Not to take up your time, let me say in closing that the day for great men as candidates for an important office is past. Great men in a great country antagonize different factions and are then compelled to fall back on literature. What we want is an obscure and silent chump. I have found him. He has never antagonized but two men in his life and they are now voting in a better land. He is a plain man, and his career at Washington would be marked with more or less tobacco juice. For over fifteen years he has been constructing at his country seat a lurid style of whiskey known as The Essence of Crime. Quietly and unostentatiously he has fought for the emancipation of whiskey everywhere. He says that we are too prone to worry about our clothes and their cost and to give too little thought to our tax-ridden rum.
Then, Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, here in the full glare of public approval, feeling that the name I am about to pronounce will in a few moments flash across a mighty continent and greet the moist and moaning news editor, the grimy peasant, the pussy banker and the streaked tennis player; that the name I now nourish in my panting brain will soon be taken up on willing tongues and borne across the union, rising and saluting the hot blue dome of heaven, pulsating across the ocean, rocking the beautifully upholstered thrones of the Old World and calling forth a dark blue torrent of profanity from the offices of the illustrated papers, none of which will be provided with his portrait, I desire to name Mr. Clem Beasly, of Arkansaw, a man who has spent his best years manufacturing man's greatest enemy. I hurrah for him and holler for him, and love him for the (hic) enemy he has made.
A PLEA FOR ONE IN ADVERSITY
I LEARN with much sadness that Mr. William H. Vanderbilt's once princely fortune has shrivelled down to $150,000,000. This piece of information comes to me like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky. Once petted, fondled and caressed, William H. Vanderbilt shorn of his wealth, and resting upon no foundation but his sterling integrity, must struggle along with the rest of us.
It would be but truth to say that Mr. Vanderbilt will receive very little sympathy from the world now in the days of his adversity and penury when the wolf is at his door. There are many of his former friends who will say that William could economize and struggle along on $150,000,000, but let them try it once and see how they would like it themselves; $150,000,000, with no salary outside of that amount, will not last forever.
A poor man might pinch along in such a case if he could get something to do, but we must remember that Mr. Vanderbilt has always lived in comparatively comfortable circumstances. His hands, therefore, are tender and his stomach juts out into the autumn air. He will, therefore, find it hard at first to husk corn and dig potatoes. When he stoops over a sawbuck around New York this winter his stomach will be in the way and his vest will no doubt split open on the back. All these things will annoy the spoiled child of luxury, and his broad features will be covered with sadness. They will, at least, if there is sadness enough in the country to do it.
The fall of William 'H. Vanderbilt and his headlong plunge from the proud eminence to which his means had elevated him downward to the cringing poverty of $150,000,000 should be a sad warning to us all. This fate may fall to any of us. Oh, let us be prepared when the summons comes. For one I believe I am ready. Should the dread news come to me to-morrow that such a fate had befallen me, I would nerve myself up to it and meet it like a man. With the ruin of my former fortune I would buy me a crust of bread and some pie, and then I would take the balance and go over into Canada and there I would establish a home for friendless bank cashiers who are now there, several hundred of them, all alone and with no one to love them.
All kinds of charitable institutions, costing many thousands of dollars, are built in America from year to year for the comfort of homeless and friendless women and children, but man is left out in the cold. Why is this thus. Lots of people in Canada, of course, are doing their best to make it cheerful and sunny for our lovely cashiers there, but still it is not home. As a gentleman once said in my hearing, "There is no place like home." And he was right.