Chapter VII: Part 7

The first remedy I would suggest, and it is one that is to be ever applied, is education. Reduce the percentage of illiteracy. Let the public schools teach not only reading and writing, but let public schools teach all the principles of American popular government. [Applause.] Let us go back to the days in which I was taught to write, when the copybook bore a text taken from Poor Richard--"Industry and frugality lead to wealth," or "Who by the plough would thrive, himself must either hold or drive,"--there was not anything said in those days about legislating a boy into wealth or comfort or ease, especially at the expense of anybody else. [Applause.]

The next remedy I would speak of is to cast out the demagogue. They are the fellows that are the curse of both and of all political parties. We have had them from the days of Julius Cæsar and Marc Antony down to date. [Laughter.] These smooth, sleek, mellifluous-tongued fellows that always have the same blood-stained garment to hold up before the populace, and some forged will to read, whereby the people were to get great legacies which they never could collect, let us cast them out. Let us frown upon them in both parties, so that they never have a standing on any political platform. [Applause.] Why, it makes the blood of an honest, straightforward, intelligent, American citizen boil to see the impudence, the hypocrisy, of men of this kind,--and they belong to both parties. I heard a story of one who used, when Long Branch was more popular than it is now, to go down there for a summer outing. One day he went out in the surf to bathe. He was strong and vigorous and bold, and he swam out beyond the breakers; he was heading strongly and fearlessly for the European shore. All at once, a shark, a man-eater, was coming the other way, and swam up squarely in front of him. They eyed each other for a moment, and then the shark blushed and swam out. [Laughter and applause.]

Then, let us have more mutual sympathy and confidence between all classes and conditions of men. The man who works for wages, day by day, is our equal in right and our equal at the ballot-box. Very often he has, generally he has, as high instincts, as loyal and true a heart, as his employer. [Applause.] There is no reason why his employer or the candidate for office or anybody else should make friends with him only about election-time. Be his friend all the year round. Show him that you sympathize with him as a fellow-citizen. This is not condescension. It is his right. It is not altruism. You understand what that is. The teacher told her class in Sunday-school: "Now, my children, you know an altruist is one who sacrifices his own interests to the interests of his fellows." "Oh! yes," says one boy, "I know; a fellow who makes his sacrifice hit." [Laughter.]

But let there be confidence between the men that earn wages and the men that pay wages. Let them meet together on a plane of political equality, and they will learn to respect the employer, and the employer, take my word for it, will learn to respect them. [Applause.]

And then, let us stop making citizens out of unworthy material. [Applause.] We welcome all those that come from over the sea, men of merit and worth and proper instincts who want to build and work among us. We do not want those who only come here to tear down and destroy. We have had the gates wide open. They have been coming--all sorts and all conditions and all beliefs. Let us shut those gates, and open them hereafter only to men of merit with right instincts. [Applause.] The law of the land declares that no subject of any foreign government shall be naturalized unless he can prove to the satisfaction of the court that he has been well attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States. How that provision has been mocked! Why, we have taken into citizenship with us thousands of men who not only were not attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, who not only did not know what those principles are, but who held principles diametrically opposed to it. Now, let us see that America suffers no longer from indigestion [laughter], from a surfeited feast of foreign anarchists and socialists and revolutionists; give us good men and true, who will not impede our digestion, and keep out those that tend to indigestion. [Applause.]

And then, let every citizen go into politics. [Laughter.] Oh, not for what is in it, but for the good of his country, to speak, write, organize, lead processions and keep it up. Rally round the flag, and keep on rallying! [Applause.] Do not let your enthusiasm and your patriotism evaporate and die away in the shouts that follow one triumphant campaign. Keep them up the whole year round--the four years round. You have heard from two sources, to-night, how important it is that we should always be vigilant and alert to defend, to educate and scatter knowledge and the spirit of intelligence among all the people. It is a very old saying but can never be too often repeated, that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

"O freedom! thou art not, as poets dream,
A fair young girl with light and delicate limbs,
And wavy tresses gushing from the cap
With which the Roman master crowned his slave,
When he took off the gyves. A bearded man,
Arm'd to the teeth, art thou; one mailed hand
Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,
Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarr'd
With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs
Are strong with struggling.... Oh! not yet,
Mayst thou unbrace thy corselet nor lay by
Thy sword; nor yet, O Freedom! close thy lids
In slumber; for thine enemy never sleeps,
And thou must watch and combat till the day
Of the new earth and heaven."

[Great applause.]

EDWARD EVERETT HALE

THE MISSION OF CULTURE

[Speech of Edward Everett Hale, D.D., at the seventy-first annual
dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December
22, 1876. The President, William Borden, gave the fifth regular toast,
to which Dr. Hale responded, as follows: "New England Culture--the
open secret of her greatness."

