Now, Mr. Spencer, we are glad to meet you here. [Applause.] We are glad to see you and we are glad to have you see us. [Laughter.] We are glad to see you, for we recognize in the breadth of your knowledge, such knowledge as is useful to your race, a greater comprehension than any living man has presented to our generation. [Applause.] We are glad to see you, because in our judgment you have brought to the analysis and distribution of this vast knowledge a more penetrating intelligence and a more thorough insight than any living man has brought even to the minor topics of his special knowledge. [Applause.] In theology, in psychology, in natural science, in the knowledge of individual man and his exposition, and in the knowledge of the world, in the proper sense of society, which makes up the world, the world worth knowing, the world worth speaking of, the world worth planning for, the world worth working for, we acknowledge your labors as surpassing those of any of our kind. [Applause.] You seem to us to carry away and maintain in the future the same measure of fame among others that we are told was given in the Middle Ages to Albertus Magnus, the most learned man of those times, whose comprehension of theology, of psychology, of natural history, of politics, of history and of learning comprehended more than any man since the classic time certainly; and yet it was found of him that his knowledge was rather an accumulation, and that he had added no new processes and no new wealth to the learning which he had achieved.

Now, I have said that we are glad to have you see us. You have already treated us to a very unique piece of work in this reception, and we are expecting perhaps that the world may be instructed after you are safely on the other side of the Atlantic in a more intimate and thorough manner concerning our merits and our few faults. [Applause and laughter.] This faculty of laying on a dissecting board an entire nation or an entire age and finding out all the arteries and veins and pulsations of their life is an extension beyond any that our own medical schools afford. You give us that knowledge of man which is practical and useful, and whatever the claims or the debates may be about your system of the system of those who agree with you, and however it may be compared with other competing systems that have preceded it, we must all agree that it is practical, that it is benevolent, that it is serious, and that it is reverent; that it aims at the highest results in virtue; that it treats evil, not as eternal, but as evanescent, and that it expects to arrive at what is sought through the aid of the millennium—that condition of affairs in which there is the highest morality and the greatest happiness. [Applause.] And if we can come to that by these processes and these instructions it matters little to the race whether it be called scientific morality and mathematical freedom or by another less pretentious name. [Applause.] You will please fill your glasses while we propose the health of our guest, Herbert Spencer. [Continued applause.]

* * * * *

THE CLASSICS IN EDUCATION

[Speech of William M. Evarts at the Thanksgiving Jubilee of the Yale Alumni, New York City, December 7, 1883. Chauncey M. Depew presided. Mr. Evarts responded for the Alumni.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ALUMNI:—I congratulate you, Mr. President, on having such a noble, such a generous, such a patient, such an appreciative body to preside over. I congratulate you, gentlemen, on having a President who combines in himself in a marked degree these two great traits of a presiding officer:—confidence in himself [great laughter], and distrust of all who are to come after him. [Laughter.] I remember forty years ago to have heard a Senator of the United States, making a stump speech in a quiet town in Vermont, amuse his audience with a story of a woodsawyer who had worked for him and who had the habit of accompanying the movement of his saw with talking to himself. He asked him one day why he did so. "Why," said he, "for two reasons. The first is, that it is a great pleasure to hear a sensible man talk, and the second is that it is a great pleasure to talk to a sensible man." [Laughter.]

Now, sir, I have but one warning to give you. It is said of Mercutio, the wittiest creation of Shakespeare, who is despatched very early in the play, "My sore wound hath served its turn, although it were not as deep as a well nor as wide as a church door." It is said that if Shakespeare hadn't killed Mercutio early, Mercutio would have killed him. If you [turning to the President] are to preside year after year or to attempt it upon so high and brilliant and bold a key as you have assumed here to-night, if you don't kill the Alumni dinners, the Alumni dinners will kill you. [Great laughter.] Yale College, as represented by its graduates, is not self-conceited nor obtrusive. It is true they have always felt the magnificent compliment paid to the College by that greatest of English thinkers and philosophers Lord Bacon, who said in a famous passage, as you will recall: "Eating makes a full man, drinking a ready man, but to be an Alumnus of Yale, a wise man." Yet we are modest and even reverent toward the claims of other universities. We are satisfied at the humble position which the French bishop took towards that great berry, the strawberry. "Doubtless," said he, "God Almighty might have made a better berry than the strawberry, but doubtless He has not." [Laughter.] That is our opinion of Yale College. [Applause.]

Now, to be an Alumnus of Yale College, is the object of all those who enter the college and the object after getting there is to get out. Sometimes indeed, the four years are spent without that fortunate result. I remember to have heard of the son of a somewhat conspicuous gentleman who had desired to give his children the benefit of an education such as Yale affords, who had spent four years there; but the entire four years were spent as a member of the Freshman class. [Laughter.] What a fortunate condition to be continually towering over more and more of those who are competing with him in scholarship and for distinction! I know of none greater unless some mode might be discovered by which one could be a Senior for four years. There is nothing in human affairs that could equal that happiness! [Laughter.] Well, college life in my generation—and I certainly had a singular reminder to-night from you, Mr. President, that I belonged to a generation that has passed out of memory, for you have excited the enthusiasm of this company only in the applause that you have drawn from those who were graduated under Presidents Woolsey and Porter. What are you to say for us who graduated under President Day? College life, I was about to say, is a charming life. The best men, we may presume, are collected from the community, placed under the happiest relations one to another and under the happiest influences from above and around them.

The President of the college has spoken to you of the pleasing fact that there is an endowment of seventy thousand dollars for fellowships. Well, when I was in college, a very moderate endowment of five dollars contributed by those who were associated as companions was a very good endowment for good fellowship. [Laughter.] And now in looking at life as it is, as we remember it in college and have seen it since, who is there that would compare mere fellowship with good-fellowship? What is there that is heartier, what sincerer, what more generous and what more just than the relations of young men of a liberal spirit toward one another in college? How many of us as we have gone on in life, prosperous, as we may have been, with nothing to complain of as to our success or our situation—how many of us have been disposed to repeat that lament of AEneas where he was continually baffled in holding closer conversation with his goddess-mother who was always carried off in a nimbus or her accents lost in the whisper of the wind:—

"cur dextrae jungere dextram Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"

Maybe in the good-fellowship of after-life, you, Mr. President, will not hesitate to walk down Broadway with your arm over General Jackson's shoulder and his about your waist, and then all the people shall cry with applause: "See how Yale men love one another!"

You will observe, from this little classic allusion that I am on the side of those who favor in the curriculum the maintenance of the learned languages. For myself, whether an education in the classic languages and in the classic literature should or should not be discarded from the education of the noble youth of the country is the question whether it is worth while in the advancing and strenuous life of modern times that men should have a liberal education. For be sure that there is no trait in that education that entitles it to the name of liberal more sure and more valuable than this education in the literature, in the history, in the language of the great men of the ages past. If any boy is put through what is called a liberal education, and finds when he goes out from it, that he is not on a level with those who understand and cherish the Greek language and literature, he will find that he is mistaken in wishing to dispense with that distinguishing trait.

I am able to give you a very interesting anecdote, as it seems to me, of this very point, of how a great man, great in his power, great in his fame, yet of an ingenuous and simple nature, may look at this accomplishment. On my return from Europe, when I first visited it, upon a public errand, while President Lincoln was at the height of his fame from the assured although not completed success and triumph in the war, and from the great transaction that had made him one of the famous men for all ages—the emancipation of the slaves—I had occasion, in a friendly meeting with him, to express a hope that he would find it in his power after the cares of State were laid aside to visit Europe and see the statesmen and great men there whose mouths were full of plaudits for his assured accomplished fame. Said he: "You are very kind in thinking I should meet with a reception so gratifying as you have proposed, and I certainly should enjoy as much as any one the acquisition and the observation that such a visit would give; but," added he, "as you know very well my early education was of the narrowest, and in the society in which I should move I should be constantly exposed in conversation to have a scrap of Greek or Latin spoken that I should know nothing about." Certainly that was a very peculiar statement to be made by this wonderful man, but it struck me at the moment that his clear mind, his self-poised nature, recognized the fact that his greatness and his fame did not lie in the direction of an association with what he regarded as the accomplished men of society and of public life brought.

I believe, therefore, that we will stand by the college while it stands by the Greek and the Latin, and certainly as representatives of the great mass of graduates we can now talk more of Greek and Latin as a common accomplishment than the greatest genius and orators of ancient times, Demosthenes or Cicero, could of English. [Laughter.]

There are many things, gentlemen, that if I were the President of this association or the President of the University, I should say and expect to be listened to, while saying it. But I confess that I have pretty much exhausted, as I perceive, your patience and my own capacity. I am now living for the reputation of making short speeches, and I am only afraid that my life will not be long enough to succeed. But I promise you that if I get a good forum and a good audience like this I will run a short speech even if I run it into the mud. [Applause.]

