I saw a little while ago a place on the road where there had once been an hotel. But the hotel and barn had burned down and there was nothing standing but two desolate chimneys, up the flues of which the fires of hospitality had not roared for thirty years. The fence was gone, and the post-holes even were obliterated, but in the road there was an old sign upon which were these words: "Entertainment for man and beast." The old sign swung and creaked in the winter wind, the snow fell upon it, the sleet clung to it, and in the summer the birds sang and twittered and made love upon it. Nobody ever stopped there, but the sign swore to it, the sign certified to it! "Entertainment for man and beast," and I said to myself: "Such is the Democratic party of the United States," and I further said, "one chimney ought to be called Tilden and the other Hendricks."
Now, my friends, I want you to vote the Republican ticket. I want you to swear you will not vote for a man who opposed putting down the Rebellion. I want you to swear that you will not vote for a man opposed to the Proclamation of Emancipation. I want you to swear that you will not vote for a man opposed to the utter abolition of slavery.
I want you to swear that you will not vote for a man who called the soldiers in the field, Lincoln hirelings. I want you to swear that you will not vote for a man who denounced Lincoln as a tyrant. I want you to swear that you will not vote for any enemy of human progress. Go and talk to every Democrat that you can see; get him by the coatcollar, talk to him, and hold him like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, with your glittering eye; hold him, tell him all the mean things his party ever did; tell him kindly; tell him in a Christian spirit, as I do, but tell him. Recollect, there never was a more important election than the one you are going to hold in Indiana. I tell you we must stand by the country. It is a glorious country. It permits you and me to be free. It is the only country in the world where labor is respected. Let us support it. It is the only country in the world where the useful man is the only aristocrat. The man that works for a dollar a day, goes home at night to his little ones, takes his little boy on his knee, and he thinks that boy can achieve anything that the sons of the wealthy man can achieve. The free schools are open to him; he may be the richest, the greatest, and the grandest, and that thought sweetens every drop of sweat that rolls down the honest face of toil. Vote to save that country.
My friends, this country is getting better every day. Samuel J. Tilden says we are a nation of thieves and rascals. If that is so he ought to be the President. But I denounce him as a calumniator of my country; a maligner of this nation. It is not so. This country is covered with asylums for the aged, the helpless, the insane, the orphans and wounded soldiers. Thieves and rascals do not build such things. In the cities of the Atlantic coast this summer, they built floating hospitals, great ships, and took the little children from the sub-cellars and narrow, dirty streets of New York City, where the Democratic party is the strongest—took these poor waifs and put them in these great hospitals out at sea, and let the breezes of ocean kiss the roses of health back to their pallid cheeks. Rascals and thieves do not so. When Chicago burned, railroads were blocked with the charity of the American people. Thieves and rascals do not so.
I am a Republican. The world is getting better. Husbands are treating their wives better than they used to; wives are treating their husbands better. Children are better treated than they used to be; the old whips and clubs are out of the schools, and they are governing children by love and by sense. The world is getting better; it is getting better in Maine, in Vermont. It is getting better in every State of the North, and I tell you we are going to elect Hayes and Wheeler and the world will then be better still. I have a dream that this world is growing better and better every day and every year; that there is more charity, more justice, more love every day. I have a dream that prisons will not always curse the land; that the shadow of the gallows will not always fall upon the earth; that the withered hand of want will not always be stretched out for charity; that finally wisdom will sit in the legislatures, justice in the courts, charity will occupy all the pulpits, and that finally the world will be governed by justice and charity, and by the splendid light of liberty. That is my dream, and if it does not come true, it shall not be my fault. I am going to do my level best to give others the same chance I ask for myself. Free thought will give us truth; Free labor will give us wealth.
CHICAGO SPEECH.
* Col. Robert G. Ingersoll spoke last night at the
Exposition Building to the largest audience ever drawn by
one man In Chicago. From 6.30 o'clock the sidewalks fronting
along the building were jammed. At every entrance there were
hundreds, and half-an-hour later thousands were clamoring
for admittance. So great was the pressure the doors were
finally closed, and the entrances at either end cautiously
opened to admit the select who knew enough to apply In those
directions. Occasionally a rush was made for the main door,
and as the crowd came up against the huge barricade they
were swept back only for another effort. Wabash Avenue,
Monroe, Adams, Jackson, and Van Buren Streets were jammed
with ladies and gentlemen who swept into Michigan Avenue and
swelled the sea that surged around the building.
At 7.30 the doors were flung open and the people rushed in.
Seating accommodations supposed to be adequate to all
demands, had been provided, but in an Instant they were
filled, the aisles were jammed and around the sides of the
building poured a steady stream of humanity, Intent only
upon some coign of vantage, some place, where they could see
and where they could hear. Prom the fountain, beyond which
the building lay in shadow to the northern end, was a
swaying, surging mass of people.
Such another attendance of ladies has never been known at a
political meeting in Chicago. They came by the hundreds, and
the speaker looked down from his perch upon thousands of
fair upturned faces, stamped with the most intense interest
in his remarks.
The galleries were packed. The frame of the huge elevator
creaked, groaned, and swayed with the crowd roosting upon
it. The trusses bore their living weight. The gallery
railings bent and cracked. The roof was crowded, and the sky
lights teemed with heads. Here and there an adventurous
youth crept out on the girders and braces. Towards the
northern end of the building, on the west side, is a smaller
gallery, dark, and not particularly strong-looking. It was
fairly packed—packed like a sardine-box—with men and boys.
Up in the organ-loft around the sides of the organ,
everywhere that a human being could sit, stand or hang, was
pre-empted and filled.
It was a magnificent, outpouring, at east 50,000 In number,
a compliment alike to the principle it represented, and the
orator.—Chicago Tribune., October 21st, 1876.
HAYES CAMPAIGN. 1876.