associated with them in
+this entertainment. For many years New York has seemed like home to me.
+I passed down Broadway in 1861, at the age of twenty-one, a lieutenant
+in a regiment from my native State; eight months later I was honored by
+that great patriot and statesman, Governor Morgan, with a commission as
+lieutenant-colonel in one of the New York regiments. From that time
+during the great Civil War I was largely identified with the New York
+troops, commanding a regiment, a brigade, and, at one time, thirty-two
+regiments from the State of New York. Many of my comrades in the field
+were from New York, many of my strongest friends are New Yorkers, and I
+am honored to-night by such a greeting as would make the heart of any
+soldier proud.
+
+The wars of the past have had their objects, their achievements, and
+glorious results. The last war was one in the interest of humanity and
+in behalf of a heroic people, who for many years had been struggling
+against cruel atrocities, oppression, and the despotism of a decaying
+monarchy. It has been most remarkable in many respects. It has presented
+one series of victories, without a single disaster or a single defeat.
+The flag of the United States has not been lowered in a single instance.
+Not a foot of ground has been surrendered, not a soldier, gun or rifle
+has been captured by the enemy. The American soldiers and sailors have
+been true to the principles and traditions of their fathers, and
+maintained the honor and glory of the American arms. One of the great
+blessings to the country in this brief but decisive war has been to
+unite firmly in bonds of imperishable union all sections of the United
+States: North, South, East, and West. Still more, it has given us reason
+and opportunity to appreciate our obligations to the mother country for
+the dignified and powerful influence of the British Empire in the
+maintenance of our principles and rights.
+
+There are other fields to conquer. The past has gone, and the future
+opens the door to greater responsibilities, and I trust to greater
+progress and prosperity. We are ascending to a clearer atmosphere, up to
+a higher level, where we should take a stronger position than ever
+before occupied by our government and people. We can no longer confine
+ourselves to the narrow limits that governed us as a people in the past.
+Much has been said of what has been the ruling policy of the past. This
+much, I think, is apparent to all, that the grave responsibilities of
+the nation are too great to be contaminated by personal, partisan, or
+sectional interests. Our interests are national in the highest degree.
+They embrace two hemispheres. They involve the welfare of a hundred
+millions of the human race. We are getting to that time when we shall
+require not only the ablest men but many of them, in every department,
+to protect and administer the affairs of the Nation. In those impressive
+lines of Holland we might exclaim:--
+
+ "God give us men; a time like this demands
+  Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands,
+  Men whom the lust of office does not kill,
+    Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy,
+  Men who possess opinions and a will,
+    Men who have honor; men who will not lie."
+
+The important and great questions that had to be met and that have been
+decided during the last few months have had a broadening influence upon
+the great mass of our people. It has been uplifting to every community
+and every phase of society. It has turned the attention of our people to
+the great power and responsibility of our Republic, and institutions,
+and true interests as a people and a nation, not only at home, but
+through every part of the globe. We have been enabled to give freedom to
+millions of the oppressed, and I believe that we shall be able to extend
+to them the hand of support and secure for them a full measure of
+justice and enlightened government. In behalf of the army and for
+myself, I wish to return my most heartfelt thanks for this most cordial
+greeting. [Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL FREEMAN MILLER
+
+
+FEDERAL JUDGES
+
+[Speech of Samuel F. Miller, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United
+  States, at the annual dinner of the State Bar Association, Albany,
+  November 20, 1878. Justice Miller spoke in response to the toast: "The
+  Supreme Court of the United States." With the toast was associated the
+  following sentiment from De Tocqueville: "The peace, the prosperity,
+  and the very existence of the Union are vested in Federal Judges."]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ASSOCIATION:--I perceive that
+in the meeting of this State Bar Association it has devolved upon me to
+inaugurate the talking on all occasions. [Laughter.] When I had supposed
+last evening that I should hear the eloquent voice of your then
+President, Judge Porter, to get up the enthusiasm which was necessary, I
+was surprised to find that he was absent, and that the distinguished
+gentleman who presided did not feel called upon to fill his place in
+that regard, though he did the honors and discharged the duties of the
+office very gracefully; and now when your own Governor, and when the
+President of the United States are toasted in advance of the body of
+which I have the honor to be a member, there is nobody with the
+respectful and cordial approval of the Association here to respond to
+the sentiments in their honor. But I have had the honor of sitting for a
+couple of hours in this body, and to find that although a moderate
+speaker myself, I had opened the way for a good deal of disposition to
+talk [applause]; and I trust it will be found that there will be a
+similar experience this evening, as I find here the Judges of the Court
+of Appeals and of the Supreme Court of this State, and others, who know
+how to speak, and who, no doubt, will speak in response to toasts.
+
+The sentiment of De Tocqueville, to which I am in some sense called
+upon to respond, is one which those of you who have read his work on
+"Democracy in America," written forty-five years ago, must know has
+reference to a much smaller body of judges than now existing. Perhaps I
+shall entertain you a little by telling you about what are the Federal
+judges, and how many of them there are. We have fifty-seven or
+fifty-eight district judges who are Federal judges. We have nine judges
+of the Circuit Court of the United States; we have five judges of the
+District of Columbia; we have five judges of the Court of Claims; and we
+have nine judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, and these
+are all considered and treated as constitutional Federal judges. That is
+to say, they enter their offices as officers of the United States, and
+hold their offices during life or good behavior. We have, in addition to
+these, eight Territories, each of which has three judges, who are
+Federal judges, although in a different sense. They are not called
+constitutional judges--I do not know that that is a very correct
+distinction--and they are only appointed for four years. These are the
+Federal judges, the name which De Tocqueville applies to them.