* * * * *

LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD

[Speech of William M. Evarts 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 Bartholdi statue. Charles Stewart Smith, vice-President of the Chamber, presided at the dinner and introduced the speaker as follows: "Gentlemen, fill your glasses for the seventh regular toast: 'Liberty Enlightening the World, a great truth beautifully and majestically expressed by the unique gift which our guests of to-night have brought safely to our shores.' The gentleman who will respond to this toast needs no introduction—Senator William M. Evarts."]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:—I may be permitted at the outset, to speak a little about the share that we have taken on this side of the water in this great achievement which in its glorious consummation, now receives the applause of the world.

When this great conception of friendship for America, joy at our triumph, and their own undaunted love of liberty, liberty for France, liberty for the United States, liberty for the world, arose, then the French people were set aflame with a desire to bring, as it were, their gifts of frankincense and myrrh to lay on this altar of liberty, that its censer might never die out, but forever perfume and ennoble the air of the world. [Applause.]

The genius of Art, the patriotism of France, the enthusiasm of its people, accomplished by contributions drawn from more than one hundred thousand, perhaps two hundred thousand givers, made up this statue, not equalled in the history of the world, and not conceived in its genius or its courage before. [Applause.]

Then it was for us to say whether we would furnish the pedestal upon which this great gift and emblem of Liberty should find its secure and permanent home; without the aid of the Government and by the movement of our own people in this city, an organization wholly voluntary, and without pretension or assumption had the faith that the American people would furnish a home fit for the statue of Liberty, however magnificent should be the reception, that would comport with its own splendor. [Cheers.]

This organization undertook actively its work in 1882, before the statue was completed, and while it remained somewhat uncertain to many who doubted whether the great statue would really be brought to its anticipated prosperity and success. But we went on, and now, within three years, this work, both of receiving and collecting subscriptions and of raising the pedestal itself, will have been completed, and I do not hesitate to say, in the face of all critics and all doubters, that a work of so great magnitude, either in its magnificence, or in its labor, has never before been completed in so short a time. [Applause.]

When we were reasonably assured of adequate funds, we commenced the concrete base on which this pedestal was to rest; and no structure of that kind, of that magnitude, of that necessity, of that perfection and permanence has ever been accomplished in the works of masonry before. [Cheers.] Commencing on the ninth of October, 1883, it was completed on the seventeenth day of May, 1884—and then commenced the work of the structure proper, of the pedestal, and it went on, and it went on, and it went sure, and it went safe, if it went slow, and there it stands. [Cheers.]

And now a word or two about the Committee. An eminent lawyer of our city was once detected and exposed and applauded for being seen standing with his hands in his own pockets [laughter], and for about three months, if you had visited the meetings of this Committee of ours, you would have seen the whole assembly standing with their hands in their own pockets [applause], and taking the first step forward asking their fellow-citizens to follow us, and not for us to follow them. [Cheers.] And so we went on, and on the tenth of this present month, we had received in hand $241,000, of which $50,000 came from the grand and popular movement of a great newspaper—"The World" [three cheers for "The World"]—fifty thousand dollars! and that made up substantially what we had announced in advance as what would be required to complete the pedestal. But where did we miscarry even in that calculation? The exploration showed us that the concrete mass must go deeper in the ground, and that cost us alone $85,000, about $30,000 more than we had counted upon before the exploration; and then the $20,000 more that makes it up to the $300,000 as our need to complete the pedestal (when we had counted upon $250,000), is made by such delay and such expenses as made the general outlay for this immense structure, continuing longer than would have been necessary, had the promptness of contributions kept pace with the possibility of completion.

Now, gentlemen, we have been patient and quiet. Nearly one-fourth of the contributions of the general citizens came from the pockets of the Committee. Instead of hearing from enterprising Chicago, and ambitious Boston, they are talking about the slowness and the dulness of New York's appreciation, of the delays in its contributions. Let the example of our patriotism and munificence be an example for them to imitate; and this city of Boston—let their people there reflect that, when they built Bunker Hill monument, it cost I am informed scarcely $100,000. They were twenty years in raising it, although the whole country was canvassed in its aid. [Laughter.]

Well, gentlemen, so much for that. And how great is this monument! How noble! How beautiful! How inspiring for the time that looks upon its completion and for the ages that shall mark it hereafter! If our country and France, as we hope, may go on in the enlargement and advancement of a glorious civilization, we may feel sure that if our descendants shall overtop us in wealth, in strength, in art, and equal us in love of liberty, they will not say that this was not a worthy triumph for the age in which we live [applause]; and if, unhappily, malign influences shall degrade our civilization and our fame, and travellers and dwellers here shall find their power has waned, and their love of liberty declined, if they shall have become a poverty-stricken and debased people, what will they think of this remaining monument of a past and lost age, but that it was a creation of the gods and that no men ever lived. [Cheers.]

Well, these French gentlemen, the Admiral and the Commandant, how shall we appreciate the beneficence of their visit, the urbanity of their attentions to us, and the happy and hearty manner in which they have accepted our hospitality. Why the Admiral—a greater triumph, let me say, than he could ever have by the power of his navy—has come here and carried New York by storm, without firing a gun. [Cheers.] And as for Commandant De Saune, he has done what in the history of the world—of our modern world, at least—no nation, no ruler has successfully attempted: he has kept "Liberty enlightening the World" under the hatches for thirty days. [Applause.]

It was tried in England, and "Liberty enlightening the World" cut off the head of the king. Tried again, it drove the dynasty of the Stuarts forever from that free island. In France, they tried to suppress it, and it uprooted the ancient monarchy and scattered the forces which were expected to repress it. The milder form of a limited monarchy, even, France would not submit to as a repression of liberty, and again twice over, under an Imperial government, "Liberty enlightening the World" has broken out from under the hatches. [Cheers.]

But Commandant De Saune is not only a bold represser of mutiny on board his vessel, but he is a great and cunning navigator; he did not tell it, but he planned it, and how narrow the calculation was. He arrived here on the seventeenth of June, Bunker Hill day [applause], and missed the eighteenth, the day of Waterloo. [Laughter and applause.]—It is thus that this French genius teaches us new lessons, and evokes irrepressible applause. [Cheers.]

I imagine that a navigator who could thus seize the golden moment, and miss the disastrous one, might, if he undertook it, discover the North Pole. [Laughter.] But I am sure he has better work before him in the world than that. [Applause.] But if he goes on to that destination, oh, let us contribute some portion of the cargo that he will put under the hatches! [Laughter.]

Well, gentlemen, this is a great event, this great triumph of civilization is indeed laden with many instructions, and many illustrations. No doubt "Liberty enlightening the World" in modern history finds its greatest instance in that torch which was lighted here; but from the enthusiasm and the inexorable logic of French philosophy on the "equality of man," was furnished we can never say how much of the zeal and of the courage that enabled our forefathers to shape the institutions of equality and liberty here [cheers], and all can mark the reaction upon France, by which our interests, our prosperity under them encouraged, ennobled and maintained the struggle for liberty there which overthrew ancient establishments and raised in their place new. And now both countries, at least, stand on the same happy combination of liberty regulated by law, and law enlightened by liberty. [Cheers.] And this great structure, emblem of so much else, example of so much else, guide to so much else, yet this emblem, this example, this guide is of the union between the genius and enthusiasm of liberty, the graceful statue and the massive and compact pedestal of our own granite by which it is upheld. [Cheers.]

Liberty can only be supported by solid and sober institutions, founded upon law as built upon a rock; and the structure solid and sober which sustains it, if Liberty has fled, is but a shapeless and unsightly mass that is no longer worthy of respect as a structure, to be torn apart until it can be better rebuilt as the home of liberty. [Prolonged applause.]



THOMAS C. EWING

OHIO AND THE NORTH-WEST

[Speech of Thomas C. Ewing at the first annual banquet of the New York Southern Society, February 22, 1887. Algernon S. Sullivan, the President of the Society, was in the chair, and announced that General Ewing would respond to the toast "Ohio and the Northwest." General Ewing was greeted with applause and cheers for Ohio.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:—Ohio and her four sisters of the Northwest are always proud and happy to be reminded of the fact of their kinship to Virginia. It was the valor and the intrepidity of the Old Dominion which, long before the Confederation was formed, wrested that great territory from the Frenchmen and the savages. It was her lofty generosity which gave to the poor young Republic that vast territory out of which has been formed five of our greatest States, and in which dwell millions of our people. It was her humane and unselfish statesmanship which annexed to the gift the condition that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, excepting punishment for crime, should ever exist in that magnificent domain. Thousands of our Revolutionary heroes sleep in Ohio in land given to them as a recognition of their own priceless services, and the beautiful district between the Scioto and the Little Miami is filled with their descendants. Therefore, Mr. President, whenever Virginia sits at the head of the table, Ohio claims a seat as one of the family.

