PRISCILLA AND JOHN ALDEN

Photogravure after a painting by Lasalett J. Potts

An admirable conception of the old story of an early Puritan courtship famous in song and story, and made use of by many New England orators.

MODERN

ELOQUENCE

EDITOR
THOMAS B REED

ASSOCIATE EDITORS
JUSTIN McCARTHY · ROSSITER JOHNSON
ALBERT ELLERY BERGH

VOLUME III
After-Dinner
Speeches
P-Z

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 "Édition 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

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 III

ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME III

THOMAS NELSON PAGE

THE TORCH OF CIVILIZATION

[Speech of Thomas Nelson Page at the twentieth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1899. The President, Frederic A. Ward, said: "In these days of blessed amity, when there is no longer a united South or a disunited North, when the boundary of the North is the St. Lawrence and the boundary of the South the Rio Grande, and Mason and Dixon's Line is forever blotted from the map of our beloved country, and the nation has grown color-blind to blue and gray, it is with peculiar pleasure that we welcome here to-night a distinguished and typical representative of that noble people who live in that part of the present North that used to be called Dixie, of whom he has himself so beautifully and so truly said, 'If they bore themselves haughtily in their hour of triumph, they bore defeat with splendid fortitude. Their entire system crumbled and fell around them in ruins; they remained unmoved; they suffered the greatest humiliation of modern times; their slaves were put over them; they reconquered their section and preserved the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon.' It is not necessary, ladies and gentlemen, that I should introduce the next speaker to you, for I doubt not that you all belong to the multitude of mourners, who have wept real tears with black Sam and Miss Annie beside the coffin of Marse Chan; but I will call upon our friend, Thomas Nelson Page, to respond to the next toast, 'The Debt Each Part of the Country Owes the Other.'">[

Ladies and Gentlemen:—I did not remember that I had written anything as good as that which my friend has just quoted. It sounded to me, as he quoted it, very good indeed. At any rate, it is very true, and, perhaps, that it is true is the reason that you have done me the honor to invite me here to-night. I have been sitting for an hour in such a state of tremulousness and fright, facing this audience I was to address, that the ideas I had carefully gathered together have, I fear, rather taken flight; but I shall give them to you as they come, though they may not be in quite as good order as I should like them. The gift of after-dinner speaking is one I heard illustrated the other day very well at a dinner at which my friend, Judge Bartlett and I were present. A gentleman told a story of an English bishop travelling in a third-class railway carriage with an individual who was swearing most tremendously, originally, and picturesquely, till finally the bishop said to him: "My dear sir, where in the world did you learn to swear in that extraordinary manner?" And he said, "It can't be learned, it is a gift." After-dinner speaking is a gift I have often envied, ladies and gentlemen, and as I have not it I can only promise to tell you what I really think on the subject which I am here to speak about to-night.

I feel that in inviting me here as the representative of the South to speak on this occasion, I could not do you any better honor than to tell you precisely what I do think and what those, I in a manner represent, think; and I do not know that our views would differ very materially from yours. I could not, if I would, undertake merely to be entertaining to you. I am very much in that respect like an old darky I knew of down in Virginia, who on one occasion was given by his mistress some syllabub. It was spiced a little with—perhaps—New England rum, or something quite as strong that came from the other side of Mason and Dixon's Line, but still was not very strong. When he got through she said, "How did you like that?" He said, "If you gwine to gimme foam, gimme foam; but if you gwine to gimme dram, gimme dram." You do not want from me syllabub I am sure.

When I came here I had no idea that I was to address so imposing an assemblage as this. I had heard about forefathers and knew that there were foremothers also, but did not know that they were going to grace this assembly with their presence as they do to-night. When a youngster, I was told by an old gentleman, before the day of the unhappy stenographer, "You can go out in the world all right if you have four speeches. If you have one for the Fourth of July, one for a tournament address, one to answer the toast to 'Woman,' and the fourth 'to sweep all creation.'" I thought of bringing with me my Fourth of July speech. If I had known I was going to address this audience I would have brought along the one that answered the toast to "Woman."

But I do not know any man in the world better prepared to address you on the subject of my toast, "The Debt Each Part of the Country Owes the Other," than myself, for I married a lady from the North. She represented in her person the blood both of Virginia and of New England. Her mother was a Virginian and her father a gentleman from New Hampshire; consequently, as I have two young daughters, who always declare themselves Yankees, I am here to speak with due gratitude to both sections, and with strong feeling for both sections to-night.

It seems to me that the two sections which we have all heard talked about so much in the past, have been gradually merging into one, and Heaven knows I hope there may never be but one again. In the nature of things it was impossible at first that there could be only one, but of late the one great wall that divided them has passed away, and, standing here facing you to-night, I feel precisely as I should if I were standing facing an audience of my own dear Virginians. There is no longer division among us. They say that the South became reconciled and showed its loyalty to the Union first at the time of the war with Spain. It is not true; the South became reconciled and showed its loyalty to the Union after Appomattox. When Lee laid down his arms and accepted the terms of the magnanimous Grant, the South rallied behind him, and he went to teach peace and amity and union to his scholars at Lexington, to the sons of his old soldiers. It is my pride that I was one of the pupils at that university, which bears the doubly-honored names of Washington and Lee. He taught us only fealty to the Union and to the flag of the Union. He taught us also that we should never forget the flag under which our fathers fought during the Civil War. With it are embalmed the tears, the holy memories that cluster thick around our hearts, and I should be unworthy to stand and talk to you to-night as an honorable man if I did not hold in deepest reverence that flag that represented the spirit that actuated our fathers. It stood for the principles of liberty, and, strange as it may seem, both sides, though fighting under different banners, fought for the same principles seen from different sides. It has not interfered with our loyalty to the Union since that flag was furled.

I do not, however, mean to drift into that line of thought. I do not think that it is really in place here to-night, but I want you to know how we feel at the South. Mason and Dixon's Line is laid down on no map and no longer laid down in the memory of either side. The Mason and Dixon's Line of to-day is that which circumscribes this great Union, with all its advantages, all its hopes, and all its aspirations. This is the Mason and Dixon's Line for us to-day, and as a representative of the South, I am here to speak to you on that account. We do owe—these two sections do owe—each other a great deal. But I will tell you what we owe each other more, perhaps, than anything else. When this country was settled for us it was with sparsely scattered settlements, ranging along the Atlantic coast. When the first outside danger threatened it, the two sections immediately drew together. New England had formed her own confederation, and at the South the Carolinas and Virginia had a confederation of their own, though not so compact; but the first thing formed when danger threatened this country was a committee of safety, which immediately began correspondence among the several colonies, and it was the fact that these very colonies stood together in the face of danger, shoulder to shoulder, and back to back, that enabled us to achieve what we did achieve.

Standing here, on this great anniversary at the very end of the century, facing the new century, it is impossible that one should not look back, and equally impossible that one should not look forward. We are just at the close of what we call, and call rightly, a century of great achievements. We pride ourselves upon the work this country has accomplished. We point to a government based upon the consent of the governed, such as the world has never seen; wealth which has been piled up such as no country has ever attained within that time, or double or quadruple that time. It is such a condition of life as never existed in any other country. From Mount Desert to the Golden Gate, yes, from the islands which Columbus saw, thinking he had found the East Indies, to the East Indies themselves, where, even as I speak, the American flag is being planted, our possessions and our wealth extend. We have, though following the arts of peace, an army ready to rise at the sound of the bugle greater than Rome was ever able to summon behind her golden eagles. We are right to call it a century of achievement. We pride ourselves upon it. Now, who achieved that? Not we, personally; our fathers achieved it; your fathers and my fathers; your fathers, when they left England and set their prows westward and landed upon the rock-bound coast; when they drew up their compact of civil government, which was a new thing in the history of the world. We did our part in the South, and when the time came they staked all that they had upon the principle of a government based only upon the consent of the governed.

We pride ourselves upon the fact that we can worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. We speak easily of God, "whose service is perfect freedom," but it was not we, but our fathers who achieved that. Our fathers "left us an heritage, and it has brought forth abundantly."

I say this to draw clearly the line between mere material wealth and that which is the real wealth and welfare of a people. We are rich, but our fathers were poor. How did they achieve it? Not by their wealth, but by their character—by their devotion to principle. When I was thinking of the speech I was to make here to-night, I asked the descendant of a New Englander what he would say was the best thing that the fathers had left to the country. He thought for a second and made me a wise answer. He said, "I think it was their character." That is indeed the heritage they left us; they left us their character. Wealth will not preserve that which they left us; not wealth, not power, not "dalliance nor wit" will preserve it; nothing but that which is of the spirit will preserve it, nothing but character.

The whole story of civilization speaks this truth with trumpet voice. One nation rises upon the ruins of another nation. It is when Samson lies in the lap of Delilah that the enemy steals upon him and ensnares him and binds him. It was when the great Assyrian king walked through his palace, and looking around him said in his pride, "Is not this great Babylon that I have built for the honor of the kingdom and for the honor of my majesty?" that the voice came to him, even while the words were in the king's mouth (saith the chronicle), "Thy kingdom is departed from thee." It was when Belshazzar sat feasting in his Babylonian palace, with his lords and ladies, eating and drinking out of the golden vessels that had been sacred to the Lord, that the writing came upon the wall, "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." Not only in the palace, but all through the great city there was feasting and dancing. Why should they not feast and why should they not dance? They were secure, with walls that were 350 feet high, eighty-five feet thick, with a hundred brazen gates, the city filled with greater wealth than had ever been brought before within walls. But out in the country a few hardy mountaineers had been digging ditches for some time. Nobody took much account of them, yet even that night, in the midst of Belshazzar's luxury and feasting, the veteran troops of Cyrus were marching silently under the dripping walls, down the bed of the lowered Euphrates, so that that which had been the very passageway of Babylon's wealth became the pathway of her ruin.

Unless we preserve the character and the institutions our fathers gave us we will go down as other nations have gone. We may talk and theorize as much as we please, but this is the law of nature—the stronger pushes the weaker to the wall and takes its place.

In the history of civilization first one nation rises and becomes the torch-bearer, and then another takes the torch as it becomes stronger, the stronger always pushing the weaker aside and becoming in its turn the leader. So it has been with the Assyrian, and Babylonian, and Median, and, coming on down, with the Greek, the Roman, the Frank, and then came that great race, the Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic race, which seems to me to-day to be the great torch-bearer for this and for the next coming time. Each nation that has borne the torch of civilization has followed some path peculiarly its own. Egyptian, Syrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Frank, all had their ideal of power—order and progress directed under Supreme authority, maintained by armed organization. We bear the torch of civilization because we possess the principles of civil liberty, and we have the character, or should have the character, which our fathers have transmitted to us with which to uphold it. If we have it not, then be sure that with the certainty of a law of nature some nation—it may be one or it may be another—it may be Grecian or it may be Slav, already knocking at our doors, will push us from the way, and take the torch and bear it onward, and we shall go down.

But I have no fear of the future. I think, looking around upon the country at present, that even if it would seem to us at times that there are gravest perils which confront us, that even though there may be evidence of weakening in our character, notwithstanding this I say, I believe the great Anglo-Saxon race, not only on the other side of the water, but on this side of the water—and when I say the Anglo-Saxon race I mean the great white, English-speaking race—I use the other term because there is none more satisfactory to me—contains elements which alone can continue to be the leaders of civilization, the elements of fundamental power, abiding virtue, public and private. Wealth will not preserve a state; it must be the aggregation of individual integrity in its members, in its citizens, that shall preserve it. That integrity, I believe, exists, deep-rooted among our people. Sometimes when I read accounts of vice here and there eating into the heart of the people, I feel inclined to be pessimistic; but when I come face to face with the American and see him in his life, as he truly is; when I reflect on the great body of our people that stretch from one side of this country to the other, their homes perched on every hill and nestled in every valley, and recognize the sterling virtue and the kind of character that sustains it, built on the rock of those principles that our fathers transmitted to us, my pessimism disappears and I know that not only for this immediate time but for many long generations to come, with that reservoir of virtue to draw from, we shall sustain and carry both ourselves and the whole human race forward.

There are many problems that confront us which we can only solve by the exercise of our utmost courage and wisdom. I do not want anything I say here this evening to have in the least degree the complexion of a political talk. I am like a friend of mine down in Virginia who told me that he never could talk politics with a man, "Because," he says, "I am that sort of a blanked fool that thinks if a man disagrees with him in politics he has insulted him." Consequently, I am not discussing this matter in any political sense whatever. But I feel quite sure, though I see many men whose opinion I respect who disagree with me, that yet this great people of ours is strong enough to carry through any obligations whatever which they may take up. I have no fear, however it may cause trouble, or may create difference and complication, of our extending our flag in the way we have done of late. I know that I differ with a very considerable section of the people of the South from whom I come, but I have no question whatever that we possess the strength to maintain any obligation that we assume, and I feel sure that in the coming years this great race of ours will have shown strength and resolution enough not only to preserve itself, to preserve the great heritage our fathers have given us of civil liberty here, but also to carry it to the isles of the sea, and, if necessary, to the nations beyond the sea. Of one thing I am very sure, that had our fathers been called on to solve this problem they would have solved it, not in the light of a hundred years ago, but in that of the present.

Among the problems that confront us we have one great problem, already alluded to indirectly to-night. You do not have it here in the North as we have it with us in the South, and yet, I think, it is a problem that vitally concerns you too. There is no problem that can greatly affect one section of this country that does not affect the other. As I came into your city to-night I saw your great structure across the river here, binding the two great cities together and making them one, and I remember that as I came the last time into your beautiful bay down yonder, I saw what seemed to be a mere web of gossamer, a bare hand's breadth along the horizon. It seemed as if I might have swept it away with my hand if I could have reached it, so airy and light it was in the distance, but when I came close to it to-night I found that it was one of the greatest structures that human intellect has ever devised. I saw it thrilling and vibrating with every energy of our pulsating, modern life. At a distance it looked as if the vessels nearest would strike it, full head, and carry it away. When I reached it I saw that it was so high, so vast, that the traffic of your great stream passed easily backward and forward under it. So it is with some of these problems. They may appear very small to you, ladies and gentlemen, or to us, when seen at a distance—as though merely a hand-sweep would get rid of them; but I tell you they are too vast to be moved easily.

There is one that with us overshadows all the rest. The great Anglo-Saxon race in the section of this country containing the inhabitants of the South understands better than you do the gravity of that great problem which confronts them. It is "like the pestilence that walketh in darkness, the destruction that wasteth at noonday." It confronts us all the day; it is the spectre that ever sits beside our bed. No doubt we make mistakes about it; no doubt there are outbreaks growing out of some phases of it that astound, and shock, and stun you, as they do ourselves. But believe me, the Anglo-Saxon race has set itself, with all its power, to face it and to overcome it; to solve it in some way, and in the wisest way. Have patience and it will be solved. Time is the great solver, and time alone. If you knew the problem as I do, my words would have more weight with you than they have. I cannot, perhaps, expect you even to understand entirely what I am saying to you, but when I tell you that it is the greatest problem that at present faces the South, as it has done for the last thirty years, I am saying it to you as an American—one of yourselves, who wants to get at the right, and get at the truth, and who will get on his knees and thank God for anyone who will tell him how to solve the problem and meet the dangers that are therein.

Those dangers are not only for us, they are for you. The key to it, in our opinion, is that to which I alluded but just now; that for the present, at least, the white race is the torch-bearer of civilization, not only for itself, but for the world. There is only one thing that I can say assuredly, and that is that never again will that element of the white race, the white people of the South, any more than you of the North, consent to be dominated by any weaker race whatsoever. And on this depends your salvation, no less than ours. Some of you may remember that once, during that great siege of Petersburg, which resulted, in the beginning of April, 1865, in the capture of the city and the overthrow of the Confederacy, there was an attempt made to mine the hitherto impregnable lines of General Lee. Finally, one cold morning, the mine was sprung, and a space perhaps double the length of one of your squares was blown up, carrying everything adjacent into the air and making a breach in the lines. Beside a little stream under the hill in the Union lines was massed a large force, a section of which, in front, was composed of negroes. They were hurried forward to rush the breach that had been created. They were wild with the ardor of battle. As it happened, a part of the gray line which had held the adjacent trenches, knowing the peril, had thrown themselves, in the dim dawn of the morning, across the newly made breach, and when they found the colored troops rushing in they nerved themselves anew to the contest. I may say to you calmly, after thirty odd years of experience with the negro race, that it was well for the town of Petersburg that morning that that attempt to carry the lines failed. That thin gray line there in the gray dawn set themselves to meet the on-rushing columns and hold them till knowledge of the attack spread and succor arrived. You may not agree with me that what happened at that time is happening now; but I tell you as one who has stood on the line, that we are not only holding it for ourselves, but for you. It is the white people of the South that are standing to-day between you and the dread problem that now confronts us. They are the thin line of Anglo-Saxons who are holding the broken breach with all their might till succor comes. And I believe the light will come, the day will break and you yourselves stand shoulder to shoulder with us, and then with this united, great American people we can face not only the colored race at the South, but we can face all other races of the world. That is what I look for and pray for, and there are many millions of people who are doing the same to-night.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not speaking in any spirit which I think will challenge your serious criticism. We are ready to do all we can to accord full justice to that people. I have many, many friends among them. I know well what we owe to that race in the past. I am their sincere well-wisher in the present and for the future. They are more unfortunate than to blame; they have been misdirected, deceived. Not only the welfare of the white people of the South and the welfare of the white people of the North, but the salvation of the negro himself depends upon the carrying out, in a wise way, the things which I have outlined, very imperfectly, I know. When that shall be done we will find the African race in America, instead of devoting its energies to the uncomprehended and futile political efforts which have been its curse in the past, devoting them to the better arts of peace, and then from that race will come intellects and intellectual achievements which may challenge and demand the recognition of the world. Then those intellects will come up and take their places and be accorded their places, not only willingly, but gladly. This is already the new line along which they are advancing, and their best friends can do them no greater service than to encourage and assist them in it; their worst enemy could do them no greater injury than to deflect them from it.

This is a very imperfect way, I am aware, ladies and gentlemen, of presenting the matter, but I hope you will accept it and believe that I am sincere in it. Accept my assurance of the great pleasure I have had in coming here this evening.

I remember, when I was a boy, hearing your great fellow-townsman, Mr. Beecher, in a lecture in Richmond, speak of this great city as "The round-house of New York," in which, he said, the machinery that drove New York and moved the world was cleaned and polished every night. I am glad to be here, where you have that greatest of American achievements, the American home and the American spirit. May it always be kept pure and always at only the right fountains have its strength renewed. [Prolonged applause.]

GEORGE M. PALMER

THE LAWYER IN POLITICS

[Speech of George M. Palmer at the annual banquet of the New York State Bar Association, given in Albany, January 18, 1899. President Walter S. Logan introduced Mr. Palmer in the following words: "The next speaker is the Hon. George M. Palmer, minority leader of the Assembly. [Applause.] He is going to speak on 'The Lawyer in Politics,' and I am very glad to assure you that his politics are of the right kind.">[

Mr. President And Members of the Bar Association of the State of New York:—Through the generous impulse of your committee I enjoy the privilege of responding to this toast. I was informed some four weeks ago I would be called upon, the committee thinking I would require that time in preparation, and I have devoted the entire time since in preparing the address for this occasion. "The Lawyer in Politics." The first inquiry of the lawyer and politician is, "What is there in it?" [Laughter.] I mean by that, the lawyer says in a dignified way, "What principle is involved, and how can I best serve my client, always forgetting myself?" The politician, and not the statesman, says, "What is in it?" Not for himself, oh, never. Not the lawyer in politics; but "What is there in it for the people I represent? How can I best serve them?"