+
+You will excuse me if I talk for a few minutes about the court of which
+I have the honor to be a member--the Supreme Court of the United States.
+That court, if it is nothing else, certainly is a hard-working court. It
+is a court of which a great deal is required; and it is some solace for
+the hard work that we have to do, that we are supposed to be a court of
+a good deal of dignity and of a very high character. I hope you all
+concur. [Laughter and applause.] Just consider what the jurisdiction of
+that court is. There have come before that court often, States--States
+which in the old ante-bellum times, we called "Sovereign States"--and
+some of them did not come voluntarily. They were brought by the process
+of that court. And when one State of the Union has a question of
+juridical cognizance against another State of the Union, it must come to
+that court. A subpoena is sent, and it is brought into that court just
+like an individual, and it must, by the constitution of this country,
+submit its rights and territorial jurisdiction, and the right which
+accompanies that territorial jurisdiction, to the decision of that
+Supreme Court. Except the great court which sat on Mount Olympus, I
+know of no other which has ever had the right to decide, and compel
+States to submit to its decision. [Applause.] It is within our province
+to declare a law of one of these sovereign States, void, absolutely
+null, because it may be in conflict with the Constitution and laws of
+the United States; and that is a function of daily occurrence. What
+other court in the world has that power? To what other court has ever
+been submitted such a function as that--to declare the legislation of a
+State like New York, with five millions of population, and other States
+verging upon the same amount of population and wealth, to declare that
+the laws which you have passed in the ordinary discharge of your powers
+as legislators, are null and void?
+
+It is a great power. We not only do that, but we decide that the laws
+which the Congress of the United States shall pass are void, if they
+conflict with that instrument under which we all live and move and have
+our being. Though we approach these subjects with regretful hesitation,
+it is a duty from which the court has never shrunk, and from which I
+presume it never will shrink as long as that court has its existence.
+[Applause.]
+
+Gentlemen, I have told you about our high prerogatives; but just look at
+what we have done! see what it is that we are compelled to know or
+supposed to know--but I am very sorry to say we don't know at all.
+[Laughter.] We are supposed to take judicial cognizance of all questions
+of international law, of treaties, of prize laws, and of the law of
+nations generally. We take notice of it without its being specially
+pleaded. We take notice of the laws and statutes of every State of these
+thirty-eight States of the Union. They are not to be proved in our
+courts; they are not brought in issue, but the judge of the Federal
+courts, from the lowest one to the highest, is supposed to take judicial
+cognizance of all the statute laws, and to know them, of the whole
+thirty-eight States of the Union, and of the eight Territories besides.
+In addition to that, we are supposed to take notice of the common law of
+the country. We take notice of the equity principles, and we apply them
+now in separate courts, notwithstanding you have combined them in your
+processes in the State courts. We are supposed to understand the civil
+law on which Texas and Louisiana have framed their system of laws; and
+we are supposed to understand all the other laws, as I said, of the
+States, divergent and varied as they are. We do the best we can to
+understand them; but, gentlemen, permit me to say that, but for the bar
+which practices before us; but for the lawyers who come up from New York
+and Pennsylvania, and from the States of the West and of the South, to
+tell us what the law is; but for the instruction and aid which they
+afford to us, our duties would be but poorly fulfilled.
+
+I take pleasure in saying, gentlemen, and it is the last thing that I
+shall trouble you with, that a bar or set of men superior in
+information, in the desire to impart that information to the court, a
+set of gentlemen in the legal profession more instructive in their
+arguments, could hardly be found in any country in the world.
+[Applause.] I doubt whether their equals are found, when you consider
+the variety of the knowledge which they must present to us, the topics
+which they discuss, the sources from which they derive the matter which
+they lay before us. I say that it is with pleasure that the court relies
+upon the lawyers of the country to enable it to perform its high
+functions.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+LITERATURE AND POLITICS
+
+[Speech of John Morley at the banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May
+  3, 1890. Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Academy, said in
+  introducing Mr. Morley: "With Literature I associate, not for the
+  first time, the name of a master of strong and sober English, a man in
+  whose writings the clear vision of a seeker after truth controls the
+  generous fervor of an idealist, and of whom every appreciator of a
+  fine literary temper must earnestly hope that the paths upon which he
+  has so long trod with growing honor may never become wholly strangers
+  to his feet--I mean Mr. John Morley."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, LADIES AND
+GENTLEMEN:--I feel that I am more unworthy now than I was eight
+years ago to figure as the representative of literature before this
+brilliant gathering of all the most important intellectual and social
+interests of our time. I have not yet been able like the Prime Minister,
+to go round this exhibition and see the works of art that glorify your
+walls; but I am led by him to expect that I shall see the pictures of
+Liberal leaders, including M. Rochefort. [Laughter.] I am not sure
+whether M. Rochefort will figure as a man of letters or as a Liberal
+leader, but I can understand that his portrait would attract the Prime
+Minister because M. Rochefort is a politician who was once a Liberal
+leader, and who has now seen occasion to lose his faith in Parliamentary
+government. [Laughter and cheers.] Nor have I seen the picture of "The
+Flowing Tide," but I shall expect to find in that picture when I do see
+it a number of bathing-machines in which, not the younger generation,
+but the elder generation are incarcerated. [Laughter.] The younger
+generation, as I understand, are waiting confidently--for the arrival of
+the "Flowing Tide," and when it arrives, the elderly gentlemen who are
+incarcerated in those machines [laughter] will be only too anxious for a
+man and a horse to come and deliver them from their imminent peril.
+[Laughter and cheers.]