I, too, coming from that great State, and proud of it and its condition, may join in congratulating you, gentlemen, on the establishment of this "Southern Society of New York." After the long season of strife and discontent this is one of the many signs which mark the vernal equinox, and foretell the coming summer. I believe, notwithstanding the infinite disasters of the war, the overthrow of slavery, and with it all the industrial system of the South, and the needless loss and the humiliations of reconstruction—I believe that there is to-day a kinder and more cordial fraternity between the North and South than ever existed since the agitation of the slavery question sixty or seventy years ago. This society formed, and meeting here in this great centre of American political and business life, can do much to promote that peace. We need more social intercourse between the Northern and Southern men, and we need, above all, a clearer and manlier understanding of each other, in order that the recollections of the war may cease to check the growing accord between us.

Gentlemen, the North craves a living and lasting peace with the South; it asks no humiliating conditions; it recognizes the fact that the proximate cause of the war was the constitutional question of the right of secession—a question which, until it was settled by the war, had neither a right nor wrong side to it. Our forefathers, in framing the Constitution purposely left the question unsettled; to have settled it distinctly in the Constitution would have been to prevent the formation of the union of the Thirteen States. They, therefore, committed that question to the future and the war came on and settled it forever. Now, the Northern people are not so mean, fanatical or foolish as to blame the South because it believed then and believes now that it had the right side of that question. How could we respect the South if it were to say now that it was insincere then, or if it were to pretend that its convictions on a question of constitutional construction had been changed by the cuffs and blows of the war? It is enough that the North and South alike agree that the war settled that question in favor of the Northern construction finally and forever.

The North does ask that the settlement of the war as embodied in the constitutional amendments shall be accepted, and obeyed in the letter and spirit, as good faith and good citizenship require. There have been undoubtedly very many instances of violation of the spirit of the amendments and there will be in the future, but no more than from the very nature of things was to have been expected; and I have no doubt that they will decrease in number as time goes on, and will finally disappear in the breaking-up of the color line in the South; and under the influence of that great sentiment become more familiar and more general every year, in favor of equal political rights to every American citizen. Aside from these questions, there is nothing to perpetuate alienation between the North and South. The new questions will lead to new divisions on other lines; already the representatives of Alabama are getting ready to stand with Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in support of the tariff on the iron industry; the spinners of the Dan and the Saco will stand very soon with the spinners of the Willimantic and the Merrimac in supporting the cotton interests, and now we see the cotton-growers of the South and the wheat-growers of the Northwest united in demanding a tariff for revenue only.

Common political interests, the ministry of social and political intercourse, and perhaps higher than all, the pride of a common citizenship are rapidly supplanting sectionalism among our own people and leading us to stand together and work out our common destiny in fraternal reunion. It has often occurred to me, as a cause of thankfulness to Almighty God—and I believe He is guiding this Republic so as to work out the problem of self-government for all mankind—that the tremendous fact of the war has caused so little change in our system of government; constitutional amendments have been so limited by interpretation by the Supreme Court of the United States that they have hardly added anything to the powers of the general Government or impaired the powers of the States. The legislation following the war when Congress seemed to have run mad with the theory that it could legislate outside of the Constitution has to a large extent fallen under the decisions of that high tribunal. One would have supposed that it could have been certain that, considering the fact that the war was waged to extend the extremest proposition of State sovereignty, that the triumph of the Federal theory would have added enormously and permanently to the powers of the general Government and diminished very greatly and permanently the powers of the States. It is well for Republican government that that evil was averted. We have our free State Government, States still stand as the fortresses of American liberty, and our Federal government moves in its orb with scarcely a perturbation to mark the influence of the war upon it.

Gentlemen, we have successfully worked out the problem of self-government, and our example will undoubtedly and in due time be followed by the world. What else is there for this Republic to do? There is a tremendous question yet unsolved which is now rising unbidden in this and in every enlightened nation. It is the question of the proper distribution of the earnings of labor and capital combined. This is a question that will not down, and we have got to meet it. British publicists and statesmen from whom we have taken in the past far too much of our politics have either ignored that question entirely, or have treated it as practically settled by the apothegm of Ricardo, that the laborer is entitled out of his earnings to just enough food and clothing to keep the machine of his body in working order, and that when that machine becomes disarranged or worn out, he must go to the almshouse.

In the United States, so far as the question does not lie outside of the powers of the State or general Government, so far as those powers can be used fairly to adjust the question, methods of adjustment will fall within the lines relating to revenue, currency, corporations, police regulations. The settlement of the intricate problem and of that immensely important one, will not be added to by flagrant assaults on public authority, nor by the interference by bodies or individuals with the free right of every single workingman to work for whatever he pleases and for whomever he pleases and as many hours as he pleases; nor by the confiscation of real or personal property. And on the other hand that question will not be solved nor aided in its solution by police interference with the right of free assembly and discussion, nor by police interference with the right to form organizations open or secret, nor by police interference with the right of laboring men to combine for their own benefit if they keep within the limits of the law. On the other hand, I dissent in toto from some of the sentiments expressed in the letter of Mr. Hewitt. [Abram S. Hewitt, Mayor of the City of New York.] This question will only be settled by the people at the ballot-box and by the enactment of such laws as will fairly distribute the net earnings which labor and capital combine to make.

Gentlemen, let us who have borne the heat and burden of the Civil War, commit it and its issues to the past, and join the incoming generation in settling this great industrial question in such a way as will be just to all, and best for the masses of the people. The South has always produced great statesmen. It was her peerless and immortal son whose love of the people and whose faith in their power of self-government did most to establish and animate our free institutions. And again let the New South send forth other statesmen armed with the power and animated with the spirit of Jefferson, [Applause.]



FREDERIC WILLIAM FARRAR

POET AND PAINTER

[Speech of Frederic W. Farrar, D.D., at the banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 3, 1884. He was at that time Canon and Archdeacon of Westminster, and in 1895 became Dean of Canterbury. The President, Sir Frederic Leighton, in introducing the speaker said: "In literature as in science a different side of our subject is each year brought into prominence according to the guest who does us the honor to respond to it. To-night I have the pleasure to call on an accomplished and eloquent divine, a writer whose sentences are pictures and his language rich with color and who is known to you not only by his books on the most sacred subjects, but also by the valuable chapters which he has contributed to the study of language, the venerable Archdeacon Farrar."]

MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:—I have no pretension to be regarded as an adequate representative of English Literature, but the toast itself is one which could never be omitted at any banquet of the Royal Academy. The artist and the man of letters, though they differ in their gifts and in their methods, are essentially united in feeling and in purpose. They appeal to the same emotions; they enforce the same lessons; they illustrate the same truths; they labor for the same objects. The common aim of both is the emancipation and free development of our spiritual nature. The humblest artist as he reads the great works written by men of genius in all ages,—the humblest man of letters as year after year he has the delight of gazing on these splendidly illuminated walls—may claim that he belongs to one and the same great brotherhood—the brotherhood of those who have consistently labored to cheer, to bless and to elevate mankind. Turner called himself the "author" not the artist of his pictures; and indeed, writing and painting are but different forms of that one eternal language of which not even Babel could confound the significance. There is hardly a single work in this Exhibition which does not illustrate the close connection between literature and art.

Landscape painting has always been the chief glory of our English school, and what are the great poets of all ages but landscape painters, and what are the best landscape painters but poets? Alike they reproduce for us aspects of nature translated into human thoughts and tinged with human emotion. When Homer shows us bees swarming out of the hollow rock and hanging in grapelike clusters on the blossoms of spring; when AEschylus flashes upon us the unnumbered laughter of the sea-waves; when Virgil in a single line paints for us the silvery Galaesus flowing now under dark boughs, and now through golden fields; when Dante bids us gaze on a sky which is of the sweet color of the Eastern sapphire; when Wordsworth points us to the daffodils tossing in the winds of March beside the dancing waves of the lake; when Tennyson shows us "the gummy chestnut buds that glisten in the April blue;" when even in prose Mr. Ruskin produces scenes and sunsets as gorgeous as those of his own Turner—what are they but landscape painters.

Again, how many memorable scenes of history are inseparable in our minds alike, and almost equally, from the descriptions of the writer or the conceptions of the artist? Shall we ever think of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots without recalling Mr. Froude's description of her, as she stood, a blood-red figure on the black-robed scaffold? Shall we ever think of Monmouth pleading for his life with James II, without remembering the picture which hung last year upon these walls? Is there no affinity between novelist and our many painters of ordinary scenes, with their kindred endeavor to shed light and beauty on the hopes and fears, the duties and sorrows of human life? Nay, even if the preacher and the divine may claim any part in the domain of letters, they, too, look to the artist for the aid and inspiration which, in their turn, they lend to him. Which of us can ever read the words, "These are the wounds with which I was wounded in the house of my friends," or, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock," without being helped to realize their meaning by the pathetic allegories of Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt? And if, sir, you will pardon the allusion, the verse, "Oh! had I the wings of a dove," is in my own mind henceforth inseparably associated, not only with the melody of Mendelssohn, in which we seem to see the dove hovering, as it were, in a cloud of golden music, but also with the picture I saw many years ago in this room, of a weary king sitting on his palace roof, his hair sable silvered, and his crown laid humbly upon the parapet beside him, whose eyes wistfully follow the flight of a flock of doves towards the twilight sky.