You may inquire what is there in this toast for you. Not very much. You remember the distinguished jurist who once sat down to a course dinner similar to this. He had been waited on by one servant during two courses. He had had the soup. Another servant came to him and said, "Sir, shall I take your order? Will you have some of the chicken soup?" "No, sir; I have been served with chicken soup, but the chicken proved an alibi." [Laughter.] A distinguished judge in this presence said he was much indebted to the Bar. I am very glad to say that the lawyer in politics formed a resolution on the first day of last January to square himself with the Bar, and he now stands without any debt. [Laughter.] I remember a reference made by the distinguished gentleman to a case that was tried by a young, struggling attorney. I also remember a young judge who appeared in one of the rural counties, who sat and heard a case very similar to the one to which reference was made, and I remember the fight of the giants before him. Points were raised of momentous importance. They were to affect the policy of the State. One lawyer insisted upon the correctness of an objection and succeeded. He felt so elated over that success he in a short time objected again, and the judge ruled against him, but in his ardor he argued with the court. "Why, I can't conceive why you make this ruling." "Why," the judge says, "I have just ruled with you once, I must rule with the other fellow this time." [Laughter.]

REPRODUCTIONS OF MURAL DECORATIONS FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON

"LAW"

Photo-engraving in colors after the original mosaic panel by Frederick Dielman

The mosaics by Mr. Dielman are remarkable for their wealth of color and detail—properties so elusive as to defy the reproducer's art. But the picture here given preserves the fundamental idea of the artist. "Law" is typified by the central figure of a woman seated on a marble throne and holding in one hand the sword of punishment, and in the other the palm branch of reward. She wears on her breast the Ægis of Minerva. On the steps of the throne are the scales of Justice, the book of Law and the white doves of Mercy. On her right are the emblematic figures of Truth, Peace, and Industry, on her left are Fraud, Discord, and Violence. "Law" is a companion piece to "History."

"The Lawyer in Politics." It is sometimes a question which way the lawyer will start when he enters politics. I remember reading once of a distinguished lawyer who had a witness upon the stand. He was endeavoring to locate the surroundings of a building in which an accident occurred, and he had put a female witness on the stand. "Now the location of the door: please give it," and she gave it in a timid way. "Will you now kindly give the location of the hall in which the accident occurred?" She gave it. "Now," he says, "we have arrived at the stairs; will you kindly tell me which way the stairs run?" She became a little nervous and she says, "I will tell you the best I can; if you are at the foot of the stairs they run up, and if you are to the top of the stairs they run down." [Laughter.] So sometimes it is pretty important to find out which way the lawyer is going when he enters in politics. He should be tried and tested before being permitted to enter politics, in my judgment, and while the State is taking upon itself the paternal control of all our professions and business industries, it seems to me they should have a civil service examination for the lawyer before he enters the realm of politics.

A lawyer that I heard of, coming from a county down the river—a county that has produced distinguished judges who have occupied positions on the Court of Appeals and in the Supreme Court of the State—said of a lawyer there who had been in politics, that he had started with bright prospects, but had become indebted to the Bar during his period in politics. He had gone back and had taken up the small cases, and yet in his sober moments it was said the sparks of genius still exhibited themselves at times. He was called upon to defend a poor woman at one time who was arrested by a heartless corporation for stealing a lot of their coal. He sobered up and squared himself before the jury, conducted the examination of the case and the trial of it, and in a magnificent burst of eloquence the case went to the jury. And after the jury retired, he sat, while they deliberated, by his client. And finally the jury came in. The foreman rose and said that "The jury find the defendant not guilty." The distinguished lawyer, in the presence of the crowd and jury, and justice of the peace, straightened back in his chair. "My dear Miss Smith, you are again a free woman. No longer the imputation of this heinous crime rests upon you. You may go from this court-room as free as the bird that pinions its wings and flies toward the heavens, to kiss the first ray of the morning sunshine. You may go as free as that bird, but before you go pay me that $3.00 you owe me on account." [Laughter.] What I mean to enforce by this is that the lawyer who is in politics solely for the $3.00 is not a safe man to intrust with political power.

Judge Baldwin, of Indiana, it is said, in giving his advice to lawyers upon one occasion, told them that the course to be pursued by a lawyer was first to get on, second to get honor, and third to get honest. [Laughter.] A man who follows that policy in my judgment is not such a lawyer as should be let loose in politics. Rather, it seems to me, that the advice to give to lawyers, and the principle to follow is, first to be honest, second to get on, and third, upon this broad basis, get honor if you can. [Applause.] It is unnecessary for me at this time to refer to the distinguished men who have entered politics from the profession of the law. I could point to those who have occupied the highest positions in the gift of the people, who have been the chief executives of this great Nation, and who have stood in the halls of Congress, and in the legislative halls of our various States, and in these important positions have helped formulate the fundamental principles which to-day govern us as a free people, and upon which the ark of our freedom rests. I believe that while in the past opportunities have presented themselves for lawyers in politics, yet no time was ever more favorable than now, when it seems to me that the service of the Bar is required in helping shape the policies and destinies of our country. We are confronted with new conditions, with new propositions, and it seems to me that the man who is learned in the law, who, as was once said of the great Peel, that his entire course in life, in and out of the profession, was guided by the desire to do right and justice, should aid in our adjustment to these new conditions.

Professional men who are superior to the fascination of power, or the charms of wealth, men who do not employ their power solely for self-aggrandizement, but devote their energies in favor of the public weal, are men who should be found in the councils of the State. Ours is the country and this the occasion when patriotism and legal learning are at a premium.

In the settling of the policy of the United States with reference to territory recently acquired, lawyers are destined to play a leading part. They are very well fitted to appreciate the fundamental principles of a free government and of human liberty. It seems the patriotic duty of the lawyer to give the country the benefit of his study and experience, not as a mere politician, but as a high-minded and learned statesman and citizen of our common country.

This is the time when high-minded, learned, and professional men should assist to plant and protect the flower of our American policy under our new conditions so that the fruitage of our system may be naturalized in new fields as a correct policy.

Duty, therefore, seems to call the lawyer to the councils of State. Our Country is his client, her perpetuity will be his retainer, fee, and compensation. [Applause.]

LORD PALMERSTON

(HENRY JOHN TEMPLE)

ILLUSIONS CREATED BY ART

[Speech of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, Prime Minister of England 1859-1865, at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 2, 1863. Sir Charles Eastlake, the President of the Royal Academy, said, in introducing Lord Palmerston: "I now have the honor to propose the health of one who is entitled to the respect and gratitude of the friends of science and art, the promoters of education and the upholders of time-honored institutions. I have the honor to propose the health of Viscount Palmerston.">[

Mr. President, Your Royal Highnesses, My Lords, and Gentlemen:—I need not, I am certain, assure you that nothing can be more gratifying to the feelings of any man than to receive that compliment which you have been pleased to propose and which this distinguished assembly has been kind enough so favorably to entertain in the toast of his health. It is natural that any man who is engaged in public life should feel the greatest interest in the promotion of the fine arts. In fact, without a great cultivation of art no nation has ever arrived at any point of eminence. We have seen great warlike exploits performed by nations in a state, I won't say of comparative barbarism, but wanting comparative civilization; we have seen nations amassing great wealth, but yet not standing thereby high in the estimation of the rest of the world; but when great warlike achievements, great national prosperity, and a high cultivation of the arts are all combined together, the nation in which those conditions are found may pride itself on holding that eminent position among the nations of the world which I am proud to say belongs to this country. [Loud cheers.]

It is gratifying to have the honor of being invited to these periodical meetings where we find assembled within these rooms a greater amount of cultivation of mind, of natural genius, of everything which constitutes the development of human intellect than perhaps ever has assembled within the same space elsewhere. And we have besides the gratification of seeing that in addition to those living examples of national genius the walls are covered with proofs that the national genius is capable of the most active and admirable development. [Cheers.] Upon the present occasion, Mr. President, every visitor must have seen with the greatest delight that by the side of the works of those whose names are familiar to all, there are works of great ability brought hither by men who are still rising to fame; and, therefore, we have the satisfaction of feeling that this country will never be wanting in men distinguished in the practice of the fine arts. [Cheers.] One great merit of this Exhibition is that whatever may be the turn of a man's mind, whatever his position in life, he may at least during the period he is within these walls, indulge the most pleasant illusions applicable to the wants his mind at that time may feel. A man who comes here shivering in one of those days which mark the severity of an English summer, may imagine that he is basking in an African sun and he may feel an imaginary warmth from the representation of a tropical climate. If, on the other hand, he is suffering under those exceptional miseries which one of the few hot days of an English summer is apt to create, he may imagine himself inhaling the fresh breezes of the seaside; he may suppose himself reclining in the cool shade of the most luxuriant foliage; he may for a time, in fancy, feel all the delights which the streets and pavements of London deny in reality. [Cheers and laughter.] And if he happens to be a young man, upon what is conventionally said to be his preferment, that is to say, looking out for a partner in life, he may here study all kinds and descriptions of female beauty [laughter and cheers]; he may satisfy his mind whether light hair or dark, blue eyes or black, the tender or the serious, the gay or the sentimental, are most likely to contribute to the happiness of his future life. [Cheers.] And without exposing himself to any of those embarrassing questions as to his intentions [laughter] which sometimes too inquisitive a scrutiny may bring [much laughter], without creating disappointment or breaking any hearts, by being referred to any paternal authority, which, he may not desire to consult, he may go and apply to practical selection those principles of choice which will result from the study within these walls.

Then those of a more serious turn of mind who direct their thoughts to State affairs, and who wish to know of what that august assembly the House of Commons is composed, may here [pointing to Phillips's picture behind the chair], without the trouble of asking an order, without waiting in Westminster Hall until a seat be vacant, without passing hours in a hot gallery listening perhaps to dull discourses in an uninteresting debate—they may here see what kind of thing the House of Commons is, and go back edified by the sight without being bored by dull speeches. [Cheers and laughter.]

Now, don't, gentlemen, imagine that I am romancing when I attribute this virtue to ocular demonstration—don't imagine that that which enters the eye does not sometimes penetrate to the mind and feelings. I will give you an instance to the contrary. I remember within these walls seeing two gentlemen who evidently, from their remarks, were very good judges of horses, looking with the greatest admiration upon the well-known picture of Landseer, "The Horseshoeing at the Blacksmith's;" and after they had looked at it for some time one was approaching nearer, when the other in an agony of enthusiasm said: "For heaven's sake, don't go too near, he will kick you." [Cheers and laughter.]

Well, gentlemen, I said that a public man must take great interest in art, but I feel that the present Government has an apology to make to one department of art, and that is to the sculptors; for there is an old maxim denoting one of the high functions of art which is "Ars est celare artem." Now there was a cellar in which the art of the most distinguished sculptors was concealed to the utmost extent of the application of that saying. We have brought them comparatively into light; and if the sculptors will excuse us for having departed from that sage and ancient maxim, I am sure the public will thank us for having given them an opportunity of seeing those beautiful works of men of which it may be said: "Vivos ducunt de marmore vultus." I trust, therefore, the sculptors will excuse us for having done, not perhaps the best they might have wished, but at least for having relieved them a little from the darkness of that Cimmerian cellar in which their works were hid. [Cheers.] I beg again to thank you, gentlemen, for the honor you have done me in drinking my health. [Loud cheers.]

JOHN R. PAXTON

A SCOTCH-IRISHMAN'S VIEWS OF THE PURITAN

[Speech of Rev. John R. Paxton, D.D., at the seventy-seventh annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1882. Josiah M. Fiske, the President, occupied the chair. Dr. Paxton responded for "The Clergy.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—There is no help for it, alas! now. The Pilgrim or Puritan doth bestride the broad continent like another Colossus and we Dutch, English, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, and Irish walk about under his huge legs [laughter]; "we must bend our bodies when he doth carelessly nod to us." For the Puritan is the pious Joseph of the land, and to his sheaf all our sheaves must make obeisance. As he pipes unto us so we dance. He takes the chief seat at every national feast and compels us highway-and-hedge people, us unfortunate Dutch and Scotch-Irish, to come in and shout his triumphs and praise at his own self-glorification meetings. [Laughter and applause.] Of course we all know it's a clear case of the tail wagging the dog. But it is too late now to go back to the order of nature or the truth of history. The Puritan, like another Old Man of the Sea, is astride our shoulders and won't come down, protest, pray, roll, wriggle as Sindbad may. Why, the Puritan has imposed his Thanksgiving Day and pumpkin-pie upon South Carolina, even. [Applause.] He got mad at the old Whig party, on account of his higher law and abolitionism, and put it to death. When the Puritan first came to these shores, he made the way to heaven so narrow that only a tight-rope performer could walk it. [Laughter.] Now, what with his Concord philosophies, transcendentalisms, and every heresy, he has made it so wide that you could drive all Barnum's elephants abreast upon it and through the strait gate. He compels us to send our sons to his colleges for his nasal note. He is communicating his dyspepsia to the whole country by means of codfish-balls and baked beans. He has encouraged the revolt of women, does our thinking, writes our books, insists on his standard of culture, defines our God, and, as the crowning glory of his audacity, has imposed his own sectional, fit, and distinguishing name upon us all, and swells with gratified pride to hear all the nations of the earth speak of all Americans as Yankees. [Laughter and applause.]

I would enter a protest, but what use? We simply grace his triumph, and no images may be hung at this feast but the trophies of the Puritan. For all that, I mean to say a brief word for my Scotch-Irish race in America. Mr. President, General Horace Porter, on my left, and I, did not come over in the Half Moon or the Mayflower. We stayed on in County Donegal, Ireland, in the loins of our forefathers, content with poteen and potatoes, stayed on until the Pilgrims had put down the Indians, the Baptists, and the witches; until the Dutch had got all the furs this side Lake Erie. [Laughter and applause.] By the way, what hands and feet those early Knickerbockers had! In trading with the Indians it was fixed that a Dutchman's hand weighed one pound and his foot two pounds in the scales. But what puzzled the Indian was that no matter how big his pack of furs, the Dutchman's foot was its exact weight at the opposite end of the scale. Enormous feet the first Van—or De—or Stuy—had. [Continued laughter.]

But in course of time, after the Pilgrims had come for freedom, the Dutch for furs, Penn for a frock—a Quaker cut and color—we came, we Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, for what? Perhaps the king oppressed the presbytery, or potatoes failed, or the tax on whiskey was doubled. Anyway we came to stay: some of us in New England, some in the valleys of Virginia, some in the mountains of North Carolina, others in New York; but the greater part pushed out into Pennsylvania—as far away as they could get from the Puritans and the Dutch—settled the great Cumberland Valley; then, crossing the Alleghany Mountains, staked out their farms on the banks of the Monongahela River, set up their stills, built their meeting-houses, organized the presbytery—and, gentlemen, the reputation of our Monongahela rye is unsurpassed to this day [long applause], and our unqualified orthodoxy even now turns the stomach of a modern Puritan and constrains Colonel Ingersoll[1] not to pray, alas! but to swear. [Loud laughter.]

Mr. President, I hope General Porter will join me in claiming some recognition for the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from these sons of the Puritans. For do you not know that your own man Bancroft says that the first public voice in America for dissolving all connection with Great Britain came not from the Puritans of New England, the Dutch of New York, nor the planters of Virginia, but from the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians? [Applause.] Therefore, Mr. President, be kind enough to accept from us the greeting of the Scotch-Irish of Pennsylvania, our native State—that prolific mother of pig-iron and coal, whose favorite and greatest sons are still Albert Gallatin, of Switzerland, and Benjamin Franklin, of Massachusetts. [Laughter and applause.]

The first son of a Forefather I ever fell in with was a nine-months Connecticut man at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the spring of '62. Now, I was a guileless and generous lad of nineteen—all Pennsylvanians are guileless and generous, for our mountains are so rich in coal, our valleys so fat with soil, that our living is easy and therefore our wits are dull, and we are still voting for Jackson. [Great laughter.] The reason the Yankees are smart is because they have to wrest a precarious subsistence from a reluctant soil. "What shall I do to make my son get forward in the world?" asked an English lord of a bishop. "I know of only one way," replied the bishop; "give him poverty and parts." Well, that's the reason the sons of the Pilgrims have all got on in the world. They all started with poverty, and had to exercise their wits on nutmegs or notions or something to thrive. [Laughter.] Yes, they had "parts." Why, they have taken New York from the Dutch; they are half of Wall Street, and only a Jew, or a long-headed Sage, or that surprising and surpassing genius in finance, Jay,[2] can wrestle with them on equal terms. Ah! these Yankees have "parts"—lean bodies, sterile soil, but such brains that they grew a Webster. [Applause.] Well, this Connecticut man invited me to his quarters. When I got back to my regiment I had a shabby overcoat instead of my new one, I had a frying-pan worth twenty cents, that cost me five dollars, and a recipe for baked beans for which I had parted with my gold pen and pencil. [Continued laughter.] I was a sadder and a wiser man that night for that encounter with the Connecticut Pilgrim.

But my allotted time is running away, and, preacher-like, I couldn't begin without an introduction. I am afraid in this case the porch will be bigger than the house. But now to my toast, "The Clergy." Surely, Mr. President and gentlemen, you sons of the Pilgrims appreciate the debt you owe the Puritan divines. What made your section great, dominant, glorious in the history of our common country? To what class of your citizens—more than to any other, I think—do you owe the proud memories of your past, and your strength, achievements, and culture in the present? Who had the first chance on your destiny, your character, your development? Why, the Puritan preacher, of course; the man who in every parish inculcated the fear of God in your fathers' souls, obedience to law, civil and divine, the dignity of man, the worth of the soul and right conduct in life. [Applause.] Believe me, gentlemen, the Puritan clergy did a great work for New England. Our whole country feels yet the impulse and movement given it by those stern preachers of righteousness, who had Abrahamic eyes under their foreheads and the stuff of Elijah in their souls. [Applause.] I know it's the fashion now to poke fun at the Puritans, to use the "Blue Laws" as a weapon against them, to sneer at them as hard, narrow, and intolerant. Yes, alas! we do not breathe through their lungs any more. The wheel has gone round, and we have come back to the very things the Puritans fled from in hatred and in horror.

We pride ourselves these days on our "sweetness and light," on our culture and manners. The soul of the age is hospitable and entertains, like an inn, "God or the devil on equal terms," as George Eliot says. Alas! the Puritan chart has failed us in the sea through which we are passing; the old stars have ceased to shine; too many of us know neither our course nor destination; "authority is mute;" the "Thus saith the Lord" of the Puritan is not enough now for our guidance. For the age is in all things not one of reason or of faith, but of speculation not only in the business of the world, but in all moral and spiritual questions as well. Well, we shall see what we shall see. But for one, I admire with all my soul a man who knows just what he was put into this world for, what his chief end in it is, what he believes, must do and must be, and in the ways thereof is willing to inflict or to suffer death. [Applause.] The Puritan divine was such a man. He sowed your rocky coasts and sterile hills with conscience and God. You are living on the virtue that came out of the hem of his garment; he is our bulwark still in this land against superstition on the one hand and infidelity on the other. [Applause.] Grand man he was, the old Puritan; once arrived he was always arrived; while other men hesitated he acted; while others debated he declared; fearing God, he was lifted above every other fear; and though he has passed away for a time—only for a time, remember: the wheel is still turning, we can't stand on air—he will come back again, but in the meantime he is still a "preacher of righteousness" to our souls as effective in death as in life. [Applause.]