+
+I thought that I detected in the last words of your speech, in proposing
+this toast, Mr. President, an accent of gentle reproach that any one
+should desert the high and pleasant ways of literature for the turmoil
+and the everlasting contention of public life. I do not suppose that
+there has ever been a time in which there was less of divorce between
+literature and public life than the present time. ["Hear! Hear!"] There
+have been in the reign of the Queen two eminent statesmen who have
+thrice had the distinction of being Prime Minister, and oddly enough,
+one of those statesmen [Lord Derby] has left behind him a most spirited
+version of Homer, while the other eminent statesman [William E.
+Gladstone]--happily still among us, still examines the legends and the
+significance of Homer. [Cheers.] Then when we come to a period nearer to
+ourselves, and look at those gentlemen who have in the last six years
+filled the office of Minister for Ireland, we find that no fewer than
+three [George Otto Trevelyan, John Morley, and Arthur Balfour] were
+authors of books before they engaged in the very ticklish business of
+the government of men. ["Hear! Hear!"] And one of these three Ministers
+for Ireland embarked upon his literary career--which promised ample
+distinction--under the editorial auspices of another of the three. We
+possess in one branch of the Legislature the author of the most
+fascinating literary biography in our language. We possess also another
+writer whose range of knowledge and of intellectual interest is so great
+that he has written the most important book upon the Holy Roman Empire
+and the most important book upon the American Commonwealth [James
+Bryce]. [Cheers.]
+
+The first canon in literature was announced one hundred years ago by an
+eminent Frenchman who said that in literature it is your business to
+have preferences but no exclusions. In politics it appears to be our
+business to have very stiff and unchangeable preferences, and exclusion
+is one of the systematic objects of our life. [Laughter and cheers.] In
+literature, according to another canon, you must have a free and open
+mind and it has been said: "Never be the prisoner of your own opinions."
+In politics you are very lucky if you do not have the still harder
+fate--(and I think that the gentlemen on the President's right hand will
+assent to that as readily as the gentlemen who sit on his left) of being
+the prisoner of other people's opinions. [Laughter.] Of course no one
+can doubt for a moment that the great achievements of literature--those
+permanent and vital works which we will never let die--require a
+devotion as unceasing, as patient, as inexhaustible, as the devotion
+that is required for the works that adorn your walls; and we have
+luckily in our age--though it may not be a literary age--masters of
+prose and masters of verse. No prose more winning has ever been written
+than that of Cardinal Newman; no verse finer, more polished, more
+melodious has ever been written than that of Lord Tennyson and Mr.
+Swinburne. [Cheers.]
+
+It seems to me that one of the greatest functions of literature at this
+moment is not merely to produce great works, but also to protect the
+English language--that noble, that most glorious instrument--against
+those hosts of invaders which I observe have in these days sprung up. I
+suppose that every one here has noticed the extraordinary list of names
+suggested lately in order to designate motion by electricity [laughter];
+that list of names only revealed what many of us had been observing for
+a long time--namely, the appalling forces that are ready at a moment's
+notice to deface and deform our English tongue. [Laughter.] These
+strange, fantastic, grotesque, and weird titles open up to my prophetic
+vision a most unwelcome prospect. I tremble to see the day approach--and
+I am not sure that it is not approaching--when the humorists of the
+headlines of American journalism shall pass current as models of
+conciseness, energy, and color of style. [Cheers and laughter.]
+
+Even in our social speech this invasion seems to be taking place in an
+alarming degree and I wonder what the Pilgrim Fathers of the seventeenth
+century would say if they could hear their pilgrim children of the
+nineteenth century who come over here, on various missions, and among
+others, "On the make." [Laughter.] This is only one of the thousand such
+like expressions which are invading the Puritan simplicity of our
+tongue. I will only say that I should like, for my own part, to see in
+every library and in every newspaper office that admirable passage in
+which Milton, who knew so well how to handle both the great instrument
+of prose and the nobler instrument of verse--declared that next to the
+man who furnished courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy he
+placed the man who should enlist small bands of good authors to resist
+that barbarism which invades the minds and the speech of men in methods
+and habits of speaking and writing.
+
+I thank you for having allowed me the honor of saying a word as to the
+happiest of all callings and the most imperishable of all arts. [Loud
+cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
+
+
+THE POETS' CORNER
+
+[Speech of John Lothrop Motley, United States Minister to England at the
+  eighty-fourth annual banquet of the Royal Literary Fund, London, May
+  28, 1873. The Right-Hon. William E. Gladstone, First Minister of the
+  Crown, was chairman. The Bishop of Derry proposed the toast, "The
+  Literature of the United States, and Mr. Motley," which was loudly
+  cheered.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I can scarcely find
+fitting words to express my gratitude for the warm and genial manner in
+which the toast of "American Literature" has been received by this
+distinguished assembly. I wish that the honor of responding to it had
+been placed in worthier hands. Two at least of our most eminent men of
+letters I thought were in England, or near it--one, that most original,
+subtle, poetical and graceful of thinkers and essayists, Mr. Emerson
+[cheers]; the other, one of our most distinguished poets and
+prose-writers, second to none in the highest spheres of imagination and
+humor: Mr. Lowell. [Cheers.] I had hoped to meet them both, but I look
+in vain for their friendly and familiar faces. In their absence, I
+venture to return thanks most sincerely, but briefly, for the eloquent
+and sympathetic words with which the distinguished prelate has spoken of
+our literature. I do so in behalf of the eminent poets and prose-writers
+in every department of literature and science, many of whose names
+tremble on my lips, but the long roll-call of which I will not
+enumerate, who are the living illustrators of our literature, and who it
+is a gratification to know are almost as familiar and highly appreciated
+in the old land of our forefathers as they are at home [cheers]; but I
+for one like to consider them all as fellow-citizens in the great
+English-speaking Republic of letters--where all are brothers, not
+strangers to each other. And as an illustration of this, I believe that
+it is not long since one of our famous poets whose exquisite works are
+familiar in every palace and every cottage all over the world where the
+English language is spoken--Mr. Longfellow--was recently requested to
+preside at one of your meetings. [Cheers.]