"Yet on her rocks, and on her sands,
And wintry hills the school-house stands,
And what her rugged soil denies,
The harvest of the mind supplies.
The riches of the Commonwealth
Are free strong minds and hearts of health
And, more to her than gold or grain
The cunning hand and cultured brain."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--You seem to have a very frank way of talking about each other among yourselves here. I observe that I am the first stranger who has crossed the river which, I recollect Edward Winslow says, divides the Continent of New England from the Continent of America [laughter], and, as a stranger, it is my pleasure and duty at once to express the thanks and congratulations of the invited guest here for the distinguished care which has been taken on this occasion outdoors to make us feel entirely at home. [Laughter.] As I came down in the snow-storm, I could not help feeling that Elder Brewster, and William Bradford, and Carver, and Winslow could not have done better than this in Plymouth; and indeed, as I ate my pork and beans just now, I felt that the Gospel of New England is extending beyond the Connecticut to other nations, and that what is good to eat and drink in Boston is good to eat and drink even here on this benighted point at Delmonico's. [Laughter.]

When you talk to us about "culture," that is rather a dangerous word. I am always a little afraid of the word "culture." I recollect the very brightest squib that I read in the late election campaign--and as the President says, gentlemen, I am going to respect the proprieties of the occasion. It was sent to one of the journals from the Western Reserve; and the writer, who, if I have rightly guessed his name, is one of the most brilliant of our younger poets, was descanting on the Chinook vocabulary, in which a Chinook calls an Englishman a Chinchog to this day, in memory of King George. And this writer says that when they have a young chief whose war-paint is very perfect, whose blanket is thoroughly embroidered, whose leggins are tied up with exactly the right colors, and who has the right kind of star upon his forehead and cheeks, but who never took a scalp, never fired an arrow, and never smelled powder, but was always found at home in the lodges whenever there was anything that scented of war--he says the Chinooks called that man by the name of "Boston Cultus." [Applause and laughter.] Well, now, gentlemen, what are you laughing at? Why do you laugh? Some of you had Boston fathers, and more of you had Boston mothers. Why do you laugh? Ah! you have seen these people, as I have seen them, as everybody has seen them--people who sat in Parker's and discussed every movement of the campaign in the late war, and told us that it was all wrong, that we were going to the bad, but who never shouldered a musket. They are people who tell us that the emigration, that the Pope of Rome, or the German element, or the Irish element, is going to play the dogs with our social system, and yet they never met an emigrant on the wharf or had a word of comfort to say to a foreigner. We have those people in Boston. You may not have them in New York, and I am very glad if you have not; but if you are so fortunate, it is the only place on God's earth where I have not found such people. [Laughter and applause.] But there is another kind of culture which began even before there was any Boston--for there was such a day as that. [Laughter.] There were ten years in the history of this worlds ten long years, too, before Boston existed, and those are the years between Plymouth Rock and the day when some unfortunate men, not able to get to Plymouth Rock, stopped and founded that city. [Laughter.] This earlier culture is a culture not of the schoolhouse, or of the tract, but a culture as well of the church, of history, of the town-meeting, as John Adams says; that nobler culture to which my friend on the right has alluded when he says that it is born of the Spirit of God--the culture which has made New England, which is born of God, and which it is our mission to carry over the world. [Applause.]

In the very heart of that culture--representing it, as I think, in a very striking way, half-way back to the day we celebrate--Ezra Styles, one of the old Connecticut men, published a semi-centennial address. It seems strange that they should have centennials then, but they had. He published a semi-centennial address in the middle of the last century, on the condition of New England, and the prospects before her. He prophesied what New England was to be in the year 1852. He calculated the population descending from the twenty thousand men who emigrated in the beginning, and he calculated it with great accuracy. He said, "There will be seven million men, women, and children, descended from the men who came over with Winslow and with Winthrop," and it proved that he was perfectly right. He went on to sketch the future of New England when these seven million should crowd her hillsides, her valleys, her farms, and her shops all over the four States of New England. For it didn't occur to him, as he looked forward, that one man of them all would ever go west of Connecticut, or west of Massachusetts. [Applause.] He cast his horoscope for a population of seven million people living in the old New England States, in the midst of this century. He did not read, as my friend here does, the missionary spirit of New England. He did not know that they would be willing to go across the arm of the ocean which separated the Continent of New England from the Continent of America. [Laughter.] All the same, gentlemen, seven million people are somewhere, and they have not forgotten the true lessons which make New England what she is. They tell me there are more men of New England descent in San Francisco than in Boston to-day. All those carried with them their mothers' lessons, and they mean their mothers' lessons shall bear fruit away out in Oregon, in California, in South Carolina, in Louisiana. [Applause.] They have those mothers' lessons to teach them to do something of what we are trying to do at home in this matter. [Applause.] We have been so fortunate in New England in this Centennial year that we are able to dedicate a noble monument of the past to the eternal memory of the Pilgrim principle. We have been so fortunate that we are able to consecrate the old South Meeting-House in Boston to the cause of fostering this Pilgrim principle [applause], that it may be from this time forward a monument, not of one branch of the Christian religion, not of one sect or another, but of that universal religion, that universal patriotism, which has made America, and which shall maintain America. [Applause.] For myself, I count it providential that in this Centennial year of years this venerable monument, that monument whose bricks and rafters are all eloquent of religion and liberty, that that monument has passed from the possession of one sect and one State to belong to the whole nation, to be consecrated to American liberty, and to nothing but American liberty. [Applause.] I need not say--for it is taken for granted when such things are spoken of--that when it was necessary for New England to act at once for the security of this great monument, we had the active aid and hearty assistance of the people of New York, who came to us and helped us and carried that thing right through. [Applause.] I am surrounded here with the people who had to do with the preservation of that great monument for the benefit of the history of this country for ever.