I am sure that I echo the sentiment of every painter, and of every author here when I say we are brothers in the effort to make the happy happier, and the sad less miserable, and in the poet's words, "to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, to feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous."

"High is our calling, friends! creative art, (Whether the instruments of words she use Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues,) Demands the service of a mind and heart Though sensitive, yet in their weakest part Heroically fashioned—to infuse Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse, While the whole world seems adverse to desert Great is the glory, for the strife was hard."

[Cheers.]



JOHN R. FELLOWS

NORTH AND SOUTH

[Speech of Col. John R. Fellows at the third annual banquet of the New York Southern Society, New York City, February 22, 1889. Col. John C. Calhoun, President of the Society, said, in introducing him. "Now, gentlemen, the next toast is: 'The Day We Celebrate.' I have been an Arkansas traveller. We have here with us to-night as our guest another who has also been an Arkansas traveller, but he has come on to this great metropolis and located here, and to-day voices the sentiment of a vast portion of our population. We now propose to hear from the Hon. John R. Fellows."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE SOUTHERN SOCIETY, AND THEIR GUESTS:—I have just come from a banquet board, the twenty-second of February gathering of a society over which for some time past I have had the honor of presiding, and which, therefore, commanded my first allegiance to-night. It is not often that I am accustomed to appear in the attitude of an apologist when called upon to respond to a sentiment such as you have assigned to me to-night, for it would be but the affectation of modesty to say that I have been unaccustomed to positions of this kind; yet I do feel something of reluctance in your presence to-night, at the first banquet of your society which I have done myself the honor of attending. I do feel some hesitation in attempting to respond to a toast which includes so much, and is so large in its scope as the one your partiality has given to me. It is altogether unexpected, for I had announced to your committee that my presence here would be of exceedingly limited duration, as I am compelled to leave your midst to visit another gathering, where I have other duties to perform to-night.

Yet I shall not hesitate to say something in response to the toast. He must be very far less than imbued with sentiments of love for his country and of a just conception of its greatness, who can fail to have something of that sentiment awakened upon an occasion like this, or in the presence of such a toast as you have given me.

I congratulate you, Mr. President, upon the auspicious character of this gathering. The youngest of all the societies which have now arisen to prominence in our midst, you give tokens in your infancy of what your future greatness is to be. It is exceedingly gratifying to hear a statement of your prosperity which insures for you so much of the future, confers so much of hope and promise upon your society as that to which we have listened to-night.

Especially is it gratifying to know of your financial condition; "the society owes nothing." In that respect the society differs radically from each of its individual members. [Laughter.] It is a Southern characteristic to owe all you can, to pay if you possibly can. There is a sentiment of honor about the Southerner that induces him to pay if he possibly can; but there is a sentiment of chivalry which always actuates him to contract debts without any reference whatever. [Laughter.] Having started your society on a basis so different from that which characterizes the units of the society is an evidence of how you have become permeated and tinctured with Yankee influences. I am glad to hear of your financial prosperity. It is a good augury, a hopeful sign of the success which awaits your efforts.

You have called upon me to respond to the toast of "The Day we Celebrate." I should rather have listened to what would be said of that toast from the lips of the eloquent Virginian who so admirably represents the State that was the birthplace of Washington, whose personal character and whose family have given so much of additional lustre and glory to the State. [Applause and cheers for General Lee.]

I may not venture, gentlemen, upon a review of the character of Washington, upon all that his life, and services, and influence meant to the world. The world, in the language of another, knows that history by heart. An hundred and fifty-seven years ago, I believe, this day, he was born. He lived almost the full age allotted to man, but he crowded that narrow life with deeds that would have rendered illustrious and immortal the history of a thousand years. He gave to the world an impetus, he impressed upon it a character and force, he gave it a conception of new power, of solidity of judgment, of strength of character, of unbending and unyielding integrity, of high devotion to principle, of just conception of duty, of patriotism and heroic resolve in the midst of temptation to wander and be subservient, of self-abnegation, of sacrifices for the benefit of others, such as would have adorned and rendered immortal—I repeat—the history of the lives of ten thousand ordinary men. [Applause.] You claim him for Virginia, but I speak the universal language when I repeat the eloquent expression of the most eloquent Irishman—"No country can claim, no age appropriate him; the boon of Providence to the human race, his fame is eternity, and his residence Creation." [Applause.] Well was it that the English subject could say (though it was the defeat of their armies and the disgrace of their policy—even they could bless the convulsion in which he had his origin), "for if the heavens thundered and the earth rocked yet when the storm had passed how pure was the atmosphere it cleared, how bright in the brow of the firmament was the planet it revealed to earth." An hundred years have passed since Washington, crowned with the honors of the successful chieftain, having led his country through the turmoil of seven years of blood and strife, in these streets and under these skies was crowned with the highest civic triumph this Republic can bestow upon its citizen.

And to-night we come to inquire less, perhaps, of Washington's history, of Washington's influence and character—for every child knows that—than we do of the country of which Washington was so conspicuous a part. It seems to me, gentlemen, that the great national holiday we celebrate, the Fourth of July, is the most significant of all holidays in the history of all the nations of the world. What does it typify, sirs? What does it signify to us? Your chairman has said that we have had an hundred years of national history. It is a little less than an hundred years since we inaugurated our first President. The Fourth of July does not celebrate the establishment of the independence of the United States; it marks but the beginning of the strife instead of its successful close. It was at the outset of the Revolutionary struggle that the Colonies threw down that gauge which defied all tradition, which stamped upon all past history, which mocked at ancient dogmas and hoary traditions, which introduced upon earth an entirely new and distinctive doctrine! Before that time men had fought for the realization of noble purposes and high aims; they had fought to win succor from distressful conditions; they had fought for relief against oppression; but they had fought for these only as the gaining of a boon and a privilege from powers that were; and everywhere it was conceded that there was upon earth a class of men ordained by Providence to rule, and that the vassal's obedience was the inheritance of the many. And when men rose up in their might to fight upon the plains of Runnymede, in earnest contest, for ancient rights, for ancient privileges, it was after all only asking something of the grace of the sovereign, and no one denied his absolute power to withhold or to grant it as he would. But the colonies threw down this defiance to earth—that there was no heaven-ordained class to govern men; that man, by virtue of his existence, by reason of his creation, was a sovereign in his own right; and that in these latter days all just rights in government were derived, not from the will of the ruler, but from the consent of the governed. [Applause.]

It was a new doctrine, I repeat, and if it could be successfully maintained there was no foundation strong enough for a throne to rest securely upon! And so all the startled nations rose up to oppose it, this innovation of all that had been in the preceding centuries; but guided by that star, led on by the resolute courage, the steadfast integrity of Washington, our fathers went on and on in pursuit of this doctrine, in quest of this precious boon, on through blood and toil, on when the struggle seemed like the very madness of despair, on and on when hope seemed to have fled, but patriotism remained; on over trembling dynasties and crumbling thrones, until they wrested that jewel of their love from the reluctant hand of a sullen king, and set it to glitter forever upon the brow of a new-born nation. [Applause.] Auspicious day, which an hundred years ago proclaimed both civil and religious liberty to all the populations of the earth! To-day we have set four other stars in our national heaven. [Applause.] Through all the years we shall go on adding to the glories of the constellation, each one with a radiance of its own, each one with an orbit of its own, but all swinging in delightful harmony in that larger orbit within which we recognize our common country, our Federal Union. [Applause.]

What did Washington do for us? Look around you! I cannot but say, as that monument in St. Paul's says of the architect of that splendid pile, Sir Christopher Wren. All of him that could die sleeps under the marble, but above his mouldering ashes there is this inscription: "Here lies the body of Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St. Paul's. Reader, would you see his monument, then look around you." [Applause.] There could be no higher evidence of the grandeur and greatness, the strength and character of the man and of his mind, than to point to the works he did. So we say of Washington. We have had an hundred years of experience in the form of government that his sword conquered for us, and that his statesman-like mind fashioned and controlled at the outset. The guidance he gave us we have never lost; the teachings he inculcated we cherish as dearly to-day as when they were uttered. Nay! nay! his memory and his fame grow brighter as the years recede, and as we get away from the frailties and foibles which attach to the weakness of our common humanity, even in the person of the strongest. As we get away it is like moving from some grand mountain peak. As you go away you see its symmetrical form rise clear in the clouds, with the eternal blue around the summit, with all its harsh and rugged outlines obliterated by distance; it is there in its perfect grandeur, in its completeness and beauty, without any of the weaknesses or foibles which attach to it.