+
+I can produce nothing new on that great subject, which seems the
+inevitable one for an American on such an occasion as this, the
+international bond of a common language, a common literature, and
+centuries of common history and tradition, which connects those two
+great nations, the United Empire and the United Republic. May the
+shadows of both never grow less and may that international bond
+strengthen its links every year! [Cheers.] What is the first hallowed
+spot in the Transatlantic pilgrimage of every true American? What is the
+true Mecca of his heart? Not the hoary tombs of the Pharaohs, and the
+one hundred gated cities of the Nile. Not the Acropolis and the
+Parthenon, the plains of Marathon, the Pass of Thermopylae, thrilling as
+they are with heroic and patriotic emotion; not the Forum and the
+Coliseum and the triumphal arches of Rome. No; the pious pilgrim from
+the Far West seeks a sequestered, old-fashioned little town, in the
+heart of the most delicious rural scenery that even old England can
+boast; he walks up a quiet, drowsy, almost noiseless street, with quaint
+old houses, half brick, half timber, hardly changed of aspect since they
+looked out on the Wars of the Roses. He comes to an ancient, ivy-mantled
+tower hard by a placid, silvery stream on which a swan is ever sailing;
+he passes through a pleached alley under a Gothic gateway of the little
+church, and bends in reverence before a solitary tomb, for in that tomb
+repose the ashes of Shakespeare. [Cheers.] We claim our share in every
+atom of that consecrated dust. Our forefathers, who first planted the
+seeds of a noble civilization in New England and Virginia, were
+contemporaries and countrymen of the Swan of Avon. So long as we all
+have an undivided birthright in that sublimest of human intellects, and
+can enjoy, as none others can, those unrivalled masterpieces, Americans
+and Englishmen can never be quite foreigners to each other though seas
+between as broad have rolled since the day when that precious dust wore
+human clothing. [Cheers.]
+
+And what is the next resting-place in our pilgrim's progress--the
+pilgrim of Outre-Mer? Surely that stately and beautiful pile which we
+have all seen in our dreams long before we looked upon it with the eyes
+of flesh, time-honored Westminster Abbey. I can imagine no purer
+intellectual pleasure for an American than when he first wanders through
+those storied aisles, especially if he have the privilege which many of
+our countrymen have enjoyed, of being guided there by the hand of one
+whose exquisite urbanity and kindliness are fit companions to his
+learning and his intellect, the successor of the ancient Abbot, the
+historian of the Abbey, the present distinguished Dean of Westminster
+[Dean Stanley], to whom we have listened with such pleasure to-night.
+[Cheers.] And it will be in the Poets' Corner that we shall ever linger
+the longest. Those statues, busts and mural inscriptions are prouder
+trophies than all the banners from the most ensanguined battle-fields
+that the valor of England has ever won, and with what a wealth of
+intellect is that nation endowed which after the centuries of immortal
+names already enshrined there has had the proud although most melancholy
+honor of adding in one decade--scarcely more than ten years--the names
+of Macaulay, Grote, Dickens, Thackeray, and Lytton? [Cheers.] They are
+our contemporaries, not our countrymen; but we cannot afford to resign
+our claim to some portion of their glory as illustrators of our common
+language. And I would fain believe that you take a fraternal interest in
+the fame of those whom we too have lost, and who were our especial
+garland--Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, Everett, Hawthorne, and
+Prescott.
+
+But I have trespassed far longer upon your attention than I meant to do
+when I arose; and I shall therefore only once more thank you for the
+great kindness with which you have received the toast of the Literature
+of the United States. [Cheers.]
+
+
+
+
+JOHN PHILIP NEWMAN
+
+
+COMMERCE
+
+[Speech of Rev. Dr. John P. Newman, at the 115th annual banquet of the
+  Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, May 8, 1883. The
+  President, George W. Lane, presided, and said: "Gentlemen, I give you
+  the fifth regular toast: 'Commerce--distributing to all regions the
+  productions of each, and, providing for the wants of all, it combines
+  in friendly intercourse the nations of the earth.' To this toast the
+  Rev. Dr. Newman will respond."]
+
+
+MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF NEW
+YORK:--This is a beautiful toast--beautiful both in structure and
+sentiment and would that it were true. [Applause.] It is true in theory
+but not in history. It may be the voice of prophecy whose fulfilment
+shall be a sublime fact. It is in the highest degree worthy of this
+Chamber of Commerce and cannot fail in its peaceful mission among the
+nations of the earth. [Applause.] But the ages testify that selfishness
+and greed have marked the commercial history of the world. How splendid
+have been the achievements of commerce, and how deplorable its failure
+to realize its legitimate mission--to unify the human race. "Get all you
+can, and keep all you get," were the selfish maxims that influenced the
+Dutch merchants in Sumatra, Java, and Ceylon. The renowned merchants of
+Portugal planted their commercial colonies on the rich coasts of
+Malabar, took possession of the Persian Gulf and transformed the barren
+island of Ormus into a paradise of wealth and luxury. But of that
+far-famed island Milton sung in these truthful and immortal lines:--
+
+ "High, on a throne of royal state which far
+  Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.
+  Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand,
+  Show'rs on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
+  Satan exalted sat."