Let me say, in one word, what purposes it is proposed this great monument shall serve, for I think they are entirely in line with what we are to consider to-night. We propose to establish here what I might fairly call a university for the study of the true history of this country. And we propose, in the first place, to make that monument of the past a great Santa Croce, containing the statues and portraits of the men who have made this country what it is. Then we propose to establish an institute for the people of America from Maine to San Francisco, the people of every nationality and every name; and we hope that such societies as this, and all others interested in the progress and preservation of the interest of our country, will aid us in the work. [Applause.] For we believe that the great necessity of this hour is that higher education in which this people shall know God's work with man. We hope that the Forefathers' societies, the Sam Adams clubs, the Centennial clubs over the land, shall make the State more proud of its fathers, and more sure of the lessons which they lived. We mean by the spoken voice and by the most popular printed word, circulated everywhere, to instil into this land that old lesson of New England culture. We stand by the side of those of you who believe in compulsory education. We desire, in looking to the future, that the determination shall be made here by us, as it has been in England, that every child born on American soil shall learn to read and write. [Applause.]

But there is a great deal more to be taught than that. There is a great deal which the common school does not teach and cannot teach, when it teaches men to read. We not only want to teach them to read, but we want to teach them what is worth reading. And we want to instil the principles by which the nation lives. We have got to create in those who came from the other side of the water the same loyalty to the whole of American principles that each man feels to his native country.

What is this Constitution for which we have been fighting, and which must be preserved? It is a most delicate mutual adjustment of the powers and rights of a nation, among and because of the powers and rights of thirty or forty States. It exists because they exist. That it may stand, you need all their mutual rivalries, you need every sentiment of local pride, you need every symbol and laurel of their old victories and honors. You need just this homestead feeling which to-night we are cherishing.

But that balance is lost, that whole system is thrown out of gear, if the seven million people of foreign parentage here are indifferent to the record of New York as they are to that of Illinois, to that of Illinois as to that of Louisiana, to that of Louisiana as to that of Maine; if they have no local pride; if to them the names of Montgomery, of John Hancock, of Samuel Adams, have no meaning, no association with the past. [Applause.] Unless they also acquire this local feeling, unless they share the pride and reverence of the native American for the State in which he is born, for the history which is his glory, all these delicate balances and combinations are worthless, all your revolving planets fall into your sun! It is the national education in the patriotism of the Fathers, an education addressing itself to every man, woman, and child from Katahdin to the Golden Gate--it is this, and only this, which will insure the perpetuity of your republic. [Applause.]

Now, gentlemen, if you would like to try an experiment in this matter, go into one of your public schools, next week, and ask what Saratoga was, and you will be told it is a great watering-place where people go to spend money. You will find there is not one in ten who will be able to tell you that there the Hessian was crushed, and foreign bayonets forever driven from the soil of New York. [Applause.] Ask about Brandywine, the place where Lafayette shed his young blood, where a little handful of American troops were defeated, yet, although they were defeated, broke the force of the English army for one critical year. Put the word Brandywine in one of your public schools, and you will see that the pupils laugh at the funny conjunction of the words "brandy" and "wine," but they can tell you nothing about the history which made the name famous. It seems to me it is dangerous to have your children growing up in such ignorance of the past. [Applause.] How much did they know here about the day when, a short time since, you celebrated the battle of Haarlem Heights, where the British were shown that to land on American soil was not everything? Is it quite safe for your children to grow up in ignorance of your past, while you are looking down upon the century of the future? The great institution we are hoping for in the future is to carry this New England culture above the mere mathematics of life, and to incorporate into all education that nobler culture which made the men who made the Revolution, which made the men who have sustained this country. [Applause.] We shall ask for the solid assistance of all the Forefathers' stock in the country to carry out this great work of national education, and I am quite sure, from what I have seen here to-night, that we shall not ask in vain. [Applause.]