I think there is no better evidence of the character and influence of Washington upon the American mind than what has transpired during and since the war. Look, sir, at the South of which you spoke! She was largely a lethargic people prior to the war. She lived in luxury; she was in the midst of a condition which yielded to her abundant support, and eliminated from her life the necessity of hard labor and earnest effort. The war came. We were bound around with a cordon we could not break; we were encircled by fire; we were thrown upon our resources. What resulted? Ah, sir, at once there leaped into life, with a splendor and with a giant's strength such as the world, such as ourselves had never conceived of, the true manhood of the South. Every man became a laborer, every woman a worker. There was nothing that the necessities of our life demanded that we did not fashion with our own hands. Deprived of all support, of all assistance from the outside world, we dug from our hills, and wrested from our soil, and evoked from resources the measure and extent of which we had never dreamed before, whatever was necessary for the support of the loved ones at home and the armies we maintained in the field. [Applause.] We illustrated a heroism and valor which is the admiration of the world, which is the highest pride and admiration of our gallant adversaries. They conquered no ignoble foe; the field was worthy even of their efforts. And when the war was over, the terrible strife had ended, while yet the land was filled with mourning, while every church on every Sunday in this North was crowded with women wearing the sable garments of woe for sons, for brothers, for husbands, for the loved of every kind and condition who were sleeping their last sleep on Southern hillsides—how did the spirit of Washington, the toleration, the kindness, the generosity, the magnanimity which in all his life he breathed out toward all exhibit itself here in the North? They took us by the hand. They lifted us to our feet again, or assisted in doing so. They gave us the recognition which one gallant man extends to another whose heroism and courage he has tested; they wrote the title of American Citizen upon our brows again, and told us to go on as parts of the Union, with our loves and hopes bound up in its common destiny. [Applause.]

The spirit of Washington has never died. The courage of Washington has never died. This war was a vital necessity—let us recognize it. This war was an ordination of Providence—let us confess it. There were issues distracting and dividing this country which no legislation, no government, and no decrees of courts could settle. At one time or another they had to be fought to their final conclusion upon the battle-field. When the contest was ended it eliminated from our national condition every element of strife, and welded us together in a bond ten thousandfold stronger and better than we had known before. [Applause.]

Now, what remains? Ah! so much remains that can never die! There are Northern soldiers here, there are Southern soldiers here. We stood face to face through the bitterness of that conflict; we stand heart to heart now. [Applause.] Whenever this country shall call upon her sons to do battle against a common foe, when North and South Carolina with Massachusetts and Vermont, when Georgia and Ohio, when all the South and all the North march side by side in behalf of Old Glory, then at the bivouac, then around our council fires, the sons will recall the valorous deeds their fathers wrought upon either side and under opposing flags during the civil strife, as the loudest call and the strongest inspiration to awaken effort in behalf of the rescued and re-united country. [Applause.] Has it not always been so? If you would awaken a flame of martial life in the sons of France, appeal to them as those whose eagles flew in triumph above Wagram, and Austerlitz, and Lodi Bridge, and bore upon the outstretched wings the glorious destinies of her favored child of fortune, her thunderbolt of war! If you would awaken Caledonia to battle, appeal to her sons as descendants of—

"Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots whom Bruce has often led,"

and at once, from Loch Lomond, from Ben Nevis, and from the Grampian Hills, her kilted warriors will troop to death as to a feast, stimulated by the recollection of the glorious deeds of those from whose loins they sprang! And hereafter, sir, if eloquence shall want a theme to awaken her sublimest efforts, or poetry shall seek some shrine at which to offer its most harmonious numbers, orator and bard will not go back to the romantic period of Agincourt and Crecy, when Henry V led his armies to victory, and Douglas poured the vials of his wrath across Northumbrian plains—no need to go back there—but they will tell of the deeds of the glorious men who drew their swords at Lee's, or Johnston's, or Longstreet's bidding, or of those who flamed the demigods of war where Grant and Sherman and Sheridan led [applause]; of those whose camp-fires shone out on the dark walls of Blue Ridge, or lit up with their glow the waters of Gauley and of Shenandoah; of those who sleep in graves consecrated forevermore, where the starts look down to-night through shadowy trees in Spottsylvanian woods and Stafford groves; of the long lines whose musketry rang out their sublime peal in the early gray of that April morning at Shiloh, whose fierce battle-shout at Chancellorsville or in the Wilderness mingled with the farewell sounds that broke on Jackson's and on Sedgwick's ears, sounds scarcely stilled ere the acclamations of angels woke them to sublimer greeting. [Applause.]

We may safely trust the story of the unequalled valor, the peerless chivalry of those years, on whichever side they fought, to the verdict which the unprejudiced future will utter. But I know if ever this country shall ask us again to flock to her standard and to do duty for her cause, there is no stronger inspiration that can be invoked, there is no enthusiasm that can be created or awakened that will lead men so quickly into the ranks of the foe and hold them so steadily in the face of death as to talk to each other of the deeds their fathers did when they stood as foes battling for what they thought was right. [Applause.] Nay! out of our very strife we have grown strong. The magnanimity of the conquering party has fused and welded us together in one irresistible, unbreakable party. No internal dissension shall disturb us henceforth; and the world arrayed in arms against us we do not fear. And all of this we derive from the teachings, the heroism, the courage, the patience, the faith, the example of the fathers, at the head of whom stood the illustrious one in whose behalf we celebrate this day. [Applause and cheers for Colonel Fellows.]



DAVID DUDLEY FIELD

THE TELEGRAPH

[Speech of David Dudley Field at the dinner given in honor of Samuel F. B. Morse, New York City, December 27, 1863.]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:—In the early days of the electric telegraph, a proposition was made that it should be called the Morseograph. I cannot but think that that would have been a distinctive and appropriate designation; thus, in all future time, when the thing should be mentioned, recalling the history of its origin. But the name of the inventor is no secret; and the world will ratify the judgment we pronounce to-night that, as benefactor and discoverer, his name will be immortal.

If we were to measure the future of the telegraph by what it has already accomplished, we should predict for it an indefinite extension. Less than twenty years ago, the first line was built in the United States. Though it extended only from Washington to Baltimore, it was begun in doubt and completed with difficulty. Thence it stretched itself out first to Philadelphia and New York, then to other principal cities, and afterward along the great thoroughfares. On the other side of the sea it advanced from city to city, and from one market to another.

At first laid with hesitation underneath the rivers, it was next carried beneath narrow seas, and at last plunged into the ocean and passed from continent to continent. Compare its feeble beginning with its achievement of to-day. Think of the uncertainty with which, after weary months upon dusty Maryland roads, the last link of that first line was closed, and then think of the exultation with which great ships in mid-ocean brought up from the bottom of the sea a cable lost two miles down, and the problem was forever solved, not only that an ocean-telegraph cable was possible, but that it could not be so lost as that it might not be found.

Standing in the presence of the great inventor, I am constrained to congratulate him upon the fulness of his triumph as he remembers the early effort, and contrasts it with the marvels of this night in this hall. That little instrument, no larger than the clock upon the chamber mantel, and making as little noise, is yet speaking to both America and Europe; and what it says will be printed before the dawn, and laid at morning under the eyes of millions of readers. Did I say before the dawn? It will meet the dawn in its circuit before it reaches the confines of eastern Europe. In the opposite quarter, we know that the message which has just left us for the West will outstrip the day. Even while I have been speaking, the message has crossed the Mississippi, passed the workmen laying the farthest rail of the Pacific road, bounded over the Sierra Nevada, and dashed into the plains of California, as the last ray of to-day's sun is fading from the shore, and the twilight is falling upon the Pacific Sea.

It is, however, not alone its history which justifies us in predicting for the telegraph indefinite extension. Its essential character must sooner or later carry it to every part of the habitable globe. Of all the agencies yet vouchsafed to man, it is the most accessible and the most potent. While the machinery itself is simple and cheap, the element from which it is fed is abundant and all-pervading. It is in the heaven above, in the earth beneath, and in the water under the earth. You take a little cup and pass into it a slender wire, when lo! there comes to it a spark from air and water, from the cloud and the solid earth, which the highest mountains cannot stop, nor the deepest seas drown, as it dashes on its fiery way, indifferent whether its errand be to the next village or to the antipodes. No other voice can speak to the far and near at the same time. No other hand can write a message which may be delivered within the same hour at Quebec and at Moscow. By no other means may you converse at once with the farmer of Illinois and the merchant of Amsterdam, with the German on the Danube and the Arab under his palm.

To the use of such an instrument there can be no limit but the desire of man to converse with man. If from this populous and opulent capital you would speak with any inhabitant of either hemisphere, you have here an agent which may be brought to do your bidding. If any, however distant, desire to speak with us, they have these means at their command. How great will be the effect of all this upon the civilization of the human race, I do not pretend to foresee. But this I foresee, as all men may, that the necessities of governments, the thirst for knowledge, and the restless activity of commerce will make the telegraph girdle the earth and bind it in a network of electric wire.