In your presence I greet with my warmest admiration, I salute with my profound reverence, the old Puritan divines of New England who had a scorn for all base uses of life, who were true to duty as they saw it, who had convictions for which they would kill or die, who formed their characters and guided their lives by the law of righteousness in human conduct. To these men under God we largely owe our liberties and our laws in this land. I take off my hat to his ghost, and salute him as greater than he who has taken a city, for the Puritan divine conquered himself. He was an Isaac, not an Ishmael; he was a Jacob, not an Esau; a God-born man who knew what his soul did wear. Great man he was, hard, stern, and intolerant. Yes, but what would you have, gentlemen? The Puritan was not a pretty head carved on a cherry-stone, but a Colossus cut from the rock, huge, grim, but awe-inspiring, fortifying to the soul if not warming to the heart. [Applause.]

Well, would he know you to-night, I wonder, his own sons, if he came in upon you now, in circumstances so different and with manners and customs so changed? Would he gaze at you with sad, sad eyes, and weep over you as the degenerate sons of noble sires? [Laughter.] No, no; you are worthy, I think. The sons will keep what the fathers won. After all, you are still one with the Puritan in all essential things. [Applause.] You clasp hands with him in devotion to the same principle, in obedience to the same God. True, the man between doublet and skin plays many parts; fashions come and go, never long the same, but "clothe me as you will I am Sancho Panza still." So you are Puritans still. Back of your Unitarianism, back of your Episcopalianism, back of your Transcendentalism, back of all your isms, conceits, vagaries—and there is no end to them—back of them all there beats in you the Puritan heart. Blood will tell. Scratch a child of sweetness and light on Beacon Hill to-day and you will find a Puritan. [Laughter.] Scratch your Emerson, your Bellows, your Lowell, your Longfellow, your Wendell Phillips, your Phillips Brooks, and you find the Puritan. [Applause.] In intellectual conclusions vastly different, in heart, at bottom, you're all one in love of liberty, in fear of God, contempt for shams, and scorn of all things base and mean. [Applause.]

So, ye ghosts of old Puritan divines, ye cannot look down on your sons to-night with sad and reproachful eyes. For the sons have not wasted what the fathers gained, nor failed in any critical emergency, nor yet forsaken the God ye feared so well, though they have modified your creed. Gentlemen, I cannot think that the blood has run out. Exchange your evening dress for the belted tunic and cloak; take off the silk hat and put on the wide brim and the steeple crown, and lo! I see the Puritan. And twenty years ago I heard him speak and saw him act. "If any man hauls down the American flag, shoot him on the spot." Why, Warren in old Boston did not act more promptly or do a finer thing. Well, what moved in your splendid Dix when he gave that order? The spirit of the old Puritan. And I saw the sons of the sires act. Who reddened the streets of Baltimore with the first Union blood?—Massachusetts. [Loud applause.] Who to-day are the first to rally to the side of a good cause, on trial in the community? Who are Still first in colleges and letters in this land? Who, east or west, advocate justice, redress wrongs, maintain equal rights, support churches, love liberty, and thrive where others starve? Why, these ubiquitous sons of the Puritans, of course, who dine me to-night. Gentlemen, I salute you. "If I were not Miltiades I would be Themistocles;" if I were not a Scotch-Irishman I would be a Puritan. [Continued applause.]

EDWARD JOHN PHELPS

FAREWELL ADDRESS

[Speech of Edward J. Phelps, Minister to England, on the occasion of the farewell banquet given to him by the Lord Mayor of London, James Whitehead, at the Mansion House, London, January 24, 1889. The Lord Mayor, in proposing the toast of the evening, said, in the course of his introductory remarks: "It now becomes my pride and privilege to ask you to join with me in drinking the health of my distinguished guest, Mr. Phelps. I have invited you here this evening because I felt it was my duty as Chief Magistrate of the City of London to take the initiative in giving you an opportunity to testify to the very high esteem in which Mr. Phelps is held by all classes of society. It is to me a very sincere satisfaction that I am able to be the medium of conveying to him, on the eve of his departure, the fact that his presence here in this country has been appreciated by the whole British nation. If anything were required to give force to what I have said, it is the fact that on this occasion we are honored by the presence of members of governments past and present, of statesmen without distinction of party, of members of both Houses of Parliament, and of nearly all the judges of the land. We have here also the highest representatives of science, of art, of literature, and of the press; and we are also honored with the presence of neighbors and friends in some of the most eminent bankers and merchants of the city. I am glad to add that all the distinguished Americans that I know of at present visiting this city have come here to show their esteem for their fellow-countryman. It may be said that this remarkable gathering is a proof not only of the fact that our distinguished guest is personally popular, but also that we are satisfied that, so far as he could, he has endeavored to do his duty faithfully and well between the country he represents and the country to which he is delegated. Mr. Phelps in leaving our shores, I think, will take with him a feeling that he has been received in the most cordial spirit, in the most friendly manner in this country. I think he will feel also—at any rate, I should like to assure him so far as I am able to observe—that he has greatly tended, by his manner and by his courteous bearing, to consolidate those friendly relations which we desire should forever exist between his country and our own. Those of us who have had the honor from time to time to meet his Excellency, know what high and good qualities he possesses, and we feel sure he will take with him to the United States a not unfavorable impression of the old country, and that so far as he can he will endeavor in the future, as I believe he has done in the past, to promote those feelings of peace, of amity between the two countries, the maintenance of which is one of the objects to be most desired in the interests of the world at large I give you 'His Excellency, the American Minister, Mr. Phelps,' and I ask you, if you please, to rise and give the toast standing, in the usual manner.">[

My Lord Mayor, my Lords, and Gentlemen:—I am sure you will not be surprised to be told that the poor words at my command do not enable me to respond adequately to your most kind greeting, nor the too flattering words which have fallen from my friend, the Lord Mayor, and from my distinguished colleague, the Lord Chancellor. But you will do me the justice to believe that my feelings are not the less sincere and hearty if I cannot put them into language. I am under a very great obligation to your Lordship not merely for the honor of meeting this evening an assembly more distinguished I apprehend than it appears to me has often assembled under one roof, but especially for the opportunity of meeting under such pleasant circumstances so many of those to whom I have become so warmly attached, and from whom I am so sorry to part. [Cheers.]

It is rather a pleasant coincidence to me that about the first hospitality that was offered me after my arrival in England came from my friend, the Lord Mayor, who was at the time one of the Sheriffs of London. I hope it is no disparagement to my countrymen to say that under existing circumstances the first place that I felt it my duty to visit was the Old Bailey Criminal Court. [Laughter.] I had there the pleasure of being entertained by my friend, the Lord Mayor. And it happens also that it was in this room almost four years ago at a dinner given to Her Majesty's Judges by my friend Sir Robert Fowler, then Lord Mayor, whose genial face I see before me, that I appeared for the first time on any public occasion in England and addressed my first words to an English company. It seems to me a fortunate propriety that my last public words should be spoken under the same hospitable roof, the home of the Chief Magistrate of the city of London. ["Hear! Hear!">[ Nor can I ever forget the cordial and generous reception that was then accorded, not to myself personally, for I was altogether a stranger, but to the representative of my country. It struck what has proved the keynote of all my relations here. It indicated to me at the outset how warm and hearty was the feeling of Englishmen toward America. [Cheers.]

And it gave me to understand, what I was not slow to accept and believe, that I was accredited not merely from one government to the other, but from the people of America to the people of England—that the American Minister was not expected to be merely a diplomatic functionary shrouded in reticence and retirement, jealously watching over doubtful relations, and carefully guarding against anticipated dangers; but that he was to be the guest of his kinsmen—one of themselves—the messenger of the sympathy and good-will, the mutual and warm regard and esteem that bind together the two great nations of the same race, and make them one in all the fair humanities of life. [Cheers.] The suggestion that met me at the threshold has not proved to be mistaken. The promise then held out has been generously fulfilled. Ever since and through all my intercourse here I have received, in all quarters, from all classes with whom I have come in contact, under all circumstances and in all vicissitudes, a uniform and widely varied kindness, far beyond what I had personally the least claim to. And I am glad of this public opportunity to acknowledge it in the most emphatic manner.

My relations with the successive governments I have had to do with have been at all times most fortunate and agreeable, and quite beyond those I have been happy in feeling always that the English people had a claim upon the American Minister for all kind and friendly offices in his power, and upon his presence and voice on all occasions when they could be thought to further any good work. [Cheers.]

And so I have gone in and out among you these four years and have come to know you well. I have taken part in many gratifying public functions; I have been the guest at many homes; and my heart has gone out with yours in memorable jubilee of that Sovereign Lady whom all Englishmen love and all Americans honor. I have stood with you by some unforgotten graves; I have shared in many joys; and I have tried as well as I could through it all, in my small way, to promote constantly a better understanding, a fuller and more accurate knowledge, a more genuine sympathy between the people of the two countries. [Cheers.]

And this leads me to say a word on the nature of these relations. The moral intercourse between the governments is most important to be maintained, and its value is not to be overlooked or disregarded. But the real significance of the attitude of nations depends in these days upon the feelings which the general intelligence of their inhabitants entertains toward each other. The time has long passed when kings or rulers can involve their nations in hostilities to gratify their own ambition or caprice. There can be no war nowadays between civilized nations, nor any peace that is not hollow and delusive, unless sustained and backed up by the sentiment of the people who are parties to it. [Cheers.] Before nations can quarrel, their inhabitants must first become hostile. Then a cause of quarrel is not far to seek. The men of our race are not likely to become hostile until they begin to misunderstand each other. [Cheers.] There are no dragon's teeth so prolific as mutual misunderstandings. It is in the great and constantly increasing intercourse between England and America, in its reciprocities, and its amenities, that the security against misunderstanding must be found. While that continues, they cannot be otherwise than friendly. Unlucky incidents may sometimes happen; interests may conflict; mistakes may be made on one side or on the other, and sharp words may occasionally be spoken by unguarded or ignorant tongues. The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. [Cheers and laughter.] The nation that comes to be without fault will have reached the millennium, and will have little further concern with the storm-swept geography of this imperfect world. But these things are all ephemeral; they do not touch the great heart of either people; they float for a moment on the surface and in the wind, and then they disappear and are gone—"in the deep bosom of the ocean buried."

I do not know, sir, who may be my successor, but I venture to assure you that he will be an American gentleman, fit by character and capacity to be the medium of communication between our countries; and an American gentleman, when you come to know him, generally turns out to be a not very distant kinsman of an English gentleman. [Cheers.] I need not bespeak for him a kindly reception. I know he will receive it for his country's sake and his own. ["Hear! Hear!">[

"Farewell," sir, is a word often lightly uttered and readily forgotten. But when it marks the rounding-off and completion of a chapter in life, the severance of ties many and cherished, of the parting with many friends at once—especially when it is spoken among the lengthening shadows of the western light—it sticks somewhat in the throat. It becomes, indeed, "the word that makes us linger." But it does not prompt many other words. It is best expressed in few. What goes without saying is better than what is said. Not much can be added to the old English word "Good-by." You are not sending me away empty-handed or alone. I go freighted and laden with happy memories—inexhaustible and unalloyed—of England, its warm-hearted people, and their measureless kindness. Spirits more than twain will cross with me, messengers of your good-will. Happy the nation that can thus speed its parting guest! Fortunate the guest who has found his welcome almost an adoption, and whose farewell leaves half his heart behind! [Loud cheers.]

ARTHUR WING PINERO

THE DRAMA

[Speech of Arthur Wing Pinero at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 4, 1895. The toast to the "Drama" was coupled with that to "Music," to which Sir Alexander Mackenzie responded. Sir John Millais in proposing the toast said: "I have already spoken for both music and the drama with my brush. ["Hear! Hear!">[ I have painted Sterndale Bennett, Arthur Sullivan, Irving, and Hare.">[

Your Royal Highness, My Lords, and Gentlemen:—There ought to be at least one strong link of sympathy between certain painters and certain dramatists, for in the craft of painting as in that of play-writing, popular success is not always held to be quite creditable. Not very long ago I met at an exhibition of pictures a friend whose business it is to comment in the public journals upon painting and the drama. The exhibition was composed of the works of two artists, and I found myself in one room praising the pictures of the man who was exhibiting in the other. My friend promptly took me to task. "Surely," said he, "you noticed that two-thirds of the works in the next room are already sold?" I admitted having observed that many of the pictures were so ticketed. My friend shrugged his shoulders. "But," said I, anxiously, "do you really regard that circumstance as reflecting disparagingly upon the man's work in the next room?" His reply was: "Good work rarely sells." [Laughter.] My lords and gentlemen, if the dictum laid down by my friend be a sound one, I am placed to-night in a situation of some embarrassment. For, in representing, as you honor me, by giving me leave to do, my brother dramatists, I confess I am not in the position to deny that their wares frequently "sell." [Laughter.] I might, of course, artfully plead in extenuation of this condition of affairs that success in such a shape is the very last reward the dramatist toils for, or desires; that when the theatre in which his work is presented is thronged nightly no one is more surprised, more abashed than himself; that his modesty is so impenetrable, his artistic absorption so profound, that the sound of the voices of public approbation reduces him to a state of shame and dismay. [Laughter.] But did I advance this plea, I think it would at once be found to be a very shallow plea. For in any department of life, social, political, or artistic, nothing is more difficult than to avoid incurring the suspicion that you mean to succeed in the widest application of that term, if you can. If therefore there be any truth in the assertion that "good work rarely sells," it would appear that I must, on behalf of certain of my brother dramatists, either bow my head in frank humiliation, or strike out some ingenious line of defence. ["Hear! Hear!">[

But, my lords and gentlemen, I shall, with your sanction, adopt neither of those expedients; I shall simply beg leave to acknowledge freely, to acknowledge without a blush, that what is known as popular success is, I believe, greatly coveted, sternly fought for, by even the most earnest of those writers who deal in the commodity labelled "modern British drama." And I would, moreover, submit that of all the affectations displayed by artists of any craft, the affectation of despising the approval and support of the great public is the most mischievous and misleading. [Cheers.] Speaking at any rate of dramatic art, I believe that its most substantial claim upon consideration rests in its power of legitimately interesting a great number of people. I believe this of any art; I believe it especially of the drama. Whatever distinction the dramatist may attain in gaining the attention of the so-called select few, I believe that his finest task is that of giving back to a multitude their own thoughts and conceptions, illuminated, enlarged, and if needful, purged, perfected, transfigured. The making of a play that shall be closely observant in its portrayal of character, moral in purpose, dignified in expression, stirring in its development, yet not beyond our possible experience of life; a drama, the unfolding of whose story shall be watched intently, responsively, night after night by thousands of men and women, necessarily of diversified temperaments, aims, and interests, men and women of all classes of society—surely the writing of that drama, the weaving of that complex fabric, is one of the most arduous of the tasks which art has set us; surely its successful accomplishment is one of the highest achievements of which an artist is capable.

I cannot claim—it would be immodest to make such a claim in speaking even of my brother dramatists—I cannot claim that the thorough achievement of such a task is a common one in this country. It is indeed a rare one in any country. But I can claim—I do claim for my fellow-workers that they are not utterly unequal to the demands made upon them, and that of late there have been signs of the growth of a thoughtful, serious drama in England. ["Hear! Hear!">[ I venture to think, too, that these signs are not in any sense exotics; I make bold to say that they do not consist of mere imitations of certain models; I submit that they are not as a few critics of limited outlook and exclusive enthusiasm would have us believe—I submit that they are not mere echoes of foreign voices. I submit that the drama of the present day is the natural outcome of our own immediate environment, of the life that closely surrounds us. And, perhaps, it would be only fair to allow that the reproaches which have been levelled for so long a period at the British theatre—the most important of these reproaches being that it possessed no drama at all—perhaps I say we may grant in a spirit of charity that these reproaches ought not to be wholly laid at the door of the native playwright. If it be true that he has been in the habit of producing plays invariably conventional in sentiment, trite in comedy, wrought on traditional lines, inculcating no philosophy, making no intellectual appeal whatever, may it not be that the attitude of the frequenters of the theatre has made it hard for him to do anything else? If he has until lately evaded in his theatrical work any attempt at a true criticism of life, if he has ignored the social, religious, and scientific problems of his day, may we not attribute this to the fact that the public have not been in the mood for these elements of seriousness in their theatrical entertainment, have not demanded these special elements of seriousness either in plays or in novels? But during recent years, the temper of the times has been changing; it is now the period of analysis, of general restless inquiry; and as this spirit creates a demand for freer expression on the part of our writers of books, so it naturally permits to our writers of plays a wider scope in the selection of subject, and calls for an accompanying effort of thought, a large freedom of utterance.

At this moment, perhaps, the difficulty of the dramatist lies less in paucity of subject, than in an almost embarrassing wealth of it. The life around us teems with problems of conduct and character, which may be said almost to cry aloud for dramatic treatment, and the temptation that besets the busy playwright of an uneasy, an impatient age, is that in yielding himself to the allurements of contemporary psychology, he is apt to forget that fancy and romance have also their immortal rights in the drama. ["Hear! Hear!">[ But when all is claimed for romance, we must remember that the laws of supply and demand assert themselves in the domain of dramatic literature as elsewhere. What the people, out of the advancement of their knowledge, out of the enlightenment of modern education, want, they will ask for; what they demand, they will have. And at the present moment the English people appear to be inclined to grant to the English dramatist the utmost freedom to deal with questions which have long been thought to be outside the province of the stage. I do not deplore, I rejoice that this is so, and I rejoice that to the dramatists of my day—to those at least who care to attempt to discharge it, falls the duty of striking from the limbs of English drama some of its shackles. ["Hear! Hear!">[ I know that the discharge of this duty is attended by one great, one special peril. And in thinking particularly of the younger generation of dramatists, those upon whom the immediate future of our drama depends, I cannot help expressing the hope that they will accept this freedom as a privilege to be jealously exercised, a privilege to be exercised in the spirit which I have been so presumptuous as to indicate.

It would be easy by a heedless employment of the latitude allowed us to destroy its usefulness, indeed to bring about a reaction which would deprive us of our newly granted liberty altogether. Upon this point the young, the coming dramatist would perhaps do well to ponder; he would do well, I think, to realize fully that freedom in art must be guarded by the eternal unwritten laws of good taste, morality, and beauty, he would do well to remember always that the real courage of the artist is in his capacity for restraint. [Cheers.] I am deeply sensible of the honor which has been done me in the association of my name with this toast, and I ask your leave to add one word—a word of regret at the absence to-night of my friend, Mr. Toole, an absence unhappily occasioned by an illness from which he is but slowly recovering. Mr. Toole charges me to express his deep disappointment at being prevented from attending this banquet. He does not, however, instruct me to say what I do say heartily—that Mr. Toole fitly represents in any assemblage, his own particular department of the drama; more fitly represents his department than I do mine. I know of no actor who stands higher in the esteem, who exists more durably in the affection of those who know him, than does John Lawrence Toole.