I ought to apologize for speaking so long. I am conscious of the fact that I am a fraud, and I am nothing but a fraud. [Laughter.] The truth is, gentlemen (I say this as I am sitting down), I have no business to be here at all. I am not a Pilgrim, nor the son of a Pilgrim, nor the grandson of a Pilgrim; there is not one drop of Pilgrim blood in my veins. I am a "forefather" myself (for I have six children), but I am not the son of a forefather. I had one father; most men have [laughter]; I have two grandfathers, I have four great-grandfathers, but I have not four-fathers. [Laughter.] I want to explain, now, how all this happened, because something is due to me before you put me out of the room. Like most men, I had eight great-great-grandfathers--so have you; so have you. If you run it up, I have got sixty-four great-grandfathers of the grandfathers of my grandfathers, and I have sixty-four great-grandmothers of the grandmothers of my grandmothers. There were one hundred and twenty-eight of these people the day the "Mayflower" sailed. There were one hundred and twenty-eight of them in England eager to come over here, looking forward to this moment, gentlemen, when we meet here at Delmonico's, and they were hoping and praying, every man of them and every woman of them, that I might be here at this table to-night [laughter], and they meant me to be; and every one of them would have come here in the "Mayflower" but for Miles Standish, as I will explain. The "Mayflower," you know, started from Holland. They had to go to Holland first to learn the Dutch language. [Laughter.] They started from Holland, and they came along the English Channel and stopped at Plymouth in England. They stopped there to get the last edition of the London "Times" for that day, in order that they might bring over early copies to the New York "Tribune" and New York "World". These ancestors of mine, the legend says, were all on the dock at Plymouth waiting for them. It was a bad night, a very bad night. It fogged as it can only fog in England. [Laughter.] They waited on the wharf there two hours, as you wait at the Brooklyn and Jersey ferries, for the "Mayflower" to come along. Methinks I see her now, the "Mayflower" of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospect of a fertile State and bound across an unknown sea. Her dark and weather-beaten form looms wearily from the deep, when the pilot brings her up at the Plymouth dock, and a hundred and twenty-eight of my ancestors press forward. They were handsome men and fair women. When they all pressed forward, Miles Standish was on hand and met them. He was on board and looked at them. He went back to the governor, and said, "Here are one hundred and twenty-eight of as fine emigrants as I ever saw." "Well," Governor Carver said, "the capacity of the vessel, as prescribed in the emigrant act, is already exceeded." Miles Standish said, "I think we could let them in." The Governor said, "No, they cannot come in." Miles Standish went back to the gangway, and said, "You are handsome men, but you can't come in;" and they had to stand there, every man and every woman of them. [Laughter.]

That is the unfortunate reason why I had no ancestors at the landing of the Pilgrims. [Laughter.] But my ancestors looked westward still. They stayed in England, praying that they might come, and when Winthrop, ten years afterwards, sailed, he took them all on board, and if the little State of Massachusetts has done anything to carry out the principles of the men who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, why, some little part of the credit is due to my humble ancestry. [Laughter and applause.]

* * * * *

BOSTON

[Speech of Edward Everett Hale, D.D., at the first annual dinner of the
New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1880. The
President, Benjamin D. Silliman, in proposing the toast, "Boston,"
said: "We are favored with the company of a typical and eloquent
Bostonian, identified with all that is learned and benevolent in that
ancient home of the Puritans, and familiar with all its notions. In
response to the toast, we call on the Rev. Edward Everett Hale."]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--I am sure that there is not a Boston boy who hears me to-night who does not recollect that when he went out to his first Pilgrim dinner, or to see Fanny Kemble or to any other evening dissipation of fifty years ago, the last admonition of his mother was, "We will leave the candle burning for you, John, but you must be sure and be home before twelve o'clock!" I am sure that the memory of this admonition is lingering among our friends now, that we are entering on the small hours, and that I must only acknowledge your courtesy and sit down. I feel, indeed, all along in your talk of hoar antiquity, that I owe my place here only to your extreme hospitality. In these aged cities you may well say to me, "You Bostonians are children. You are of yesterday," as the Egyptians said to the Greek traveller. For we are still stumbling along like little children, in the anniversaries of our quarter-millennium; but we understand perfectly well that the foundations of this city were laid in dim antiquity. I know that nobody knows when Brooklyn was founded. Your commerce began so long ago that nobody can remember it, but I know that there was a beaver trap on every brook in Kings County, while Boston was still a howling wilderness. These noble ancestors of yours had made themselves at home on Plymouth Rock before we had built a flat-boat on any river in Massachusetts Bay. [Applause.]

It is only as the youngest daughter, quite as a Cinderella, that we of Boston have any claim on your matchless hospitality. But, as Cinderella should, we have done our best at home to make ready our sisters when they should go to the ball. When my brother Beecher, just now, closed his speech with a Latin quotation, I took some satisfaction in remembering that we taught him his Latin at the Boston Latin school. And I could not but remember when I listened with such delight to the address of Mr. Secretary Evarts, which you have just now been cheering, that the first time I heard this persuasive and convincing orator, was when he took the prize for elocution, a boy of thirteen, on the platform in the great hall in our old schoolhouse in School Street. Nay, I confess also, to a little feeling of local as well as national pride, when the President of the United States [Rutherford B. Hayes] was speaking. Just as he closes this remarkable administration, which is going to stand out in history, distinguished indeed among all administrations from the beginning, so pure has it been, so honorable and so successful--just as he closes this administration he makes here this statement of the principles on which are based the success of an American statesman, in a few fit words so epigrammatic that they will be cited as proverbs by our children and our children's children. I heard that masterly definition of the laws which have governed the New Englander, I took pride in remembering that the President also was a graduate of our law school. These three are the little contributions which Cinderella has been preparing in the last half-century, for the first dinner-party of the Brooklyn Pilgrim Society. [Applause.]