The Atlantic, the most dangerous and difficult of all the seas, has been crossed. In the Pacific you may pass easily from island to island, till you reach the shores of Eastern Asia. There an American company will take it up and extend it from side to side of the central Flowery Land. And an English company is about to cross the straits which divide Australia from the elder continent. Indeed, I think that I declare not only what is possible but what will come to pass within the next decade, that there will be a telegraph-office wherever there is now a post-office, and that messages by the telegraph will pass almost as frequently as messages by the mail.

Then the different races and nations of men will stand, as it were in the presence of one another. They will know one another better. They will act and react upon one another. They may be moved by common sympathies and swayed by common interests. Thus the electric spark is the true Promethean fire, which is to kindle human hearts. Then will men learn that they are brethren, and that it is not less their interest than their duty to cultivate good-will and peace throughout all the earth.

* * * * *

EARLY CONNECTICUT

[Speech of David Dudley Field at a complimentary dinner given by the Saturday Night Club to the judges of the Supreme Court, New York City, April 5, 1890. Clark Bell, President of the Club, said in the course of his introductory remarks: "It is our grand good fortune to have with us to-night the Nestor of the American bar, who was born in Connecticut, and whose useful life has covered nearly all the years of our present century. His eye has seen much that is far in the past, and beside that love and affection he bears to his birthplace are the reminiscences of the men conspicuous in the judicial annals of his native State, who have been upon the stage of action during the eventful years of the present century. When we shall have separated, when this banquet shall be but a memory and a reminiscence, that which will give us most pleasure, the reminiscence we shall prize among the highest, will be that of the presence of the Hon. David Dudley Field, whose illustrious name I will connect with the toast—'Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar of Connecticut'"]

MR. PRESIDENT:—When you did me the honor to invite me to this banquet, I was quick to accept the invitation, because I expected to meet the judges of my native State, of which I bear so pleasant a remembrance. I find, however, representatives from other seats of justice come to greet the judges of Connecticut. You have here a judge from the Dominion of Canada, over which shines the mild light of Arcturus, and on the other side a representative from Texas where glows, not the Lone Star of other days, but the bright constellation of the Southern Cross. You have judges from the neighboring State of New Jersey, from the further State of Pennsylvania, and from Delaware, about which I may use the language of John Quincy Adams, speaking of Rhode Island: "She is to be measured, not by the smallness of her stature, but by the loftiness of her principles." All these eminent judges are here to join in the salutation to the judges of Connecticut, and to them therefore our attention is to be chiefly directed.

I am old enough to remember the judges of Connecticut when they sat under the authority of the Colonial charter, that charter which was hidden in the famous oak of Hartford to escape seizure by an emissary of the King of England. I was present at the trial in Haddam, my native town, of a man for murder. Trumbull was the judge, that Trumbull who wrote "McFingal," and who, being elected for a single year, as was then the rule, was re-elected as long as he lived. He was neatly dressed, wearing ruffles in the bosom, and at the wrists, and was in trim knee-breeches.

I remember this incident of the trial. The crowd was so great that the court was adjourned from the court house to the church, then called the meeting-house. The jurors sat in the square pews. One of the jurors, a respectable farmer of the neighborhood, thinking that he had detected some mistake of the counsel rose to correct him, when the counsel retorted that the juror was the one mistaken, and added: "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." The prisoner was convicted and was hanged at Middletown. I went up to see the execution, and when I reached the place trained bands were marching through the streets, playing their music as if for a great festivity. A sermon was preached to a crowded house, and the prisoner was then taken, dressed in a shroud, to a hill near by, and in the presence of thousands of spectators was executed. These scenes were of course impressed strongly on the memory of a boy. I remember the session of the county court at Haddam, when the judges, headed by the sheriff, marched in order from the tavern to the court house. I remember seeing in court David Daggett, wearing white top boots, and I met Roger Minot Sherman, driving into the village in a sulky. I remember Staples and Hungerford. The latter went into court one day with a Bible under his arm, to show from the first chapter of Genesis, as authority in an insurance case, that the day began at sunset, "and the evening and the morning were the first day."

In those days party feeling ran high in Connecticut, between the Democrats and the Federalists—"Demos" and "Feds," as they were called for shortness—and contempt as well. Let me recount two anecdotes: The Rev. Dr. Backus, riding along the highway, stopped at a brook to water his horse, when another rider came up from the opposite side, and thus addressed the good man: "Good-morning, Mr. Minister." The latter replied, "Good-morning, Mr. Democrat. How did you know that I was a minister?" "By your dress. How did you know that I was a Democrat?" "By your address."

At another time Dr. Backus, being prosecuted for a libel upon Mr. Jefferson, was taken from his home to Hartford to be bailed. The minister and the marshal rode of course, for that was not the heyday of vehicles. The minister rode very fast, so fast that the marshal called out after him: "Dr. Backus, Dr. Backus, you ride as if the devil were after you." The Doctor turning his head replied, "Just so!"

Mr. President, Connecticut has been often abused for the frugality and thrift of its people, and called in derision the Nutmeg State. I remember hearing that a New Yorker once put into his will an injunction against any child of his being educated in Connecticut.

An Episcopal clergyman removing from New York into a Connecticut town was actually boycotted. The people would not sell him anything to eat, and I believe he returned for food and shelter to the hither side of Byram River. I remember such a joke as this current in New York; that they had a singular habit in Connecticut, when a man cast up his accounts with his neighbor and gave him a note for the balance, he used to exclaim: "Thank God, that debt is paid." Some of the people have singular tastes now and then; as for example there is a hill behind East Haddam that used to be called "Stagger-all-hill," but inquiring the other day, I was told its name was now "Mount Parnassus."

They may say all these things if they please, but Connecticut has no public debt, or a very small one at most, and her people are industrious, educated, polite to strangers, jealous of their rights and brave enough to defend them. I remember hearing Mrs. Fanny Kemble say, some years ago, of the twelve hundred thousand people then inhabiting Massachusetts, that, taking them all in all, she thought they were the foremost twelve hundred thousand people living together in the world, and I can speak in similar terms of the inhabitants of Connecticut, as really a part of the same people.

In conclusion, Mr. President, may I without affectation utter these words of love for my native State, its scenery and its people. Flow on, gentle river, shine on, rugged and wooded hills, smile on, green meadows basking in the sun, and you, brave people, who dwell amid these scenes, prove yourselves ever worthy of your progenitors, and flaunt high as you will, the old banner with its hopeful and trustful motto—qui transtulit sustinet.



FRANCIS M. FINCH

THE OFFICE OF THE LAW

[Speech of Francis M. Finch on assuming the chair of the President of the New York State Bar Association, at their annual dinner, Albany, N. Y., January 17, 1900. The ex-President, Walter J. Logan, introduced him in the following words: "Before I introduce to you Judge Finch, I want to say just one word for myself. The New York State Bar Association has treated me with distinguished consideration, and I shall ever regard every member of the Association as my personal friend, and among the pleasantest experiences of my life, which I am only just commencing, that the lawyers of the State of New York thought me worthy of the position which I am now surrendering. Allow me to introduce to you Judge Finch. [Applause.] I want to introduce to you, Judge Finch, the most splendid body of men in the American nation,—the New York State Bar Association. Judge Finch is now President."]

GENTLEMEN:—I regard it as a very great honor to be called upon to preside over the work of this Association for the coming year. I do not know of any other temptation which would have drawn me away from the quiet of my ordinary life into an arena so public and so open to critical observation. It is entirely natural that one who has crossed the line of threescore and ten should covet a life of rest, or at least some restful work which makes no heavy demand upon brain and nerves, but I have received from the Bar of the State of New York, in the years that have gone by, and which seem to me now almost like a dream, I have received at their hands so much kindness and courtesy, so much of that encouragement and generous approval which makes the hardest work a pleasure and happiness, that it seemed to me almost ungrateful and ungracious to refuse the duty which was sought to be imposed upon me, and so I have surrendered, with such grace as I may, and will endeavor, to the best of my ability, to push forward the work of this Association. [Applause.]

Indeed, gentlemen, I confess, as over our cups confessions are sometimes excusable and in order—I confess that it is something of a comfort not to be quite forgotten. [Applause.] It is the lot of the average judge—I don't mean by that these old associates of mine, sitting by me, who are a long way above the average [applause]—it is the lot of the average judge to disappear from the public memory very soon after his work is done. Occasionally there is one who makes his appearance in the flush of some new and remarkable era, and fastens his name to its beginning. Occasionally there are others who do some excellent work, not altogether judicial, and in that manner keep their memories alive; but the most of us, when our work is done, step down into the mist and the darkness of a very swift and prompt oblivion. And if you, gentlemen of the Bar, have chosen for me to draw back the curtains a little, to dissipate somewhat the mist and the darkness, it is just like you; it is only another of those kindly deeds which it is pleasant to remember, and for which I am grateful, and glad to have the opportunity of saying so. [Applause.]