+
+There is no less truth than poetry in that last line, for there the
+devil sat, and Tom Moore's "Fair Isle of Kisham" has faded from the
+visions of the world. [Applause.]
+
+The Spanish merchants grasped the wealthy States of South America, and
+held as captives the affluent Incas of Peru and Bolivia. But Spain has
+long since retired from her commercial supremacy and the South American
+Provinces are left poor indeed.
+
+While every Anglo-Saxon is justly proud of England's greatness in art
+and learning, in statesmanship and martial prowess, yet her commercial
+history does not always reflect credit upon her foreign trade. Rapacity
+so characterized her merchants who composed the old East India Company
+that the British Government felt compelled to revoke the charter of that
+famous monopoly. Influenced by some of her merchants the guns of her
+invincible navy opened the treaty ports of China and forced the opium
+trade upon the Celestials against their earnest protests, and in that
+protest not a few of the best Englishmen joined.
+
+To-day France and England, Belgium and Holland are contending for
+commercial supremacy in the "Dark Continent," which an American explorer
+and traveler opened to the foreign trade of all nations [applause]; but,
+judging from the past, the sable sons of Africa are yet to learn the
+selfishness of commerce.
+
+Happily for us, the United States has been more fortunate because more
+honorable in her commercial intercourse with other lands. [Applause.] By
+his justice, by his prudence, by his firmness, Commodore Perry [cheers],
+our great sailor diplomatist, not only opened to us Japan, that "Kingdom
+of the Rising Sun," but secured for America the friendship and
+admiration of the Japanese. And there is to-day, awaiting the action of
+our nation, a treaty of amity and commerce, drawn by the wisest of men,
+the most sagacious of statesmen, the greatest of living soldiers; and
+when that treaty shall have been ratified, the United States and Mexico
+will be united in friendly intercourse, sweet and pleasant, like the
+love of David and Jonathan. [Applause.]
+
+It is a great question whether this country shall repeat the commercial
+history of the world, or carry to glorious consummation the noble
+sentiment of this toast. All the signs of the times seem to indicate
+that the commercial sceptre of the world, held by the Phoenicians for
+1,000 years, held by the Romans through a whole millennium, held by the
+Venetians during five centuries, held by the Portuguese for three
+hundred years, and since held by the English--whether that sceptre is
+not rapidly to pass into the hands of the American merchant; and when
+that is an accomplished fact, we shall hear less of the decline of
+American shipping or that the balance of trade is against us.
+[Applause.] Our vast domain, our immense resources, our unparalleled
+productive capacity, all seem to prophesy that we are largely to feed
+and clothe Adam's innumerable family. [Applause.] If so, then any calm
+and sagacious mind must realize that our present methods of forming
+commercial treaties should be radically changed. If it has been found
+necessary to have a Department of Agriculture, a Department of
+Education, why not a Department of Commerce, connected with the National
+Government, and from which shall come the suggestions, the facts, and
+the influence for the formation of commercial treaties, and at the head
+of which shall be a wise and prudent merchant conversant with the
+products of all lands and familiar with the best interests of our own
+country? [Applause.] The science of political economy is so profound, so
+complicated, so far-reaching as to transcend the capacity of the average
+statesman. It has become a specialty. Congressional committees on
+Commerce and on Foreign Relations are hardly adequate to the task. Not a
+few of the members of such know more about ward elections than tariff
+laws, and know as little about products and trade of foreign lands as of
+the geography of other nations. Let us lift the whole subject of
+commerce from the arena of partisan politics. [Applause.]
+
+This toast looks forward to the friendship of nations. The merchant is
+the chosen John the Baptist of that better day. The merchant is the true
+cosmopolitan--the citizen of the world. Farmers with their products of
+the soil, flocks and herds are local; miners with their metallic mines
+and mineral mountains are local; manufacturers with their fabrics of
+skill are local; inventors with their manifold contrivances to lift the
+burden of toil from the shoulders of humanity, are local; artists, with
+their canvas that glows and their marble that breathes, are local;
+authors, with their mighty thoughts of truth and fiction, are local;
+statesmen with their laws, wise and otherwise [laughter], are local; but
+the merchant is the cosmopolitan citizen of the world, the friend of
+all, the enemy of none, a stranger nowhere, at home everywhere; who
+sails all seas, travels all lands, and to whom all come with their fruit
+of hand and brain, waiting for a home or a foreign market. [Applause.]
+
+Commerce should ever be the voice of peace. Aided by science, and
+sanctified by religion, it should be the all-powerful stimulant to
+universal amity. The honest and honorable merchant is the natural
+antagonist of the factious politician, the ambitious statesman, the
+glory-seeking warrior. [Applause.] While the merchant is the most ardent
+of patriots, commerce is the unifier of nations, whereby is to be
+fulfilled the dream of poets and the vision of seers in the brotherhood
+of man, in a congress of nations, and a parliament of the world. The old
+German Hanseatic League, representing sixty-six maritime cities and
+forty-four dependencies, seemed to prophesy an international chamber of
+commerce for the peace of the whole earth. If the high interests of our
+Christian civilization demand International Congresses of Law, of
+Geography, of Peace, how much more an International Congress of
+Commerce, to give direction to the relations of peace and trade between
+all peoples. This would approach the realization of the dream of a
+universal republic. [Applause.]
+
+It is eminently proper that from this Christian city should go forth the
+voice of commercial peace, honesty and honor; give us such Christian
+merchants as Peter Cooper [cheers], as William E. Dodge [cheers], as
+Governor Morgan [cheers], dealing fairly and honorably with the weaker
+States with which we shall trade. [Applause.] For say what you please,
+Christianity is the religion of industry, of thrift, of wealth demanding
+the comforts of life and enriching all who follow its divine precepts,
+and giving to the world that code of higher and better commercial
+morality whereby wealth is permanent, and riches are a benediction.
