THE EVACUATION OF NEW YORK
Reprinted with the author's permission
BY JOSEPH H. CHOATE
Mr. President and Gentlemen,—I came here to-night with some notes for a speech in my pocket, but I have been sitting next to General Butler, and in the course of the evening they have mysteriously disappeared. The consequence is, gentlemen, that you may expect a very good speech from him and a very poor one from me. When I read this toast which you have just drunk in honor of Her Gracious Majesty, the Queen of Great Britain, and heard how you received the letter of the British Minister that was read in response, and how heartily you joined in singing "God Save the Queen," when I look up and down these tables and see among you so many representatives of English capital and English trade, I have my doubts whether the evacuation of New York by the British was quite as thorough and lasting as history would fain have us believe. If George III, who certainly did all he could to despoil us of our rights and liberties and bring us to ruin—if he could rise from his grave and see how his granddaughter is honored at your hands to-night, why, I think he would return whence he came, thanking God that his efforts to enslave us, in which for eight long years he drained the resources of the British Empire, were not successful.
The truth is, the boasted triumph of New York in getting rid of the British once and forever has proved, after all, to be but a dismal failure. We drove them out in one century only to see them return in the next to devour our substance and to carry off all the honors. We have just seen the noble Chief Justice of England, the feasted favorite of all America, making a triumphal tour across the Continent and carrying all before him at the rate of fifty miles an hour. Night after night at our very great cost we have been paying the richest tribute to the reigning monarch of the British stage, and nowhere in the world are English men and women of character and culture received with a more hearty welcome, a more earnest hospitality, than in this very state of New York. The truth is, that this event that we celebrate to-day, which sealed the independence of America and seemed for a time to give a staggering blow to the prestige and the power of England, has proved to be no less a blessing to her own people than to ours. The latest and best of the English historians has said that, however important the independence of America might be in the history of England, it was of overwhelming importance in the history of the world, and that though it might have crippled for a while the supremacy of the English nation, it founded the supremacy of the English race. And in the same spirit we welcome the fact that those social, political, and material barriers that separated the two nations a century ago have now utterly vanished; that year by year we are being drawn closer and closer together, and that this day may be celebrated with equal fitness on both sides of the Atlantic and by all who speak the English tongue.