I wished to confine what I have to say to-night simply to these words of acknowledgment, but the thought comes to me, and I think I must give it expression, that there never was a year in the history of this nation when the work of the intelligent, of the able and of the scholarly lawyer was more imperatively demanded in the interest of the nation and of the race, than this year which now opens before us. [Applause.] I have long been of the conviction that the law never leads civilization, but always follows in its wake; that its purpose and its object is to regulate and control the relations of men with each other, and their relations to the State; but those relations must first come, must first be established before there is anything for the law to regulate. Progress goes on; new inventions are made; new relations between men occur, and it is the office and the purpose of the law to march behind them, to regulate and order and systematize them, and produce, if need be, justice out of injustice; and to-day beyond the questions of taxation, which are an almost insoluble problem, we have already the beginnings in the metropolis of the State of an underground railway, likely to open and introduce questions as difficult and as remarkable as those which attended the elevated railways. We have a mass of colossal trusts, as they are called, combinations of capital, in an extraordinary degree, with which some of you have already been wrestling, and others of you will be called upon to confront or defend. Beyond that the student of international law is about to be obliged to look away from home and reconsider his foundations, to reflect anew upon the conclusions to which he has come in the application of the questions of what is contraband and what is not in the light of an extending commerce. Beyond that, again, and what interested me, perhaps, more than it may you, I saw the other day in one of our leading city journals, a statement which I have been able to verify, that the German nation on the first day of January in this year, set in operation a new Prussian code, which substituted for the civil law and the Latin doctrine the Teutonic law of Germany. I myself cannot read the German language; but, if there are some among you, within the sound of my voice, who are capable of doing that, I set you the task between now and one year from to-day of studying and examining that new Prussian code, which must be a marked departure, and giving us the benefit of your knowledge and your judgment. And, beyond that still, the nation itself stands to-day at the parting of the ways; stands to-day upon the verge of a new and most unexpected and remarkable destiny, and, I repeat, that there never was, I think, there never will be, gentlemen, another year in which the labor and the study and the thought of the scholarly and intelligent and learned lawyer could be more needed or more in demand. [Applause.]

Let me add one word, not quite so serious, and that, with reference to my friend who has been your President during the past year, and who, for his patient industry in your behalf, for the manner in which he has conducted your affairs and looked after your interests, deserves the thanks of this Association, which, in your name and behalf, I venture to give him. [Applause.] What I want to say, however, outside of that, is a little bit in the line of complaint. He has undertaken to take away from me my surplus over and above ten millions of dollars [laughter], and give it to the State of New York. He says in justification that he thinks and believes that it would be for the best, but, with all deference to his opinion, I venture to say that I would rather trust my children to spend that surplus than the average legislature. [Laughter.] More than that, and the suggestion will relieve my friend somewhat, I do not intend to have any surplus over his ten millions, not if I know it. When I reach that happy point, and find that my inventory is running above it, I propose quietly to take that surplus and hand it over, first, on one side, and then on the other, to my children, and that beautiful inheritance law of his will have no application to me whatever. [Laughter.] Nevertheless, while I disagree with him about those things, and think I see my way out of the difficulty, I pardon all of it, because he has promised me faithfully on his honor that until the close of the festivities he would remain your President, and when in the end he bade you good-night he would do it for me, as well as for himself, and wish you each and all a happy journey to your homes and a safe return to these same tables one year from to-day. [Applause.]



JOHN FOORD

THE LAND O' CAKES

[Speech of John Foord at the 143d annual banquet of the St. Andrew's Society of the State of New York, December 1, 1899. The speech was delivered in response to the toast, "The Land O' Cakes."]

MR. PRESIDENT, MEMBERS AND GUESTS OF THE ST. ANDREW'S SOCIETY:—I suppose there are some in this company who would find it hard to tell the difference between a bear bannock and a pease scone. For the benefit of such, I may be permitted to say that there was no suggestion of fancy bread about the "cakes" with which the name of Scotland has been associated. They were very plain bread, indeed, and quite as destitute of leaven as that which the Children of Israel were condemned to eat in the wilderness. The only sweetening they had came from the fact that they were the fruit of honest toil; and hunger, as you know, is "gude kitchen." Together with the "hale-some parritch, chief o' Scotia's food," they formed the staff of life of a people whose tastes were as simple as their ideals were high. "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal," was the motto proposed by Sydney Smith for the "Edinburgh Review"; and, jocular as was the suggestion, it touches the keynote of Scottish character and history. For, what have we not done on a little oatmeal? Our fathers fought on it, worked on it, thought and studied on it, wrote ballads and preached sermons on it, and created the Scotland, kinship with which we are all so proud to claim, on a diet chiefly composed of oat cakes and oatmeal porridge. On such frugal fare, they subdued a harsh and stubborn soil and made it yield its yearly toll of harvest; they took tribute of wool and mutton from the moorland and the hillside, and of hide and beef from the fallow lea; they levied on loch and sea to support their fisher-folk; and kept the rock and the reel and the flying shuttle busy to clothe themselves with homespun, so that the old Arbroath toast became a very epitome of the vocations of that primitive time: "The life o' man, the death o' fish, the shuttle, and the plough; corn, horn, linen, yarn, lint, and tarry 'oo." Nay more, defying the rigors of an ungenial climate, they set themselves, in their dour and stubborn way, to make flowers grow where Nature never intended such flowers to be; and they became so cunning in the mystery of Adam's art that the Scottish gardener took the place of direction wherever men laid out flower-beds or built greenhouses throughout the civilized world.

On such simple lines of industry were laid the foundations of the material greatness of Scotland—its mines, its furnaces, its machine shops, its shipyards, its flax and jute mills, and all the other forms of productive energy that have placed this little country and its few millions of people in the front rank of the mechanical activity of the world. But is it because of such triumphs as these that the name of Scotland appeals so powerfully to the heart and the imagination of men? I think not. Had our race been distinguished only for its care of the bawbees, for its indomitable perseverance, its capacity to endure hardship, its adaptiveness, and its enterprise, I trow that the passionate pilgrim would not turn so eagerly to Scotland to cull the flowers of poesy and breathe the air of romance. And remember, our Scottish people are rather what the country has made them, than the country is what it has been made by them. I heard Governor Roosevelt say the other evening that the State of New York was merely another name for the aggregate of the people in it, and I could not help thinking that there must be in the Dutch blood a certain deficiency of imagination. Can you imagine a Scotsman, however matter-of-fact and commonplace, offering such a definition of his native land? The land of brown heath and shaggy wood, land of the mountain and the flood, the land of our sires, must be, indeed, part of ourselves; but it is also something beyond and above ourselves,—the cradle of memories that will fade only with our latest breath, the home of traditions, whose spell we could not, if we would, shake off, the seat of beauty and of grandeur that we somehow think are finer than the fairest or sublimest scenes that earth can show. We know the feeling that prompted Byron to say:—

"When I see some tall rock lift its head to the sky, Then I think of the hills that o'ershadow Culbean."

For, to most of us, in all our intercourse with Nature, the Scottish mind supplies a Scottish background. There is nothing that affects me quite so powerfully as a fine sunset; but I confess that, from all the magnificent sunsets that I have seen between the Palisades and the Rocky Mountains, I have derived no such emotion as I have felt when, "gathering his glory for a grand repose," the sun set behind the Grampians; and the peak of Schehallion, like a spearhead, cleft the evening sky. Why, the Scottish exile thinks that the sun turns a kindlier face to his native land than it does to countries less favored, like the one who sang:—

"The sun rises bright in France, And fair sets he; But he's tint the blythe blink he had In my ain countrie."

We are what we are, gentlemen, because the land of our birth is "Bonnie Scotland," as well as the "Land o' Cakes." Its beauty has entered into our blood; its majesty and sublimity have given us a certain elevation of soul. Thus it came about that, beside the homely kailyard virtues of our forefathers, and their stern uncompromising religious zeal, there grew up in all their wild beauty such a profusion of the flowers of song, of poetry, and of romance that you shall hardly find between Tweed's silver stream and where the ocean billows break in thunder on Cape Wrath, ten square miles of Scottish ground which have not been celebrated in ballad, legend, song or story. Whence, think you, came that affluence of melody with which every strath and glen and carse of Scotland was vocal—melody that auld wives crooned at their spinning wheel: lasses lilted at ewe-milking, before the dawn of day; fiddlers played at weddings and christenings; and pipers sent echoing among the hills to inspire the march of the warlike living or sound a lament for the heroic dead? A long line of nameless Scottish minstrels had lived and died generations before Burns and Ferguson, Tannahill and Lady Nairne, and all the rest of our sweet singers took the old tunes and gave them a form and vesture as immortal as their own fame. We are called a practical, hard-headed people, and so we are; but the most enduring part of our literature tells of the romantic ideals that Scotsmen have cherished and the chivalrous deeds they have done. We are thought to be severely logical; and if allowance be made for our point of view, we are that also. But the unsympathetic student of Scottish history will not get very far with his subject by keeping steadily in mind our practicalness and our logic. If he thinks of these alone, he will be apt to pronounce those Scotsmen fools who sacrificed two centuries of progress for the barren, if glorious, privilege of national independence; he will think they must have been pure fanatics who spilt their blood that they might have Christ's Kirk and Covenant regulated in their own peculiar way; and he will hold them as mere feather-brains who sacrificed their lands and their lives to an obstinate loyalty to the House of Stuart. Yet it is of such unreason, if unreason it be, that the warp and the woof of the historic annals of Scotland have been spun: it is this defiance of what the utilitarian philosopher calls the rules of common sense, as applied to human conduct, that has given the Scottish race their unique position among the tribes of men.

