LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 1 .»:I:i3iJi{;«: -< ll tj H i5 ill i i i It! t ' 
 ? 'i f i Ml if >i t) ! iM 'i ' i • 
 
 ffflfnHHifi H i Hi 
 
 |: I f|i| fit p i 
 
 J Ji 1 1 11 ) f f r 1 1 J 5 1 <.•>; 1 
 
 ill 
 iii 
 
 •Ji.Ji!;3jr ■;,■■■■ 
 
 DDD1'^S13S7^ 
 
 i|:::::-:::2 
 
X66<1 
 
 Book „^ 3 53 
 
^ 
 
 • i 
 
 
 FOUR DAYS 
 
 AT THE 
 
 National Republican Convention, 
 
 ST. LOUIS, 
 
 JUNE, 1896, ^ 
 
 ,1 
 
 AND OTHER POLITICAL OCCASIONS. 
 
 SPEECHES AND ADDRESSES 
 
 OF 
 
 Hon. Chauncey M. Depevv, LLD. 
 
JltiKT 189T BY BJ FALK 
 
 PHl^TaSRAVUHE * UJlQR CO I 
 
 LOuj^ 
 
 iUs^j^/uiaP'^ 
 
\ 
 
/ 
 
 FOUR DAYS ^'33 
 
 AT THE 
 
 National Republican Convention, 
 
 ST. LOUIS, 
 
 JUNE, 1896, 
 
 AND OTHER POLITICAL OCCASIONS. 
 
 SPEECHES AND ADDRESSES 
 OF 
 
 Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, LLD. 
 
E-Uo 
 
 .JJ3 53 
 
FIRST DAY. 
 
 Address at the Banquet of the Law Alumni Association of Mis- 
 souri on the evening of June 13, 1896. 
 
 SECOND DAY. 
 
 Address before the Merchants' Exchange, St. Louis, at noon on 
 June 14, 1896. 
 
 Address before the University Club of St. Louis on the evening Of 
 June 14, 1896. 
 
 THIRD DAY. 
 
 Address at the Entertainment given in Convention Hall, St. Louis, 
 in Aid of the Soldiers' Home of Missouri, on the evening of June 15, 
 1896. 
 
 Speech to the Ladies in the Rotunda of the Southern Hotel, St. 
 Louis, on the evening of June 15, 1896. 
 
 FOURTH DAY. 
 
 Speech Nominating Governor Levi P. Morton for President of the 
 United States at the National Republican Convention, St. Louis, on 
 June 16, 1896. 
 
 Speech at the National Republican Convention in response to the 
 Motion Making the Nomination of Major McKinley Unanimous, June 
 
 16,1896. 
 
 AFTERMATH. 
 
 Speech on the Issues of the Campaign to an Audience of 28,000 
 people, at the Coliseum, Chicago, October 9, 1896. 
 
Speech delivered at the Dinner of the New England Society at 
 Washington on Forefathers' Day, December 22, 1897. 
 
 Speech upon taking the Chair as President of the Republican 
 Club of the City of New York, January 17, 1898. 
 
 Speech as President of the Republican Club of the City of New 
 York at the Banquet at Delmonico's, Celebrating the Birthday of 
 Abrahann Lincoln, February 12, 1898. 
 
 Address at the Concert given at the Astoria Hotel, March 4, 1898, 
 for the Benefit of the Widows and Orphans of those who perished on 
 the Warship Maine. 
 
 Speech as President of the Ennpire State Society of the Sons of the 
 American Revolution at the Annual Banquet on the Anniversary of 
 the Fall of Lord North's Ministry, March 19, 1898. 
 
Address at the Banquet of tlie Law Alumni 
 Association of Missouri on tlie even- 
 ing of June 13, 1896. 
 
 Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: 
 
 It affords me very great pleasure to meet my 
 brethren of the bar of Missouri. Though not in the 
 active practice of the profession, the many and im- 
 portant questions which come before me for review 
 or decision keep me in constant touch and interest 
 
 with the law. 
 
 Our associations are as national, as broad and 
 as liberal as the authority of the Constitution of the 
 United States and the jurisdiction of the courts. The 
 law is the only one of the professions whose mem- 
 bers will both criticise themselves and accept criti- 
 cisms from others with cheerfulness and equanim- 
 ity. Any one who has tried it often, as I have, will 
 discover a singular sensitiveness among the clergy, 
 the doctors, and the journalists. No one can be 
 faithful to his calling and have in it that loyal pride 
 which makes for success without being jealous of its 
 rights and privileges and proud of the distinction it 
 confers. But it is never wise to take one's self or 
 one's pursuits too seriously. All professions but 
 our's resent raillery, ridicule or fun at their expense, 
 or doubting suggestions of their infallibility. We, 
 however, care little for the shafts of envy or of malice, 
 or of sport. We submit, without response, to things 
 that are said about us, and the judgments which 
 
6 
 
 are pronounced upon us by lay or professional 
 brethren, in the serene consciousness that clients 
 must continue to contribute to our support, and that 
 neither individuals nor corporations, nor munici- 
 palities, nor states nor nations can get along with- 
 out us. 
 
 It was a magnificent array of noble barons and 
 gallant knights who, upon prancing chargers and in 
 glittering armor, gathered upon the field of Kunny- 
 mede. But they could only poise their lances and 
 shout their battlecries for declarations of the prin- 
 ciples of liberty which had been prepared by the 
 lawyers, and when the great charter had been drawn 
 up by those learned in the law, these mighty nobles 
 were compelled to affix their signatures by a mark 
 and stamp their seals with the hilts of their swords. 
 
 The early Puritan period has furnished to elo- 
 quence and poetry a halcyon picture of Arcadian 
 peacefulness. " For one hundred years," cries the 
 speaker, " these communities lived with no judges to 
 puzzle and no lawyers to vex them." At the risk of 
 the charge of iconoclasm I must break that venerable 
 image. They had courts, but they w^ere ecclesiasti- 
 cal ones, and they had lawyers, but they were the 
 Puritan ministers. Doubtless these learned clerics 
 conscientiously and justly settled neighborhood 
 disputes between individuals, but the peace of 
 communities and the rights of their citizens rest upon 
 broader foundations. They hung witches, they ex- 
 pelled Baptists, they banished Quakers, they drove 
 Roger Williams, the most enlightened man of that 
 period, into exile in a wilderness, they demonstrated 
 that under a theocracy, as under an oligarchy or a 
 
despotism, liberty can not be maintained except by 
 the eternal principles of law, and a learned body of 
 men to interpret and courts to enforce them. We 
 will select as types of the Puritan period and the 
 period of the development of the law, the Rev. Cotton 
 Mather and Oliver Ellsworth, both educated for the 
 ministry, both men of genius, culture and acquire- 
 ments. Cotton Mather, in passing judgment and in- 
 flicting sentences, created conditions which virtually 
 destroyed civil and religious liberty, while Oliver 
 Ellsworth, having become learned in the law and hav- 
 ing adopted it as a profession, prepared the judiciary 
 article of the Constitution, devised the system and 
 procedure of the Supreme Court of the United States 
 as it exists to-day, and in an illustrious career as its 
 Chief Justice, began the formation of that body of 
 law which has promoted justice and enlarged liberty 
 in our country. 
 
 We are accustomed to pay superlative tribute to 
 the great soldiers of our country. Washington and 
 Greene and Schuyler and Gates, of the Revolution- 
 ary period, and General Scott and General Jackson 
 and Commodores Decatur and Perry, of the war of 
 1812, and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan, are all 
 embalmed in the richest rhetoric of our history, the 
 most stirring pages of the schoolbooks and the most 
 glowing periods of our eloquence. In lesser measure 
 we glorify the statesmen of the Republic. 
 
 It is the story of our nation that its origin and 
 development have been due to a few great leaders. 
 We have little written, and less understood, of the 
 large debt we owe to a few great lawyers. Alexan- 
 der Hamilton was the most brilliant and construe- 
 
8 
 
 tive intelligence of his own or of almost any age. 
 He was the leader of the bar of the United States. 
 With i^rophetie vision he saw the possibilities of the 
 limitless expansion and power of this country and 
 the impossibility of its development unless it became 
 a nation. The Colonial statesmen were jealous of 
 the rights of their colonies and unwilling to sur- 
 render the autonomy of their commonwealths to a 
 central government. With infinite tact, and with 
 marvelous condensation of language, Hamilton cap- 
 tured the assent of the discordant members of the 
 young confederacy to a Constitution which created 
 a Republic bound together as they thought by a rope 
 of sand, but tied, as he knew, in bonds of indissolu- 
 ble and indestructible union. 7 The task of inter- 
 preting the delphic utterances of Hamilton into a 
 lucid exposition of national power and grandeur fell 
 upon that other leader of the bar of his time, Chief 
 Justice Marshall. When he decided, in 1803, that 
 the Supreme Court of the United States could annul 
 a statute which had been passed by Congress and 
 signed by the President, he prevented the possibility 
 of the usurpation of power by the legislative or ex- 
 ecutive branches of the government, or both com- 
 bined; he safeguarded liberty, life and property 
 against legislative anarchy or legislative commun- 
 ism. When he decided, five years later, that the 
 Supreme Court of the United States could declare 
 invalid the acts of the Legislatures of the several 
 states which were in conflict with the Constitution 
 of the United States, he linked the states together 
 by a chain of law which could only be broken by 
 revolution. When, still later, he held that this same 
 
majestic tribunal had jurisdiction over and could 
 bring before it the warring commonwealths of the 
 Kepublic and render judgment upon their differ- 
 ences, he made impossible organized war between 
 the states. We pass down another generation and 
 the conflict which Hamilton foresaw and furnished 
 the broad language to cover, which Chief Justice 
 Marshall gave the law to decide, of the rights of the 
 states and the powers of the government, became a 
 political question of the first moment. Then again 
 the leader of. the bar, in a speech in the United 
 States Senate, unequaled for the felicity of its dic- 
 tion, the power of its logic, the sustained and lofty 
 grandeur of its thought, proclaimed the doctrine of 
 " liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and 
 forever." This great lawyer was Daniel Webster. 
 His speech w^ent into the schoolbooks, it formed the 
 declamation for the coming citizens, soldiers and 
 statesmen of the Eepublic and created a deathless 
 and passionate love for the Union. Another genera- 
 tion came upon the stage, educated and enthused by 
 the eloquence of Webster, and another lawyer, 
 supremely great as such, though too much in poli- 
 tics to be a leader of the bar, had devolved upon him 
 the supreme task of supporting the idea of Hamil- 
 ton, maintaining the decisions of Marshall, carrying 
 out the doctrines of Webster, and of so concentrat- 
 ing the resources of the country for its defence and 
 the powers of the Union for its maintenance, that he 
 might hold the Kepublic together by the over- 
 whelming force of arms and cement it with new and 
 eternal ties by justice and forgiveness, and, " with 
 
10 
 
 malice toward none and charity for all," this majes- 
 tic work was performed by Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 The great minds of other countries and of cen- 
 turies preceding our Republic saw the dangers to 
 liberty of the concentration of judicial authority in 
 the executive or the legislature. Montesquieu 
 pointed it out clearly when he said, in effect, that if 
 the executive has judicial power it is tyranny, if the 
 legislature has judicial power it is tyranny. To ad- 
 vance the judiciary to the point where it could be 
 absolutely independent of the throne and of Parlia- 
 ment, of the executive and of Congress, is impossible 
 in older countries. Whether it be a limited mon^ 
 archy as in England, a republic as in France, or an 
 autocracy as in Russia, the traditions of the throne 
 will not permit the judiciary to curb its authority. 
 Whether it be a Parliament as in Great Britain, a 
 Senate and House of Deputies as in France, or a 
 representative body, as in any of the continental 
 countries, there is in them, and especially in their 
 upper house, a heredity of feudal authority which 
 will not brook the judge criticising its action or nul- 
 lifying its laws. Fortunately for us our ancestors, 
 trained and educated in the best traditions of civil 
 and religious liberty, approached the problems of 
 government without the heredity of monarchy or 
 feudalism. They had neither classes nor privileges. 
 It was possible for them to declare in principle 
 and formulate in practice the idea of Montesquieu 
 and the philosophical statesmen of preceding gene- 
 rations. They could create the executive with its 
 powers, the legislature with its authority, and make 
 a written Constitution, and organize a court which 
 
11 
 
 could say to congresses and to presidents, " this 
 Constitution is the supreme law, and your acts must 
 conform to its provisions or they will be null and 
 void and of no effect." In this innovation in govern- 
 ment and power of the court we have the preserva- 
 tive principles of American liberty and the perpet- 
 ual continuance of American opportunity. 
 
 Every decade, almost every year, has its problems 
 for solution, and its critical time. It is the mission 
 of the bar, and one which it has always fulfilled, to 
 forecast or to meet these dangerous situations. This 
 is a lawyers' government, its Constitution was 
 framed by lawyers, all but three of its Presidents 
 have been lawyers, all but five of its Vice-Presidents, 
 seven-tenths of its Cabinet Ministers and the 
 majority of its Congressmen, Senators and members 
 of its state legislatures have also been lawyers. The 
 lawyer is a man of peace, but he is also a man of 
 action. His courage is exhibited both in resisting 
 popular clamor and in leading patriotic enthusiasm. 
 He formulated the demands which led to the Revo- 
 lution, and when nothing but war could secure them, 
 he enlisted in the Continental army. The lawyers 
 did their best to settle the controversies between the 
 North and the South, but when only the bloody arbit- 
 rament of arms could decide the contest, in propor- 
 tion to their numbers more lawyers enlisted in the 
 Union and Confederate armies than came from any 
 other vocation or calling. 
 