+[Applause.] Awakened by this unseen power, it is commercial enterprise
+that has transformed our earth into one vast neighborhood, that has made
+air and ocean whispering galleries, that has started the iron horse to
+stride a continent in seven days and launched the majestic steamer which
+touches two continents between two Sundays. [Applause.]
+
+I confess to you, gentlemen, that I have no fear from the accumulations
+of vast mercantile wealth when under the benign constraints of religion.
+Wealth is the handmaid of religion. Such wealth has beautified the face
+of society, has advanced to this consummation those great philanthropic
+enterprises which have delivered the oppressed and saved the Republic,
+and which have filled our city with schools of learning, galleries of
+art, halls of justice, houses of mercy, and temples of piety. [Continued
+applause.]
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
+
+
+CASTLES IN SPAIN
+
+[Speech of Charles Eliot Norton at the "Whittier Dinner," in celebration
+  of the poet's seventieth birthday, and the twentieth birthday of the
+  "Atlantic Monthly," given by the publishers of the magazine, Boston,
+  December 17, 1877. William Dean Howells, then editor of the
+  "Atlantic," officiated as chairman. Mr. Norton spoke for James Russell
+  Lowell, the first editor of the "Atlantic," then serving as United
+  States Minister to Spain.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--We miss to-night one man to whom
+many names are equally befitting: the humorist, the wit, the wise
+thinker, the poet, the scholar, the worker, the friend--but the man who,
+of all others, should be here to do honor to our guest. We miss the
+first editor of the "Atlantic," whose comprehensive sympathies, wide as
+his vast, broad genius; whose cultivated taste, whose various and
+thorough learning gave to our Monthly, from the beginning, first place
+among American magazines and secured for it that deserved popularity
+which you, sir [Mr. Howells], are doing so much to maintain. The same
+qualities which made him eminent as an editor will make him eminent as
+the representative abroad of what is best in the social and political
+life of our country. No man could more truly exhibit, as comprehending
+them in himself, the high spirit, the noble aims, the varied
+achievements of a generous and large-minded nation--a nation not always
+so careful as it ought to be that its ministers accredited to foreign
+powers should be servants creditable to itself. But in the place that he
+now fills I cannot but regard him as, in a special sense, the envoy of
+the company gathered around this table. I believe that every one of us
+has, or at least has had, possessions in Spain that require to be well
+looked after; they are possessions of extraordinary, enormous, quite
+incalculable value, of which the title deeds are not always as complete
+as we could wish. Lowell himself had large estates of this sort:--
+
+ "When I was a beggarly boy,
+    I lived in a cellar damp,
+  I had not a friend, nor a toy,
+    But I had Aladdin's lamp.
+
+ "When I could not sleep for the cold,
+    I had fire enough in my brain,
+  And I built with their roofs of gold
+    My beautiful castles in Spain."
+
+And so too, he, the friend of us all, whose presence makes us all glad
+to-night, and whom we always greet with all love and honor, has had
+possessions in the same fair land:--
+
+ "How much of my heart, O Spain,
+    Went out to thee in days of yore!
+  What dreams romantic filled my brain,
+  And summoned back to life again
+  The Paladins of Charlemagne,
+    The Cid Campeador?"
+
+How many "castles in Spain not built of stone" has he dwelt in, and with
+what delightful hospitality has he welcomed us as guests within their
+spacious and splendid halls! And even you, sir, for whose sake we have
+met to-night, even you, modest as your retirement has seemed to be in
+that quiet home, which you have made dear to the lovers of poetry and
+purity and peace, you have privately had your speculations in real
+estate in that land of romance, from which you have drawn large
+revenues. You will pardon me for reminding you of one of them, where--
+
+ "On the banks of the Xenil, the dark Spanish maiden
+  Comes up with fruit of the tangled vine laden."
+
+I have sometimes fancied that even the Concord River had its springs
+somewhere in the snowy Sierras of Estremadura, toward which the windows
+of the sage-poet's dwelling were turned, and from whose heaven-reaching
+summits he has so often caught the fresh airs of celestial breath. Few
+of us, indeed, have had the good fortune to add to their vast real
+estates in Spain any substantial articles of personal property, but one
+of us, rich in the gifts of Don Quixote's land, has actually a piece of
+plate, a silver punch bowl, which at times, when filled, has, I doubt
+not, given him assurance of undisputed rights in the most magnificent
+castles:--
+
+ "A Spanish galleon brought the bar--so runs the ancient tale--
+ 'Twas hammered by an Antwerp smith, whose arm was like a flail."
+
+And even you and I, Mr. Editor, and all the rest of us, possess, as I
+have said, our smaller domains in that distant land, all of them with
+castles; but not all the castles, I fear, in good repair or quite
+habitable; and some of us would be perplexed to say if they lay in
+Granada or Andalusia, La Mancha--or to tell exactly how many turrets
+they had, or how large a company they could accommodate with good
+entertainment. Now, sir, such being the case, all of us having such
+real, but too often, alas! neglected possessions in Spain, I am not
+surprised that Lowell writes to me that he finds the Spanish Legation
+one of the busiest in Europe. He is to establish our titles, and the
+work is not without its difficulties. Let us send him our God-speed. May
+he come back to us to assure us, as he better than any other can do, of
+the henceforth undisturbed enjoyment of all our castles in Spain.
+[Applause.]