HORACE PORTER
Photogravure after a photograph from life

HORACE PORTER

MEN OF MANY INVENTIONS

[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-second annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1877. The President, William Borden, said: "Gentlemen, in giving you the next toast, I will call upon one whom we are always glad to listen to. I suppose you have been waiting to hear him, and are surprised that he comes so late in the evening; but I will tell you in confidence, he is put there at his own request. [Applause.] I give you the eleventh regular toast: 'Internal Improvements.'—The triumph of American invention. The modern palace runs on wheels.

'When thy car is loaden with [dead] heads,
Good Porter, turn the key.'

General Horace Porter will respond.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the New England Society:—I suppose it was a matter of necessity, calling on some of us from other States to speak for you to-night, for we have learned from the history of Priscilla and John Alden, that a New Englander may be too modest to speak for himself. [Laughter.] But this modesty, like some of the greater blessings of the war, has been more or less disguised to-night.

We have heard from the eloquent gentleman [Noah Porter, D.D.] on my left all about the good-fellowship and the still better fellowships in the rival universities of Harvard and Yale. We have heard from my sculptor friend [W. W. Story] upon the extreme right all about Hawthorne's tales, and all the great Storys that have emanated from Salem; but I am not a little surprised that in this age, when speeches are made principally by those running for office, you should call upon one engaged only in running cars, and more particularly upon one brought up in the military service, where the practice of running is not regarded as strictly professional. [Laughter.] It occurred to me some years ago that the occupation of moving cars would be fully as congenial as that of stopping bullets—as a steady business, so when I left Washington I changed my profession. I know how hard it is to believe that persons from Washington ever change their professions. [Laughter.] In this regal age, when every man is his own sovereign, somebody had to provide palaces, and, as royalty is not supposed to have any permanent abiding place in a country like this, it was thought best to put these palaces on wheels; and, since we have been told by reliable authority that "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," we thought it necessary to introduce every device to enable those crowned heads to rest as easily as possible. Of course we cannot be expected to do as much for the travelling public as the railway companies. They at times put their passengers to death. We only put them to sleep. We don't pretend that all the devices, patents, and inventions upon these cars are due to the genius of the management. Many of the best suggestions have come from the travellers themselves, especially New England travellers. [Laughter.]

Some years ago, when the bedding was not supposed to be as fat as it ought to be, and the pillows were accused of being constructed upon the hom[oe]opathic principle, a New Englander got on a car one night. Now, it is a remarkable fact that a New Englander never goes to sleep in one of these cars. He lies awake all night, thinking how he can improve upon every device and patent in sight. [Laughter.] He poked his head out of the upper berth at midnight, hailed the porter and said, "Say, have you got such a thing as a corkscrew about you?" "We don't 'low no drinkin' sperits aboa'd these yer cars, sah," was the reply. "'Tain't that," said the Yankee, "but I want to get hold onto one of your pillows that has kind of worked its way into my ear." [Loud laughter.] The pillows have since been enlarged.

I notice that, in the general comprehensiveness of the sentiment which follows this toast, you allude to that large and liberal class of patrons, active though defunct, known as "deadheads." It is said to be a quotation from Shakespeare. That is a revelation. It proves conclusively that Shakespeare must at one time have resided in the State of Missouri. It is well-known that the term was derived from a practice upon a Missouri railroad, where, by a decision of the courts, the railroad company had been held liable in heavy damages in case of accidents where a passenger lost an arm or a leg, but when he was killed outright his friends seldom sued, and he never did; and the company never lost any money in such cases. In fact, a grateful mother-in-law would occasionally pay the company a bonus. The conductors on that railroad were all armed with hatchets, and in case of an accident they were instructed to go around and knock every wounded passenger in the head, thus saving the company large amounts of money; and these were reported to the general office as "deadheads," and in railway circles the term has ever since been applied to passengers where no money consideration is involved. [Laughter.]

One might suppose, from the manifestations around these tables for the first three hours to-night, that the toast "Internal Improvements" referred more especially to the benefiting of the true inwardness of the New England men; but I see that the sentiment which follows contains much more than human stomachs, and covers much more ground than cars. It soars into the realms of invention. Unfortunately the genius of invention is always accompanied by the demon of unrest. A New England Yankee can never let well enough alone. I have always supposed him to be the person specially alluded to in Scripture as the man who has found out many inventions. If he were a Chinese Pagan, he would invent a new kind of Joss to worship every week. You get married and settle down in your home. You are delighted with everything about you. You rest in blissful ignorance of the terrible discomforts that surround you, until a Yankee friend comes to visit you. He at once tells you you mustn't build a fire in that chimney-place; that he knows the chimney will smoke; that if he had been there when it was built he could have shown you how to give a different sort of flare to the flue. You go to read a chapter in the family Bible. He tells you to drop that; that he has just written an enlarged and improved version, that can just put that old book to bed. [Laughter.] You think you are at least raising your children in general uprightness; but he tells you if you don't go out at once and buy the latest patented article in the way of steel leg-braces and put on the baby, the baby will grow up bow-legged. [Laughter.] He intimates, before he leaves, that if he had been around to advise you before you were married, he could have got you a much better wife. These are some of the things that reconcile a man to sudden death. [Continued laughter and applause.]

Such occurrences as these, and the fact of so many New Englanders being residents of this city and elsewhere, show that New England must be a good place—to come from.

At the beginning of the war we thought we could shoot people rapidly enough to satisfy our consciences, with single-loading rifles; but along came the inventive Yankee and produced revolvers and repeaters, and Gatling guns, and magazine guns—guns that carried a dozen shots at a time. I didn't wonder at the curiosity exhibited in this direction by a backwoods Virginian we captured one night. The first remark he made was, "I would like to see one of them thar new-fangled weepons of yourn. They tell me, sah, it's a most remarkable eenstrument. They say, sah, it's a kind o' repeatable, which you can load it up enough on Sunday to fiah it off all the rest of the week." [Laughter.] Then there was every sort of new invention in the way of bayonets. Our distinguished Secretary of State has expressed an opinion to-night that bayonets are bad things to sit down on. Well, they are equally bad things to be tossed up on. If he continues to hold up such terrors to the army, there will have to be important modifications in the uniform. A soldier won't know where to wear his breastplate. [Laughter.] But there have not only been inventions in the way of guns, but important inventions in the way of firing them. In these days a man drops on his back, coils himself up, sticks up one foot, and fires off his gun over the top of his great toe. It changes the whole stage business of battle. It used to be the man who was shot, but now it is the man who shoots that falls on his back and turns up his toes. [Laughter and applause.] The consequence is, that the whole world wants American arms, and as soon as they get them they go to war to test them. Russia and Turkey had no sooner bought a supply than they went to fighting. Greece got a schooner-load, and, although she has not yet taken a part in the struggle, yet ever since the digging up of the lost limbs of the Venus of Milo, it has been feared that this may indicate a disposition on the part of Greece generally to take up arms. [Laughter and applause.]

But there was one inveterate old inventor that you had to get rid of, and you put him on to us Pennsylvanians—Benjamin Franklin. [Laughter.] Instead of stopping in New York, in Wall Street, as such men usually do, he continued on into Pennsylvania to pursue his kiting operations. He never could let well enough alone. Instead of allowing the lightning to occupy the heavens as the sole theatre for its pyrotechnic displays, he showed it how to get down on to the earth, and then he invented the lightning-rod to catch it. Houses that had got along perfectly well for years without any lightning at all, now thought they must have a rod to catch a portion of it every time it came around. Nearly every house in the country was equipped with a lightning-rod through Franklin's direct agency. You, with your superior New England intelligence, succeeded in ridding yourselves of him; but in Pennsylvania, though we have made a great many laudable efforts in a similar direction, somehow or other we have never once succeeded in getting rid of a lightning-rod agent. [Laughter.] Then the lightning was introduced on the telegraph wires, and now we have the duplex and quadruplex instruments, by which any number of messages can be sent from opposite ends of the same wire at the same time, and they all appear to arrive at the front in good order. Electricians have not yet told us which messages lies down and which one steps over it, but they all seem to bring up in the right camp without confusion. I shouldn't wonder if this principle were introduced before long in the operating of railroads. We may then see trains running in opposite directions pass each other on a single-track road. [Laughter.]

There was a New England quartermaster in charge of railroads in Tennessee, who tried to introduce this principle during the war. The result was discouraging. He succeeded in telescoping two or three trains every day. He seemed to think that the easiest way to shorten up a long train and get it on a short siding was to telescope it. I have always thought that if that man's attention had been turned in an astronomical direction, he would have been the first man to telescope the satellites of Mars. [Laughter.]

The latest invention in the application of electricity is the telephone. By means of it we may be able soon to sit in our houses, and hear all the speeches, without going to the New England dinner. The telephone enables an orchestra to keep at a distance of miles away when it plays. If the instrument can be made to keep hand-organs at a distance, its popularity will be indescribable. The worst form I have ever known an invention to take was one that was introduced in a country town, when I was a boy, by a Yankee of musical turn of mind, who came along and taught every branch of education by singing. He taught geography by singing, and to combine accuracy of memory with patriotism, he taught the multiplication-table to the tune of Yankee Doodle. [Laughter.] This worked very well as an aid to the memory in school, but when the boys went into business it often led to inconvenience. When a boy got a situation in a grocery-store and customers were waiting for their change, he never could tell the product of two numbers without commencing at the beginning of the table and singing up till he had reached those numbers. In case the customer's ears had not received a proper musical training, this practice often injured the business of the store. [Laughter.]

It is said that the Yankee has always manifested a disposition for making money, but he never struck a proper field for the display of his genius until we got to making paper money. [Laughter.] Then every man who owned a printing-press wanted to try his hand at it. I remember that in Washington ten cents' worth of rags picked up in the street would be converted the next day into thousands of dollars.

An old mule and cart used to haul up the currency from the Printing Bureau to the door of the Treasury Department. Every morning, as regularly as the morning came, that old mule would back up and dump a cart-load of the sinews of war at the Treasury. [Laughter.] A patriotic son of Columbia, who lived opposite, was sitting on the doorstep of his house one morning, looking mournfully in the direction of the mule. A friend came along, and seeing that the man did not look as pleasant as usual, said to him, "What is the matter? It seems to me you look kind of disconsolate this morning." "I was just thinking," he replied, "what would become of this government if that old mule was to break down." [Laughter and applause.] Now they propose to give us a currency which is brighter and heavier, but not worth quite as much as the rags. Our financial horizon has been dimmed by it for some time, but there is a lining of silver to every cloud. We are supposed to take it with 412½ grains of silver—a great many more grains of allowance. [Laughter.] Congress seems disposed to pay us in the "dollar of our daddies"—in the currency which we were familiar with in our childhood. Congress seems determined to pay us off in something that is "child-like and Bland." [Laughter and applause.] But I have detained you too long already. [Cries of "No, no; go on!">[

Why, the excellent President of your Society has for the last five minutes been looking at me like a man who might be expected, at any moment, to break out in the disconsolate language of Bildad the Shuhite to the patriarch Job, "How long will it be ere ye make an end of words?" Let me say then, in conclusion, that, coming as I do from the unassuming State of Pennsylvania, and standing in the presence of the dazzling genius of New England, I wish to express the same degree of humility that was expressed by a Dutch Pennsylvania farmer in a railroad car, at the breaking out of the war. A New Englander came in who had just heard of the fall of Fort Sumter, and he was describing it to the farmer and his fellow-passengers. He said that in the fort they had an engineer from New England, who had constructed the traverses, and the embrasures, and the parapets in such a manner as to make everybody within the fort as safe as if he had been at home; and on the other side, the Southerners had an engineer who had been educated in New England, and he had, with his scientific attainments, succeeded in making the batteries of the bombarders as safe as any harvest field, and the bombardment had raged for two whole days, and the fort had been captured, and the garrison had surrendered, and not a man was hurt on either side. A great triumph for science, and a proud day for New England education. Said the farmer, "I suppose dat ish all right, but it vouldn't do to send any of us Pennsylvany fellers down dare to fight mit does pattles. Like as not ve vould shoost pe fools enough to kill somepody." [Loud applause and laughter, and cries of "Go on; go on.">[

HOW TO AVOID THE SUBJECT

[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-fifth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1880. "We have been told here to-night," said the President, James C. Carter, "that New York has been peopled by pilgrims of various races, and I propose, as our next toast, 'The Pilgrims of Every Race.' And I call upon our ever welcome friend, General Horace Porter, for a response.">[

Mr. President:—I am here, like the rest of your guests, to-night, in consequence of these notes of invitation that we have received. I know it is always more gratifying to an audience for speakers to be able to assure them, in the outset of their remarks, that they are here without notes; but such is not my case. I received the following:

"The Committee of Arrangements of the New England Society respectfully invite you to be present at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society, and the two hundred and sixtieth of the landing of the Pilgrims at Metropolitan Concert Hall." [Laughter.]

Such is the ignorance of those of us upon whom Providence did not sufficiently smile to permit us to be born in New England, that I never knew, until I received that note, anything about the landing of the Pilgrims at Metropolitan Concert Hall. This certainly will be sad news to communicate to those pious people who assembled in Brooklyn last night, and who still rest happy in the belief that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Church. [Laughter.] From the day they have chosen for the anniversary, it seems very evident that the Pilgrims must have landed somewhere one day before they struck Plymouth Rock. [Laughter.]

The poet Longfellow tells us, in one of his short poems, "learn to labor and to wait." I have labored through about twenty-five courses at this table, and then I have waited until this hour, in the hope that I might be spared the inevitable ordeal. But when the last plate had been removed, and your president, who is a stern man of duty, rapped upon the table, I saw there was no escape, and the time had come when he was going to present to you one of the most popular of all dishes at a New England banquet, tongue garnished with brains. He seems, following the late teachings of Harvard and Yale, to have invited the guests to enter for a sort of skull-race. [Laughter.] Now, I suppose that, in calling first upon those on his right and left, it is a matter of convenience for himself, and he has acted from the same motives that actuated a newly fledged dentist who, when his first patient applied, determined to exercise all that genius and understanding which Boston men generally exercise in the practice of their profession. The patient, coming from the country, told him he wanted two back teeth, which he pointed out to him, pulled. The dentist placed him in a chair, and in a few moments he had pulled out his two front teeth. The patient left the chair, and it occurred to him that the circumstance might be deemed of sufficient importance to call the dentist's attention to it. He said, "I told you to pull out these two back teeth." "Yes," said the dentist, "so you did; but I found that the front ones were kind of handier to get at." [Laughter and applause.] I suppose the reason your president called upon those of us nearest the platform to-night was because he found us a little handier to get at. But there is no use in speakers coming here and pleading want of preparation, because, doubtless, the New Englanders who expected to take part to-night might have been found at any time within the last six months sitting under blue glass to enlarge their ideas. [Laughter.] I ventured to say to the committee that, this being such a large room, some of your speakers might not have a high enough tone of voice to be heard at the other end. They looked unutterable things at me, as much as to say that at New England dinners I would find the speakers could not be otherwise than high-toned. [Laughter.]

The first New Englander I ever had the pleasure to listen to was a Pilgrim from Boston, who came out to the town in Pennsylvania, where I lived, to deliver a lecture. We all went to the lecture. We were told it was worth twice the price of admission to see that man wipe the corners of his mouth with his handkerchief before he commenced to speak. Well, he spoke for about two hours on the subject of the indestructibility of the absolute in connection with the mutability of mundane affairs. The pitch and variety of the nasal tones was wonderful, and he had an amazing command of the longest nouns and adjectives. It was a beautiful lecture. The town council tried to borrow it and have it set to music. It was one of those lectures that would pay a man to walk ten miles in wet feet—to avoid. After he got through, a gentleman in the audience, thinking it the part of good nature, stepped up and congratulated him upon his "great effort." The lecturer took it as a matter of course, and replied, "Oh, yes, you will find the whole atmosphere of Boston exhilarant with intellectual vitality." [Laughter.]

Now, if there is one thing which modern Pilgrims pride themselves upon more than another, it is in being the lineal descendants of those who came over by the Mayflower. To prove this, when you visit their homes, they bring forth family records in the shape of knives, forks, and spoons that were taken from the Mayflower. From the number of those articles I have seen, I have come to the conclusion that the captain of the Mayflower did not get back to England with a single article belonging to the ship that was not nailed fast to the deck. Such a dread have the people of that island of this wide-spread Puritanical kleptomania attaching to people coming here, that even as late as 1812 the commander of one of the British frigates took the wise precaution to nail his flag fast to the mast. [Laughter.]

We have heard that the Pilgrim fathers made amends for their shortcomings, from the fact of their having determined, after landing, to fill the meeting-houses and have worship there, and that brave men were detailed from the congregation to stand sentinels against a surprise by the Indians. It is even said that during those long and solemn sermons some of the members vied with each other in taking their chances with the Indians outside. Some of these acts of heroism re-appear in the race. I have been told that some of the lineal descendants of these hardy men that paced up and down in front of the meeting-house have recently been seen pacing up and down all night in front of the Globe Theatre, in Boston, ready in the morning to take their chance of the nearest seat for Sara Bernhardt's performance. [Laughter.]

Now, sir, the New Englanders are eminently reformers. I have never seen anything they did not attempt to reform. They even introduced the Children of the Sun to the shoe-shops of Lynn, with the alleged purpose of instructing the Chinese in letters, yet recently in Massachusetts they themselves showed such lamentable ignorance as not to know a Chinese letter when they saw it. [Laughter.] But the poor Chinese have been driven away. They have been driven away from many places by that formidable weapon—the only weapon which Dennis Kearney has ever been able to use against them—the Chinese must-get. [Laughter.]

I have never seen but one thing the Yankee could not reform, and that was the line of battle at Bull Run, and I call upon Pilgrim Sherman as a witness to this. He was there, and knows. Bulls have given as much trouble to Yankees as to Irishmen. Bulls always seem to be associated with Yankee defeat, from the time of Bull Run down to Sitting Bull, and I will call upon Pilgrim Miles as a witness to that.

Now, gentlemen, let me say that the presence of General Grant to-night will enable you to settle forever that question which has vexed the New England mind all the period during which he was making his triumphal journey round the globe—the question as to whether, in his intercourse with kings and potentates, he was always sure to keep in sufficient prominence the merits of the Pilgrim fathers, and more especially of their descendants. I have no doubt he did. I have no doubt that to those crowned heads, with numerous recalcitrant subjects constantly raising Cain in their dominions, the recital of how the Pilgrims went voluntarily to a distant country to live, where their scalps were in danger, must have been a pleasant picture. [Laughter.]