I read in a New York newspaper in Washington the other day that something done in Boston lately was done with the "usual Boston intensity." I believe the remark was not intended to be a compliment, but we shall take it as one, and are quite willing to accept the phrase. I think it is true in the past, I hope it will be true in the future, that we go at the things which we have to do with a certain intensity, which I suppose we owe to these Puritan Fathers whom to-night we are celebrating. Certainly we have gone at this business of emigration with that intensity. It is perfectly true that there are in Brooklyn to-day more people than there are in Boston, who were born in Boston from the old New England blood. Not that Brooklyn has been any special favorite. When I met last year in Kansas, a mass meeting of twenty-five thousand of the old settlers and their children, my daughter said to me: "Papa, I am glad to see so many of our own countrymen." She certainly had never seen so many before, without intermixture of people of foreign races. Now it is certainly our wish to carry that intensity into everything. If the thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing thoroughly. What we do we mean to do it for everybody. You have seen the result. We try, for instance, if we open a Latin school at all, to have it the best Latin school in the world. And then we throw it open to everybody, to native and heathen, to Jew and to Greek, to white and black and red, and we advise you to go and do likewise. [Applause.]

You recollect the old joke, I think it began with Preston of South Carolina, that Boston exported no articles of native growth but granite and ice. That was true then, but we have improved since, and to these exports we have added roses and cabbages. Mr. President, they are good roses, and good cabbages, and I assure you that the granite is excellent hard granite, and the ice is very cold ice. [Laughter and applause.]

WILLIAM F. HALL

YARN OF THE MANAGER BOLD

[Speech of William P. Hall (popularly known by his pen name, "Biff"
Hall) at the fortieth dinner of the Sunset Club, Chicago, Ill.,
January 7, 1892. The Secretary, Joseph B. Mann, acted as Chairman. The
general subject of the evening's discussion was, "The Modern Stage;
its Mission and Influence."]

GENTLEMEN.:--I must confess that I have never regarded the drama in a very serious light. As to its purpose and mission, if I was trying to find out, I should consult the pleasant-faced young man who sits in the box-office. He knows how these things stand with the public. Perhaps the reason I do so regard the matter may be found in my early experiences. The first theatrical performance I ever saw was in this city twenty-five years ago, and one of the prominent features was our old friend, Billy Rice.[6] Billy Rice never gives rise to a serious thought on any occasion. Why, the other night I went to hear Billy Rice, and I heard him tell that same old story that he told in the same old way twenty-five years ago. It really gave me the idea that the drama is not progressive. [Laughter.]

I consider that the theatre and the newspaper are brother and sister; they are always together. Wherever two or three are gathered together in the wilderness some venturesome individual starts a newspaper, and then immediately through its columns induces some other equally venturesome individual to build an opera-house. The people who act there are called turkey actors, for the reason that they hibernate during most of the year and only appear when the turkey is ripe for plucking in holiday time. They then go out and depredate the country. They have a wonderful repertoire, from Howard's "Shenandoah" to Hood's "Sarsaparilla." They play everywhere; it is called the kerosene circuit. If there is nothing else available they let the water out of the water-tank at the station and play in that. [Laughter.] Gentlemen, these are the pioneers of the drama. They convey to the rural mind what knowledge it has of real fire-engines and the triumphs of the scenic artist, and I think we should give to them the credit of spreading through this land those beautiful dramas, "Jim the Westerner," and "The Scout of the Rockies." I do not know what their influence may be; I don't care to touch upon that part of the subject; but I think I cannot better illustrate the straits they are in sometimes than by reciting a little parody on W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballad, the "Yarn of the Nancy Bell." It is entitled:--

THE YARN OF THE MANAGER BOLD

It was near the town they call Detroit,
In the State of Mich-i-gan,
That I met on the rocks, with a property-box,
A gloomy theatrical man.
His o. p. heel was quite worn off,
And weary and sad was he,
And I saw this "fake" give himself a shake,
As he croaked in a guttural key:
"Oh, I am the star and the manager bold,
And the leading and juvenile man,
And the comedy pet, and the pert soubrette,
And the boss of the box-sheet plan."

He wiped his eye on a three-sheet bill,
'Twas lettered in blue and red,
He cursed the fates and the open dates,
And I spoke to him, and said:
"'Tis little I know of the mimic show,
But if you will explain to me--
I'll eat my vest if I can digest
How you can possibly be,
At once a star, and a manager bold,
And a leading and juvenile man,
And a comedy pet, and a pert soubrette,
And a boss of a box-sheet plan."