+
+
+
+
+RICHARD OGLESBY
+
+
+THE ROYAL CORN
+
+[Speech of Ex-Governor Richard Oglesby at the banquet of the Fellowship
+  Club, Chicago, September 9, 1894, on the occasion of the Harvest-Home
+  Festival. The Toast-master was Franklin H. Head, and the toast that he
+  gave to each speaker was, "What I Know About Farming." In the report
+  by Volney W. Foster, member of the Club, it is recorded that the
+  Governor rose slowly, after being called upon by the toast-master, and
+  was seemingly waiting for an inspiration. He looked deliberately upon
+  the harvest decorations of the room and finally his eyes seemed to
+  rest upon the magnificent stalks of corn that adorned the walls. He
+  then slowly and impressively paid the following impromptu tribute to
+  the corn.]
+
+
+MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--The corn, the corn, the corn, that
+in its first beginning and its growth has furnished aptest illustration
+of the tragic announcement of the chiefest hope of man. If he die he
+shall surely live again. Planted in the friendly but sombre bosom of the
+mother earth it dies. Yea, it dies the second death, surrendering up
+each trace of form and earthly shape until the outward tide is stopped
+by the reacting vital germ which, breaking all the bonds and cerements
+of its sad decline, comes bounding, laughing into life and light, the
+fittest of all the symbols that make certain promise of the fate of man.
+And so it died and then it lived again. And so my people died. By some
+unknown, uncertain and unfriendly fate, I found myself making my first
+journey into life from conditions as lowly as those surrounding that
+awakening, dying, living, infant germ. It was in those days when I, a
+simple boy, had wandered from Indiana to Springfield, that I there met
+the father of this good man [Joseph Jefferson] whose kind and gentle
+words to me were as water to a thirsty soul, as the shadow of a rock to
+weary man. I loved his father then, I love the son now. Two full
+generations have been taught by his gentleness and smiles, and tears
+have quickly answered to the command of his artistic mind. Long may he
+live to make us laugh and cry, and cry and laugh by turns as he may
+choose to move us.
+
+But now again my mind turns to the glorious corn. See it! Look on its
+ripening, waving field! See how it wears a crown, prouder than monarch
+ever wore, sometimes jauntily; and sometimes after the storm the
+dignified survivors of the tempest seem to view a field of slaughter and
+to pity a fallen foe. And see the pendant caskets of the corn-field
+filled with the wine of life, and see the silken fringes that set a form
+for fashion and for art. And now the evening comes and something of a
+time to rest and listen. The scudding clouds conceal the half and then
+reveal the whole of the moonlit beauty of the night, and then the gentle
+winds make heavenly harmonies on a thousand-thousand harps that hang
+upon the borders and the edges and the middle of the field of ripening
+corn, until my very heart seems to beat responsive to the rising and the
+falling of the long melodious refrain. The melancholy clouds sometimes
+make shadows on the field and hide its aureate wealth, and now they
+move, and slowly into sight there comes the golden glow of promise for
+an industrious land. Glorious corn, that more than all the sisters of
+the field wears tropic garments. Nor on the shore of Nilus or of Ind
+does nature dress her forms more splendidly. My God, to live again that
+time when for me half the world was good and the other half unknown! And
+now again, the corn, that in its kernel holds the strength that shall
+(in the body of the man refreshed) subdue the forest and compel response
+from every stubborn field, or, shining in the eye of beauty make
+blossoms of her cheeks and jewels of her lips and thus make for man the
+greatest inspiration to well-doing, the hope of companionship of that
+sacred, warm and well-embodied soul, a woman.
+
+Aye, the corn, the Royal Corn, within whose yellow heart there is of
+health and strength for all the nations. The corn triumphant, that with
+the aid of man hath made victorious procession across the tufted plain
+and laid foundation for the social excellence that is and is to be. This
+glorious plant, transmuted by the alchemy of God, sustains the warrior
+in battle, the poet in song, and strengthens everywhere the thousand
+arms that work the purposes of life. Oh that I had the voice of song, or
+skill to translate into tones the harmonies, the symphonies and
+oratorios that roll across my soul, when standing sometimes by day and
+sometimes by night upon the borders of this verdant sea, I note a world
+of promise, and then before one-half the year is gone I view its full
+fruition and see its heaped gold await the need of man. Majestic,
+fruitful, wondrous plant! Thou greatest among the manifestations of the
+wisdom and love of God, that may be seen in all the fields or upon the
+hillsides or in the valleys!
+
+
+
+
+JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
+
+
+MOORE, THE BARD OF ERIN
+
+[Speech of John Boyle O'Reilly at a banquet held in Boston, May 27,
+  1879, in commemoration of the centenary of Thomas Moore. Mr. O'Reilly,
+  as chairman of the banquet, sat at the head of the table, with Oliver
+  Wendell Holmes on his right, and Mayor Frederick O. Prince on his
+  left. The company numbered more than one hundred, and was a
+  representative gathering, mostly of Irish-American citizens. The toast
+  to the memory of Moore, with which Mr. O'Reilly's speech closed, was
+  drunk by the company standing, the orchestra meanwhile playing "Should
+  auld acquaintance be forgot?"]
+
+
+GENTLEMEN:--The honorable distinction you have given me in
+seating me at the head of your table involves a duty of weight and
+delicacy. At such a board as this, where Genius sits smiling at
+Geniality, the President becomes a formality, and the burden of his duty
+is to make himself a pleasant nobody, yet natural to the position. Like
+the apprentice of the armorer, it is my task only to hold the hot iron
+on the anvil while the skilled craftsmen strike out the flexible
+sword-blade. There is no need for me to praise or analyze the character
+or fame of the great poet whose centennial we celebrate. This will be
+done presently by abler hands, in eloquent verse and prose. Tom Moore
+was a poet of all lands, and it is fitting that his centenary should be
+observed in cosmopolitan fashion. But he was particularly the poet of
+Ireland, and on this point I may be allowed to say a word, as one proud
+to be an Irishman, and prouder still to be an American.