And, even in this age of steam and electricity, they will still cherish their romance. It was but the other day that there was pointed out to the Gordon Highlanders in the Transvaal the expediency of exchanging the garb of old Gaul for a uniform of khaki: the one would be less of a shining mark for the enemy than the other, and, its adoption would probably result in saving many lives. You know their decision. I think I hear them say, "All this may well be true; but we stand by the kilt and the tartan." That, a critical world may say, is magnificent, but it is not war. We say, magnificent or not, it is war; for the kilt and the tartan are inseparable from the sentiment that makes these men the redoubtable soldiers they are. Take those away, and you break their touch with a continuous tradition which transforms every man in the regiment, be he Scottish, English or Irish, into a Gordon, with all the dash and vim and dare-devil courage that centre around the name. The Gordon blood in him helped Byron to understand and express the potency of the Highland tradition:—

"But, with the breath that fills Their mountain pipe, so fill the mountaineers With the fierce native daring which instills The stirring memories of a thousand years. And Evan's, Donald's fame rings in each clansman's ears."

May there never come a time when the mind of our race will be closed against such a sentiment as that! Let us go on doing our share, resolutely, faithfully, conscientiously, of the work of the world; let us keep well to the front with the same success that we have done of yore; but let us not forget that we owe the unconquerable spirit in us to our Auld Mither Scotland, that it is from her breast there has been drawn the celestial ichor which has nourished genius in the cottage as generously as in the Hall, and that has made the inheritance of the ploughman's son more precious than a Dukedom. We shall, as your President has said, be better, and not worse citizens of this great Republic; we shall play our part all the more worthily, in public or private station, if every fibre of our being thrills to an auld Scotch sang, and we feel in our inmost heart that—

"Where the caller breezes sweep Across the mountain's breast, Where the free in soul are nurst, Is the land that we lo'e best."



SIMEON FORD

ME AND SIR HENRY

[Speech of Simeon Ford at a banquet given to Sir Henry Irving by the Lotos Club, New York City, October 29, 1899. The President, Frank R. Lawrence, occupied the chair.]

GENTLEMEN:—I cannot but envy you the intellectual treat in which you are revelling, in being permitted to listen to the resistless eloquence of both me and Sir Henry Irving. It is not often that two such stars as me and Sir Henry will consent to twinkle in the same firmament. But your gifted President can accomplish wonders. He is what Weber and Fields[3] call a "hypnotister."

As the President has said, I am not one of the set speakers. I just blew in here, and blew in my good money to attend this feast, like the rest of the rank and file, and now I have to work my passage as well. I am simply put in as a filler. The President, with his awe-inspiring, chill-producing gavel, is the "wrapper," and I am the filler; and you, who smoke, have observed ere this that a mighty fine wrapper is often associated with a very rank filler.

If I had had about twenty minutes' warning I could have prepared a eulogy on Sir Henry, setting forth his virtues as a man and an actor in such a way that he never would have recognized himself, and with such eloquence that Dr. Greer [David H. Greer] would have looked like thirty cents. But I did not get the twenty minutes, so poor Sir Henry must content himself with the few scant bouquets with which he has already been bombarded.

A sober, able-bodied eulogizer with a good address and a boiled shirt can get a pretty steady winter's job in this Club at board wages. I have, in my poor, weak way, eulogized several distinguished men in this historic room, all of whom I am happy to say, are now convalescent. I eulogized Joe Choate and he got a job at the Court of St. James; I eulogized Horace Porter, and he is now playing one night stands at the Moulin Rouge; Dr. Depew, and he not only got sent to Washington, but got a raise of wages at the Grand Central Depot; yet when I saw him the next day and delicately intimated that I was yearning to view the scenic beauty of his great four track system, his reception reminded me of the lines of Longfellow, beginning—

"Try not the pass, the old man said Dark lowers the tempest overhead."

and so, instead of resting that night on a beautiful Wagner hair-mattress, I had to be content with "excelsior."

The only man who really appreciated my efforts was dear old Joe Jefferson. When I gave him to understand that I was anxious to see him in one of his matchless characterizations, he inquired if I had a family that shared my anxiety, and when informed that I had, he generously tendered all hands a pass to the family circle. The Lord loves a cheerful giver, but the Lord help any one who strikes Joe for a free pass.

I can understand that the life of an actor must be a trying one, and success difficult to achieve, and it must be a source of great gratification to Sir Henry to feel that he has done so much to elevate the stage as well as the price of admission. But he deserves success, and the last time I gave up three dollars to behold him, and afterwards, with a lot of enthusiasts, took his horses from his carriage and dragged him in triumph two miles to his hotel, I really felt that I had had a run for my money.

But if, Sir Henry, in gratitude for this beautiful tribute which I have just paid you, you should feel tempted to reciprocate by taking my horses from my carriage and dragging me in triumph through the streets, I beg that you will restrain yourself for two reasons. The first reason is—I have no horses; the second is—I have no carriage.

* * * * *

A RUN ON THE BANKER

[Speech of Simeon Ford at the Annual dinner of the Manhattan Bankers of the New York State Bankers' Association, February 7, 1900. The President, Warner Van Norden, presided.]

GENTLEMEN:—As I sat here this evening, listening to the strains of that fine old Bankers' anthem entitled "When you ain't got no money, why you needn't come around," I was thinking what a grand idea it was for you magnates to get together once a year to exchange ideas and settle among yourselves what shall be done, and who shall be done, and how you will do them. Personally, I'd prefer to exchange cheques rather than ideas with many here present; not but what the ideas are all right, but somehow, when money talks I am always a fascinated listener.

I did not come here voluntarily, but at the pressing invitation of some of my most pressing creditors on your committee. They said Secretary Gage would be here, and Mr. J. P. Morgan, and that without my presence the affair would seem incomplete, but that if we three got together we could settle various perplexing financial problems right on the spot. The committee told me to choose my own subject and they would endorse anything I would say—without recourse. They delicately intimated, however, that any playful allusions to the City Bank better be left unsaid; and so I can only remark:—

"And I would that my tongue could utter, The thoughts that arise in me!"

and let it go at that.

I must say, however, that Secretary Gage made one serious mistake. If he had consulted me (which he never did, although he had abundant opportunity) I would have advised him to put his money in an institution I know about where it would have received a rousing welcome and where I could have taken a fall out of it myself. If the price of the Custom-House had gotten into my hands, and I'd been given twenty-four hours' start, I believe I could have given the secretary a run for his money. But, instead, he placed it in a rich, smooth-running, well-oiled institution where it was used in averting a panic and straightening out financial tangles, and greasing the wheels of commerce, and similar foolishness.

This is the first opportunity I have had of meeting you Bank Presidents collectively, and when you are thawed out. I have met most of you, individually, when you were frozen stiff. I never supposed you could warm up, as you seem to have done, my previous impressions having been of the "How'd you like to be the iceman" order. Sometimes I have thought I'd almost rather go without the money than get a congestive chill in a Bank President's office, and have him gaze into my eyes, and read the inmost secrets of my soul, and ask unfeeling questions, and pry rudely into my past, and throw out wild suggestions about getting Mr. Astor to endorse for me, and other similar atrocities. And even if I succeed in deceiving him he leads me, crushed, humiliated and feeling like thirty cents, to a fly cashier, who, taking advantage of my dazed condition, includes in my three-months' note, not only Christmas and the Fourth of July, but St. Patrick's Day, Ash Wednesday and sixteen Sundays, so that, by the time he has deducted the interest, what's coming to me looks like a Jaeger undershirt after its first interview with an African blanchisseuse. That's the kind of thing the poet had in mind when he wrote—"I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows."

I have observed that one's reception at a bank varies somewhat with the condition of the money market. Go in when money is easy and the President falls on your neck, calls you by your first name, and cheerfully loans you large sums on your "Balloon Common" and your "Smoke Preferred," and you go on your way rejoicing. The next day, news having arrived that a Gordon Highlander has strained a tendon in his leg while sprinting away from a Dutchman near Ladysmith, or an Irish lady chef has sent home two pounds sterling to her family, money goes up to one hundred and eighty per cent. a minute, and you get a note requesting you to remove your "Balloon Common" and your "Smoke Preferred" and substitute Government Bonds therefor. And still you wonder at crime.