 The questions which the profession is especially 
 to meet to-day are many, and one of them is that the 
 law shall not be degraded by unworthy practition- 
 ers. With all that may be said against the lawyers, 
 
12 
 
 fewer of tliem are rascals, fewer defaulters, fewer 
 faithless to tlieir duties, than the members of any- 
 other i3rofession upon which devolve obligations 
 and trusts. The weaknesses of humanity enter into 
 our calling as into every other, but v/herever the pro- 
 fession has been degraded it has been by the Legis- 
 lature lowering the standard and admitting to the 
 bar those v/ho had neither the character nor the 
 learning nor the equipment to interpret the law, to 
 protect the weak, to remedy wrongs or to enforce 
 rights. Cheap law and cheap lawyers not only de- 
 grade the profession, but they promote litigation 
 and let loose a horde of incompetent and unworthy 
 practitioners to prey upon the community. The 
 standard of admission to the bar should be made 
 higher and higher, so that those only who are wor- 
 thy can be admitted. We should devote our efforts 
 to the simplification of procedure. It is a standing 
 disgrace to the civilization and the intelligence of 
 the United States that there are more homicides in 
 our country in proportion to the population than in 
 any other civilized nation. It is not due, as is be- 
 lieved by foreigners, to a contempt for law, to a 
 want of authority in the courts or integrity in juries, 
 but to the fact that obsolete and worthless rules of 
 pleading and practice defeat justice. A man's life is 
 more precious than the life of him who takes it. That 
 the murderer should escape because there may be 
 a technical flaw in his indictment throws the com- 
 munity in a rage back to those first principles of 
 natural justice, where, there being no law and no 
 courts, the murderer was tried by his neighbors and 
 upon proof was executed with no other appeal than 
 
13 
 
 that which might be made to the Supreme Judge of 
 the Universe. We should brush aside these techni- 
 calities, which bring the law into contempt, protect 
 murderers and make life cheap. When the Appel- 
 late Court decides cases upon their merits, upon the 
 guilt or innocence of the accused, there will be sub- 
 stituted in this country for Judge Lynch the supreme 
 authority of the law and its appointed or elected 
 administrators. 
 
 Lawyers can generally be trusted when they be- 
 come judges. The history of our country demon- 
 strates this assertion, and the history of Great Bri- 
 tain, from which we derive our law, establishes this 
 principle. Coke, as Attorney-General, was subser- 
 vient to the Crown, but as Judge defied the King and 
 sustained the sovereignty of the law. This reforma- 
 tion must be brought about, not only for the peace 
 of communities, not only to promote respect for the 
 law, but that in foreign countries there may not be 
 the universal impression that all our judges go by 
 the name of Lynch. 
 
 The domestic relation is the most sacred in a civil- 
 ized community. Home is the sweetest word in the 
 English language. He who assails it is an enemy 
 of his country, and the statute which weakens it is 
 destructive of social order and of domestic happi- 
 ness. We should strive to bring about that uni- 
 formity of law which would give in every state the 
 same rules for divorce. We should so legislate, if 
 necessary by Congress, under the provisions of the 
 Constitution, that a state or territory may not, for 
 temporary gain, say that the sacrament of marriage 
 can be sacrificed upon a whim and vv^ithout notice. 
 
14 
 
 and compel older communities, which recognize in 
 their statutes the sacredness of the obligation, to 
 obey this travesty upon morals and upon law. 
 
 Steam and electricity have made possible the ac- 
 cumulation of great fortunes and the formation of 
 powerful combinations. The world has not adjusted 
 itself to these circumstances, and sudden and violent 
 disruptions of industrial conditions produce distress, 
 doubt and distrust during the processes of reorgani- 
 zation. It will require all the courage, patriotism 
 and ability of the lawyers, in public and private life, 
 during this tentative and critical period, to guard 
 both against assault and encroachment upon indi- 
 vidual enterprise, opportunity and liberty, and the 
 delusive dangers of socialism and anarchy. 
 
 I know of no more charming member of the com- 
 munity than the old lawyer. I studied with a judge 
 who, as I left his office, had completed the eighty- 
 sixth year of his life, and the sixty-fifth year of his 
 practice. The old lawyer is the custodian of the 
 secrets of the community. If he has been true to his 
 profession and to his best instincts and teachings, 
 he has been the benefactor of the village, or the 
 town, or the county in which he has spent his life. 
 He has settled family disputes; he has reconciled 
 heirs to the provisions of wills; he has adjusted satis- 
 factorily to all, and to the prevention of family feuds, 
 the distribution of estates; he has prevented neigh- 
 borhood vendettas on boundary lines; he has 
 brought old-time enmities into cordial friendships; 
 he has made clients and money by being honest, 
 faithful and true. The secrets of his register, of his 
 safe and of his memory are the skeletons of the fam- 
 
15 
 
 ily closet of the whole neighborhood. But the pro- 
 cess of modern cremation does not more perfectly 
 destroy the human frame than does this lawyer's 
 fidelity to his oath keep out of sight these family 
 skeletons. 
 
 The law promotes longevity. It is because its dis- 
 cipline improves the physical, the mental and the 
 moral conditions of its practitioner. In other words 
 it gives him control over himself, and a great 
 philosopher has written that he who can command 
 himself is greater than he who has captured a city. 
 The world has been seeking for all time the secrets 
 of longevity and happiness. If they can be united, 
 then we return to the conditions of Methusalah and 
 his compatriots. Whether I may live to their age I 
 know not, but I think I have discovered the secret of 
 Methusalah's happy continuance for nearly a thou- 
 sand years upon this planet. 
 
 He stayed here w^hen there was no steam and no 
 electricity, no steamers upon the river or the ocean 
 propelled by this mighty power, no electric light, no 
 railways spanning the continent, no overhead wires 
 and no cables under the ocean communicating intel- 
 ligence around the world, and no trolley lines re- 
 ducing the redundant population. He lived not be- 
 cause he w^as free from the excitements incident to 
 the age of steam and electricity, but because of the 
 secret which I have discovered, and it is this: 
 Longevity and happiness depend upon what you put 
 in your stomach and what gets into your mind. 
 
 My brother lawyers of Missouri, those of you who 
 have been long at the bar, and those who are just 
 entering upon the practice of the profession, it is 
 
16 
 
 with great pleasure that I can step aside at your 
 invitation, from the political excitements and the 
 party passions which call me here as a delegate to 
 the Republican National Convention, and meet you 
 in this social communion and happy interchange of 
 those fraternal greetings which lawyers can always 
 extend to each other. 
 
Address before the Merchants' Exchange, 
 St. Louis, at noon on June 14, 1896. 
 
 Mr. President and Merchants of St. Louis: 
 
 It is with great pleasure tliat I am here to-day to 
 meet you and be greeted by you. I did not come to 
 St. Louis to make a business speech — I am a busi- 
 ness man on a political errand (cries of " Good " and 
 laughter) — but I came because I believe it to be the 
 duty of the business men of this country to take the 
 government of the business of the country in hand. 
 (Applause.) We have neglected our duty in that re- 
 spect, and many of the evils — most of them — which 
 afflict our municipalities, our States and our Con- 
 gress are because the business men of the country 
 have been too absorbed in their own affairs — their 
 private affairs — to pay attention to public ques- 
 tions which are their private affairs. (Applause.) 
 This Convention which meets here to-morrow is a 
 gathering of the representatives of one of the great 
 parties of the country. It is fortunate for free insti- 
 tutions and for their permanence that there should 
 always be two great parties to watch each other, and 
 when the one makes mistakes or becomes corrupt, 
 the other can step into its place. 
 
 I count it a fortunate event that the Kepublican 
 National Convention is held in the city of St. Louis. 
 (Applause.) It is fortunate that this party, organ- 
 ized on lines which thirty-five years ago were so full 
 2 
 
18 
 
 of passionate resentment, is holding its quadrennial 
 meeting for the nomination of its candidates and for 
 the enunciation of its principles in the principal city 
 of what was formerly a slave State, in the principal 
 city of what was formerly a border State, in the 
 midst of the territory where a generation before the 
 people were at each other's throats upon the exist- 
 ence of the Union. It demonstrates as nothing else 
 could to the country and the world that the United 
 States are now one nation and one people. (Loud 
 cheers and applause.) It is fortunate, also, that 
 these Conventions are held. This is a great country; 
 it is a big country; it is a vast country; and the ele- 
 ments of its union and prosperity will be promoted 
 by having all parts become better acquainted with 
 each other. The North, the East and the Northwest 
 know but little of this capital of the Mississippi 
 valley, and of the Mississippi valley itself. But w^e 
 come here from New England, we come from the 
 Middle States, we come from the Northwest, we 
 come from the Pacific Coast, to carry back to our con- 
 stituencies everywhere that the Mississippi valley is 
 about as important a part in the business and intel- 
 ligence of this great country as the sections from 
 which we come ourselves. (Cheers and applause.) 
 Certainly, we have all been pleased with the gener- 
 ous hospitality with which you have received us. 
 No community ever did so much to make the visiting 
 delegations of the country happy and comfortable. 
 (" Hear, hear," and applause.) There has been no 
 politics in this reception. You simply wanted to 
 know the men without regard to politics from all 
 over the country, and that they should know you. 
 
1» 
 
 No host ever did so much for guests as you have done. 
 (Cries of " Good " and applause.) To clear your at- 
 mosphere and to give it a temperature that New 
 Yorkers envy (laughter), you get up a |10,000,000 
 cyclone — and you did it well. (Bene wed laughter.) 
 Now, gentlemen, I believe in the force and power 
 and influence of organizations like your own all over 
 the country. They are the real Legislatures; they 
 are the real Congresses. There is no Board of Trade 
 in the United States which in the same length of 
 time could have done and failed to do what Congress 
 has done and failed to do in the last six months. 
 (Laughter and applause.) Whatever difl'erences of 
 latitude or longitude there may be, there is no differ- 
 ence of opinion upon great questions affecting the 
 currency of the country between New York and St. 
 Louis, and Boston and New Orleans, and Philadel- 
 phia and Minneapolis, and St. Paul and San Fran- 
 cisco. We know what is best for the interests of the 
 country, and we wish our representatives knew as 
 much. We have seen a spectacle which has had the 
 most disastrous effect upon our credit and upon our 
 business, of a few^ men intent upon putting their 
 ideas upon nine-tenths of their fellow-citizens, hold- 
 ing up the government, saying " You shall not have 
 the money to pay your debts, you shall not have the 
 money to run your government, you shall not have 
 the revenue necessary to keep yourself solvent, you 
 shall not have the resources necessary to sustain 
 your credit, unless you adopt our ideas in regard to 
 the currency." (" Hear! " and applause.) I am glad, 
 not as a Republican, but as a business man, that that 
 issue has been made, and let us settle it now and for- 
 
20 
 
 ever. ("Hear! Hear! " and cheers.) I have no hesi- 
 tation in saying that if to-morrow there is nominated 
 and put upon a platform in the Republican Conven- 
 tion a man who believes that there should be the 
 free and unlimited coinage of silver, and a platform 
 which so declares, that ticket could not be elected. 
 (Cries of " Good! " " Hear! " Bravo! " and applause.) 
 There are no party lines on a question of this kind. 
 The business men of this country know, and knoAV by 
 their knowledge of the laws of trade, know by the 
 sad experience of the last few years, that one of the 
 causes of this frightful depression which is keeping us 
 in the throes of uncertainty and distrust is because 
 there is a doubt as to our currency being on a par 
 and in touch with the best currency of the commer- 
 cial nations of the world. (" Bravo! " and applause.) 
 I have no sympathy with half-and-half measures, or 
 men w^ho are half men and half something else. 
 (Laughter.) Let us say what we mean, and then let 
 the people, knowing what we mean, decide for the 
 one side or the other. I am told that the word 
 " gold " is unpopular. Well, then, let us declare for 
 gold and see if it is unpopular — " G-o-l-d " as the 
 standard currency of the United States, until by in- 
 ternational agreement with the commercial nations 
 of the world we shall have some other standard. 
 (Applause.) With two thousand millions of foreign 
 commerce, with Liverpool affecting the price of our 
 wheat and the value of our corn, VN^ith our products 
 going to other nations from our factories, we can not 
 be isolated from the rest of the world in that which 
 tlie world calls money. Our money must be as good 
 as the best, and never tainted nor doubted. (Cries 
 
21 
 
 of " Good ! " and applause.) Let silver have its place, 
 let paper have its place, let any token have its place 
 that is redeemable on presentation at the bank in a 
 gold coin of the value expressed on the face of the 
 token. (Applause.) 
 
 Now, gentlemen, I did not come here to argue the 
 currency question. I came as a business man to meet 
 business men, knowing that all business men have 
 the same ideas on this question. And what do these 
 exchanges mean? We are told that there are certain 
 States wedded to other ideas. We have no hostility 
 to them. I have just been through them, and they 
 are to grow great and prosperous, not by one element 
 of production, whether it is silver, or gold, or copper, 
 or cattle, or the product of the field, but they are to 
 grow great by the varied industries which make Mis- 
 souri great and make New York great. 
 
 I am delighted to meet with you here in St. Louis. 
 It is many years since I had the pleasure of meeting 
 you on a public occasion. I am delighted to find, in 
 studying your local affairs, that you have the best 
 city government, according to an authority on that 
 subject. Dr. Shaw, that there is anywhere in the 
 United States. (Applause.) That city government 
 has come from having devolved upon your best citi- 
 zens the formation of a charter for yourselves. It 
 solves the problem of municipal government, that, 
 leave the people of any locality to themselves, and 
 intelligence and integrity will govern that munici- 
 pality. (Applause.) 
 
 Gentlemen, there are in this country about four- 
 teen millions of people who are wage earners. About 
 twelve millions of them are in the States that believe 
 
22 
 
 that the standard of money in the United States 
 should be the best, or equal to the best, in the world. 
 Those twelve millions of workers want to be paid for 
 100 cents' worth of work in a coin that is worth 100 
 cents anywhere (applause) ; and you who are at these 
 great marts, you who are studying blackboards, you 
 who are listening to the ticker over on the other side 
 of this room, you want that there should be no doubt 
 on that question. You come here in the morning 
 and you find the price of wheat in Liverpool, you find 
 what is being done in the Argentine, you know what 
 is being done in India, you know what is being done 
 in Egypt, you know what are the carrying prices by 
 land and sea, and then as merchants you form your 
 calculations; but if you have to figure up at the same 
 time what is the difference between the money which 
 you use and the money with which you have got to 
 sell or buy v/ith, there is not brains enough in this 
 organization to know whether a man goes to bed sol- 
 vent or bankrupt. (Applause.) 
 