+
+Not blindly but kindly we lay our wreath of rosemary and immortelles on
+the grave of Moore. We do not look to him for the wisdom of the
+statesman or the boldness of the popular leader. Neither do we look for
+solidity to the rose-bush, nor for strength to the nightingale, yet
+each is perfect of its kind. We take Tom Moore as God sent him--not only
+the sweetest song-writer of Ireland, but even in this presence I may
+say, the first song-writer in the English language, not even excepting
+Burns. The harshness of nature or even of human relations found faint
+response in his harmonious being. He was born in the darkness of the
+penal days; he lived to manhood under the cruel law that bred a terrible
+revolution; but he never was a rebel. He was the college companion and
+bosom friend of Robert Emmet, who gave his beautiful life on the gibbet
+in protest against the degradation of his country; but Moore took only a
+fitful part in the stormy political agitation of the time. When all was
+done it was clear that he was one thing and no other--neither a
+sufferer, a rebel, an agitator, nor a reformer, but wholly and simply a
+poet. He did not rebel, and he scarcely protested. But he did his work
+as well as the best, in his own way. He sat by the patriot's grave and
+sang tearful songs that will make future rebels and patriots.
+
+It was a hard task for an Irishman, in Moore's day, to win distinction,
+unless he achieved it by treason to his own country. In his own bitter
+words:--
+
+ "Unpriz'd are her sons till they've learned to betray;
+    Undistinguished they live, if they shame not their sires;
+  And the torch that would light them thro' dignity's way
+    Must be caught from the pile where their country expires."
+
+And yet Moore set out to win distinction, and to win it in the hardest
+field. The literary man in those days could only live by the patronage
+of the great, and the native nobility of Ireland was dead or banished. A
+poet, too, must have an audience; and Moore knew that his audience must
+not only be his poor countrymen, but all who spoke the English language.
+He lived as an alien in London, and it is hard for an alien to secure
+recognition anywhere, and especially an alien poet. The songs he sang,
+too, were not English in subject or tone, but Irish. They were filled
+with the sadness of his unhappy country. He despaired of the freedom of
+Ireland, and bade her:--
+
+ "Weep on, weep on, your hour is past,
+  Your dream of pride is o'er;"
+
+but he did not turn from the ruin to seek renown from strange and
+profitable subjects. As the polished Greeks, even in defeat, conquered
+their Roman conquerors by their refinement, so this poet sang of
+Ireland's sorrow and wrong till England and the world turned to listen.
+In one of his melodies, which is full of pathetic apology to his
+countrymen for his apparent friendship to England, he sighs in secret
+over Erin's ruin:--
+
+ "For 'tis treason to love her and death to defend."
+
+He foresaw even then the immortality of his verse and the affection of
+future generations for his memory, when he wrote:--
+
+ "But tho' glory be gone, and tho' hope fade away,
+    Thy name, loved Erin, shall live in his songs;
+  Not e'en in the hour when the heart is most gay,
+    Will he lose the remembrance of thee and thy wrongs.
+  The stranger shall hear thy lament on his plains;
+    The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o'er the deep;
+  Till thy masters themselves, as they rivet thy chains,
+    Shall pause at the song of their captive and weep."
+
+But this was not his entire work for Ireland and for true literature and
+art; nor is it for this sentimental reason that his centenary is
+observed throughout the world. In some countries we are able to see the
+beginning of the artistic or literary life of the nation; we can even
+name the writer or artist who began the beautiful structure; and though
+the pioneer work is often crude, it merits and receives the gratitude of
+the nation. Though Moore was an original poet of splendid imagination,
+he undertook a national work in which his flights were restrained by the
+limitations of his task. He set himself to write new words to old music.
+He found scattered over Ireland, mainly hidden in the cabins of the
+poor, pieces of antique gold, inestimable jewels that were purely Irish.
+These were in danger of being lost to the world, or of being malformed,
+or stolen from their rightful owners, by strangers who could discover
+their value. These jewels were the old Irish airs--those exquisite
+fabrics which Moore raised into matchless beauty in his delicious
+melodies. This was his great work. He preserved the music of his nation
+and made it imperishable. It can never be lost again till English
+ceases to be spoken. He struck it out like a golden coin, with Erin's
+stamp on it; and it has become current and unquestioned in all civilized
+nations. For this we celebrate his centennial. For this, gentlemen, I
+call on you to rise--for after one year, or a hundred, or a thousand, we
+may pour a libation to a great man--I ask you to rise and drink--"The
+memory of Tom Moore."
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+
+[1] Chauncey M. Depew, who, earlier in the evening, had spoken on the
+subject of municipal consolidation.
+
+[2] By Sir Archibald Alison.
+
+[3] Burlesque Comedians.
+
+[4] Henry Ward Beecher.
+
+[5] John P. Newman.
+
+[6] The Negro minstrel.
+
+[7] The portrait referred to is that of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw,
+killed at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, July 18, 1863.
+
+[8] The bust is that of General Charles Russell Lowell, who died October
+20, 1864, of wounds received at Cedar Creek, Va., October 19.
+
+[9] William McKinley.
+
+[10] He was not knighted till 1895.
+
+[11] Professor Stokes, President of the Royal Society.
+
+[12] Members of this organization are exempted from jury service.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner
+Speeches E-O, by Various
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