If I am to have any reputation for brevity I must now close these remarks. I remember a lesson in brevity I once received in a barber's shop. An Irishman came in, and the unsteady gait with which he approached the chair showed that he had been imbibing of the produce of the still run by North Carolina Moonshiners. He wanted his hair cut, and while the barber was getting him ready, went off into a drunken sleep. His head got bobbing from one side to the other, and at length the barber, in making a snip, cut off the lower part of his ear. The barber jumped about and howled, and a crowd of neighbors rushed in. Finally the demonstration became so great that it began to attract the attention of the man in the chair, and he opened one eye and said, "Wh-wh-at's the matther wid yez?" "Good Lord!" said the barber, "I've cut off the whole lower part of your ear." "Have yez? Ah, thin, go on wid yer bizness—it was too long, anyhow!" [Laughter.] If I don't close this speech, some one of the company will be inclined to remark that it has been too long, anyhow. [Cheers and laughter.]

A TRIP ABROAD WITH DEPEW

[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-seventh annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1882. Josiah M. Fiske, the President, occupied the chair and called upon General Porter to respond to the toast: "The Embarkation of the Pilgrims.">[

Gentlemen:—Last summer two pilgrims might have been seen embarking from the port of New York to visit the land from which the Pilgrim Fathers once embarked. One was the speaker who just sat down [Chauncey M. Depew], and the other the speaker who has just arisen. I do not know why we chose that particular time. Perhaps Mr. Choate, with his usual disregard of the more accurate bounds of veracity, would have you believe that we selected that time because it was a season when there was likely to be a general vacation from dinners here. [Laughter.] Our hopes of pleasure abroad had not risen to any dizzy height. We did not expect that the land which so discriminating a band as the Pilgrim Fathers had deliberately abandoned, and preferred New England thereto, could be a very engaging country. We expected to feel at home there upon the general principle that the Yankees never appear so much at home as when they are visiting other people. [Laughter.]

I have noticed that Americans have a desire to go to Europe, and I have observed, especially, that those who have certain ambitions with regard to public life think that they ought to cross the ocean; that crossing the water will add to their public reputations, particularly when they think how it added to the reputation of George Washington even crossing the Delaware River. [Laughter and applause.] The process is very simple. You get aboard a steamer, and when you get out of sight of land you suddenly realize that the ship has taken up seriously its corkscrew career through the sea. Certain gastronomic uncertainties follow. You are sailing under the British flag. You always knew that "Britannia ruled the waves;" but the only trouble with her now is that she don't appear to rule them straight. [Laughter.] Then you lean up against the rail; soon you begin to look about as much discouraged as a Brooklyn Alderman in contempt of court. Your more experienced and sympathizing friends tell you that it will soon pass over, and it does. You even try to beguile your misery with pleasant recollections of Shakespeare. The only line that seems to come to your memory is the advice of Lady Macbeth—"To bed, to bed!"—and when you are tucked away in your berth and the ship is rolling at its worst, your more advisory friends look in upon you, and they give you plenty of that economical advice that was given to Joseph's brother, not to "fall out by the way." [Laughter.]

For several days you find your stomach is about in the condition of the tariff question in the present Congress—likely to come up any minute. This is particularly hard upon those who had been brought up in the army, whose previous experience in this direction had been confined entirely to throwing up earthworks. [Laughter.] You begin to realize how naval officers sometimes have even gone so far as to throw up their commissions. If Mr. Choate had seen Mr. Depew and myself under these circumstances he would not have made those disparaging remarks which he uttered to-night about the engorgement of our stomachs. If he had turned those stomachs wrong side out and gazed upon their inner walls through that opera-glass with which he has been looking so intently lately upon Mrs. Langtry, he would have found that there was not even the undigested corner of a carbuncular potato to stop the pyloric orifice; he would have found upon those inner walls not a morsel of those things which perish with using. [Laughter.]

But Mr. Choate must have his joke. He is a professional lawyer, and I have frequently observed that lawyers' jokes are like an undertaker's griefs—strictly professional. You begin now to sympathize with everybody that ever went to sea. You think of the Pilgrim Fathers during the tempestuous voyage in the Mayflower. You reflect how fully their throats must have been occupied, and you can see how they originated the practice of speaking through their noses. [Great laughter and applause.] Why, you will get so nauseated before the trip is over at the very sight of the white caps that you can't look at the heads of the French nurses in Paris without feeling seasick. There are the usual "characters" about. There is the customary foreign spinster of uncertain age that has been visiting here, who regales you with stories of how in New York she had twelve men at her feet. Subsequent inquiry proves that they were chiropodists. [Laughter.]

And then you approach Ireland. You have had enough of the ocean wave, and you think you will stop there. I have no doubt everybody present, after hearing from the lips of the distinguished chaplain on my right as to the character of the men who come from that country, will hereafter always want to stop there. And when you land at Queenstown you are taken for an American suspect. They think you are going to join the Fenian army. They look at you as if you intended to go forth from that ship as the dove went forth from the ark, in search of some green thing. You assure them that the only manner in which you can be compared with that dove is in the general peacefulness of your intentions. Then you go wandering around by the shores of the Lakes of Killarney and the Gap of Dunloe, that spot where the Irishman worked all day for the agent of an absentee landlord on the promise of getting a glass of grog. At night the agent brought out the grog to him, and the Irishman tasted it, and he said to the agent, "Which did you put in first, the whiskey or the water?" "Oh," said he, "the whiskey." "Ah, ha! Well, maybe I'll come to it by and by." [Laughter.] You look around upon the army, the constabulary, the police, and you begin to think that Ireland is a good deal like our own city of Troy, where there are two police forces on duty—that it is governed a great deal. You can't help thinking of the philosophical remark made by that learned Chinese statesman, Chin Lan Pin, when he was here at the time Dennis Kearney was having an unpleasantness with the Orientals. A man said to him, "Your people will have to get out of here; the Irish carry too much religion around to associate with Pagans." "Yes," said Chin Lan Pin, "we have determined to go. Our own country is too overcrowded now, we can't go there, and I think we'll go to Ireland." Said the man, "To Ireland? You will be jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire." Said Chin Lan Pin, "I have travelled in your country and all around a good deal, and I have come to the conclusion that nowadays Ireland is about the only country that is not governed by the Irish." [Applause and laughter.]

Then you go to Scotland. You want to learn from personal observation whether the allegation is true that the Scotch are a people who are given to keeping the Sabbath day—and everything else they can lay their hands on. [Laughter.] You have heard that it is a musical country, and you immediately find that it is. You hardly land there before you hear the bag-pipes. You hear that disheartening music, and you sit down and weep. You know that there is only one other instrument in the world that will produce such strains, and that is a steam piano on a Mississippi steamboat when the engineer is drunk. And in this musical country they tell you in song about the "Lassies Comin' Through the Rye;" but they never tell you about the rye that goes through the "laddies." And they will tell you in song about "bodies meeting bodies coming through the rye," and you tell them that the practice is entirely un-American; that in America bodies usually are impressed with the solemnity of the occasion and the general propriety of the thing, and lie quiet until the arrival of the coroner, but that the coroners are disputing so much in regard to their jurisdiction, and so many delays occur in issuing burial permits, that, altogether, they are making the process so tedious and disagreeable that nowadays in America hardly anybody cares to die. You tell them this in all seriousness, and you will see from their expression that they receive it in the same spirit. [Laughter.]

Then you go to England. You have seen her colonies forming a belt around the circle of the earth, on which the sun never sets. And now you have laid eyes on the mother-country, on which it appears the sun never rises. Then you begin to compare legislative bodies, Parliament and Congress. You find that in Parliament the members sit with their hats on and cough, while in Congress the members sit with their hats off and spit. I believe that no international tribunal of competent jurisdiction has yet determined which nation has the advantage over the other in these little legislative amenities. And, as you cross the English Channel, the last thing you see is the English soldier with his blue trousers and red coat, and the first you see on landing in France is the French soldier with his red trousers and blue coat, and you come to the conclusion that if you turn an English soldier upside down he is, uniformly speaking, a Frenchman. [Laughter.]

We could not tarry long in France; it was the ambition of my travelling companion to go to Holland, and upon his arrival there the boyish antics that were performed by my travelling companion in disporting himself upon the ancestral ground were one of the most touching and playful sights ever witnessed in the open air. [Laughter.] Nobody knows Mr. Depew who has not seen him among the Dutch. He wanted especially to go to Holland, because he knew the Pilgrims had gone from there. They did not start immediately from England to come here. Before taking their leap across the ocean they stepped back on to Holland to get a good ready. [Laughter.] It is a country where water mingles with everything except gin—a country that has been so effectually diked by the natives and damned by tourists. [Laughter.] There is one peculiar and especial advantage that you can enjoy in that country in going out to a banquet like this. It is that rare and peculiar privilege which you cannot expect to enjoy in a New England Society even when Mr. Choate addresses you—the privilege of never being able to understand a word that is said by the speakers after dinner. But we had to hurry home. We were Republicans, and there was going to be an election in November. We didn't suppose that our votes would be necessary at all; still it would look well, you know, to come home and swell the Republican majority. [Laughter.] Now when you get on that ship to come back, you begin for the first time to appreciate the advantage of the steam lanes that are laid down by the steamship company, by which a vessel goes to Europe one season over one route and comes back another season over another route, so that a man who goes to Europe one season and comes back another is treated to another change of scenery along the entire route. [Laughter.]

As I said, we thought it was the thing for Republicans to come home to vote. At the polls we found it was rather the thing for them to stay away. But we acted upon that impulse which often seizes upon the human breast—the desire to come home to die. I never for one moment realized the overwhelming defeat that we were going to suffer until one day Mr. Choate confided to me his determination to speak for the Citizens' candidate. [Loud laughter.] And this left us the day after that election and left the other members of our party standing around the highways and byways with that one supplication upon each one's lips: "Lord, be merciful unto me a Republican and a sinner." [Loud applause and laughter.]

WOMAN

[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-eighth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1883. The President, Marvelle W. Cooper, in introducing the speaker, arose, mentioned the single word "Woman"—and said: "This toast will be responded to by one whom you know well, General Horace Porter.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—When this toast was proposed to me, I insisted that it ought to be responded to by a bachelor, by some one who is known as a ladies' man; but in these days of female proprietorship it is supposed that a married person is more essentially a ladies' man than anybody else, and it was thought that only one who had had the courage to address a lady could have the courage, under these circumstances, to address the New England Society. [Laughter.]

The toast, I see, is not in its usual order to-night. At public dinners this toast is habitually placed last on the list. It seems to be a benevolent provision of the Committee on Toasts in order to give man in replying to Woman one chance at least in life of having the last word. [Laughter.] At the New England dinners, unfortunately the most fruitful subject of remark regarding woman is not so much her appearance as her disappearance. I know that this was remedied a few years ago, when this grand annual gastronomic high carnival was held in the Metropolitan Concert Hall. There ladies were introduced into the galleries to grace the scene by their presence; and I am sure the experiment was sufficiently encouraging to warrant repetition, for it was beautiful to see the descendants of the Pilgrims sitting with eyes upturned in true Puritanic sanctity; it was encouraging to see the sons of those pious sires devoting themselves, at least for one night, to setting their affections upon "things above." [Applause and laughter.]

Woman's first home was in the Garden of Eden. There man first married woman. Strange that the incident should have suggested to Milton the "Paradise Lost." [Laughter.] Man was placed in a profound sleep, a rib was taken from his side, a woman was created from it, and she became his wife. Evil-minded persons constantly tell us that thus man's first sleep became his last repose. But if woman be given at times to that contrariety of thought and perversity of mind which sometimes passeth our understanding, it must be recollected in her favor that she was created out of the crookedest part of man. [Laughter.]

The Rabbins have a different theory regarding creation. They go back to the time when we were all monkeys. They insist that man was originally created with a kind of Darwinian tail, and that in the process of evolution this caudal appendage was removed and created into woman. This might better account for those Caudle lectures which woman is in the habit of delivering, and some color is given to this theory, from the fact that husbands even down to the present day seem to inherit a general disposition to leave their wives behind. [Laughter.]

The first woman, finding no other man in that garden except her own husband, took to flirting even with the Devil. [Laughter.] The race might have been saved much tribulation if Eden had been located in some calm and tranquil land—like Ireland. There would at least have been no snakes there to get into the garden. Now woman in her thirst after knowledge, showed her true female inquisitiveness in her cross-examination of the serpent, and, in commemoration of that circumstance, the serpent seems to have been curled up and used in nearly all languages as a sign of interrogation. Soon the domestic troubles of our first parents began. The first woman's favorite son was killed with a club, and married women even to this day seem to have an instinctive horror of clubs. The first woman learned that it was Cain that raised a club. The modern woman has learned it is a club that raises cain. Yet, I think, I recognize faces here to-night that I see behind the windows of Fifth Avenue clubs of an afternoon, with their noses pressed flat against the broad plate glass, and as woman trips along the sidewalk, I have observed that these gentlemen appear to be more assiduously engaged than ever was a government scientific commission in taking observations upon the transit of Venus. [Laughter.]

Before those windows passes many a face fairer than that of the Ludovician Juno or the Venus of Medici. There is the Saxon blonde with the deep blue eye, whose glances return love for love, whose silken tresses rest upon her shoulders like a wealth of golden fleece, each thread of which looks like a ray of the morning sunbeam. There is the Latin brunette with the deep, black, piercing eye, whose jetty lashes rest like silken fringe upon the pearly texture of her dainty cheek, looking like raven's wings spread out upon new-fallen snow.

And yet the club man is not happy. As the ages roll on woman has materially elevated herself in the scale of being. Now she stops at nothing. She soars. She demands the coeducation of the sexes. She thinks nothing of delving into the most abstruse problems of the higher branches of analytical science. She can cipher out the exact hour of the night when her husband ought to be home, either according to the old or the recently adopted method of calculating time. I never knew of but one married man who gained any decided domestic advantage by this change in our time. He was an habitué of a club situated next door to his house. His wife was always upbraiding him for coming home too late at night. Fortunately, when they made this change of time, they placed one of those meridians from which our time is calculated right between the club and his house. [Laughter.] Every time he stepped across that imaginary line it set him back a whole hour in time. He found that he could then leave his club at one o'clock and get home to his wife at twelve; and for the first time in twenty years peace reigned around that hearthstone.

Woman now revels even in the more complicated problems of mathematical astronomy. Give a woman ten minutes and she will describe a heliocentric parallax of the heavens. Give her twenty minutes and she will find astronomically the longitude of a place by means of lunar culminations. Give that same woman an hour and a half, with the present fashions, and she cannot find the pocket in her dress.

And yet man's admiration for woman never flags. He will give her half his fortune; he will give her his whole heart; he seems always willing to give her everything that he possesses, except his seat in a horse-car. [Laughter.]

Every nation has had its heroines as well as its heroes. England, in her wars, had a Florence Nightingale; and the soldiers in the expression of their adoration, used to stoop and kiss the hem of her garment as she passed. America, in her war, had a Dr. Mary Walker. Nobody ever stooped to kiss the hem of her garment—because that was not exactly the kind of garment she wore. [Laughter.] But why should man stand here and attempt to speak for woman, when she is so abundantly equipped to speak for herself. I know that is the case in New England; and I am reminded, by seeing General Grant here to-night, of an incident in proof of it which occurred when he was making that marvellous tour through New England, just after the war. The train stopped at a station in the State of Maine. The General was standing on the rear platform of the last car. At that time, as you know, he had a great reputation for silence—for it was before he had made his series of brilliant speeches before the New England Society. They spoke of his reticence—a quality which New Englanders admire so much—in others. [Laughter.] Suddenly there was a commotion in the crowd, and as it opened a large, tall, gaunt-looking woman came rushing toward the car, out of breath. Taking her spectacles off from the top of her head and putting them on her nose, she put her arms akimbo, and looking up, said: "Well, I've just come down here a runnin' nigh onto two mile, right on the clean jump, just to get a look at the man that lets the women do all the talkin'." [Laughter.]

The first regular speaker of the evening [William M. Evarts] touched upon woman, but only incidentally, only in reference to Mormonism and that sad land of Utah, where a single death may make a dozen widows. [Laughter.]

A speaker at the New England dinner in Brooklyn last night [Henry Ward Beecher] tried to prove that the Mormons came originally from New Hampshire and Vermont. I know that a New Englander sometimes in the course of his life marries several times; but he takes the precaution to take his wives in their proper order of legal succession. The difference is that he drives his team of wives tandem, while the Mormon insists upon driving his abreast. [Laughter.]

But even the least serious of us, Mr. President, have some serious moments in which to contemplate the true nobility of woman's character. If she were created from a rib, she was made from that part which lies nearest a man's heart.

It has been beautifully said that man was fashioned out of the dust of the earth while woman was created from God's own image. It is our pride in this land that woman's honor is her own best defence; that here female virtue is not measured by the vigilance of detective nurses; that here woman may walk throughout the length and the breadth of this land, through its highways and its byways, uninsulted, unmolested, clothed in the invulnerable panoply of her own woman's virtue; that even in places where crime lurks and vice prevails in the haunts of our great cities, and in the rude mining gulches of the West, owing to the noble efforts of our women, and the influence of their example, there are raised up, even there, girls who are good daughters, loyal wives, and faithful mothers. They seem to rise in those rude surroundings as grows the pond lily, which is entangled by every species of rank growth, environed by poison, miasma and corruption, and yet which rises in the beauty of its purity and lifts its fair face unblushing to the sun.

No one who has witnessed the heroism of America's daughters in the field should fail to pay a passing tribute to their worth. I do not speak alone of those trained Sisters of Charity, who in scenes of misery and woe seem Heaven's chosen messengers on earth; but I would speak also of those fair daughters who come forth from the comfortable firesides of New England and other States, little trained to scenes of suffering, little used to the rudeness of a life in camp, who gave their all, their time, their health, and even life itself, as a willing sacrifice in that cause which then moved the nation's soul. As one of these, with her graceful form, was seen moving silently through the darkened aisles of an army hospital, as the motion of her passing dress wafted a breeze across the face of the wounded, they felt that their parched brows had been fanned by the wings of the angel of mercy.

Ah! Mr. President, woman is after all a mystery. It has been well said, that woman is the great conundrum of the nineteenth century; but if we cannot guess her, we will never give her up. [Applause.]

FRIENDLINESS OF THE FRENCH

[Speech of Horace Porter 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 statue of "Liberty Enlightening the World." Charles Stewart Smith, vice-President of the Chamber, proposed the following toast: "The French Alliance; initiated by noble and sympathetic Frenchmen; grandly maintained by the blood and treasure of France; now newly cemented by the spontaneous action of the French people; may it be perpetuated through all time." In concluding his introduction, the Chairman said: "We shall hear from our friend, General Porter.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—[3]Voulez-vous me permettre de faire mes remarques en français? Si je m'addresse à vous dans une langue que je ne parle pas, et que personne ici ne comprends, j'en impute la faute entièrement à l'example malheureux de Monsieur Coudert. Ce que je veux dire est que—this is the fault of Coudert. He has been switching the languages round in every direction, and has done all he could to sidetrack English.

What I mean to say is, that if I were to mention in either language one tithe of the subjects which should be alluded to to-night in connection with the French Alliance, I should keep you all here until the rising of another sun, and these military gentlemen around me, from abroad, in attempting to listen to it, would have to exhibit what Napoleon considered the highest quality in a soldier: "Two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage." [Applause.]