 Gentlemen, on behalf of my associates in the Con- 
 vention, I thank you for the generous hospitality 
 with which you have received us; I thank you for 
 the facilities of every kind which you have offered to 
 make our stay here comfortable and pleasant; I 
 thank you that you have led us to know that if any 
 National Convention for any purpose wants to find 
 a first-class place in which to meet, it better come to 
 St. Louis. (Cheers.) 
 
Address before the University Cluti of St. Louis 
 on tlie evening of June 14, 1896. 
 
 Gentlemen: 
 
 Your invitation has been an agreeable surprise to 
 the college men who are attending our National 
 Republican Convention. You give us the unex- 
 pected opportunity to escape, at least for an evening, 
 from the maelstrom of politics. 
 
 The delegates to our national conventions have but 
 three days in which to name the candidates and for- 
 mulate the principles which are to govern for four 
 years this great Republic. This concentration of such 
 mighty issues in so limited a time gives us the oppor- 
 tunity for neither rest nor sleep. You have happily, 
 for those who are university men, given the required 
 relief. From the close committee rooms, the crowded 
 hotel corridors, the surging masses on the streets, the 
 wild excitement, the intense feelings and the fierce 
 discussions of the hour, we are here once more upon 
 the old college campus. It is a festal night for Alma 
 Mater. The air is vocal with college songs, the trees 
 are hung with Chinese lanterns and the speakers are 
 met with that most inspiring of sounds, the old col- 
 lege cheers. 
 
 The colleges of the country have not escaped the 
 universal tendency to association. You may call it 
 monopoly or you may designate it as a trust or you 
 may apply to it any other name, and yet the tendency 
 of the times is for those of similar minds and pur- 
 
24 
 
 suits to get together. Twenty-five years ago gradu- 
 ates of the different colleges and universities knew 
 but little of each other. Their meetings were of their 
 own kind, and they were in touch only with the men 
 of their own institutions. These university clubs 
 which now exist in all the cities of the country are 
 the centers of college unity and of the university 
 spirit. As the Federal and Confederate soldiers 
 meet together in yonder convention for the good of 
 their common country, and meet again at the social 
 board to talk over their old campaigns, so in these 
 university clubs gather old enemies who fought their 
 fights as Yale men or Harvard men, as Columbia men 
 or Princeton men or the men of the fresh water col- 
 leges, with the oar, with the bat, and with the ball. 
 Here we lay aside our strifes of politics and our com- 
 petitions of business or the professions, here we cul- 
 tivate the true college spirit and form new and life- 
 long college associations. 
 
 I am specially delighted to meet here upon this 
 campus of your club and under your warm Southern 
 sky that grand old war governor, and gallant soldier 
 of Illinois, General Oglesby. It is seldom that the 
 untamed giant of the west finds himself among met- 
 ropolitan conditions in what you are pleased to call 
 our effete east. I am sure the governor will permit 
 me to remind him of and relate to you an incident con- 
 nected with one of his visits to New York. It was at 
 t he banquet of the Eepublican Club; there were eight 
 speakers and two hours for the addresses. The Gov- 
 ernor said tc me: " Hovv^ long is a man permitted to 
 calk on Republican principles at a Eepubllcaa iiu et- 
 ing in New York? " " Well," said I, " how long is a 
 
25 
 
 man permitted to talk on Kepublican principles 
 at a Republican meeting in tlie west? " " In 
 Illinois," said the Governor, " never less tlian 
 three hours and frequently five." " Well," I said, 
 " Governor, there are six speakers to talk after 
 you; it is now half-past ten o'clock; you will be 
 called about eleven, and if you talk more than fifteen 
 minutes you may never return to Illinois." " Well," 
 said he, " it is difficult for a man to concentrate his 
 thoughts within that space, but I will try." At 
 twelve o'clock the Governor was careering in the full 
 tide of eloquence; at one o'clock he went back to his 
 hotel with Governor Foraker, denouncing the dys- 
 peptic New Yorker who could not digest a fair dose 
 of the great doctrines of Eepublicanism. Foraker 
 says that at four o'clock the Governor came into his 
 room and said, '' Foraker, these weaklings of the east 
 do not understand our western vigor and the 
 strength of our western thought. Now, I will tell 
 you what I intended to say." Foraker managed to 
 meet me the next day at lunch. One other incident 
 of the visit which also showed how little confidence 
 the west places in our eastern conditions was the fol- 
 lowing: Said the Governor, " Depew, where were 
 you born?" I said, "Up in Peekskill, on the Hudson 
 river, about forty-five miles from New York." "Where 
 was your father born?" " At the same place and 
 on the old farm." " And your grandfather? " " On 
 the old farm." " And your great-grandfather? " 
 " On the old farm? " " And your great-great-grand- 
 father? " " He bought the farm of the Indians; he 
 was a Huguenot; and born in France." Said the 
 Governor, " I don't believe one word of it; there is 
 
26 
 
 no such case in the whole State of Illinois." I be- 
 lieve the first settler in Illinois went there less than 
 one hundred years ago. 
 
 We hear much of the influence which the educated 
 men should exercise upon public affairs. We little 
 estimate how great, how mighty, is the power of the 
 graduates of our American colleges. The people of 
 the east do not appreciate, and apparently cannot 
 understand that in the western cities and towns are 
 a larger number of university men in j)roportion to 
 the population than in the older east. The univer- 
 sity club flourishes and is the strongest in the coun- 
 try between the Mississippi river and the Pacific 
 slope. I have yet to find a municipality of any con- 
 siderable population which has not extended to me 
 the cordial greeting of its university men when I 
 have visited the town. From the farmhouse and the 
 miner's cottage, as well as from the dwelling of the 
 merchant and the professional man and the palace of 
 the millionaire, the youth of America are constantly 
 being recruited into the under-graduate army of our 
 colleges and universities. There merit alone wins 
 distinction; there the conditions of the boy outside 
 the college walls have no influence upon his standing 
 inside the college campus. Colleges are the great 
 leveling influences of the country, but they level up. 
 Their standard is manhood — American manhood. 
 They give to their sons that broad culture, that lib- 
 eral learning and that catholic spirit which brings 
 you together in this university club, which leads 
 you to extend to us of all the colleges who are stran- 
 gers within your gates your charming hospitality 
 and which makes this night the most agreeable of 
 our visit to St. Louis. 
 
Address at the Entertainment given in Con- 
 vention Hall, St. Louis, in Aid of the 
 Soldiers' Home of Missouri, on the 
 evening of June 15, 1896. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: 
 
 We Americans are fond of dramatic situations. 
 The first century of our national existence is the 
 most wonderful and brilliant drama ever written. 
 The stage has been the North American continent, 
 the actors the American people and the audience the 
 world. The subject of this drama is the evolution 
 of liberty. Its influence upon the audience has been 
 incalculable. It has promoted revolutions, over- 
 turned thrones, changed the course of empires and 
 uplifted distant peoples to higher civilization and 
 the acquisition of greater rights. The contrast be- 
 tween to-night and to-morrow is picturesque. To- 
 night we devote the hour to memory and gratitude — 
 to memory of the heroes dead, who fell upon the 
 battlefield for their flag and country, and gratitude 
 to the heroes living, who, with their departed com- 
 rades, saved this republic. To-morrow the delegates 
 representing one of the great parties of the country 
 will meet in the effort to put before the country can- 
 didates and principles, which will give to their 
 organization and its measures and policy the control 
 of the Government, which the men whom we honor 
 to-night enabled to exist. 
 
28 
 
 The characteristics of the decisive conflicts of the 
 past and of the principles enunciated by the great 
 minds of former generations and the wonderful ad- 
 ventures of discoverers and explorers have been that 
 they little understand the ultimate results of what 
 they did or said. All the centuries of the Christian 
 era were a preparation for the American experi- 
 ment. From the crucifixion of the Saviour to the sail- 
 ing of Columbus there are dreary ages of tyranny 
 and suffering. The culture of antiquity, its civiliza- 
 tion and its arts, were lost in the darkness of the 
 middle ages. Fuedalism divided the civilized world 
 into masters and slaves. The concentration of power 
 in the monarch permitted the light of liberty and 
 learning to glimmer here and there, amidst the 
 gloom of arbitrary exactions and fierce oppression. 
 The voyage of Columbus and his historic discovery 
 present the picture which survives the events of the 
 fifteenth century and gives to it its glory and re- 
 nown. But Columbus, dreamer and seer as he was, 
 neither saw nor comprehended the consequences of 
 his discovery. The little band of pilgrims which 
 ■gathered in the cabin of the Mayflower were the 
 state builders of their period. The charter which 
 they drew presented the central features of Ameri- 
 can liberty. Its immortal declaration that they pro- 
 posed in the wilderness, where they would settle to 
 form a government of just and equal laws, laid the 
 foundations of our institutions. But the narrow 
 bigotry with which they carried out this principle 
 demonstrated that they had not yet arrived at a full 
 apprehension of the broad conditions and beneficent 
 workings of this mighty truth. 
 
29 
 
 The Declaration of Independence, put for tlie first 
 time in a bill of rights, which should be the charter 
 of a nation, the academic and philosophic utterances 
 of Rosseau and the philosophers of the sixteenth 
 century. Its maxim, which condensed all the teach- 
 ings of the past on the rights of man, was " that all 
 men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their 
 Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among 
 these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 
 And yet the patriots of the Continental Congress and 
 the soldiers of the Continental army did not compre- 
 hend the infirmity of their sublime principle with 
 slavery existing in the country. For three-quarters 
 of a century the American people explained and 
 blushed and blushed to explain this anomaly be- 
 tween the declarations and the practice of their 
 charter of liberty. But when the proclamation of 
 emancipation, striking the shackles from the limbs 
 of the slaves and freeing the bondmen, was issued by 
 Abraham Lincoln, the stain was removed from the 
 parchment of Jefferson. American citizens stood 
 erect in the pride of untainted liberty, and the pain- 
 ful and weary march for freedom had ended in vic- 
 tory. The victory had been won by the sacrifice of 
 the flower of the youth of the country. Those in the 
 Federal army fighting for the preservation of the 
 Union, and those in the Confederate army, of the 
 same race and lineage, fighting for what they be- 
 lieved to be right, expiated by their sacrifice the 
 crime of the century, and with their blood washed 
 from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States and the decisions of the 
 courts, the infamy of human slavery. The full fru- 
 
30 
 
 ition of the aspiration of the ages and the realization 
 of the hopes of mankind came at Appomattox. The 
 sun of that day illuminated two thousand years of 
 human progress. It made clear the perfected prin- 
 ciples of the Declaration of Independence, the full 
 practice of the Mayflower Charter, the living exercise 
 of the rights of Magna Charta and the fulfillment in 
 government of equal rights and equal opportunities 
 before the law and the evolution of civilization 
 towards Christ's mission, " Peace on earth -and good 
 will toward men." 
 
 Thirty years ago I delivered the address on the 
 first Memorial Day in the graveyard of the old Cort- 
 land town church. The sacred edifice had been Avor- 
 shiped in for 150 years. The stones which marked 
 the places where the rude forefathers of the hamlet 
 slept, bore inscriptions to the memory of many a sol- 
 dier of the Revolutionary War. Beside them were 
 the new-made graves of their grandsons and great- 
 grandsons, who had fallen in the battles to preserve 
 the nation which they had died to found. Every one of 
 the three thousand people who had gathered from the 
 village and the farms were in deep mourning. There 
 was a vacant place at every fireside and sorrow 
 in every heart. The oration proceeded amidst 
 tears and sobs, which faintly expressed the deep 
 agony and love of my hearers. On Memorial Day, 
 this last 30th day of May, the land was full of joy. 
 It was a day of parades, excursions and festivals, of 
 pleasure and happiness. The sorrows and griefs, the 
 hatreds and vindictiveness of thirty years ago were 
 forgotten. The men and the women, the boys and 
 the girls on steamboats and on cars, in the fields and 
 
31 
 
 in the woods with merry games and infectious laugh- 
 ter, were the living and beautiful evidences of the 
 growth, the prosperity and the beneficence of our 
 freed and reunited Kepublic. Thank God for the 
 
 change. 
 
 A generation has come into active and controlling 
 citizenship which knows nothing of the Civil War. 
 Its battlefields are as distant, its events as legend- 
 ary, and its heroes as impersonal to them as Bunker 
 Hill and Lexington, as Washington and Lafayette. 
 For them such celebrations as this are the univer- 
 sities of patriotism and schools for the inculca- 
 tion of the inestimable value and incalculable bless- 
 ings of our national union. There is no animosity, 
 there are no heart-burnings, there is no revival of 
 revengeful feelings by the recital of this story. The 
 son of the Confederate soldier can point with pride 
 to the superb valor of his father, and rejoice with 
 the son of the Union veteran, as citizens of a com- 
 mon country, in the result which gives to both the 
 equal and unequaled blessings of citizenship of the 
 American Union. 
 
 Soldiers' homes are not for the generals or the 
 colonels, but they are the asylums w^here a grateful 
 people will and must smooth the declining years of 
 the private soldier. Events crowd upon each other 
 so rapidly that the fame of to-day is obliterated by 
 the reputation of to-morrow. With few exceptions, 
 names which were as familiar thirty years ago as 
 household words, are no longer known. As I go 
 through the great national cemeteries, the proud 
 monuments erected to the heroes who led the troops 
 to victory do not impress me so much as the pile of 
 
32 
 
 sombre granite which has inscribed upon it, " To the 
 unknown dead." The beautiful tribute of a great 
 poet to the common soldiers making a famous charge 
 was : 
 
 " Theirs not to reason wby; 
 Theirs but to do and die." 
 