He ran his hand through his dusty hair,
And pulled down a brunette cuff,
And on the rocks, with his property-box,
He told me his story tough:
"It was in the year of eighty-three,
When a party of six and me
Went on the road with a show that's knowed
As a 'musical com-i-dee.'
I writ it myself--it knocked 'em cold--
It made 'em shriek and roar;
But we struck a reef and came to grief,
On the west of the Michigan shore.
Each night it rained, or snowed or blowed,
And when the weather was clear
They'd say: 'It's sad your house is bad.
But wait till you come next year.'
We travelled along from town to town
A-tryin' to change our luck--
With nothin' to taste but bill-board paste
An' the 'property' canvas duck.
At last we got to Kankakee,
All travel-stained and sore,
When the star got mad and shook us bad
For a job in a dry-goods store--
And then the leading heavy man
Informed me with a frown
He was going away the very next day
With a circus then in town;
And the comedy pet and the pert soubrette
Engaged as cook and waiter--
They are still doing well in a small hotel
Near the Kankakee the-ay-ter.
Then only the 'comic' and me remained,
For to leave he hadn't the heart;
Each laugh was a drop of blood to him,
And he loved that comedy part.
We played one night to a right good house,
Eight dollars and a half;
But to my ill-luck in my lines I stuck
And I queered the comedian's laugh.
He fell down dead of a broken heart--
The coroner, old and sage,
Said his brain was cracked with a bad attackt
Of the centre of the stage.
I played that part all by myself
For a week in Kankakee;
O'er rails and rocks with this property-box
I've walked to where I be.
I never say an actor's good,
I always damn a play;
I always croak, and a single joke
I have, which is to say:
That I am the star, and the manager bold,
And the leading and juvenile man
And the comedy pet, and the pert soubrette,
And the boss of the box-sheet plan."

[Laughter and applause.]

MURAT HALSTEAD

OUR NEW COUNTRY

[Speech of Murat Halstead at the 126th annual banquet of the Chamber of
Commerce of the State of New York, November 20, 1894. Alexander B.
Orr, President of the Chamber, in proposing this toast, said: "I now
have the honor of introducing to you that eminent journalist, the Hon.
Murat Halstead, who will respond to the toast, 'Our New Country.'"]

MR. PRESIDENT:--In the Orkney Islands there is a cathedral described by the guide as of two parts--the old and the new. The story is glibly told that when it had stood for five hundred years a storm beat down the tower and did other damage, making reconstruction necessary; and that tempest was six hundred years ago. On the road from Geneva to Chamouni there is a point of which Bædeker says: "The rocks on the left are seven thousand feet high." In the Orkneys a tower six hundred years old is new, and in the Alps a precipice seven thousand feet high is a moderate bit of scenery. The standards of the measurement of time and space may be exact, and yet are comparative, affected by the atmosphere of history and the scale of landscapes.

In that portion of this country which was the West a generation ago, a farm was old when the stumps had rotted in the fields, and the land was improved when the trees were cut. New ground was that which had not been ploughed. Once a man of varied experiences accounted to a pious woman for an unhappy bit of profanity by saying that when a boy he had ploughed new ground, and the plough caught in the roots, and the horses balked, and his feet were torn with splinters and thorns, and the handles of the plough kicked and hurt him, until depravity was developed. The lady said she would pray for his forgiveness, if he never would do so any more, and he promised, and I am told he did not keep that promise.

Daniel Boone's new country, when he lived on the Yadkin, in North Carolina, was Kentucky, and afterward it was Missouri. Washington's new country was first Ohio, and then Indiana. Lincoln's new country, when he was a child, was Indiana, and then Illinois. Beyond the Alleghany Mountains was the land of promise of the original States; beyond the Mississippi was the new world of those who moved west in wagons, before the Mexican war and the railroads broadened our dominions, and we were bounded east and west by the oceans. It was for the new country of their ages that Columbus and the Puritans and Captain John Smith set sail. In the new country there is always, at least, the dream of liberty and the hope that the earth we inherit may be generous in the bounties it yields to toil.

The march of manhood westward has reached the shores of the seas that look out on ancient Asia. We have realized the vision of the Genoese--finding in the sunset the footsteps of Marco Polo. We have crossed the mountain ranges and followed the majestic rivers, have traced the borders of the great lakes, whitened by the sails and darkened by the smoke of a commerce that competes in magnitude with that of the salted sea; and Texas, our France, confronts the Mediterranean of our hemisphere.

We have crushed the rocks and sifted the sand that yielded silver and gold, and the soil is ours that is richer than gold mines, whether we offer in evidence South Carolina, whose Sea-Island cotton surpasses the long staple of Egypt; or the Dakotas, matchless for wheat; or the lands of the cornstalk in the Mississippi Valley, that could feed all the tribes of Asia; or Nebraska, whose beets are sweeter with sugar than those that were the gift of Napoleon to Germany.