One cannot speak of the French Alliance without recalling the services of Benjamin Franklin in connection with it. When he was in Paris and was received in a public assemblage, not understanding anything of the language, and believing, very properly, that it was a good thing always to follow the example of the French in society, he vociferously applauded every time the rest of them applauded, and he did not learn until it was all over that the applause was, in each instance, elicited by a reference to his name and distinguished public services, and so, during the eloquent speech of our friend, Mr. Coudert, I could not but look upon the American members of this assemblage, and notice that they applauded most vociferously when they supposed that the speaker was alluding particularly to their arduous services as members of the Chamber of Commerce. [Laughter.]

I congratulate our friends from abroad, who do not understand our language, upon the very great privilege they enjoy here to-night, a privilege that is not enjoyed by Americans or by Englishmen who come among us. It is the rare and precious privilege at an American banquet of not being expected to pay the slightest attention to the remarks of the after-dinner speakers. [Laughter.] If there is one thing I feel I can enjoy more than another, it is standing upon firm land and speaking to those whose life is on the sea, to these "toilers of the deep." There is in this a sort of poetic justice, a sentimental retribution; for on their element I am never able to stand up, and, owing to certain gastronomic uncertainties, my feelings on that element are just the reverse of those I experience at the present moment. For in the agonies of a storm I have so much on my mind that I have nothing whatever on my stomach. But after this feast to-night I have so much on my stomach that I fear I have nothing whatever on my mind. And when I next go to sea I want to go as the great statue of Liberty: first being taken all apart with the pieces carefully stored amidships. [Laughter.]

While they were building the statue in France, we were preparing slowly for the pedestal. You cannot hurry constructions of this kind; they must have time to settle. We long ago prepared the stones for that pedestal, and we first secured the services of the most useful, most precious stone of all—the Pasha from Egypt. [Laughter.] We felt that his services in Egypt had particularly fitted him for this task. There is a popular belief in this country, which I have never once heard contradicted, that he took a prominent part in laying the foundations of the great Pyramids, that he assisted in placing the Egyptian Sphinx in position, and that he even had something to do with Cleopatra's Needle. [Laughter.]

When Napoleon was in Egypt he said to his people: "Forty centuries are looking down upon you." We say to General Stone, as he stands upon that pedestal: "Fifty-five millions of people are looking up to you! and some of them have contributed to the fund." [Laughter.] When we read of the size of that statue, we were troubled, particularly when we saw the gigantic dimensions of the Goddess's nose, but our minds were relieved when we found that that nose was to face southward, and not in the direction of Hunter's Point. [Laughter and applause.]

Monsieur le President:—[4]Quand le c[oe]ur est plein il deborde, et ce soir mon c[oe]ur est plein de la France, mais—Oh, there I go, again wandering with Coudert away from the mother-tongue. [Laughter.]

I have no doubt all the gentlemen here to-night of an American turn of mind wish that the mantle of Elijah of old had fallen upon the shoulders of Mr. Coudert, for then he might have stood some chance of being translated. [Laughter.] A few years ago distinguished military men from abroad came here to participate in the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the surrender of Yorktown by Lord Cornwallis. They were invited here by the Government, the descendants of all distinguished foreigners, to participate in that historical event, except the descendants of Lord Cornwallis. [Laughter.] And if our French guests had been here then, and had gone down and seen Yorktown, they would not have wondered that Cornwallis gave up that place; their only astonishment would have been that he consented to remain there as long as he did. [Laughter.]

But, Mr. President, upon a subject fraught with so much interest to us all, and with so much dignity, let me, before I close, speak a few words in all seriousness. If we would properly appreciate the depth and the lasting nature of that traditional friendship between the two nations, which is the child of the French Alliance, we must consider the conditions of history at the time that alliance was formed. For years a desperate war had been waged between the most powerful of nations and the weakest of peoples, struggling to become a nation. The American coffers had been drained, the spirit of the people was waning, hope was fading, and patriot hearts who had never despaired before were now bowed in the dust. The trials of the Continental army had never been matched since the trade of war began. Their sufferings had never been equalled since the days of the early Christian martyrs. While courage still animated the hearts of the people, and their leaders never took counsel of their fears, yet a general gloom had settled down upon the land. Then we saw a light breaking in upon our eastern horizon, a light which grew in brilliancy until it became to us a true bow of promise. That light came from the brave land of France. [Enthusiastic cheering.]

Then hope raised our standards; then joy brightened our crest; then it was, that when we saw Gates and Lincoln and Greene and Washington, we saw standing shoulder to shoulder with them, D'Estaing, De Grasse, Rochambeau, and that princely hero [pointing to a portrait against the wall], that man who was the embodiment of gallantry, of liberty, of chivalry, the immortal Lafayette. [Loud cheers.] Then the two armies moved hand-in-hand to fight the common foe. They vied nobly with each other and, by an unselfish emulation and by a generous rivalry, showed the world that the path of ambition had not become so narrow that two could not walk it abreast. [Cries of "Good! Good!" and cheers.]

Two treaties were made; one was military in its terms, and was called the Defensive Treaty. The other we recall with great interest in the presence of an assemblage of business men such as this. The second treaty was called the Treaty of Friendship and Commerce. The results of those treaties have passed into history. That alliance taught many worthy lessons. It taught that tyranny you may find anywhere; it is a weed that grows on any soil. But if you want liberty, you must go forth and fight for it. [Applause.] It taught us those kindly sentiments between nations which warm the heart, liberalize the mind, and animate the courage. It taught men that true liberty can turn blind submission into rational obedience. It taught men, as Hall has said, that true liberty smothers the voice of kings, dispels the mists of superstition, and by its magic touch kindles the rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, the flame of eloquence, pours into our laps opulence and art, and embellishes life with innumerable institutions and improvements which make it one grand theatre of wonders. [Cheers.]

And now that this traditional friendship between the two nations is to be ever cemented by that generous gift of our ally, that colossal statue, which so nobly typifies the great principle for which our fathers fought, may the flame which is to arise from its uplifted arm light the path of liberty to all who follow in its ways, until human rights and human freedom become the common heritage of mankind.

Ariosto tells us a pretty story of a gentle fairy, who, by a mysterious law of her nature, was at certain periods compelled to assume the form of a serpent and to crawl upon the ground. Those who in the days of her disguise spurned her and trod upon her were forever debarred from a participation in those gifts that it was her privilege to bestow, but to those who, despite her unsightly aspect, comforted her and encouraged her and aided her, she appeared in the beautiful and celestial form of her true nature, followed them ever after with outstretched arms, lavished upon them her gifts, and filled their homes with happiness and wealth.

And so, when America lay prostrate upon the ground, after throwing off the British yoke, yet not having established a government which the nations of the earth were willing to recognize, then it was that France sympathized with her, and comforted her, and aided her, and now that America has arisen in her strength and stands erect before the nations of the world, in the true majesty and glory of that form in which God intended she should thenceforth tread the earth, she always stands with arms outstretched towards France in token of the great gratitude she bears her. [Applause and cheers.]

THE CITIZEN SOLDIER

[Speech of Horace Porter at the eighth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1887. The President, John Winslow, proposed the toast, "The Citizen Soldier," saying: "The next regular toast is 'The Citizen Soldier.' I have already referred to the embarrassment which a presiding officer feels in introducing a well-known and distinguished man. If I refer to the distinguished gentleman who is to respond to this toast as a pathetic speaker, you will immediately recall some of his fine humor; and if I should speak of him as a humorous speaker you will recall some pathetic sentence; so it is better to let General Horace Porter speak for himself.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—After General Sherman the deluge. I am the deluge. It is fortunate for me this evening that I come after General Sherman only in the order of speech, and not in the order of dinner, for a person once said in Georgia—and he was a man who knew regarding the March to the Sea—that anyone who came after General Sherman wouldn't find much to eat. Having been brought up in Pennsylvania, I listened with great interest to General Sherman's reference to the proposed names of the States in the country. He mentioned one as "Sylvania." That was evidently a dead letter till we put the Pen(n) to it. [Laughter.] I noticed that President Dwight listened with equal interest to the statement of that expedition which went West and carried such a large quantity of whiskey with it, in consequence of which the first University was founded. [Laughter.]

But, gentlemen, when I am requested in such an august presence as this to speak of the "Citizen Soldier," I cannot help feeling like the citizen soldier of Hibernian extraction who came up, in the streets of New York, to a general officer and held out his hand for alms, evidently wanting to put himself temporarily on the General's pay-roll, as it were. The General said: "Why don't you work?" He said he couldn't on account of his wounds. The General asked where he was wounded. He said, "In the retrate at Bull Run." "But whereabouts on your person?" He replied, "You'll notice the scar here." [Pointing to his face.] "Now, how could you get wounded in the face while on the retreat?" "I had the indiscrition to look back." [Laughter.] "Well," said the General, "that wouldn't prevent your working." "Ah," answered the man, "the worst wound is here." [Left breast.] The General said, "Oh, that's all bosh; if the bullet had gone in there it would have passed through your heart and killed you." "I beg your pardon, sir, at that moment me heart was in me mouth!" [Great laughter.] So if I had known that such an early attack was to be made upon me here to-night, I should have thrown my pickets farther out to the front, in hopes of getting sufficient information to beat a hasty retreat; for if there is one lesson better than another taught by the war, it is that a man may retreat successfully from almost any position, if he only starts in time. [Laughter.]

In alluding to the Citizen Soldier I desire it to be distinctly understood that I make no reference to that organization of Home Guards once formed in Kansas, where the commanding officer tried to pose as one of the last surviving heroes of the Algerine War, when he had never drawn a sword but once and that was in a raffle, and where his men had determined to emulate the immortal example of Lord Nelson. The last thing that Nelson did was to die for his country, and this was the last thing they ever intended to do. [Laughter.]

I allude to that Citizen Soldier who breathed the spirit of old Miles Standish, but had the additional advantage of always being able to speak for himself; who came down to the front with hair close cropped, clean shaven, newly baptized, freshly vaccinated, pocket in his shirt, musket on his shoulder, ready to do anything, from squirrel hunting up to manslaughter in the first degree. He felt that with a single rush he could carry away two spans of barbed-wire fence without scratching himself. If too short-sighted to see the enemy, he would go nearer; if lame, he would make this an excuse to disobey an order to retreat; if he had but one stocking, he would take it off his foot in wet weather and wrap it around the lock of his gun; and as to marching, he would keep on the march as long as he had upper garments enough left to wad a gun or nether garments enough to flag a train with. [Laughter.] He was the last man in a retreat, the first man in an enemy's smoke-house. When he wanted fuel he took only the top rail of the fence, and kept on taking the top rail till there was none of that fence left standing. The New England soldier knew everything that was between the covers of books, from light infantry tactics to the new version of the Scriptures. One day, on a forced march in Virginia, a New England man was lagging behind, when his colonel began stirring him up and telling him he ought to make better time. He at once started to argue the case with the colonel, and said: "See here, colonel, I've studied the tactics and hev learned from 'em how to form double column at half distance, but I hev never yet learned how to perform double distance on half rations." [Laughter.]

But, Mr. President, this is a subject which should receive a few serious words from me before I sit down. It was not until the black war cloud of rebellion broke upon us that we really appreciated the Citizen Soldier at his full worth. But when the country was struck we saw, pouring down from the hill tops, and surging up from the valleys, that magnificent army of citizen soldiery, at the sight of which all Christendom stood amazed. They gathered until the streets of every hamlet in the land were lighted by the glitter of their steel and resounded to the tread of their marching columns. It seemed that the middle wall of partition was broken down between all classes, that we were living once more in the heroic ages, that there had returned to us the brave days of old, when "none were for a party but all were for the state." [Applause.] And then that unbroken line swept down to the front. But in that front what scenes were met! There was the blistering Southern sun; swamps which bred miasma and death; rivers with impassable approaches; heights to be scaled, batteries to be captured, the open plain with guns in front and guns in flank, which swept those devoted columns until human blood flowed as freely as festal wine; there was the dense forest, the under-growth barring the passage of man, the upper-growth shutting out the light of heaven; ammunition-trains exploding, the woods afire, the dead roasted in the flames, the wounded dragging their mangled limbs after them to escape its ravages, until it seemed that Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth. [Applause.]

And when success perched upon our banners, when the bugle sounded the glad notes of final and triumphal victory, the disbanding of that army was even more marvellous than its organization. It disappeared, not as the flood of waters of the spring, which rend the earth, and leave havoc and destruction in their course; but rather, as was once eloquently said, like the snows of winter under a genial sun, leaving the face of Nature untouched, and the handiwork of man undisturbed; not injuring, but moistening and fructifying the earth. [Applause.] But the mission of the Citizen Soldier did not end there, it has not ended yet. We have no European enemy to dread, it is true; we have on our own continent no foeman worthy of our steel; for, unlike the lands of Europe, this land is not cursed by propinquity. But we must look straight in the face the fact that we have in our midst a discontented class, repudiated alike by employers and by honest laborers. They come here from the effete monarchies of the old world, rave about the horrors of tyrannous governments, and make no distinction between them and the blessings of a free and independent government. They have, but a little while ago, created scenes in which mob-law ruled the hour, riot held its sanguinary sway, and the earth of our streets tasted the blood of our citizens. When such scenes as these occur, we cannot wait for aid from the crews of vessels in the offing, we cannot look for succor to the army garrisons of distant forts; but in our great cities—those plague spots in the body politic—we want trained militia who can rally as rapidly as the long roll can be beaten. And I know that all property-owners feel safer, that all law-abiding citizens breathe freer, when they see a militia, particularly like that in our own State, go forth in the summer to be inured to the hardships of the march, to the discipline of tent-life in the field, exhibiting an esprit de corps, a discipline, a true touch of the elbow, which is beyond all praise. I love to take off my hat to their marching column; I love to salute its passing banners. They will always be the true bulwark of our defence. I know of no man, and no set of men, who more gladly or more eagerly make this statement than those who have been reared in the regular army; and I take particular pride in making this acknowledgment and paying this tribute in the presence of the senior and the most illustrious living commander of our Citizen Soldiery. [Allusion to General Sherman followed by great applause.]

THE MANY-SIDED PURITAN

[Speech of Horace Porter at the eighty-second annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1887. Ex-Judge Horace Russell, the President of the Society, in introducing General Porter, said: "James T. Brady used to say that a good lawyer imbibed his law rather than read it. [Laughter.] If that proposition holds true in other regards, the gentleman whom I am to call to the next toast is one of the very best of New Englanders—General Horace Porter [applause], who will speak to 'Puritan Influence.'">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—While you were eating Forefathers' dinner here a year ago, I happened to be in Mexico, but on my return I found that the Puritan influence had extended to me, for I was taken for the distinguished head of this organization, and was in receipt of no end of letters addressed to General Horace Russell and Judge Horace Porter and Mr. Horace Russell and Porter, President of the New England Society, and all begging for a copy of Grady's[5] speech. Distant communities had got the names of the modern Horatii mixed. [Laughter.] In replying I had to acknowledge that my nativity barred me out from the moral realms of this puritanical society, and I could only coincide with Charles II when he said he always admired virtue, but he never could imitate it. [Laughter and applause.] When the Puritan influence spread across the ocean; when it was imported here as part of the cargo of the Mayflower, the crew of the craft, like sensible men, steered for the port of New York, but a reliable tradition informs us that the cook on board that vessel chopped his wood on deck and always stood with his broadaxe on the starboard side of the binnacle, and that this mass of ferruginous substance so attracted the needle that the ship brought up in Plymouth harbor. And the Puritans did not reach New York harbor for a couple of hundred years thereafter, and then in the persons of the members of the New England Society. It is seen that the same influences are still at work, for the fact that these Puritans have brought up in Delmonico's haven of rest is entirely owing to the attractions of the cook. [Laughter and applause.]

The old Puritan was not the most rollicking, the jolliest, or the most playful of men. He at times amused himself sadly; he was given to a mild disregard of the conventionalities. He had suppressed bear-baiting, not, it is believed, because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the audience. He found the Indians were the proprietors of the land, and he felt himself constrained to move against them with his gun with a view to increasing the number of absentee landlords. [Laughter and applause.] He found the Indians on one side and the witches on the other. He was surrounded with troubles. He had to keep the Indians under fire and the witches over it. These were some of the things that reconciled that good man to sudden death. He frequently wanted to set up a mark and swear at it, but his principles would not permit him. He never let the sun go down upon his wrath, but he, no doubt, often wished that he was in that region near the pole where the sun does not go down for six months at a time, and gives wrath a fair chance to materialize. He was a thoughtful man. He spent his days inventing snow-ploughs and his evenings in sipping hot rum and ruminating upon the probable strength of the future Prohibition vote. Those were times when the wives remonstrated with their husbands regarding the unfortunate and disappointing results of too much drink, particularly when it led the men to go out and shoot at Indians—and miss them. [Long continued laughter.] It is supposed that these men, like many others, generally began drinking on account of the bite of a snake, and usually had to quit on account of attacks from the same reptiles.

But, Mr. President, if you will allow me a few words of becoming gravity with which to retract any aspersions which I may have inadvertently cast upon the sacred person of the ancient Puritan, I assure you I will use those words with a due sense of the truth of the epigram—that "gravity is a stratagem invented to conceal the poverty of the mind." That rugged old Puritan, firm of purpose and stout of heart, had been fittingly trained by his life in the Old World, for the conspicuous part he was to enact in the New. He was acquainted with hardships, inured to trials, practised in self-abnegation. He had reformed religions, revolutionized society, and shaken the thrones of tyrants. He had learned that tyranny you may have anywhere—it is a weed which grows on any soil—but if you want freedom you must go forth and fight for it. [Long continued applause.]

At his very birth he had had breathed into his nostrils the breath of that true liberty which can turn blind submission into rational obedience, which, as Hall says, can "smother the voice of kings, dissipate the mists of superstition, and by its magic touch kindle the rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, the flames of eloquence." [Applause.] He had the courage of his convictions, he counselled not with his fears. He neither looked to the past with regret nor to the future with apprehension. He might have been a zealot—he was never a hypocrite; he might have been eccentric—he was never ridiculous. He was a Hercules rather than an Adonis. In his warfare he fired hot shot; he did not send in flags of truce; he led forlorn hopes; he did not follow in the wake of charges. When he went forth with his sledge-hammer logic and his saw-mill philosophy, all who stood in the path of his righteous wrath went down before him, with nothing by which to recognize them except the pieces he had left of them. When he crossed the seas to plant his banners in the West, when he disembarked upon the bleak shores of America, the land which was one day to speak with the voice of a mighty prophet, then the infant just discovered in the bulrushes of the New World, he came with loins girded and all accoutred for the great work of founding a race which should create a permanent abiding place for liberty, and one day dominate the destinies of the world. [Prolonged applause.] Unlike the Spanish conqueror upon far southern coasts, the leader did not have to burn his ship to retain his followers, for when the Mayflower spread her sails for home, not a man of Plymouth Colony returned on board her.

The Puritan early saw that in the new land, liberty could not flourish when subject to the caprices of European Courts; he realized with Burke that there was "more wisdom and sagacity in American workshops than in the cabinets of princes." He wanted elbow-room; he was philosophic enough to recognize the truth of the adage that it is "better to sit on a pumpkin and have it all to yourself than to be crowded on a velvet cushion."

When the struggle for independence came, the Puritan influence played no small part in the contest. When a separate government had been formed he showed himself foremost in impressing upon it his principles of broad and comprehensive liberty. He dignified labor; he believed that as the banner of the young Republic was composed of and derived its chief beauty from its different colors, so should its broad folds cover and protect its citizens of different colors.