 But behind every musket in the Union army was 
 a thinking man. The volunteer had enlisted to fight 
 for a principle and to die, if need be, to prevent the 
 dissolution of the Union. He did reason why, and 
 he did do and die to win by his valor the cause whose 
 justice and right he so well understood. 
 
 A few years ago in a museum at Athens I saw the 
 busts and statues of the famous generals of Greece. 
 They had been found in exploring the ruins of the 
 ancient temples. But recently there had been dis- 
 covered a slab upon which had been carved in bas- 
 relief the full-sized figure of the soldier who ran the 
 twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens to carry 
 the news of the victory which had saved his coun- 
 try, and who, as he voiced it to his countrymen, 
 dropped dead. Three thousand years have elapsed 
 since the message of that soldier proclaimed to the 
 world a triumph of civilization over barbarism, of 
 which we to-day in distant America enjoy the fruits. 
 That venerable monument lives and will continue to 
 express the unselfish valor and patriotism of the 
 common soldier. 
 
 Caesar and his legions battled for the conquest of 
 the world; Napoleon fought to conquer Europe, 
 while Frederick the Great and Marlborough and all 
 the great generals of ancient and modern times led 
 their armies to buttress thrones or subdue peoples.. 
 
33 
 
 The Grand Army of the Republic marched and 
 fought and bled and died, not for conquest or fame, 
 not for pelf or power, but to free the enslaved. Julia 
 Ward Howe, in her battle hymn, expresses their 
 ideas : 
 
 " In the beauty of the lilies 
 
 Christ was born across the sea, 
 As He died to make men holy, 
 Let us die to make men free." 
 
 These early days of June are full of patriotic 
 memory. Thirty-five years ago the four weeks from 
 the 12th of May to the 12th of June decided the fate 
 of Missouri, the future of St. Louis, and, to a large 
 extent, the destiny of the Republic. The streets 
 of this beautiful and prosperous capital of the Mis- 
 sissippi Valley are now full of vehicles of commerce, 
 crowds of prosperous people and marching clubs, 
 carrying the banners of party favorites in the peace- 
 ful and emulous strife for party victory. But thirty- 
 five years ago the drum beats of w^ar were heard 
 in this town and hostile armies were encamped upon 
 the borders of St. Louis. The question w^hich any 
 day might decide, which was upon every lip and 
 blanching every cheek, was, "Shall Missouri cast her 
 lot with the Union or join the Confederacy?" Had 
 she joined the Confederacy, the war would have been 
 prolonged, her territory would have been the camping 
 grounds and battlefields of the Union and Confeder- 
 ate armies, her farms would have been devastated, 
 her industries destroyed, her cities laid waste, and 
 the prosperity of St. Louis set back half a century. 
 This calamity, beyond the powder of imagination to 
 picture or words to describe, was prevented, Mis- 
 S 
 
34 
 
 souri saved and St. Louis rescued by the foresight, 
 the patriotism and the indomitable courage of your 
 great citizen, Frank Blair. It was fortunate that 
 he should have for his right arm that gallant soldier 
 and hero, Captain Lyon. It often happens in the 
 story of empires that small events count for more 
 in their results than the greatest battles. Captain 
 Lyon's seizure of Camp Jackson will be reckoned by 
 the future historian as one of the decisive conflicts 
 of the Civil War. Every state preserves for the in- 
 spiration of its citizens the memory of the men who 
 have made it or saved it, and the Missouri trinity 
 will be Frank Blair, General Lyon and General 
 Sigel. 
 
 It requires only a brief contemplation of Ameri- 
 can battlefields to illustrate the madness or the 
 idiocy of the statesmen who would frighten us by 
 the dangers which they claim threaten our security 
 or peace from foreign assault or foreign invasion. 
 Thirty thousand American soldiers conquered Mexico, 
 with twelve millions of inhabitants. It was American 
 bravery, intelligence and dash. Three millions of 
 people threw off the yoke of the British Government, 
 though England was mistress of the seas and the 
 arbiter of Europe. Hooker's men stormed the almost 
 impregnable heights of Lookout Mountain, and 
 won a victory above the clouds, while Pickett's 
 brigade of the Confederate army hurled themselves 
 with unavailing valor upon the breastworks and 
 died under the murderous fire of the batteries of 
 Meade at Gettysburg. There are in the United 
 States to-day a reserve of ten millions of fighting men. 
 They are the same stock, with the same bravery and 
 
35 
 
 the same unconquerable spirit as those who fought 
 from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, who won the victory 
 under Jackson at New Orleans, who followed Scott 
 and Taylor into Mexico, and stormed the heights of 
 Chapultepec, and marched triumphantly into the 
 city of the Montezumas. They are of the same stock 
 and spirit, the same courage and fearlessness of 
 death as the soldiers who won the admiration of 
 the French and English officers on the staffs of 
 General Grant and General Lee in those con- 
 flicts of the Civil War, where five hundred thou- 
 sand men died in battle. Those soldiers require 
 no standing army for their safety, no expensive, 
 exhausting and threatening militarism for the 
 salvation or the defense of their country. They 
 will take care of that themselves. It is for us 
 to preserve the glorious heritage for which these 
 men died or were wounded, or are now maimed and 
 helpless in our midst. Our duty is to care tenderly 
 and piously for the survivors of the grand army, and 
 to carry out in policy, in principle and in practice 
 the ideas for which they fought. Their triumph 
 gave to the Republic the new South. It substituted 
 for the old oligarchy and slavery the superb develop- 
 ment which comes with individual enterprise and 
 free labor. The new South is redeeming its wilder- 
 nesses for population and homes; it is reclaiming its 
 waste lands for the varied productions of its fruc- 
 tifying climate. It is bringing out the exhaustless 
 treasures of its mountains and hills; it is establish- 
 ing manufactories, founding cities and adding its 
 quota to the majesty, the power and the greatness 
 of the United States. We must be true and faithful 
 
36 
 
 in safeguarding the ballot-box and the right of the 
 citizen to deposit his vote and have it honestly re- 
 corded. We must be courageous in fighting the mad- 
 ness of the hour or the errors which increase with 
 business depression and hard times, and go with our 
 party into temporary defeat, if need be, for the pre- 
 servation of the national credit, and those principles 
 of sound finance and practice common with the com- 
 mercial nations of the world, and which alone can 
 keep us solvent, prosperous and progressive. From 
 Columbus to the Mayflower, from the Mayflower to 
 Washington and the Declaration of Independence, 
 from W\ashington and the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence to Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation 
 are the stepping stones of American liberty and 
 modern development. The crowning blessing of this 
 majestic evolution is that American citizenship 
 which is the common heritage of us all. 
 
speech to the Ladies in tlie Rotunda of the 
 
 Southern Hotel, Si. Louis, on the 
 
 evening of June 15, 1896. 
 
 Mr. Depew, returning from delivering the oration 
 in Convention Hall in aid of the Soldiers' Home, was 
 stopped by a crowd of ladies in the rotunda of the 
 Southern Hotel who demanded a speech. He spoke 
 as follows: 
 
 Ladies: 
 
 After an effort of an hour in the great Convention 
 Hall I am too tired to make a speech, especially as I 
 have been all the evening trying to reach and inter- 
 est an audience of ten thousand people. But who 
 can resist the call of the ladies? I never have been 
 able to yet, and what is more I never want to be able 
 to. I am only waiting for that call to be concen- 
 trated and for her to speak. 
 
 You are not delegates to this convention officially, 
 but unofficially you are the convention. As the wives 
 and sisters of the gentlemen who are to nominate 
 the candidates and make the platform which we 
 believe the country will adopt, your influence is 
 potent both for candidates and principles. In- 
 structed as I am by my own State for its favorite 
 son, and loyal to his success, I nevertheless feel the 
 depressing influence of the great mass of the women 
 here who are captured by the brilliant career in the 
 field and in Congress of the gallant statesman of Ohio. 
 
38 
 
 We, of New York, always do our best for our man 
 and then go home to carry the Empire State for the 
 ticket. We carry back no heart-burnings, no re- 
 venges, no envies, no matter what may be the out- 
 come of the convention. 
 
 We hear much about the woman in politics, and 
 the discussion is never ending whether she should 
 be legally there. My experience is that woman is 
 always in politics; it is pre-eminently her sphere. I 
 do not mean practical i)olitics of caucuses and con- 
 ventions, but real politics which govern countries. 
 The salons of a succession of brilliant women have 
 governed France for two centuries. The parlors of 
 Washington are the seats of power. When the ques- 
 tion is a moral one, or when the issue is gravely pa- 
 triotic, involving the existence of the country, then 
 the best canvassers and the most inspiring speakers 
 — not upon the platform, but in every home — are 
 the women. The women are the hope of the Eepub- 
 lican party; they are imbued with its principles and 
 inspired by its history. To them the story of its past 
 is linked through loved ones who marched and 
 fought for their country with the best of family tra- 
 ditions and family glory. 
 
 I was crossing the plains to the Pacific Coast a few 
 years ago. The train stopped at a station in Wyom- 
 ing, the State where women have the right to vote. 
 The people on the platform recognized me and in the 
 free and off-hand western way came up and gave me 
 hospitable greeting. Then one said: "Mr. Depew, 
 maybe you will run for President some day, and if 
 so, as we have female suffrage in Wyoming, you 
 ought to know the ladies." And so the women were 
 
39 
 
 called and I was introduced. I said to one little 
 woman as slie stood beside lier gigantic husband, 
 " Do as many women as men vote, in proportion to 
 their numbers, in this State?" "More," she an- 
 wered. " Well, do you ladies generally vote as your 
 husbands wish or as your husbands command?" 
 Like the snapping of a bear trap she shot out, " Not 
 much," and then she seemed to grow to gigantic pro- 
 portions, while, amidst the laughter of the crowd, 
 her giant husband became a pigmy. 
 
 You ladies are more speculative than we; you are 
 more intense partisans and greater optimists. You 
 believe that what you believe must ultimately be the 
 accepted faith, because you have no doubt as to its 
 being the truth, and you believe that the party of 
 your choice must win because it is the right party. 
 
 Let me indulge in a little prediction. Our country 
 is now the financial storm center of the world. It 
 has been the storm center of liberty and liberty won. 
 It has been the storm center of independence and 
 independence won. Now that it is the storm center 
 of clashing opinions upon those financial principles 
 upon which depend the prosperity of a country, I 
 believe that the principles which place our country 
 in harmony with the great commercial nations of the 
 world will win. No other party but the Kepublican 
 party professes those principles; no other party but 
 the Republican party will declare those principles. 
 We will go to the country from this convention stak- 
 ing everything upon the gold standard. We will win 
 or fall by that issue. But as sure as truth lives, as 
 sure as the right prevails, as sure as God has the 
 destinies of this countrv in his hands and is to work 
 
40 
 
 out in the future as He has worked out in the past 
 within its borders the problems of happiness for hu- 
 manity, so sure is it that the candidates to be nomi- 
 nated by this convention and the principles to be 
 there adopted — the old principles of the Eepublican 
 party — with unalterable devotion to sound finance 
 also in the platform, will carry the country. 
 
 When next I meet you, ladies, I trust it will be at 
 Washington, when we shall be viewing the Presi- 
 dential procession marching down Pennsylvania 
 avenue, the hero of it the Eepublican candidate, the 
 nominee of this St. Louis convention, triumi)hantly 
 elected by the peoi)le. 
 
speech Nominating Governor Levi P. Morton 
 
 for President of the United States at the 
 
 National Republican Convention, 
 
 St. Louis, on June i6, 1896 
 
 Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention: 
 
 National Republican Conventions have been epoch 
 makers. They have formulated the principles, orig- 
 inated the policies and suggested the measures 
 which in the history of the United States form its 
 most progressive periods. They have nominated for 
 the Presidency statesmen and soldiers who were the 
 leaders of the people in their onward march to larger 
 libertv and broader and better industrial conditions. 
 No party, no matter however glorious its achieve- 
 ments or how brilliant its successes, can rely upon 
 the past. Its former triumphs are only its certifi- 
 cates of character, which must be met by continuing 
 effort as beneficent and wise as anything of which it 
 boasts. The party which is to permanently govern a 
 country and is secure in its past, must not only be 
 equal to the present, but must forecast and provide 
 for the future. The Republican party has held pos- 
 session of the government of the United States for 
 more than a generation because it has triumphantly 
 met these conditions. The unequalled successes of 
 the Republican party, its hold upon the country and 
 its masterful influence upon affairs have been due 
 to the fact that in every crisis its principles have 
 solved the problems of the hour and its selected 
 
42 
 
 leader has been the man for the occasion. The great- 
 est moral and patriotic questions which a free people 
 were ever called upon to meet were slavery and se- 
 cession in the early days of our organization. But 
 with " Union and Liberty " as our watchword and 
 with Lincoln as our leader we saved the Republic 
 and emancipated the slave. The passionate and crit- 
 ical issues of reconstruction were successfully met 
 and the hostile sections happily united by a policy 
 of conciliation which could only secure the consent 
 of the victors and the assent of the conquered by the 
 influence of the soldier President who had the confi- 
 dence of the armies which he had led in triumph and 
 the enemies whom he had paroled with honor. In a 
 period when progress halted because of the distrust 
 of commonwealths and their citizens of each other 
 the later and better judgment of the country ex- 
 pressed its acknowledgment to the non-partisanship 
 and judicial fairness of Hayes and Evarts. The 
 youth who came to manhood after the Civil War and 
 knew little of its agonies or its animosities, found a 
 glorious example of American possibility and 
 achievement in the canal driver, the college student, 
 the school principal, the college president, the Union 
 general, the illustrious debater in the House of 
 Representatives, the brilliant and magnetic Garfield. 
 In defeat and in victory, for the policies which stood 
 for the development of American industries, for 
 America for Americans, whether native or natural- 
 ized, and for the reciprocity which bound the North 
 American and South American continents together, 
 we had the Plumed Knight of our enthusiasm and 
 our love, James G. Blaine. As a new generation 
 
43 
 
 came to the majority, to whom the past was a legend, 
 the present, the difficult task of development and 
 prosperity and the future theory without experience, 
 the Republican party again happily practiced, in its 
 control of the executive and the legislative branches 
 of the government, that policy of the protection of 
 American industries and that practice of sound 
 finance which gave to the Republic its era of greatest 
 prosperity and its period of the largest returns for 
 capital, the fullest employment for labor and the 
 highest wages for work in the history of our nation 
 in the closing year of the administration of that able 
 and accomplished statesman, Benjamin Harrison. 
 
