One word only of any seriousness about your toast; it says: "The Press—right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set right." Gentlemen, this is your affair. A stream will not rise higher than its fountain. The Hudson River will not flow backward over the Adirondacks. The press of New York is fed and sustained by the commerce of New York, and the press of New York to-day, bad as it is in many respects—and I take my full share of the blame it fairly deserves—is just what the merchants of New York choose to have it. If you want it better, you can make it better. So long as you are satisfied with it as it is, sustain it as it is, take it into your families and into your counting-rooms as it is, and encourage it as it is, it will remain what it is.
If, for instance, the venerable leader of your Bar, conspicuous through a long life for the practice of every virtue that adorns his profession and his race, is met on his return from the very jaws of the grave, as he re-enters the Court-room to undertake again the gratuitous championship of your cause against thieves who robbed you, with the slander that he is himself a thief of the meanest kind, a robber of defenceless women—I say if such a man is subject to persistent repetition of such a calumny in the very city he has honored and served, and at the very end and crown of his life, it is because you do not choose to object to it and make your objection felt. A score of similar instances will readily occur to anyone who runs over in his memory the course of our municipal history for the last dozen years, but there is no time to repeat or even to refer to them here.
And so, Mr. President, because this throng of gentlemen, gathered about the doors, pay me the too great compliment by remaining standing to listen when they have started to go home—let me come back to the text you gave me, and the sentiment with which we began: "The Press—right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set right." [Applause.] The task in either case is to be performed by the merchants of New York, who have the power to do it and only need resolve that they will.
I congratulate you, gentlemen, on the continued attractions of the annual entertainment you offer us; above all, I congratulate you on having given us the great pleasure of meeting once more and seeing seated together at your table the first four citizens of the metropolis of the Empire State: Charles O'Conor, Peter Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, and John A. Dix. I thank you for the courtesy of your remembrance of the Press; and so to one and all, good-night. [Applause.]
GLADSTONE, ENGLAND'S GREATEST LEADER
[Speech of Whitelaw Reid at a dinner given by the Irish-Americans to Justin McCarthy, New York City, October 2, 1886. Judge Edward Browne presided. Mr. Reid was called upon to speak to the toast, "Gladstone, England's Greatest Leader.">[
Gentlemen:—I am pleased to see that since this toast was sent me by your committee, it has been proof-read. As it came to me, it describes Mr. Gladstone as England's greatest Liberal leader. I thought you might well say that and more. It delights me to find that you have said more—that you have justly described him as England's greatest leader. ["Hear! Hear!">[ I do not forget that other, always remembered when Gladstone is mentioned, who educated his party till it captured its opponents' place by first disguising and then adopting their measures. That was in its way as brilliant party leadership as the century has seen, and it placed an alien adventurer in the British peerage and enshrined his name in the grateful memory of a great party that vainly looks for Disraeli's successor. [Applause.] I do not forget a younger statesman, never to be forgotten henceforth by Irishmen, who revived an impoverished and exhausted people, stilled their dissensions, harmonized their conflicting plans, consolidated their chaotic forces, conducted a peaceful Parliamentary struggle in their behalf with incomparable pertinacity, coolness, and resources; and through storms and rough weather has held steadily on till even his enemies see now, in the very flush of their own temporary success, that in the end the victory of Parnell is sure. [Loud applause.] Great leaders both; great historic figures whom our grandchildren will study and analyze and admire.
But this man whom your toast honors, after a career that might have filled any man's ambition, became the head of the Empire whose mourning drum-beat heralds the rising sun on its journey round the world. That place he risked and lost, and risked again to give to an ill-treated powerless section of the Empire, not even friendly to his sway, Church Reform, Educational Reform, Land Reform, Liberty! [Cheers.] It was no sudden impulse and it is no short or recent record. It is more than seventeen years since Mr. Gladstone secured for Ireland the boon of disestablishment. It is nearly as long since he carried the first bill recognizing and seriously endeavoring to remedy the evils of Irish land tenure.
He has rarely been able to advance as rapidly or as far as he wished; and more than once he has gone by a way that few of us liked. But if he was not always right, he has been courageous enough to set himself right. If he made a mistake in our affairs when he said Jefferson Davis had founded a nation, he offered reparation when he secured the Geneva Arbitration, and loyally paid its award. If he made a mistake in Irish affairs in early attempts at an unwise coercion he more than made amends when he led that recent magnificent struggle in Parliament and before the English people, which ended in a defeat, it is true, but a defeat more brilliant than many victories and more hopeful for Ireland. [Applause.]