He was a grand character in history. We take off our hats to him. We salute his memory. In his person were combined the chivalry of Knighthood, the fervor of the Crusader, the wit of Gascony, and the courage of Navarre. [Prolonged applause.]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

[Speech of Horace Porter at a dinner given by the Republican Club in honor of the ninetieth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday, New York City, February 12, 1889. Mortimer C. Addams, the newly elected President of the Club, occupied the chair. General Porter was called upon for a response to the first toast, "Abraham Lincoln—the fragrant memory of such a life will increase as the generations succeed each other." General Porter was introduced by the chairman, as one "whose long acquaintance with Abraham Lincoln, intimate relationship, both official and personal, with our illustrious chieftain, General Grant, and distinguished career as a brave defender of his country in the time of her peril, have eminently fitted him to tell the story of our great War President.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—I am encumbered with diverse misgivings in being called upon to rise and cast the first firebrand into this peaceful assemblage, which has evidently been enjoying itself so much up to the present time. From the herculean task accomplished by the Republican party last fall we have come to think of its members as men of deeds and not of words, except the spellbinders. [Laughter.] I fear your committee is treating me like one of those toy balloons that are sent up previous to the main ascension, to test the currents of the air; but I hope that in this sort of ballooning I may not be interrupted by the remark that interrupted a Fourth of July orator in the West when he was tickling the American Eagle under both wings, delivering himself of no end of platitudes and soaring aloft into the brilliant realms of fancy when a man in the audience quietly remarked: "If he goes on throwing out his ballast, in that way, the Lord knows where he will land." [Laughter.] If I demonstrate to-night that dryness is a quality not only of the champagne but of the first speech as well, you may reflect on that remark as Abraham Lincoln did at City Point after he had been shaken up the night before in his boat in a storm in Chesapeake Bay. When he complained of the feeling of gastronomic uncertainty which we suffer on the water, a young staff officer rushed up to him with a bottle of champagne and said: "This is the cure for that sort of an ill." Said the President: "No, young man, I have seen too many fellows seasick ashore from drinking that very article." [Laughter.]

The story of the life of Abraham Lincoln savors more of romance than reality. It is more like a fable of the ancient days than a story of a plain American of the nineteenth century. The singular vicissitudes in the life of our martyred President surround him with an interest which attaches to few men in history. He sprang from that class which he always alluded to as the "plain people," and never attempted to disdain them. He believed that the government was made for the people, not the people for the government. He felt that true Republicanism is a torch—the more it is shaken in the hands of the people the brighter it will burn. He was transcendently fit to be the first successful standard-bearer of the progressive, aggressive, invincible Republican party. [Loud applause.] He might well have said to those who chanced to sneer at his humble origin what a marshal of France raised from the ranks said to the haughty nobles of Vienna boasting of their long line of descent, when they refused to associate with him: "I am an ancestor; you are only descendants!" [Laughter and cheers.] He was never guilty of any posing for effect, any attitudinizing in public, any mawkish sentimentality, any of that puppyism so often bred by power, that dogmatism which Johnson said was only puppyism grown to maturity. [Laughter.] He made no claim to knowledge he did not possess. He felt with Addison that pedantry and learning are like hypocrisy in religion—the form of knowledge without the power of it. He had nothing in common with those men of mental malformation who are educated beyond their intellects. [Laughter.]

The names of Washington and Lincoln are inseparably associated, and yet as the popular historian would have us believe one spent his entire life in chopping down acorn trees and the other splitting them up into rails. Washington could not tell a story. Lincoln always could. [Laughter.] And Lincoln's stories always possessed the true geometrical requisites, they were never too long, and never too broad. [Laughter.] He never forgot a point. A sentinel pacing near the watchfire while Lincoln was once telling some stories quietly remarked that "He had a mighty powerful memory, but an awful poor forgettery." [Laughter.]

The last time I ever heard him converse, he told one of the stories which best illustrated his peculiar talent for pointing a moral with an anecdote. Speaking of England's assistance to the South, and how she would one day find she had aided it but little and only injured herself, he said: "Yes, that reminds me of a barber in Sangamon County. He was about going to bed when a stranger came along and said he must have a shave. He said he had a few days' beard on his face, and he was going to a ball, and the barber must cut it off. The barber got up reluctantly, dressed, and put the stranger in a chair with a low back to it, and every time he bore down he came near dislocating his patient's neck. He began by lathering his face, including nose, eyes, and ears, strapped his razor on his boot, and then made a drive scraping down the right cheek, carrying away the beard and a pimple and two or three warts. The man in the chair said: 'You appear to make everything level as you go.' [Laughter.] The barber said: 'Yes, if this handle don't break, I will get away with what there is there.' The man's cheeks were so hollow that the barber could not get down into the valleys with the razor and an ingenious idea occurred to him to stick his finger in the man's mouth and press out the cheeks. Finally he cut clean through the cheek and into his own finger. He pulled the finger out of the man's mouth, and snapped the blood off it, looked at him, and said: 'There, you lantern-jawed cuss, you have made me cut my finger.'" [Laughter.] "Now," said Lincoln, "England will find she has got the South into a pretty bad scrape from trying to administer to her. In the end she will find she has only cut her own finger." [Applause.]

But his heart was not always attuned to mirth; its chords were often set to strains of sadness. Yet throughout all his trials he never lost the courage of his convictions. When he was surrounded on all sides by doubting Thomases, by unbelieving Saracens, by discontented Catilines, his faith was strongest. As the Danes destroyed the hearing of their war-horses in order that they might not be affrighted by the din of battle, so Lincoln turned a deaf ear to all that might have discouraged him, and exhibited an unwavering faith in the justice of the cause and the integrity of the Union. [Cries of "Bravo!" and cheers.]

It is said that for three hundred years after the battle of Thermopylæ every child in the public schools of Greece was required to recite from memory the names of the three hundred martyrs who fell in the defence of that Pass. It would be a crowning triumph in patriotic education if every school child in America could contemplate each day the grand character and utter the inspiring name of Abraham Lincoln. [Loud applause.]

He has passed from our view. We shall not meet him again until he stands forth to answer to his name at the roll-call when the great of earth are summoned in the morning of the last great reveille. Till then [apostrophizing Lincoln's portrait which hung above the President's head], till then, farewell, gentlest of all spirits, noblest of all hearts! The child's simplicity was mingled with the majestic grandeur of your nature. You have handed down unto a grateful people the richest legacy which man can leave to man—the memory of a good name, the inheritance of a great example! [Loud and enthusiastic applause.]

SIRES AND SONS

[Speech of Horace Porter at the eighty-sixth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1891. J. Pierpont Morgan, the President, occupied the chair, and called upon General Porter to speak on "Sires and Sons.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—All my shortcomings upon this occasion must be attributed to the fact that I have just come from last night's New England dinner, in Brooklyn, which occurred largely this morning. They promised me when I accepted their invitation that I should get away early, and I did. I am apprehensive that the circumstance may give rise to statements which may reflect upon my advancing years, and that I may be pointed out as one who has dined with the early New Englanders.

I do not like the fact of Depew's coming into the room so late to-night and leaving so short an interval between his speech and mine. His conduct is of a piece with the conduct of so many married men nowadays who manifest such exceedingly bad taste and want of tact in dying only such a very short time before the remarriage of their wives.

I have acquired some useful experience in attending New England Society dinners in various cities. I dine with New Englanders in Boston; the rejoicing is marked, but not aggressive. I dine with them in New York; the hilarity and cheer of mind are increased in large degree. I dine with them in Philadelphia; the joy is unconfined and measured neither by metes nor bounds. Indeed, it has become patent to the most casual observer that the further the New Englander finds himself from New England the more hilarious is his rejoicing. Whenever we find a son of New England who has passed beyond the borders of his own section, who has stepped out into the damp cold fog of a benighted outside world and has brought up in another State, he seems to take more pride than ever in his descent—doubtless because he feels that it has been so great. [Laughter.]

The New England sire was a stern man on duty and determined to administer discipline totally regardless of previous acquaintance. He detested all revolutions in which he had taken no part. If he possessed too much piety, it was tempered by religion; while always seeking out new virtues, he never lost his grip on his vices. [Laughter.] He was always ambitious to acquire a reputation that would extend into the next world. But in his own individual case he manifested a decided preference for the doctrine of damnation without representation.

When he landed at Plymouth he boldly set about the appalling task of cultivating the alleged soil. His labors were largely lightened by the fact that there were no agricultural newspapers to direct his efforts. By a fiction of speech which could not have been conceived by a less ingenious mind, he founded a government based upon a common poverty and called it a commonwealth. He was prompt and eminently practical in his worldly methods. In the rigors of a New England winter when he found a witch suffering he brought her in to the fire; when he found an Indian suffering he went out and covered him with a shotgun. [Laughter.]

The discipline of the race, however, is chiefly due to the New England mother. She could be seen going to church of a Sabbath with the Bible under one arm and a small boy under the other, and her mind equally harassed by the tortures of maternity and eternity. When her offspring were found suffering from spring fever and the laziness which accompanies it, she braced them up with a heroic dose of brimstone and molasses. The brimstone given here was a reminder of the discipline hereafter; the molasses has doubtless been chiefly responsible for the tendency of the race to stick to everything, especially their opinions. [Laughter.]

The New Englanders always take the initiative in great national movements. At Lexington and Concord they marched out alone without waiting for the rest of the Colonies, to have their fling at the red-coats, and a number of the colonists on that occasion succeeded in interfering with British bullets. It was soon after observed that their afternoon excursion had attracted the attention of England. They acted in the spirit of the fly who bit the elephant on the tail. When the fly was asked whether he expected to kill him he said: "No, but I notice I made him look round." [Laughter.]

THE MINUTE MAN

Photogravure after a photograph

In commemoration of the famous Revolutionary struggle of the farmers of Concord, Mass., April 19, 1775, this statue was erected. The sculptor was Daniel Chester French, a native of Concord. The statue was unveiled at the centennial celebration of the battle, 1875. It is of bronze, heroic size, and stands near the town of Concord, by the battlefield, on the side of the Concord River occupied by the Americans. The position is described by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his lines which are graven in the pedestal of the statue:

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world."

Such are the inventive faculty and self-reliance of New Englanders that they always entertain a profound respect for impossibilities. It has been largely owing to their influence that we took the negro, who is a natural agriculturist, and made a soldier of him; took the Indian, who is a natural warrior, and made an agriculturist of him; took the American, who is a natural destructionist, and made a protectionist of him. They are always revolutionizing affairs. Recently a Boston company equipped with electricity the horse-cars, or rather the mule-cars, in the streets of Atlanta. When the first electric-motor cars were put into service an aged "contraband" looked at them from the street corner and said: "Dem Yankees is a powerful sma't people; furst dey come down h'yar and freed de niggers, now dey've done freed de mules." [Laughter.]

The New Englander is so constantly engaged in creating changes that in his eyes even variety appears monotonous. When a German subject finds himself oppressed by his Government he emigrates; when a French citizen is oppressed he makes the Government emigrate; when Americans find a portion of their Government trying to emigrate they arm themselves and spend four years in going after it and bringing it back. [Laughter and applause.]

You will find the sons of New England everywhere throughout the world, and they are always at the fore. I happened to be at a French banquet in Paris where several of us Americans spoke, employing that form of the French language which is so often used by Americans in France, and which is usually so successful in concealing one's ideas from the natives. There was a young Bostonian there who believed he had successfully mastered all the most difficult modern languages except that which is spoken by the brake-men on the elevated railroads. When he spoke French the only departure from the accent of the Parisian was that nuance of difference arising from the mere accidental circumstance of one having learned his French in Paris and the other in Boston. The French give much praise to Molière for having changed the pronunciation of a great many French words; but his most successful efforts in that direction were far surpassed by the Boston young man. When he had finished his remarks a French gentleman sitting beside me inquired: "Where is he from?" I replied: "From New England." Said he: "I don't see anything English about him except his French." [Laughter.]

In speaking of the sons of New England sires, I know that one name is uppermost in all minds here to-night—the name of one who added new lustre to the fame of his distinguished ancestors. The members of your Society, like the Nation at large, found themselves within the shadow of a profound grief, and oppressed by a sense of sadness akin to the sorrow of a personal bereavement, as they stood with uncovered heads beside the bier of William T. Sherman; when the echo of his guns gave place to the tolling of cathedral bells; when the flag of his country, which had never been lowered in his presence, dropped to half-mast, as if conscious that his strong arm was no longer there to hold it to the peak; when he passed from the living here to join the other living, commonly called the dead. We shall never meet the great soldier again until he stands forth to answer to his name at roll-call on the morning of the last great reveille. At this board he was always a thrice welcome guest. The same blood coursed in his veins which flows in yours. All hearts warmed to him with the glow of an abiding affection. He was a many-sided man. He possessed all the characteristics of the successful soldier: bold in conception, vigorous in execution, and unshrinking under grave responsibilities. He was singularly self-reliant, demonstrating by all his acts that "much danger makes great hearts most resolute." He combined in his temperament the restlessness of a Hotspur with the patience of a Fabius. Under the magnetism of his presence his troops rushed to victory with all the dash of Cæsar's Tenth Legion. Opposing ranks went down before the fierceness of his onsets, never to rise again. He paused not till he saw the folds of his banners wave above the strongholds he had wrested from the foe.

While mankind will always appreciate the practical workings of the mind of the great strategist, they will also see in his marvellous career much which savors of romance as well as reality, appeals to the imagination and excites the fancy. They will picture him as a legendary knight moving at the head of conquering columns, whose marches were measured not by single miles, but by thousands; as a general who could make a Christmas gift to his President of a great seaboard city; as a chieftain whose field of military operations covered nearly half a continent; who had penetrated everglades and bayous; the inspiration of whose commands forged weaklings into giants; whose orders all spoke with the true bluntness of the soldier; who fought from valley's depth to mountain height, and marched from inland rivers to the sea. No one can rob him of his laurels; no man can lessen the measure of his fame. His friends will never cease to sing pæans in his honor, and even the wrath of his enemies may be counted in his praise. [Prolonged applause.]

THE ASSIMILATED DUTCHMAN

[Speech of Horace Porter at the fourth annual dinner of 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, introduced General Porter as follows: "Gentlemen, we will now proceed to a toast that we shall all enjoy, I am sure, after so much has been said about the Dutch. This toast is to be responded to by a gentleman whom we all know. It is hardly necessary to introduce him. But I will read the sentiment attached to this toast: 'The American: Formed of the blendings of the best strains of Europe, he cannot be worthy of his ancestry without combining in himself the best qualities of them all.' And I call upon General Horace Porter to respond.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—We speakers have naturally been a little embarrassed at the outset this evening, for just as we were about to break into speech, your President reminded us that the only one worthy of having a monument built to his memory was William the Silent. Well, it seemed to carry me back to those ancient days of Greece, when Pythagoras inaugurated his School of Silence, and called on Damocles to make the opening speech.

Your President has shown from the start this evening that he is determined to enforce discipline, totally regardless of previous acquaintance. He appears to have been in a Shakespearian mood to-night. He seemed to be looking at each one of these alleged speakers and saying of him: "Therefore, I'll watch him till he be dieted to my request and then I will set upon him." But he must remember that Shakespeare also said: "Dainty bits make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits."

I do not know how the rest of you feel, but after these delicious but somewhat plethoric dinners, I feel very much like Mr. Butterby, when his lavender-colored trousers were sent to him the night before his wedding, and he returned them to the tailor with a note saying, "Let them out two inches around the waist, which will leave a margin for emotion and the wedding breakfast." [Laughter.]

Now, we speakers to-night cannot expect to be received with any vast ebullition of boisterous enthusiasm here, for we understand that every member pays for his own wine. Besides, I am sure that you will not be likely to get any more ideas from me than you would get lather from a cake of hotel soap.

After having wrestled with about thirty dishes at this dinner, and after all this being called upon to speak, I feel a great sympathy with that woman in Ireland who had had something of a field-day on hand. She began by knocking down two somewhat unpopular agents of her absentee landlord, and was seen, later in the day, dancing a jig on the stomach of the prostrate form of the Presbyterian minister. One of her friends admired her prowess in this direction and invited her in, and gave her a good stiff glass of whiskey. Her friend said, "Shall I pour some water in your whiskey?" and the woman replied, "For God's sake, haven't I had trouble enough already to-day?" [Laughter.]

I am a little at a loss still to know how I got into this company to-night. I begin to feel like some of those United States Senators who, after they have reached Washington, look around and wonder how they got there. The nearest approach to being decorated with a sufficiently aristocratic epithet to make me worthy of admission to this Society was when I used to visit outside of my native State and be called a "Pennsylvania Dutchman." But history tells us that at the beginning of the Revolution there was a battle fought at Breed's Hill, and it was called the Battle of Bunker Hill, because it was not fought there; and I suppose I have been brought into this Dutch Society to-night because I am not a Dutchman. [Laughter.]

I have great admiration for these Dutchmen; they always get to the front. When they appear in New York they are always invited to seats on the roof; when they go into an orchestra, they are always given one of the big fiddles to play; and when they march in a procession, they are always sure to get a little ahead of the band. This Society differs materially from other so-called foreign societies. When we meet the English, we invariably refer to the common stock from which we sprang, but in the Dutch Society the stock is always preferred! and when a Dutchman dies, why, his funeral is like that funeral of Abel, who was killed by his brother Cain—no one is allowed to attend unless he belongs to a first family. [Laughter.]

Now, a Dutchman is only happy when he gets a "Van" attached to the front of his name, and a "dam" to the rear end of the city from which his ancestors came. I notice they are all very particular about the "dam." [Laughter.]

There was a lady—a New York young lady—who had been spending several years in England and had just returned. She had posed awhile as a professional beauty. Then she attempted to marry into the aristocracy, but the market for titles was a little dull that year and she came home. She had lived there long enough to become an Anglomaniac. She met a Dutchman in New York—I think he was a member of the Holland Society—and she said: "Everything seems so remarkably commonplace here, after getting back from England; I am sure you must admit that there is nothing so romantic here as in England." The Dutchman remarked: "Well, I don't know about that." She said: "I was stopping at a place in the country, with one of the members of the aristocracy, and there was a little piece of water—a sort of miniature lake, as it were—so sweet. The waters were confined by little rustic walls, so to speak, and that was called the 'Earl's Oath'; we have nothing so romantic in New York, I'm sure." Said the Dutchman: "Oh, yes, here we have McComb's Dam." [Laughter.]

But, Mr. President, I certainly am in earnest sympathy with the patriotic sentiment expressed in the toast which you have been pleased to assign to me to-night, saying, in effect, that the American is composed of the best strains of Europe, and the American cannot be worthy of his ancestors unless he aims to combine within himself the good qualities of all. America has gained much by being the conglomerate country that she is, made up of a commingling of the blood of other races. It is a well-known fact in the crossing of breeds that the best traits predominate in the result. We in this land, have gained much from the purity of those bloods; we have suffered little from the taint.

It is well in this material age, when we are dwelling so much upon posterity, not to be altogether oblivious to pedigree. It has been well said that he who does not respect his ancestors will never be likely to achieve anything for which his descendants will respect him. Man learns but very little in this world from precept; he learns something from experience; he learns much from example, and the "best teachers of humanity are the lives of worthy men."