 A few weeks preceding the convention of four 
 years ago at Minneapolis I had an afternoon with 
 Mr. Blaine. With marvelous intuition he forecast 
 the future. He said: " Substantially all the forces 
 of opposition, of distrust and of disappointment, of 
 theory and of imagination which accumulate against 
 a party that has been in power for over thirty years 
 are now concentrated for an assault upon our posi- 
 tion and is certain to succeed. The Democratic party 
 and its allies of Populism and of all other isms are 
 destined in this campaign, no matter who is our can- 
 didate or what is our platform, to secure possession 
 of the government." The country knows to its 
 loss, its sorrow and its grief, that the prediction 
 has been fulfilled in every part. In its fulfillment 
 the United States has the experience and Europe 
 has the business and prosperity. 
 
 We meet to take up the broken cord of national 
 development and happiness and link it once more to 
 the car of progress. Our industries stagnant, our 
 
44 
 
 manufactures paralyzed, our agriculture disheart- 
 ened, our artisans unemployed, our finances disor- 
 dered, our treasury bankrupt, our credit impaired, 
 our position among the nations of the world ques- 
 tioned, all look to this convention and call upon its 
 wisdom for hope and rescue. 
 
 The conditions created by the practice of Demo- 
 cratic policies, the promise of Democratic measures 
 and the differences of Democratic statesmen would 
 seem to argue an unquestioned and overwhelming 
 triumph for the Republican party in the coming elec- 
 tion. No matter how brilliant the x^romise, no 
 matter how serene the outlook, it is the part of wis- 
 dom, with the uncertainties of politics and our recent 
 experience of the tragic shifting of issues, to be care- 
 ful, prudent and wise in platform and in candidate. 
 
 I am grieved to see a secession for any cause from 
 a Republican Convention. I can honor the intense 
 devotion to an idea which impels the delegates repre- 
 senting the free coinage of silver constituencies to 
 sever lifelong political associations. But I believe 
 the gentlemen who have just left us, who are Repub- 
 licans on every vital principle of our party, will 
 sooner or later rejoin the only party with which they 
 can permanently act. The hope of that return is the 
 silver lining to our party clouds. I cannot help re- 
 minding our departing friends that the streets of 
 Heaven are paved with gold, and in rejecting and 
 fleeing from that metal on the highway of prosperity 
 and progress, there is no intermediate purgatory for 
 a resting place. The standard of Heaven is revealed 
 and known, that of the other place an experiment. 
 
 The last few years have been a campaign of uni- 
 
45 
 
 versity extension among the people of the United 
 States, and while we may in platform and candidate 
 meet all the requirements of party obligations and 
 party expectations, we must remember that there is 
 a vast constituency which has little fealty to parties 
 or to organizations biTt votes for the man and the 
 principles which are in accord with their views in the 
 administration of the country. The whole country, 
 north, south, east and west, w^ithout any division in 
 our lines, or out of them, stands, after what has hap- 
 pened in the last three years, for the protection of 
 American industries, for the principle of reciprocity 
 and for America for Americans. But a compact 
 neighborhood of great commonwealths, in which are 
 concentrated the majority of the population, of the 
 manufactures and of the industrial energies of the 
 United States, has found that business and credit 
 exist only with the stability of sound money. 
 
 It has become the fashion of late to decry busi- 
 ness as unpatriotic. We hear much of the " sordid 
 considerations of capital," " employment," "■ indus- 
 trial energies " and " prosperous labor." The United 
 States differing from the medieval conditions which 
 govern older countries, differing from the militarism 
 which is the curse of Euroj)ean nations, differing 
 from thrones which rest upon the sword is preemi- 
 nently and patriotically a commercial and a business 
 nation. Thus commerce and business are synony- 
 mous with patriotism. When the farmer is afield 
 sowing and reaping the crops which find a market 
 that remunerates him for for his toil, when the 
 laborer and the artizan find work seeking them and 
 not themselves despairing of work, when the wage of 
 
46 
 
 the toiler promises comfort for his family and hope 
 for his children, when the rail is burdened with the 
 product of the soil and of the factory, when the spin- 
 dles are humming and the furnaces are in blast, 
 when the mine is putting out its largest product and 
 the national and individual wealth are constantly 
 increasing, when the homes owned unmortgaged by 
 the people are more numerous day by day and month 
 by month, when the schools are most crowded, the 
 fairs most frequent and happy conditions most uni- 
 versal in the nation, then are the promises fulfilled 
 which make these United States of America the 
 home of the oppressed and the land of the free. 
 
 It is to meet these conditions and to meet them 
 with a candidate who represents them and about 
 whom there can be no question, that New York pre- 
 sents to you for the Presidency, under the unanimous 
 instructions of two successive Republican State Con- 
 ventions, the name of her Governor, Levi P. Morton. 
 New York is the cosmopolitan State of the Union. 
 She is both a barometer and thermometer of the 
 changes of popular opinion and popular passion. She 
 has been the pivotal commonwealth which has de- 
 cided nearly every one of the national elections in 
 this generation. She has more Yankees than any 
 city in New England, more Southerners than any 
 community in the south and more native-born West- 
 erners than any city in the west and the representa- 
 tives of the Pacific coast within her borders have 
 been men who have done much for the develop- 
 ment of that glorious region. These experienced 
 and cosmopolitan citizens with their fingers upon the 
 pulses of the finance and trade of the whole country, 
 
47 
 
 feel instantly the conditions that lead to disaster or 
 to prosperity. Hence they swing the State sometime 
 to the Eepublican and sometime to the Democratic 
 column. 
 
 In the tremendous effort to break the hold which 
 Democracy had upon our commonwealth, and which 
 it had strengthened for ten successive years, we se- 
 lected as our standard bearer the gentleman whom I 
 present on behalf of our State here to-day and who 
 carried New York, and took the Legislature with 
 him, by one hundred and fifty-six thousand majority. 
 
 We are building a navy and the White Squadron 
 is a forerunner of a commerce which is to whiten 
 every sea and carry our flag into every port of the 
 world. Not our wish perhaps, nor our ambitions 
 probably, but our very progress and expansion have 
 made us one of the family of nations. We can no 
 longer without the hazard of unnecessary frictions, 
 with other governments, conduct our foreign policy 
 except through the medium of a skilled diplomacy. 
 For four years as minister to France, when critical 
 questions of the import of our products into that 
 country were imminent, Levi P. Morton learned and 
 practiced successfully the diplomacy which was best 
 for the prosperity of his country. None of the mis- 
 takes which have discredited our relations with for- 
 eign nations during the past four years could occur 
 under his administrations. He is the best type 
 of the American business man — that type which 
 is the ideal of school, the academy and the col- 
 lege, that type which the mother presents to her 
 boy in the western cabin and in the eastern tene- 
 ment as she is marking out for him a career by 
 
48 
 
 which he shall rise from his poor surroundings 
 to grasp the prizes which come through Ameri- 
 can liberty and American opportunity. You see 
 the picture. The New England clergyman on his 
 meagre salary, the large family of boys and girls 
 about him, the sons going out with their common 
 school education, the boy becoming the clerk in the 
 store, then granted an interest in the business, then 
 becoming its controlling spirit, then claiming the at- 
 tention of the great house in the city and called to a 
 partnership, then himself the master of great affairs. 
 Overwhelmed by the incalculable conditions of civil 
 war, but with undaunted energy and foresight, he 
 grasped again the elements of escape out of bank- 
 ruptcy and of success and with the return of pros- 
 perity, he paid to the creditors who had compromised 
 his indebtedness, every dollar, principal and interest, 
 of what he owed them. The best type of a successful 
 business man, he turns to politics, to be a useful 
 member of Congress, to diplomacy, to be a successful 
 minister abroad, to the executive and administrative 
 branches of government, to be the most popular Vice- 
 President and the presiding officer of that most 
 august body, the Senate of the United States. 
 
 Our present deplorable industrial and financial 
 conditions are largely due to the fact that while we 
 have a President and a cabinet of acknowledged abil- 
 ity, none of them have had business training or expe- 
 rience. They are persuasive reasoners upon indus- 
 trial questions, but have never practically solved in- 
 dustrial problems. They are the book farmers who 
 raise w^heat at the cost of orchids and sell it at the 
 price of wheat. With Levi P. Morton there would be 
 
49 
 
 no deficiency to be met by the issue of bonds, there 
 would be no blight upon our credit which would call 
 for the services of a syndicate, there would be no tri- 
 fling with the delicate intricacies of finance and com- 
 merce which would paralyze the operations of trade 
 and manufacture. 
 
 Whoever may be nominated by this convention 
 will receive the cordial support, the enthusiastic ad- 
 vocacy of the Eepublicans of New York, but in the 
 shifting conditions of our commonwealth. Governor 
 Morton can secure more than the party strength, and 
 without question in the coming canvass, no matter 
 what issues may arise between now and November, 
 place the Empire State solidly in the Republican 
 
 column. 
 
 4 
 
Speecli at the National Republican Convention 
 
 in Response to the Motion Malcing the 
 
 Nomination of Major McKinley 
 
 Unanimous, June i6, 1896. 
 
 Gentlemen: 
 
 We of New York have made our battle for our 
 favorite son. We have followed the instructions of 
 the convention which sent us here and we have been 
 honorably beaten. We not only bow to the will of 
 the majority, but we hail its choice with ardor and 
 enthusiasm. W^e will go home to work night and 
 day for the election of McKinley. We will roll up 
 for him the largest majority which the Empire State 
 has ever given any presidential candidate since the 
 Civil war. It will not count by thousands, but by 
 hundreds of thousands. 
 
 Since we have been here in touch with the rest of 
 the country, we have felt the strength of his popu- 
 larity and the power of his hold upon the people of 
 the United States. He is not unknown to us. On the 
 contrary, he has spoken all over our State and every- 
 where is loved and honored as a great leader of our 
 Kepublican party. He embodies more than any 
 other man living the vital principle of the protection 
 of American industries, the principle which has de- 
 veloped our resources, which has made our country 
 so marvelously prosperous, the beneficent principle 
 of the Republican party. 
 
52 
 
 The father of one of the candidates before this con- 
 vention was a New England Puritan minister in a 
 little New England mountain hamlet. It was said 
 of him that though he had thirteen children and a 
 salary of only three hundred dollars a year, yet he was 
 marvelously gifted in prayer. As the news of this 
 nomination of McKinley is flashed over our country 
 to-night and read to-morrow morning in every far- 
 mer's house and miner's cottage, in every store and 
 factory, on every street corner, among those who 
 are at work, and the thousands who are unemployed, 
 there will be millions of the men and women who 
 will be marvelously gifted in prayer — first, the 
 prayer of thanksgiving and praise that the man who 
 represents the principle of protection which gave 
 them work and wages, and homes and happiness is 
 the candidate of the Kepublican party; and then the 
 prayer of petition to the Almighty that among the 
 dispensations of His providences will be the election 
 of William McKinley to the Presidency of the United 
 States. 
 
Speecli on tlie Issues of tlie Campaign to an 
 
 Audience of 28,000 People, at tlie Coliseum, 
 
 Chicago, October 9, 1896. 
 
 Felloic Citizens: 
 
 Chicago was burned to the ground in 1871. Such 
 a calamity never before befell a great city. Her peo- 
 ple stood bewildered, but undaunted, amid the ashes 
 of their homes, their business and their fortunes. 
 
 It took them two years to readjust their relation 
 with the business and credit of the country, and then 
 they proceeded to rebuild their city upon a scale 
 grander than they had ever dreamed before. They 
 found the money with which to do it from the sav- 
 ings banks, the life insurance companies, the capital- 
 ists of the east and from Europe. Then came the 
 crime of '73, by which silver was demonetized and 
 the United States went upon the gold standard. 
 Twenty-three years have passed, and Chicago, the 
 metropolis of the west, the largest and the most hope- 
 ful business center in the world, the home of great 
 industries, the seat of a population which has grown 
 nearly ten-fold during this period, presents the most 
 marvelous object lesson in the story of finance, in 
 the story of gold as a standard of value, of the value 
 of gold as an unvarying standard by which to meas- 
 ure all other kinds of currency and all the product 
 of the farm and factory, of brains and of labor. A 
 hundred and fifty thousand men marching the streets 
 to-day, proud of their American citizenship, no 
 
54 
 
 matter where they were born, proud of Chicago, glo- 
 r^'ing in the past and hopeful of the future, spoke 
 with a voice which will be heard all over this land 
 for honest money and the national honor. Even our 
 misguided friends, who marched to-night under 
 the banner of free coinage of silver, did so because 
 the streets, the avenues upon which they marched, 
 the houses in which they lived, the factories in which 
 they worked, railways upon which they labored, 
 were all of them marvelous creations in twenty-three 
 years of business carried on under the gold standard. 
 I was delighted to have for my escort to-night, my 
 friends, the wheelmen. It takes a first-class row 
 among fair-minded men, who have hitherto known 
 little of each other, for them to become well ac- 
 c[uainted and friends. The New York Central is now 
 carrying the wheelman and his wheel, and I hail 
 these swift messengers of the prosi)erity and energy 
 of the Republic as one of the most active and most 
 intelligent agencies in distributing sound money lit- 
 erature and resting from their wheels to enforce 
 sound money doctrine. People who travel much and 
 with their eyes wide open are generally the best 
 judges of what is best for the country, and the wheel- 
 men and the commercial travelers are almost unani- 
 mously for McKinley, sound money and prosperity. 
 In all other ( anvasses they have been divided, as have 
 all other vocations and pursuits and conditions of 
 people in the United States. There will always be, 
 and it is best for the country that there should be, 
 a fair division of parties upon economic questions. 
 We can differ upon protection and free trade; w^e 
 can differ upon a system of banking as to whether 
 
55 
 
 the greenbacks should be retired and the currency 
 issues be left to the national banks and the law of 
 supply and demand; we can differ as to questions of 
 internal improvements and reciprocity, but we can- 
 not differ on questions which affect the life of our 
 nation or the honor of our country, or the inviolabil- 
 ity of our credit. 
 