We have found the springs that yield immortal youth, not in bubbling waters in a flowery wilderness, but in the harvests of the fields and the stored energies of inexhaustible mines, not for the passing person who perishes when his work is done, but for the imperishable race.

All this in our country, "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," but with the clothing of life on the ribs, and new in the evolution of conditions by the works of man that make the nations of the earth a family--achievements wonderful in scope, splendid in promise, marvellous in the renown that is of peace; in the fame of the genius that is labor, the spell-binder that gathers and builds, creates and glorifies.

Within the historic record of this Chamber of Commerce of New York, the waters of Lake Erie have been carried through our canals and rivers to the Atlantic, making the Hudson River what Henry Hudson thought it was when he sailed through the beautiful gate of the incomparable continent--the road from the east to the west around the world; and the statue of Thomas Benton points westward from the great cross of the rivers in the heart of the continent--the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi--and the inscription reads: "There is the road to India."

How familiar is the construction of the Pacific railroad; of the telegraph lines across the continent and through the oceans; the record of steamers of ten thousand tons, five hundred knots a day; the miraculous telephone; the trolley, that is with us to stay and to conquer, introducing all the villages to the magic of rapid transit, promoting, with the incessant application of a new force, the American homogeneity of our vast and various population--blending them for one destiny. One is not venturing upon disputed ground--there is no prohibited politics in it to say that slavery is gone--for all classes and sections of our common country will agree it is well. The earth has grown both small and great for us. Its gigantic mysteries are no more. Its circumnavigation is commonplace. The kinetoscope comes to aid the phonograph to make pictures of action and lasting records of music and of speech. The people of coming generations are to hear the voices that have charmed or awed, persuaded, bewitched or commanded, in departed centuries. There will be libraries of rolls, storing for all time these treasures; rolls not unlike those cylinders preserved in the Babylonish deserts. Photography is bringing to us, as on parchment leaves painted with sunlight, the secrets of the depths of the seas and the skies; it is finding new stars, and with the telescopic camera likenesses may be snatched across spaces impenetrable by the naked eye. The aristocracy of intelligence becomes a democracy for the diffusion of the knowledge of the history of the day, which is the most important chapter that has been written, impartial, instantaneous, and is becoming universal.

This is more than a new country; it is a new world. Our own farmers are in competition with those of Egypt, India, Russia and Argentina. Australia with her wool and beef and mutton, Egypt and India with cotton and wheat, South America, Africa and Asia, made fruitful with resources, seek the same markets with our producers; and the mills of Old England are within a few cents and hours, in cost of transportation and time, as cheap and nigh as those of New England to New York. Once, a war between Japan and China would have been so remote that, as they say in the newspapers, there could have been no news in it; but it means matter of business for us now. With the novel conditions, there come upon us new and enormous problems for solution, and responsibilities that cannot be evaded. Once, we were an isolated nation. There was no trouble about becoming involved in the "entangling alliances" that were the cause of alarm to the Father of his Country. Now, the ends of the earth are in our neighborhood, and we touch elbows with all the races of mankind, and all the continents and the islands are a federation. The newspapers are, to continue the poetic prophecy, "the parliament of man."

The drift of human experience is to increased aggregations, to concentration and to centralization. This mighty city, in her material grandeur, and, we may trust, her moral redemption, stands for forty-six indestructible States and one indivisible nation. Her lofty structures far surpass already the palaces of the merchant princes of Tyre and Venice and Liverpool, and we behold, in these imperial towers, the types of the magnificence of the coming time. There never was so fair and superb, ample and opulent a bride as she, in the wholesome arms of the ocean that embrace these islands, adorned with the trophies of the wealth of the world, and whose rulers, the slavery of crime abolished, are the sovereign millions. These are new developments of authority, new growths of responsibility.

The Congress, forty years ago, was a body insignificant in its relations with the masses of the people, in comparison with what it is to-day. It grapples, of necessity, with the new conditions, and the character of the public service is of enlarged consequence, for it is to all the communities and commonwealths far more comprehensive and penetrating in its influence than in other days; and it is well the citizens of the Republic are aroused to appreciation of their added requirements in the care that public life must give the general welfare.

During the recent popular experience of Christian science applied to practical politics, that resulted, among other things, in the intimacy of representative men of the Bowery and the Fifth Avenue, that allows the citizens of each locality to walk into the other locality at bedtime and select their sleeping-rooms, without asking whether the folks are at home, and to depart with or without leaving their P. P. C. cards, one of the speakers, noting in his audience evidences of dissent, said: "If I am speaking in a way that is prerogatory, while I want to go on, I am willing to quit." He honored his nativity by his modesty, and was allowed to go on; but he preferred to sit down, though his theme seemed to him to expand under treatment, and with his new word he retired. I quote him as a precedent and example for immediate imitation. It is more than a joke, though, that Fifth Avenue and the Bowery have got together, and we may hope they will work well for the good of this new country. [Prolonged applause.]