We have a great many admirable so-called foreign societies in New York, and they are all doing good work—good work in collecting interesting historical data in regard to the ancestors who begat them; in regard to the lands from which they came—good work in the broad field of charity. But it is the Holland Society which seems to be a little closer to us than the others—more our Society, even with those of us who have no Dutch blood in our veins. We feel that these old Dutch names are really more closely associated in our minds with the city of New York than with Holland itself.

The men from whom you sprang were well calculated to carry on the great work undertaken by them. In the first place, in that good old land they had educated the conscience. The conscience never lost its hold upon the man. He stood as firm in his convictions as the rock to its base. His religion was a religion of the soul, and not of the senses. He might have broken the tables of stone on which the laws were written; he never would have broken those laws themselves. He turned neither to the past with regret nor to the future with apprehension. He was a man inured to trials; practised in self-abnegation; educated in the severe school of adversity; and that little band which set out from Holland to take up its career in the New World was well calculated to undertake the work which Providence had marked out for them. Those men had had breathed into their nostrils at their very birth the true spirit of liberty. Somehow or other liberty seemed to be indigenous in that land. They imbibed that true spirit of liberty which does not mean unbridled license of the individual, but that spirit of liberty which can turn blind submission into rational obedience; that spirit of liberty which Hall says stifles the voices of kings, dissipates the mists of superstition, kindles the flames of art, and pours happiness into the laps of the people. Those men started out boldly upon the ocean; they paused not until they dipped the fringes of their banners in the waters of the western seas. They built up this great metropolis. They bore their full share in building up this great nation and in planting in it their pure principles. They builded even better than they knew.

In the past year I think our people have been more inclined than ever before to pause and contemplate how big with events is the history of this land. It was developed by people who believed not in the "divine right of kings," but in the divine right of human liberty. If we may judge the future progress of this land by its progress in the past, it does not require that one should be endowed with prophetic vision to predict that in the near future this young but giant Republic will dominate the policy of the world. America was not born amidst the mysteries of barbaric ages; and it is about the only nation which knows its own birthday. Woven of the stoutest fibres of other lands, nurtured by a commingling of the best blood of other races, America has now cast off the swaddling-clothes of infancy, and stands forth erect, clothed in robes of majesty and power, in which the God who made her intends that she shall henceforth tread the earth; and to-day she may be seen moving down the great highways of history, teaching by example; moving at the head of the procession of the world's events; marching in the van of civilized and christianized liberty, her manifest destiny to light the torch of liberty till it illumines the entire pathway of the world, and till human freedom and human rights become the common heritage of mankind. [Applause.]

TRIBUTE TO GENERAL GRANT

[Speech of Horace Porter at the banquet of the Army of the Tennessee, upon the occasion of the inauguration of the Grant Equestrian Statue in Chicago, October 8, 1891.]

Mr. Chairman:—When a man from the armies of the East finds himself in the presence of men of the armies of the West, he feels that he cannot strike their gait. He can only look at them wistfully and say, in the words of Charles II, "I always admired virtue, but I never could imitate it." [Laughter.] If I do not in the course of my remarks succeed in seeing each one of you, it will be because the formation of the Army of the Tennessee to-night is like its formation in the field, when it won its matchless victories, the heavy columns in the centre. [An allusion to the large columns in the room.] [Laughter.]

Almost all the conspicuous characters in history have risen to prominence by gradual steps, but Ulysses S. Grant seemed to come before the people with a sudden bound. Almost the first sight they caught of him was in the flashes of his guns, and the blaze of his camp-fires, those wintry days and nights in front of Donelson. From that hour until the closing triumph at Appomattox he was the leader whose name was the harbinger of victory. From the final sheath of his sword until the tragedy on Mount McGregor he was the chief citizen of the republic and the great central figure of the world. [Applause.] The story of his life savors more of romance than reality. It is more like a fabled tale of ancient days than the history of an American citizen of the nineteenth century. As light and shade produce the most attractive effects in a picture, so the singular contrasts, the strange vicissitudes in his marvellous career, surround him with an interest which attaches to few characters in history. His rise from an obscure lieutenancy to the command of the veteran armies of the republic; his transition from a frontier post of the untrodden West to the Executive Mansion of the nation; his sitting at one time in his little store in Galena, not even known to the Congressman from his own district; at another time striding through the palaces of the Old World, with the descendants of a line of Kings rising and standing uncovered in his presence [Applause.]—these are some of the features of his extraordinary career which appeal to the imagination, excite men's wonder, and fascinate all who read the story of his life. [Applause.]

General Grant possessed in a striking degree all the characteristics of the successful soldier. His methods were all stamped with tenacity of purpose, with originality and ingenuity. He depended for his success more upon the powers of invention than of adaptation, and the fact that he has been compared, at different times, to nearly every great commander in history is perhaps the best proof that he was like none of them. He was possessed of a moral and physical courage which was equal to every emergency in which he was placed: calm amidst excitement, patient under trials, never unduly elated by victory or depressed by defeat. While he possessed a sensitive nature and a singularly tender heart, yet he never allowed his sentiments to interfere with the stern duties of the soldier. He knew better than to attempt to hew rocks with a razor. He realized that paper bullets cannot be fired in warfare. He felt that the hardest blows bring the quickest results; that more men die from disease in sickly camps than from shot and shell in battle.

His magnanimity to foes, his generosity to friends, will be talked of as long as manly qualities are honored. [Applause.]

You know after Vicksburg had succumbed to him he said in his order: "The garrison will march out to-morrow. Instruct your commands to be quiet and orderly as the prisoners pass by, and make no offensive remarks." After Lee's surrender at Appomattox, when our batteries began to fire triumphal salutes, he at once suppressed them, saying, in his order: "The war is over; the rebels are again our countrymen; the best way to celebrate the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field." [Applause.] After the war General Lee and his officers were indicted in the civil courts of Virginia by directions of a President who was endeavoring to make treason odious and succeeding in making nothing so odious as himself. [Applause.] General Lee appealed to his old antagonist for protection. He did not appeal to that heart in vain. General Grant at once took up the cudgels in his defence, threatened to resign his office if such officers were indicted while they continued to obey their paroles, and such was the logic of his argument and the force of his character that those indictments were soon after quashed. So that he penned no idle platitude; he fashioned no stilted epigrams; he spoke the earnest convictions of an honest heart when he said, "Let us have peace." [Applause.] He never tired of giving unstinted praise to worthy subordinates for the work they did. Like the chief artists who weave the Gobelin tapestries, he was content to stand behind the cloth and let those in front appear to be the chief contributors to the beauty of the fabric. [Applause.]

One of the most beautiful chapters in all history is that which records the generous relations existing between him and Sherman, that great soldier who for so many years was the honored head of this society, that great chieftain whom men will always love to picture as a legendary knight moving at the head of conquering columns, whose marches were measured not by single miles, but by thousands; whose field of military operations covered nearly half a continent; whose orders always spoke with the true bluntness of the soldier; who fought from valley's depths to mountain heights, and marched from inland rivers to the sea. [Applause.] Their rivalry manifested itself only in one respect—the endeavor of each to outdo the other in generosity. With hearts untouched by jealousy, with souls too great for rivalry, each stood ready to abandon the path of ambition when it became so narrow that two could not tread it abreast. [Applause.]

If there be one single word in all the wealth of the English language which best describes the predominating trait of General Grant's character, that word is "loyalty." [Applause.] Loyal to every great cause and work he was engaged in; loyal to his friends; loyal to his family; loyal to his country; loyal to his God. [Applause.] This produced a reciprocal effect in all who came in contact with him. It was one of the chief reasons why men became so loyally attached to him. It is true that this trait so dominated his whole character that it led him to make mistakes; it induced him to continue to stand by men who were no longer worthy of his confidence; but after all, it was a trait so grand, so noble, we do not stop to count the errors which resulted. [Applause.] It showed him to be a man who had the courage to be just, to stand between worthy men and their unworthy slanderers, and to let kindly sentiments have a voice in an age in which the heart played so small a part in public life. Many a public man has had hosts of followers because they fattened on the patronage dispensed at his hands; many a one has had troops of adherents because they were blind zealots in a cause he represented, but perhaps no man but General Grant had so many friends who loved him for his own sake; whose attachment strengthened only with time; whose affection knew neither variableness, nor shadow of turning; who stuck to him as closely as the toga to Nessus, whether he was Captain, General, President, or simply private citizen. [Great applause.]

General Grant was essentially created for great emergencies; it was the very magnitude of the task which called forth the powers which mastered it. In ordinary matters he was an ordinary man. In momentous affairs he towered as a giant. When he served in a company there was nothing in his acts to distinguish him from the fellow-officers; but when he wielded corps and armies the great qualities of the commander flashed forth and his master strokes of genius placed him at once in the front rank of the world's great captains. When he hauled wood from his little farm and sold it in the streets of St. Louis there was nothing in his business or financial capacity different from that of the small farmers about him; but when, as President of the Republic, he found it his duty to puncture the fallacy of the inflationists, to throttle by a veto the attempt of unwise legislators to tamper with the American credit, he penned a State paper so logical, so masterly, that it has ever since been the pride, wonder, and admiration of every lover of an honest currency. [Applause.] He was made for great things, not for little. He could collect for the nation $15,000,000 from Great Britain in settlement of the Alabama claims; he could not protect his own personal savings from the miscreants who robbed him in Wall Street.

But General Grant needs no eulogist. His name is indelibly engraved upon the hearts of his countrymen. His services attest his greatness. He did his duty and trusted to history for his meed of praise. The more history discusses him, the more brilliant becomes the lustre of his deeds. His record is like a torch; the more it is shaken, the brighter it burns. His name will stand imperishable when epitaphs have vanished utterly, and monuments and statues have crumbled into dust; but the people of this great city, everywhere renowned for their deeds of generosity, have covered themselves anew with glory in fashioning in enduring bronze, in rearing in monumental rock that magnificent tribute to his worth which was to-day unveiled in the presence of countless thousands. As I gazed upon its graceful lines and colossal proportions I was reminded of that child-like simplicity which was mingled with the majestic grandeur of his nature. The memories clustering about it will recall the heroic age of the Republic; it will point the path of loyalty to children yet unborn; its mute eloquence will plead for equal sacrifice, should war ever again threaten the Nation's life; generations yet to come will pause to read the inscription which it bears, and the voices of a grateful people will ascend from the consecrated spot on which it stands, as incense rises from holy places, invoking blessings upon the memory of him who had filled to the very full the largest measure of human greatness and covered the earth with his renown. [Applause.]

An indescribably touching incident happened which will ever be memorable and which never can be effaced from the memory of those who witnessed it. Even at this late date I can scarcely trust my own feelings to recall it. It was on Decoration Day in the City of New York, the last one he ever saw on earth. That morning the members of the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans in that vicinity, arose earlier than was their wont. They seemed to spend more time that morning in unfurling the old battle flags, in burnishing the medals of honor which decorated their breasts, for on that day they had determined to march by the house of their dying commander to give him a last marching salute. In the streets the columns were forming; inside the house on that bed, from which he was never to rise again, lay the stricken chief. The hand which had seized the surrendered swords of countless thousands could scarcely return the pressure of the friendly grasp. The voice which had cheered on to triumphant victory the legions of America's manhood, could no longer call for the cooling draught which slaked the thirst of a fevered tongue; and prostrate on that bed of anguish lay the form which in the New World had ridden at the head of the conquering column, which in the Old World had been deemed worthy to stand with head covered and feet sandaled in the presence of princes, kings, and emperors. Now his ear caught the sound of martial music. Bands were playing the same strains which had mingled with the echoes of his guns at Vicksburg, the same quick-steps to which his men had sped in hot haste in pursuit of Lee through Virginia. And then came the heavy, measured steps of moving columns, a step which can be acquired only by years of service in the field. He recognized it all now. It was the tread of his old veterans. With his little remaining strength he arose and dragged himself to the window. As he gazed upon those battle-flags dipping to him in salute, those precious standards bullet-riddled, battle-stained, but remnants of their former selves, with scarcely enough left of them on which to print the names of the battles they had seen, his eyes once more kindled with the flames which had lighted them at Shiloh, on the heights of Chattanooga, amid the glories of Appomattox; and as those war-scarred veterans looked with uncovered heads and upturned faces for the last time upon the pallid features of their old chief, cheeks which had been bronzed by Southern suns and begrimed with powder, were bathed in the tears of a manly grief. Soon they saw rising the hand which had so often pointed out to them the path of victory. He raised it slowly and painfully to his head in recognition of their salutations. The column had passed, the hand fell heavily by his side. It was his last military salute. [Long continued applause and cheers.]

NOAH PORTER

TEACHINGS OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

[Speech of Rev. Dr. Noah Porter, President of Yale College, 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, occupied the chair. This speech of President Porter followed a speech of President Eliot of Harvard. The two Presidents spoke in response to the 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.">[

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the New England Society:—The somewhat miscellaneous character of the sentiment which has called me up embarrasses me not a little as to which of the points I should select as the subject of my remarks. I am still more embarrassed by the introduction of additional topics on the part of my friend, the President of Harvard College. The president knows that it is our custom to meet once a year, and discuss all the matters to which he has referred, as often as we meet. [Laughter.] He knows also that he was providentially prevented, by a very happy occurrence to himself, from attending our last College Convention; and in consequence of his absence, for which we all excused and congratulated him, the meeting was more than usually tame. [Laughter.] Now, I find that all the sentiments which he had been gathering for a year have been precipitated upon me on this occasion. [Laughter.] I rejoice that His Excellency, the President of the United States, and the distinguished Secretary of State [Rutherford B. Hayes and William M. Evarts], are between us. [Laughter.] For here is a special occasion for the application of the policy of peace. [Laughter.] I therefore reserve what few remarks I shall make upon this special theme for a moment later.

The first point in the sentiment proposed recognizes New England as the mother of two colleges. I think we should do well also to call to mind, especially under the circumstances by which we are surrounded this evening, that New England was not merely the mother of two colleges which have had some influence in this land, but that New England, with all its glory and its achievements, was, in a certain sense, the creation of a college. It would be easy to show that had it not been for the existence of one or two rather inferior colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, there never would have been a New England. In these colleges were gathered and trained not a few of the great leaders of opinion under whose influence the father of New England became a great political power in the mother country. It is not to the Pilgrim Fathers alone who landed at Plymouth on December 22, 1620, that New England owes its characteristic principles and its splendid renown, but it is also to the leaders of the great Puritan party in England, who reinforced that immigration by the subsequent higher and nobler life of the planters of Massachusetts Bay, conspicuous among whom was the distinguished and ever-to-be-honored Governor Winthrop. [Applause.]

It was from these colleges that so many strong-hearted young men went forth into political public life in England to act the scholar in politics, and who, as scholars in politics, enunciated those new principles and new theories of government which made Old England glorious for a time, and which made New England the power for good which she afterward became, first at her home in the old States, and in all their extension westward even to this hour. These scholars sought emphatically a reform of the civil service in England. That was their mission. They vindicated their principles upon the scaffold and their rights upon the field of battle at home, and they transmitted that spirit to the emigrants who came out from among them before the great rebellion reached its great crisis and finished its memorable history.

While, then, we honor the universities of which New England has been the mother, let us remember that New England owes its being to a university. In remembering this, we shall be prepared to follow in the steps of our fathers, and to be mindful of what we ourselves owe to our own institutions of learning.

In respect to the rivalry between Yale and Harvard, which was noticed in the sentiment to which I speak, and in reply to the suggestions which have been offered by the President of Harvard, I will venture a single remark. You, sir, who are learned in our New England history, are not unfamiliar with the saying which was once somewhat current, that when a man was found in Boston, in the earlier generations, who was a little too bad to live with, they sent him to Rhode Island [Laughter.]; and when they found a man who was a little too good to be a comfortable neighbor, they sent him to Connecticut. [Laughter.] The remainder—the men of average respectability and worth—were allowed to remain on the shores of Massachusetts Bay and in Boston. And so it happened that these people of average goodness, from constantly looking each other in the face, contracted the habit of always praising one another with especial emphasis; and the habit has not been altogether outgrown. [Laughter.] The people of Rhode Island, being such as I have described, found it necessary to have certain principles of toleration to suit their peculiar condition, which they denominated the principles of soul liberty.

The people of Connecticut, being so very good, could not allow their goodness to remain at home, and they very soon proceeded on a missionary errand westward toward the city of New York, and in due time captured the harbor and the infant city, and the great river of the North. In this way, New York fell into the hands of those super-excellent Connecticut Yankees, and with that began the stream of emigration westward which has made our country what it is. [Laughter and applause.] Perhaps this piece of history is about as good an explanation of the jealousy of Yale toward Harvard as the interpretation which has been given by the President of that honorable university—that Yale College was founded because of the discontent of the self-righteous Puritans of Connecticut with the religious opinions of the ruling spirits at Harvard. [Laughter.] That piece of information has been amply discussed and exploded by an able critic, and I will not repeat the arguments here.

As to any present rivalry which may exist between those institutions, we disclaim it altogether. We know no jealousy of Harvard College now. We acknowledge no rivalry except in the great enterprise of training upright and intelligent and good-principled men for the service and the glory of our common land. [Applause, and cries of "Hear! Hear!">[ But there is one means to this end you may be sure we shall always insist upon—and that is the principle which we have received from our fathers, that manhood and character are better than knowledge. The training which our country demands is that which we intend always to give; and it is a training in manhood of intelligence, in manhood of character, and in a constant, ever-present faith in the providence and goodness of the living God. [Applause.]

I deem it proper here to remind you, that Yale College was foremost among the American colleges in cherishing the taste for physical science, and that these sciences, in all their forms, have received from us the most liberal attention and care. If any of you doubt this, we would like to show you our museum, with its collections, which represent all that the most recent explorations have been able to gather. In these well-ordered collections you would find as satisfactory an exhibition of results as you could ask for. [Applause.] You need not fear, however, that, because we believe in science, we have learned any more to disbelieve in the living God. As we stand in the midst of one of the halls of our splendid museum, and see arrayed before us all the forms of vertebrate life, from man down to the lowest type, and see how one and the other suggests the progress—the evolution, if you please—during we care not how many centuries of advancing life; the more closely we study these indications, the more distinctly do we see lines of thought, of intelligence, and goodness reflected from one structure to another, and all declaring that a divine thought and love has ordered each and all. [Applause.] Hence we find no inconsistency between the teachings of this museum on the one corner and the teachings of the college chapel on the other. [Applause.] We therefore commit ourselves, in the presence of all these sons of New England, whether they live in this city of their habitation and their glory, or whether they are residents of other cities and States of the North and Northwest, to the solemn declaration, that we esteem it to be our duty to train our pupils on the one hand in enlightened science, and on the other in the living power of the Christian faith. [Applause.] We are certainly not sectarian. It is enough that I say that we aim to be enlightened Christian believers, and with those hopes and those aspirations we trust that the next generation of men whom we shall educate will do their part in upholding this country in fidelity to its obligations of duty, in fidelity to every form of integrity, in generous self-sacrifice on the field of contest, if it be required, and in Christian sympathy with the toleration and forbearance which should come after the fight. [Applause.]

HENRY CODMAN POTTER

THE CHURCH