 In 1880 Garfield was elected by a narrow margin; 
 in 1884 the Democrats came in and Cleveland was 
 elected by a small majority; in 1888 Harrison was 
 elected by a few thousand; in 1892 Cleveland carried 
 the country. These were the healthy and natural 
 divisions into great parties which constitute the 
 strength and perpetuity of free government. But, 
 when the lunatics and theorists and experiment- 
 alists got possession of the Democratic convention 
 at Chicago and drove out nine-tenths of the experi- 
 enced brains of the organization, and when they 
 made their alliance with the idiotic asylum at St. 
 Louis, the safety of the country demanded that sane 
 men, without regard to previous party affiliations, 
 should combine and save the honor and business of 
 the nation. They have done so with a unanimity 
 which has excited the astonishment and admiration 
 of every one. In all previous contests the news- 
 papers were about equally divided; the leaders in 
 the professions in business, and in the trades were 
 about equally divided; colleges were about equally 
 divided. Now ninety-nine per cent, of the pro- 
 fessors in the colleges in the country are for McKin- 
 ley and sound money. All of the Republicans of 
 national fame, with about three exceptions, are for 
 McKinley and the national honor. All the Demo- 
 
56 
 
 crats, including the President and cabinet, who 
 have for a generation held the confidence of their 
 party and the respect of the country, have placed 
 the national honor, the national faith and na- 
 tional and individual credit above a captured 
 and corrupted organization. Four-fifths of the 
 labor leaders are for McKinley and prosperity. 
 The pulpit, usually averse to taking sides in 
 partisan politics, preaches with tremendous ear- 
 nestness from the commandment: "Thou shalt 
 not steal." With the intelligence, integrity, busi- 
 ness sagacity and conscience of our people so unani- 
 mously arrayed on the right side, we wonder why 
 there should be any other side. For the silver ele- 
 ment we can account because of the persistent edu- 
 cation carried on for the last ten years by a syndicate 
 of mine owners and because there are in every com- 
 munity sensible men on all questions but one. On 
 that there is a wheel wrong in their heads. But for 
 the revolutionary part of the program of the popo- 
 cratic party, we can only account by ascribing it to 
 the socialistic and anarchistic party who are seeking 
 to overturn all existing institutions without present- 
 ing any program for better ones in their place. But 
 there are historical reasons for temporary crazes like 
 this. They account for their existence and promise 
 their disappearance. Whenever in the history of 
 the world there has been a great epidemic, it has been 
 the opportunity of the fanatic and the crank. As 
 the black death, or the plague or the cholera, have 
 swept their tens of thousands in the grave, the 
 religious fanatic has cried : " The church is a 
 failure; I am insinred; follow me." They go with 
 
57 
 
 him in the wilderness, and perish, or they give away 
 their property because the world is coming to an end 
 at ten minutes past twelve, and they won't need sil- 
 ver in the next w orld ; or they go out at dawn in the 
 morning, as they are now doing in New York, and 
 walk barefooted on the grass to cure consumption. 
 So, in times of commercial disturbance, financial 
 difficulty and industrial distress, the financial theo- 
 rist and experimentalist has his opportunity, and he 
 never proposes but one remedy, and that is debased 
 currency — manufacture more so-called money, and 
 so make money cheap. In every instance, in the 
 whole history of the world, where money has been 
 debased, the standard of money destroyed and the 
 currency cheapened, it has ruined the nation, de- 
 stroyed business and reduced populations to poverty, 
 despair and starvation. 
 
 We hear much of the crime of '73. We are told 
 that silver was demonetized by a trick. We are in- 
 formed that the panic which began in '93 and is still 
 on was caused by the demonetization of silver in 1873. 
 There must be mighty little active energy in silver 
 if it takes twenty years after vaccination for the in- 
 flammation to break out. Who w^ere the criminals? 
 First, they Vv^ere Senator Stewart, president^of the 
 Chicago Popocratic convention, v/ho spoke in favor 
 of gold as the only standard while the bill was under 
 consideration. Second, it was Senator Jones, of Ne- 
 vada, who said on the same debate, " Gold is the only 
 standard among great commercial peoples," and 
 Jones has furnished the ablest and most productive 
 of the silver literature. Bryan must hang them; 
 he must suspend upon the same gallows every living 
 
58 
 
 member of the Congress of 1873, both in the Senate 
 and House, because they all voted for this bill. But, 
 says Mr. Bryan, it was on their desks for a year and 
 a half; it was debated through 153 pages of the Con- 
 gressional Kecord, but not a member of either house 
 understood the most important bill of the session. 
 If Bryan is right what a collection of idiots the Con- 
 gress of '73 must have been. But silver was demone- 
 tized by Jefferson's order to the mint to coin no more 
 silver dollars in 1806; so he must go to Monticello, 
 and take out the bones of Jefferson from their tomb 
 and hang them as an exhibit, and as the creator of 
 this crime, as Charles II. did of Cromwell. He must 
 go to the hermitage and disturb the sacred resting 
 place of General Jackson and put his skeleton on 
 exhibit. He must go to Marshfield for Webster and 
 to Ashland for Clav, and to South Carolina for Cal- 
 houn, and to Missouri for Thomas H. Benton, and to 
 Auburn for William H. Seward, for either in 1834 or 
 in 1853, when a law was passed making silver cur- 
 rency only in amounts under five dollars, or in '73, 
 they spoke for, advised and voted for the demoneti- 
 zation of silver. 
 
 V/ho are the criminals upon the gallows and who 
 are the hangmen, who, as the representatives of the 
 virtue and intelligence of our day, have executed 
 just judgment upon these enemies of their country? 
 The criminals are all the presidents, from Jefferson 
 to Garfield ; all the cabinet ministers from Hamilton 
 to John A. Dix, all the mighty men of debate from 
 Madison and Webster and Clay to Abraham Lincoln 
 and James G. Blaine. They are all the treasures of 
 statesmanship and patriotism that our country pos- 
 
591 
 
 sesses. And who are their judges and executioners? 
 Bryan and Sewall and Watson. This famous spike 
 team, which is now careering and cavorting about 
 the country; the wild broncho of Nebraska in the 
 lead; the staid, slow, Puritan nag from Maine at the 
 wheel, and his mate, the untamed colt from Georgia, 
 trying not to pull the wagon, but to kick the stufdng 
 out of the Puritan. 
 
 We have absolute liberty in this country of politi- 
 cal freedom and religious toleration. We permit 
 the Chinaman to worship his joss, and the Jap to bow 
 before Buddha. The policy gambler to clasp his 
 hands and knock his head on the floor in supersti- 
 tious reverence of the mystical figures 4-11-44, and 
 so we must view with toleration the followers of this 
 new religion, who see salvation in 16 to 1. Where 
 is the sacredness that makes sixteen ounces of silver 
 for one of gold the foundation stone of our national 
 greatness, business prosperity and human happi- 
 ness? When Columbus discovered America ten 
 ounces of silver were equal to one of gold. The statue 
 standing in front of the Auditorium on the lake front 
 at Chicago casts a bronze smile of contempt at the 
 limitless brass which discredits the standard of Col- 
 umbus' period. W^hen the Pilgrim fathers landed 
 upon Plymouth Eock and created a government of 
 just and equal laws, thirteen ounces of silver were 
 equal to one of gold. Brewster and Carver and Win- 
 throp, and old Jonathan Edwards and the other 
 Puritan fathers rise from their graves to rebuke 
 Bryan and Sewall and Watson and the rest when 
 they say that 16 to 1 in 1896 is more sacred than 13 
 to 1 in 1620. 
 
60 
 
 Truthful, honest, religious men, as those old Puri- 
 tans were, they say to those modern advocates of sil- 
 ver, " You are liars and frauds. Yf hen we said that 
 thirteen ounces of silver were equal to one of gold, 
 we stated what was the truth, for then thirteen 
 ounces of silver had the same market value as 
 one of gold. Y^hen you say that sixteen ounces 
 of silver is equal to one of gold, you are per- 
 petrating a monstrous fraud, because even we, 
 as the ghosts of men, who have been buried for 
 two hundred and fifty years, know enough of the 
 conditions in the world to-day to know that it takes 
 thirty-two ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold." 
 Y^hen our forefathers had driven the British from 
 the country and created a free and independent 
 republic, they declared that the standard of value 
 between silver and gold v>^as fifteen ounces of 
 silver to one of gold. They were patriots; they 
 loved their country; they knew that the young repub- 
 lic could only live upon an immutable standard, and 
 so, after investigating the question, in Europe, as 
 Hamilton said, they decided that 15 to 1 was the ex- 
 act ratio. Y^hen we ask Mr. Bryan why he repudia- 
 ted Columbus and the Puritan fathers and the found- 
 ers of the republic, why he proclaims that the govern- 
 ment must say that sixteen ounces of silver is equal 
 in value and must be taken by the people as equal in 
 value to one ounce of gold for the products of their 
 farms, the output of their factory and their labor, 
 when he knows that by doing so they are only getting 
 half value and a fraudulent return to the farm, the 
 manufacturer and the wage-earner, his answer is: 
 " Times have changed since the revolutionary war, 
 and I'm not George Washington." 
 
61 
 
 Bryan and Sewall and Watson proclaim a revolu- 
 tion. They do not propose, as has always been pro- 
 posed in every canvass before, measures within con- 
 stitutional limits and well settled principles of gov- 
 ernment, but they seek to overthrow all the experi- 
 ence and all the wisdom of the past, to enter upon a 
 wild career of constitutional and economic changes. 
 We all admit the right of revolution and its necessity 
 to escape oppression and tryanny and establish lib- 
 erty. Our forefathers exercised the right when they 
 resisted the encroachments upon their liberties by 
 the mother country and won their independence. But 
 revolutions are never justifiable unless the wrongs 
 are beyond remedy by the people. We have no 
 thrones, no house of lords, no privileged classes. 
 Every four years the people at the ballot box decide 
 who shall be their President, and every two years 
 who shall be their congressmen. We, the people, 
 make our own laws, and we, the people, are inter- 
 ested in their enforcement. 
 
 Eevolution means the most frightful disasters in 
 business, in employment, and in the happiness of the 
 people. Temporarily, it suspends industries and 
 paralyzes markets. The Popocratic convention pro- 
 poses in its program to destroy the Supreme Court of 
 the United States as it now exists under the constitu- 
 tion; to prohibit the issue of bonds to carry on the 
 government and maintain its credit; to destroy the 
 sacredness of private contracts between individuals, 
 as now guaranteed by the constitution; to destroy 
 the standard of value upon which is based the sol- 
 vency and credit of all civilized nations; to debase 
 the currency and issue fiat money. When the fathers 
 of our republic were making a nation they had before 
 
62 
 
 them the example of the French revolution. They 
 saw each party as it came in power, send to the guil- 
 lotine the leaders of the opposition; they saw a harlot 
 placed upon a throne and worshipped by a nation as 
 the representative of the reign of reason, which was 
 to bring a new and better era to the world. They 
 made up their minds to establish a government with 
 a written constitution, which could not be destroyed 
 by temporary madness. They provided how that 
 constitution could be amended if the people wanted 
 it amended, but they gave them ample time 
 to consider before it was done. They created a 
 Supreme Court v/ith the majestic power, a new 
 power and a new condition in government; the power 
 to say to Congress and to President, " The law which 
 you have passed oversteps the limits of the constitu- 
 tion. If you want to legislate on that subject you 
 must pass a law that is in the lines of the constitu- 
 tion." This Supreme Court by its decisions has given 
 to the Federal government the powers which have 
 enabled it to protect its life, to put rebellion down 
 and save liberty. There are two places in this coun- 
 try where all men are absolutely equal. Where the 
 poor and the rich, the fortunate and the unfortunate, 
 have the same power and the same standard: one is 
 the ballot box and the other the Supreme Court. The 
 poorer, the more unfortunate, the weaker the citizen, 
 the more he should strive to sustain the indepen- 
 dence of the courts, for in them alone can he find 
 protection against the strong and the wicked. 
 
 Bryan proposes to abolish the Supreme Court and 
 make it the creature of the party caucus whenever a 
 new congress comes in. Because it decided the in- 
 
63 
 
 come tax to be unconstitutional. It decided not that 
 an income tax is unconstitutional, but that the law 
 passed by the Popocratic Congress was unconstitu- 
 tional; or in other words, that this party hadn't 
 brains enough to frame a constitutional law. I will 
 undertake to retain any one of a dozen lawyers 
 whom I could name in Chicago who could draft 
 a law on this subject which the Supreme Court 
 would hold to be constitutional. Abolishing the 
 Supreme Court will not furnish constructive talent 
 to Mr. Bryan's party. There are three things legis- 
 lation cannot do. It cannot give experience to a 
 child, even if he is thirty-six years old. It cannot 
 put sense where nature has failed to put it, and it 
 cannot make fifty cents a dollar. 
 