BENJAMIN HARRISON

THE UNION OF STATES

[Speech of Benjamin Harrison at the thirteenth annual dinner of the New
England Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, December 22, 1893. In
proposing the first toast, "The President of the United States," the
Chairman, Charles Emory Smith, said: "Gentlemen, my first duty is to
give a welcome to our honored guests and a greeting to our worthy
members. My second duty is to make an immediate change of the
programme. Among the distinguished guests who honor us by their
presence to-night is the illustrious patriot and statesman who has
filled--yes, filled, not rattled around in--the great dignity of the
Presidency of the United States. [Applause.] In his career he has won
the admiration of the country not merely by his transcendent abilities
as a statesman, but by his noble qualities as a man. Among other
characteristics, his love of children has touched the heart of the
country. He has promised the little children who are gathered in his
distant home that he will join them in preparing and sharing the joys
of Christmas. It is imperative not that he shall leave us at this
moment but that he shall terminate the three days of cordial and
perhaps somewhat burdensome hospitality which he has enjoyed in
Philadelphia, at a later stage of this evening. In order that he may
be entirely free, and because the first word should be spoken by the
first man at the table, I ask you to join me, at this time, in
drinking a toast to the health of the illustrious patriot, who is as
greatly respected and honored in private life as he was in the
Presidency--General Benjamin Harrison, whom I now have the pleasure of
presenting to you."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA:--When my good friend and your good neighbor and President, Mr. Charles Emory Smith, invited me to be present to-night, I felt a special demand upon me to yield to his request. I thought I owed him some reparation for appointing him to an office the emoluments of which did not pay his expenses. [Merriment.] Your cordial welcome to-night crowns three days of most pleasurable stay in this good City of Philadelphia. The days have been a little crowded; I think there have been what our friends of The Four Hundred would probably call "eight distinct functions;" but your cordiality and the kind words of your presiding officer quite relieve my fatigue and suggest to me that I shall rightly repay your kindness by making a very short speech. ["No, no!"] It is my opinion that these members of the New England Society are very creditable descendants of the Forefathers. I'm not quite sure that the Forefathers would share this opinion if they were here; but that would be by reason of the fact that, notwithstanding the load of substantial virtues, which they carried through life, their taste had not been highly cultivated. [Laughter.]

I dread this function which I am now attempting to discharge more than any other that confronts me in life. The after-dinner speaker, unlike the poet, is not born,--he is made. I am frequently compelled to meet in disastrous competition about some dinner-table gentlemen who have already had their speeches set up in the newspaper offices. They are given to you as if they were fresh from the lip; you are served with what they would have you believe to be "impromptu boned turkey;" and yet, if you could see into the recesses of their intellectual kitchen, you would see the days of careful preparation which have been given to these spontaneous utterances. The after-dinner speaker needs to find somewhere some unworked joker's quarry, where some jokes have been left without a label on them; he needs to acquire the art of seeming to pluck, as he goes along in the progress of his speech, as by the wayside, some flower of rhetoric. He seems to have passed it and to have plucked it casually,--but it is a boutonniere with tin foil round it. [Laughter.] You can see, upon close inspection, the mark of the planer on his well-turned sentences. Now, the competition with gentlemen who are so cultivated is severe upon one who must speak absolutely upon the impulse of the occasion. It is either incapacity or downright laziness that has kept me from competing in the field I have described.

It occurred to me to-day to inquire why you had to associate six States in order to get up a respectable Society. My friend Halstead [Murat Halstead] and I have no such trouble. We are Ohio-born, and we do not need to associate any other State in order to get up a good Society, wherever there is a civil list of the Government. If you would adopt the liberal charter method of the Ohio Society, I have no doubt you could subdivide yourselves into six good societies. The Ohio Society admits to membership everybody who has lived voluntarily six months in Ohio. No involuntary resident is permitted to come in. [Laughter.]

But the association of these States and the name "New England" is a part of an old classification of the States which we used to find in the geography, and all of that classification has gone except New England and the South. "The West" has disappeared and "the Middle States" cannot be identified. Where is "the West"? Why, just now it is at the point of that long chain of islands that puts off from the Alaska coast; and, if I am to credit what I read (for I have no sources of information now except the not absolutely reliable newspaper press), there are some who believe there are wicked men who want to hitch the end of that chain into an island farther out in the sea. [Applause.] If that is to be done, the West would become the East, for I think the Orient has generally been counted to be the East.

I would not, however, suggest a division of the New England Society. It is well enough to keep up an association that is one, not only of neighborhood and of historical association, but of sentiment. Let the New England Society live, and I fancy it will not be long until you enjoy the distinction of being the only great subdivision of the States; for, my fellow-citizens, whatever barriers prejudice may raise, whatever obstruction the interests of men may interpose, whatever may be the outrages of cruelty to stay the march of men, that which made the subdivision called "the Southern States," and all that separated them from the States of the West and of the North, will be obliterated. [Cheering.]

I am not sure, though the story runs so, that I have a New England strain. The fact is that I have recently come to the conclusion that my family was a little overweighted with ancestry, and I have been looking after posterity. [Merriment.]