 The Declaration of Independence guarantees to 
 every citizen, life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- 
 ness. When Mr. Cleveland and the government went 
 into Chicago and permitted the railway trains to 
 move, they were simply carrying out that provision. 
 All men are created equal, says the Declaration of 
 Independence, with certain inalienable rights, 
 among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of hap- 
 piness. When a hundred or a thousand men in a 
 mob stop railroad trains all over the country, and 
 prevent the mails, which carry letters of business, of 
 family and affection, sick people who must be speed- 
 ily got to hospitals or homes, husbands who are try- 
 ing to reach their wives, mothers who are flying to 
 their children, and lovers who are speeding to their 
 girls, that mob is destroying the equal right of mil- 
 lions of people, to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit 
 of happiness, and it is the duty of the government to 
 clear the highway and let the people move. 
 
64 
 
 Mr. Bryan, passing through Chicago, advised the 
 workingmen to wear McKinley buttons and march in 
 the procession to-day to keep from being dis- 
 charged by their employers, but to vote for him. He 
 has made three thousand speeches, and in every one 
 of them has charged that employers are coercing 
 their employes and advising the employes to assert 
 their independence. I say this is a monstrous slan- 
 der on the workingmen of this country. They are 
 independent. Under the Australian ballot they are 
 in the box with no witnesses of their act but God. 
 There is absolute freedom among railroad men, and 
 that I know. No president, no superintendent, no 
 manager controls, or attempts to control, their politi- 
 cal action. There are thirty thousand employes in the 
 New York Central system of which I am president. I 
 go out every year upon the stump to speak for what I 
 believe to be right, which is the Eepublican party and 
 protection and sound money. And every one of my 
 fellow employes knows that he can vote against my 
 politics and talk against my politics and work 
 against my politics. 
 
 Major Priest died the other day at the age of ninety, 
 having been an employe of the New York Central for 
 fifty years. He was a Democrat of Democrats, and the 
 leader of his party in the Mohawk valley. He was 
 my political opponent, my subordinate, whom I 
 could discharge, and my personal friend. It would 
 have been dangerous to the health and good looks 
 of any demagogue to tell the old major that he could 
 not work and vote for the Democratic ticket. In 
 the Cleveland canvass of '92 I spoke as now for the 
 Republican ticket. I said after one of the meetings 
 
65 
 
 to a switcliman in the yards: " Well, Jerry, how do 
 you stand this year?" He said: "Boss, that's a 
 good speech you made last night, but the boys are 
 agin you this time," and a large majority of the em- 
 ployes of the New York Central voted for Cleveland, 
 though both their president and chairman of the 
 board, Mr. Vanderbilt, were for Harrison. 1 said 
 to Jerry the other day: " Well, Jerry, how are you 
 now?" He said: "Boss, we're all with you this 
 time. No 50-cent dollars for us." 
 
 As one of the largest employers of labor in the 
 United States, in my official capacity, as a laborer 
 myself upon the pay-roll and liable to be dismissed as 
 any of the others by the superior power of the board 
 of directors, I resent, I repel this insult to the man- 
 hood and the independence of the workingmen of 
 the United States — this insult to their intelligence, 
 for they know better. 
 
 We have been for three years suffering from an in- 
 dustrial depression greater than ever before. For nine- 
 teen years, from 1873 to 1892, under a gold stand- 
 ard, our country had prospered as never before. 
 Wages had advanced, the country every year sus- 
 tained in comfort an increasing population, and 
 the output of our farms and our factories made 
 us the industrial leader of the world. The blight 
 which came upon us, from my point of view, was 
 first, the threat and limited execution of free trade, 
 and next, and still worse, the assault upon confi- 
 dence by the action of Mr. Bryan's party in holding 
 up the government and refusing supplies, preventing 
 its having adequate revenue and tampering with the 
 
 currency. 
 
 5 
 
66 
 
 What are the remedies? We say, return to the 
 paths of prosperity; get out of the woods and into 
 the roads that lead to markets and to employment. 
 In all his speeches, Mr. Bryan endeavors to excite 
 employes against employers; wage earners against 
 wage payers. I state this proposition without fear 
 of contradiction — a proposition which every work- 
 ingman knows to be true — that if the employer and 
 his employes are agreed upon wages and hours, 
 then their interests are the same. The employe 
 wants the factory or the furnace or the mills to have 
 orders, to have a market vv^hich will take its product; 
 otherwise he cannot have employment, or he will 
 have to work on half time. He wants his employer 
 to extend his business, to double it, to treble it, to 
 quadruple it, because that means that more of his fel- 
 lows shall receive emploj-ment. It means that he 
 shall share in this prosperitj^ by an increase of pay. 
 This panic has thrown ninety thousand railroad men 
 off the pay-roll. No one feels worse about that than 
 the directors and the presidents and the managers. 
 There are fifty thousand cars lying idle between New 
 York and Chicago and St. Louis. That means loco- 
 motive engineers and firemen and brakemen and 
 switchmen out of employment. That means less 
 work in the shops and mechanics laid off. That 
 means that the mill is no longer sending out its pro- 
 duct, and the farmer no longer finds a market. 
 
 What I want, what I pray for, what I am out trav- 
 eling for, night and day, making speeches, to bring 
 about is to change all this. Now I am distressed 
 and my heart is wrung by men and their wives and 
 their daughters coming to me for employment. 
 
>7 
 
 What I want is to see the day and to see it speedily, 
 when I shall be seeking men, when I shall be adver- 
 tising for engineers and firemen and switchmen on 
 the New York Central railroad. When every rail- 
 road president and manager will be in a position to 
 employ all the skilled railway labor there is in the 
 country and be calling upon the farms for their boys 
 to enter the service. 
 
 When times are hard, cars are idle, trains are dis- 
 continued and a portion of the force has no work, 
 the railroad president finds it impossible to keep up 
 the efficiency of his road and the equipment and to 
 satisfy his stockholders with dividends. In the last 
 three years one-third of the railroad mileage of the 
 country has gone into bankruptcy, stopped paying 
 dividends and stopped paying interest upon a large 
 amount of their bonds. 
 
 Mr. Bryan and his friends are hov»ding about the 
 oppression of capital and that the demonetization of 
 silver in '73 has led to two things, they say: One, 
 the increase of returns to capital, and the other op- 
 pression and reduction of returns to labor. Nothing 
 in my time has equaled the adamantine cheek with 
 which the Popocratic orators turn facts into fiction. 
 Since '73 the wages of labor in every branch of in- 
 dustry have increased sixty per cent. The returns 
 upon capital have fallen one-half. The wages on 
 the New York Central railroad in 1873 were, for 
 engineers |80 on passenger trains; now they are |150 
 a month; for freight engineers in '73, $60; now |100. 
 Firemen then received |40 a month; now |75 on 
 passenger trains and $60 on freight trains. Train- 
 men then received $35 a month; now they receive 
 
68 
 
 from $45 to $50. Trackmen then received 87^ 
 cents a day; now they receive $1.35. The Central 
 railroad received in '73 one cent and thirty-one hun- 
 dreths a ton per mile for the carriage of the products 
 of the farm. Last year we got only seventy-five one- 
 hundredths of a cent a ton per mile. We paid form- 
 erly eight per cent, to our stockholders; now we pay 
 four. This reduction of one-half in the freight 
 charges of the New York Central has come entirely 
 out of capital and been divided between the con- 
 sumer and the producer. While the employes, in- 
 stead of sharing in the burden, have had their wages 
 continuously advanced. In 1873 the western farmer 
 and builder paid one per cent, a month for his money, 
 now, if the security is good, they get it at five and six 
 per cent, a year. 
 
 Mr. Bryan says we want more money, and the free 
 coinage of silver will give it to us. We had $18.50 of 
 money for every man, woman and child in 1873, and 
 we have $23 for every man, woman and child in 1896. 
 We have, in addition, unissued money in the treas- 
 ury, which, if the country would take it, would make 
 the amount for each person $34. We do not want 
 more money; we want credit and confidence. We 
 have the largest internal commerce of any country 
 in the world. It is greater than the tonnage of all 
 the ships on the ocean and all the railroads in all 
 countries outside the United States. If this com- 
 merce, carried upon our railroads, rivers and canals, 
 had to be handled in money, the gold and silver cur- 
 rency of all the nations of Europe and of America 
 besides, would not be sufficient. Ninety-eight per 
 cent, of the currency which makes possible this vast 
 
69' 
 
 internal trade, are checks, drafts, bills of exchange 
 and credits. 
 
 If this country and the world has confidence in the 
 stability of our currency, then we have the conditions 
 of confidence instead of the disasters of distrust. 
 Confidence means the spindles humming, the fur- 
 naces in blast, the machinery of the mills and the 
 factories working to the limit of their capacities, 
 the farmer finding a ready and remunerative market 
 at the neighboring town for his products, work seek- 
 ing men, and not men seeking work, mortgages paid 
 off, homes acquired, the schools full of children, the 
 railroads crowded with freight and passengers, holi- 
 days and picnics and general happiness and pros- 
 perity. Mr. Bryan says that his experiment of the 
 free coinage of silver will, of course, cause a panic. 
 The boy of the Platte in his reckless talk, does not 
 understand the horrors of a panic. We swallowed 
 a potato bug four years ago and now he proposes 
 that we take a dose of Paris green to kill it. A panic 
 means the banks refusing to loan because the depos- 
 itors are calling for their money; it means the closing 
 of the mills and shops and factories and mines; it 
 means the big mercantile establishments going into 
 bankruptcy and their clerks in the streets; it means 
 thousands of honest toilers seeking jobs without find- 
 ing them, and returning to homes where there are 
 hungry children and despairing wives. To talk 
 lightly of panic is to be indifferent to human misery 
 and a crime against suffering humanity. 
 
 But Mr. Bryan is to cure all this by his remedy 
 working after the panic. He is like the doctor, the 
 quack doctor, who said to the patient, when the pa- 
 
70' 
 
 tient asked him: " Doctor, what is the matter with 
 me, anyhow? " " Well," said the doctor, " my friend, 
 hanged if I know, but the post-mortem will reveal it." 
 
 The orators of this new creed say that with the 
 free coinage of silver there will be unlimited money 
 for every one. But money can be had only in two 
 ways; by stealing it, or giving labor or some product 
 of value in exchange for it. After the silver mine 
 owner has had his millions of silver bullion coined 
 into bright and glittering dollars, saying on one side 
 " This is a dollar," and stamped on the other, " In 
 God we trust," and worth only fifty-three cents, he 
 will not give it to any one, unless that person can 
 give him something of value in exchange, or labor in 
 exchange. This whole scheme is a gigantic con- 
 spiracy with a. few able and unscrupulous directors 
 and many dupes. 
 
 In traveling across the continent I met most of the 
 leading directors, managers and owners in the silver 
 mining industry, and such of them as would frankly 
 discuss the question said that at the present price 
 of labor many mines of low grade ores could not 
 be worked at a profit. But if they could get the 
 free coinage of silver at the ratio of IG to 1 the de- 
 mand for silver for coinage would appreciate the 
 price of it, and a silver dollar being worth only fifty- 
 three cents in legal tender, they could pay their work- 
 men in these silver dollars, and so get down the 
 wages of the miners. Thus, they would make money, 
 estimated at f3G,000,000 a year out of the general 
 public of the United States on the one hand and 
 make more by this compulsory reduction of wages 
 to their employes on the other. 
 
71 
 
 To support his theory of the free coinage of silver, 
 Mr. Bryan has called upon Bismarck. And Bis- 
 marck, without approving the plan has said "yes, you 
 are a young and vigorous nation and just the country 
 to try." Bismarck, in 1871, demonetized silver in 
 Germany and established the gold standard. It left 
 Germany with three hundred millions of silver in the 
 treasury, which, on account of the fall in the price 
 of the metal, she has been unable to dispose of. So 
 Bismarck says, as experience has often said to cred- 
 ulity before, to this callow youth of the Platte, " of 
 course, your great country can try the free coinage of 
 silver, and the world will look on with eagerness for 
 the result of your experiment," and then the grand 
 old statesman quietly sends word to the German 
 treasurer, " Be sure you get our silver in the United 
 States mints first." 
 
 He calls upon James G. Blaine as a witness, but 
 while Blaine favored bimetallism, if the parity of the 
 two metals could be maintained at the gold standard, 
 he was always the enemy of the debasement of the 
 currency, the repudiation of debts or a stain upon 
 the national honor. He calls Henrv Ward Beecher 
 as a witness and said in his Brooklyn speech that if 
 Beecher were alive he would stand beside him as a 
 friend of humanity. But Beecher is alive in the 
 speeches which he has left behind him, and on 
 Thanksgiving Day, 1877, Beecher spoke thus: 
 " Whenever in any nation, there is such an attempt 
 to tamper with standards that the moral sense of 
 man is bewildered and liberty is given to unprinci- 
 pled men at large, to cheat, to be unfaithful to obli- 
 gation, to refuse the payment of honest debts, it is all 
 
72 
 
 the worse if done with the permission of the law. 
 Whoever tampers with established standards, tam- 
 pers with the very marrow and vitality of the public 
 faith. Gold is the world's standard; gold is the uni- 
 versal measure of value; gold is king in commerce, 
 all other money must represent gold." 
 
 Mr. Bryan calls Lincoln as a witness to support his 
 revolutionary scheme to prevent the President of the 
 United States from sending troops into a State to 
 suppress riot and disorder, unless the Governor of 
 the State asks it. It was Abraham Lincoln who, 
 against the protest of Governors, sent Grant through 
 Kentucky to Donelson and Shiloh and Vicksburg; 
 sent Sherman from Atlanta to the sea, and sent the 
 Army of the Potomac from Washington to Appo- 
 mattox. Mr. Bryan, when he cites facts, finds them 
 refuted by history and by experience, and when he 
 cites witnesses, they are all testifying against him. 
 The saints of the Republic rise from their graves to 
 protest against his misquotations of their utterances 
 and falsifications of their positions. 
 
 I said of Mr, Bryan, when the audience left him in 
 Madison Square garden, that he was like Casablanca, 
 
 The boy stood on the burning deck, 
 Whence all but him had fled, 
 
 After jN'ovember 3d, as I find from my western 
 trip, the resemblance will be still more striking, for 
 the poet says: 
 
 There came a burst of thunder sound, 
 
 The boy, oh, where was he 
 Ask of the winds that far around 
 
 With fragments strewed the sea. 
 
 Major McKinley, on the other hand, every day, and 
 many times a day, in speeches to delegations visiting 
 
7S 
 
 him at his home, calls as witnesses to his position on 
 finance, on currency, on protection, on patriotism, 
 on national honor and on national credit, all the 
 great statesmen of the nation, and Washington and 
 Hamilton, and Jackson and Lincoln, and Grant and 
 Garfield shout through the record of their lives and 
 their utterances when alive, "Amen, McKinley." 
 
 Against the misinformation, the inexperience, the 
 unfitness for the greatest office in the world of Wil- 
 liam Jennings Bryan, we place this type of our best 
 citizenship, this model soldier, statesman and man. 
 Major McKinley. When, at eighteen years of age, he 
 was working and studying to enter college, Sumter 
 was fired upon, the next day found him enlisted in the 
 Twenty-third Ohio. At the battle of Antietam, he 
 was commissary sergeant in charge of the rations in 
 the rear. Along in the afternoon, he thought the 
 boys in front must be hungry and thirsty. He was 
 in a safe place, but he prepared the sandwiches and 
 boiled the coffee and loaded two mule wagons and 
 through the hail of shot and shell drove to the front. 
 The mules and driver of one wagon were killed, but 
 the other got through, and amid the cheers of the 
 brigade. Sergeant McKinley served the coffee. 
 
 As lieutenant, McKinley in one of the battles of 
 the wilderness, was ordered to carry a command 
 to a regiment isolated by the retreat and about to be 
 captured, to join the brigade. The hoofs of his horse 
 as he galloped across the plain did not stir up the 
 dust more rapidly than the bullets which fell thickly 
 around him. But he reached the regiment, gave the 
 order and saved it from surrender. Then he became 
 Major McKinley. 
 
74 
 
 He has earned by his services in Congress one more 
 responsibility. That the people of the United States 
 will give him on the 3d of November, with a unan- 
 imity and enthusiasm unprecedented in our election, 
 and the title will be William McKinley, President 
 of the United States. 
 
Speecli delivered at the Dinner of the New Eng- 
 land Society at Washington on Fore- 
 fathers' Day, December 22, 1897. 
 
 Mr. President and Gentlemen: 
 
 That I should leave New York late this afternoon 
 and travel 240 miles to dine with you seems to justify 
 the charge so often made against me, that I will go 
 any distance for a dinner. But the fact that the 
 dinner is the frugal fare of the Puritans also ijroves 
 that I am not particular about the dinner. 
 
 Nothing better illustrates the progress of our cen- 
 tury and the difference between the days of the fore- 
 fathers and our own than this trip. A busy man of 
 affairs, I left New York at the close of business hours, 
 I am in Washington in time for this celebration, hav- 
 ing prepared my speech on the route, and, sleeping 
 comfortably on the car, will be at my office again 
 before business hours in the morning. 
 
 My ancestors having arrived in this country among 
 the early settlers, on the one side in New York, on 
 the other in New England, and having fallen in love 
 and married in the old-fashioned way, without re- 
 gard to race or creed, I can claim a membership of 
 nearly every one of the national societies. 
 
 First comes the Scotch, whose dinner is made di- 
 gestible by the bagpipes and indigestible by haggis, 
 and whose glory in literature and philosophy no one 
 can dispute. I have enough Scotch blood to know 
 
7i3 
 
 that a Scotchman keeps the Sabbath and everything 
 else he can lay his hands on. Next comes my own 
 Dutch Knickerbocker compatriots, who, believing 
 that Holland kept alive the spark of civil and re- 
 ligious liberty, and happy in the wisdom of their far- 
 sighted ancestors, pre-empted the land on Manhattan 
 Island. Then the sons of St. Patrick revel in wit and 
 eloquence, while the Welshman displays the intellect 
 of Gladstone and the obstinacy of an army mule. 
 
 But for real, solid, unmistakable and honest claim- 
 ing of all that there is in this country, and much that 
 there is in the world, of which the nineteenth century 
 can boast and the twentieth century hope for, the 
 Yankee takes the palm. Yet no student of American 
 history and no American can fail to accord to the 
 forefathers nearly everything which their descend- 
 ants claim for them. The Homeric epic, the immortal 
 poem of Virgil and the Niebelungenlied have inter- 
 ested and inspired all the ages, but the simple story 
 of the Pilgrim fathers leaving their comfortable 
 homes, abandoning their property and risking their 
 lives by crossing the ocean and settling in an inhos- 
 pitable wilderness, simply for the privilege of wor- 
 shiping God according to the dictates of their con- 
 science and of enjoying the priceless benefits of civil 
 and religious liberty, is far and away nobler, higher 
 and more impressive education than all the deeds of 
 all the warriors and conquerers in the epics and his- 
 tories of the past. 
 
 We draw the line between the Pilgrim and the 
 Puritan. The Pilgrims learned valuable lessons dur- 
 ing their eleven years in Holland. Dutch hospitality, 
 the open doors of the Dutch University, the benefl- 
 
77 
 
 cence of universal education and the benefits of re- 
 ligious tolerance made upon them an indelible im- 
 pression. The forty families who in the cabin of the 
 Mayflower signed the immortal charter, first in the 
 history of nations of the equality of all men before 
 the law, did more for liberty and for the upbuilding 
 of these United States than the twenty thousand 
 Puritans who came after them. The Pilgrims burned 
 no witches, banished no human being for conscience 
 sake, but lived their godly lives at peace even with 
 the Indians. They welcomed and protected all who 
 would come to them and share their fortunes. 
 
 But the Puritan forefathers, imbued with the 
 spirit of the Old Testament, and feeling little the 
 lessons of the New, were very different persons. For 
 seventy years they would not permit a lawyer in 
 their colonies, which, perhaps, was not an unmixed 
 evil, but the clergy wanted to make and execute the 
 laws. They created a theocratic government. We 
 find many of their peculiarities in our own time. 
 They were the progenitors of the political leader 
 whom we sometimes designate as the " boss." They 
 believed in liberty, but only for those who agreed 
 with them. They believed in free speech, but only 
 for those who preached as they taught and from 
 their texts. They treated summarily the mugwumps 
 of their day. They flogged them and bored their ears. 
 The mugwumps were the Quakers, whom they pun- 
 ished, and the Hutchinsons, whom they expelled. 
 The leader of independent thought and independent 
 action in the church, which was then the political 
 party, was Roger Williams. He found that there 
 was no place for an independent politician in the 
 
78 
 
 Puritan theocracy, and so he set up, on Narragansett 
 bay, a republic of absolute tolerance in religion and 
 freedom of thought and expression. Old Cotton 
 Mather, the imperious leader or Puritan " boss," de- 
 nounced Williams' settlement as the home of every- 
 thing that was vicious, revolutionary and criminal 
 in religion and politics. To quote his own words, 
 " Rhode Island is occupied by Antinomians, Ana- 
 baptists, Quakers, Ranters and everything else but 
 Christians,the receptacle of the convicts of Jerusalem 
 and the outcasts of the land." Ammunition was 
 scarce and dear, and so the Puritans passed laws 
 punishing any who wasted it by unnecessary fusi- 
 lades, except the gun was directed against wolves or 
 Indians — there was no close season for shooting 
 Indians. 
 
 But the grand merit of these bigots was that they 
 could both suffer for conscience' sake and could 
 learn the lesson of experience. They evoluted into 
 the most liberal conditions and hosx3itable and en- 
 lightened charity for the opinions of others, not by the 
 clash of arms, but by open-mindedness. They were 
 wedded to church and state, but they separated the 
 church from the state when they saw the union was 
 not consistent with religious liberty. They recognized 
 that all government is based upon the consent of the 
 governed, and, above all, they built their republic, 
 not upon the masses, but upon the individual. Their 
 high thinking has carried them so far that wherever 
 there is a Yankee there is a church and a creed as 
 individual as himself. They practiced slavery, and 
 yet the Puritan Lovejoy and the Puritan John Brown 
 
79 
 
 could, in after years, with the unanimous approval 
 of the Puritans, die for the freedom of the slave. 
 
 Whenever there has been a great crisis in our his- 
 tory, the leaders of beneficent revolution have been 
 the ever-expanding descendants from the Puritan 
 stock. It was Sherman, of the Connecticut Sher- 
 mans, of whom I am glad to be one, who made the 
 brilliant march to the sea. It was Grant of the 
 Massachusetts Grants, who was not only the great 
 commander, but the patriot and statesman in the 
 hour of victory. And it was a Lincoln from the 
 Lincolns of New England who signed the Emanci- 
 pation Proclamation, 
 
 Stephen A. Douglas once said that New England 
 was a great place to emigrate from. The roving 
 peculiarity of the Puritan and his descendants has 
 been the salvation of the United States. They have 
 gone into our new territories, and with their inher- 
 ited talent as state builders, they have erected com- 
 monwealths which now form, from the West and the 
 Northwest and the Pacific slope, the strength, the 
 glory and the hope of our country. Though always 
 outnumbered, they have impressed their individual- 
 ity upon the institutions of all these States; they 
 have carried everywhere the church and the school- 
 house. 
 
 Religion and universal education have been their 
 methods of solving popular discontent and pro- 
 moting popular prosperity and happiness. They 
 have believed and demonstrated the truth of their 
 faith, that a home is not territorial and ancestral, 
 but is the spot where the man has worked out his 
 own problems in life, and, in working them out, has 
 
80 
 
 promoted the best interests of the family, of the com- 
 munity, of the State and of the country. They have 
 kept alive their Puritan traditions by journeying 
 occasionally on Thanksgiving day to the old home- 
 stead, to impair their digestions with many kinds 
 of New England pie, and strengthen their faith by 
 a new baptism of New England " pie-ty." While few 
 of them stay in Boston, and while they have given 
 it over to the Irish, yet, as between Heaven and Bos- 
 ton, they give the odds to Boston. Saint Peter re- 
 marked to the Yankee who was criticising the pearly 
 gates and the golden streets, " You must remember 
 that this is not Boston — only Heaven." I met the 
 other day a type of the Silas Lapham, of Howell's 
 delightful story, who said that, having made a for- 
 tune and settled on the Back bay, he had made up 
 his mind to repair the deficiencies of early education, 
 and had just completed the reading of Shakespeare. 
 I asked him what was his opinion of the great drama- 
 tist. " Very high," said he, " I do not believe there 
 are more than ten men in Boston who could have 
 written that book! " 
 
 The world moves in circles, and what has been will 
 be. The Puritan ministers, when they governed, ad- 
 mitted nobody to a share in the government, except 
 its supporters. So, after nearly three hundred years, 
 we find the sons of the Puritan missionaries in 
 Hawaii following an ancestral precept, and admit- 
 ting nobody to share in their government, except 
 those who will support them. 
 
 The Puritans, after testing different standards of 
 finance, argued themselves into the belief that per- 
 manent prosperity could only be had by a single 
 
81 
 
 standard, and one which could not be disturbed. To 
 maintain this standard they borrowed money in 
 England at fifty per cent, interest, so poor was their 
 credit, or so deficient their financier. Captain Miles 
 Standish. They, however, were willing to assist 
 their neighbors who differed from them in opinion. 
 When they found that the currency of the Indians 
 was wampum, they established wampum factories, 
 and, sending their agents among the tribes, they 
 gathered the valuable furs and pelts, and bought the 
 Indian's land. The Indian financier, richer than ever 
 in the amount of the currency which was in circula- 
 tion, woke up one day to the rude realization that his 
 property was gone and for it he had money which 
 had lost its value. Governor Kieft, the Dutch Gov- 
 ernor of New Amsterdam, finding coin scarce, and 
 having no mint, nor silver mines, nor paper mills, 
 decreed that a certain shell should become the cur- 
 rency of New York. The intelligent Puritan, always 
 anxious to aid his neighbor, immediately explored the 
 sea coasts of New England for this shell, found it in 
 enormous quantities, polished it up and made it 
 better looking than that which the New Amsterdam 
 treasury had put in circulation; and with that cur- 
 rency the Yankee bought most of the old silver and 
 large quantities of the old furniture which the frugal 
 Dutchmen had brought from Holland. Much of the 
 Mayflower furniture, now found in every New Eng- 
 land family, was the result of this assistance in their 
 finances rendered by the Yankees of the sixteenth 
 century to the Dutchmen of the same century on 
 Manhattan Island. New York's reputation as the 
 6 
 
'82. 
 
 center of the gold-bug conspiracy is due to the fact 
 that it still has a lively memory of its once having 
 lost its property and held the shells. 
 
 Plymouth Rock is now only a portable stone, in- 
 closed in the park in the old village for the reverence 
 of every one; but there is no part of the United States 
 where we cannot find Plymouth Rock hens and Ply- 
 mouth Rock pants. 
 
 Every age has its problems. Pastor Robinson 
 planted the dynamite of truth in the Pilgrim mind 
 when, in his farewell sermon, he said that God had 
 not yet revealed the whole of His truth to any man. 
 With the close of the nineteenth century there has 
 come a change in American conditions as radical as 
 that brought about by the Revolutionary War. The 
 Pilgrim enacted his charter in the cabin of the May- 
 flower to establish a government in the new world. 
 
 The Revolutionary War w^as fought that the peo- 
 ple of the new world might govern themselves and 
 be free, not only from European dictation, but also 
 from all European entanglements or political asso- 
 ciations. The young Republic welcomed the immi- 
 grant, because it intended to make of him and his, 
 American citizens, because it meant to utilize the 
 brains and the moral and physical power of the new- 
 comers for the development within itself of the 
 American Republic. The farewell address of George 
 Washington was imbued with the spirit of America 
 for Americans. The revenue policy of Alexander 
 Hamilton, which was concurred in by all the early 
 patriots, w^as for the purpose of utilizing and pro- 
 moting American resources and American Indus- 
 
83 
 
 tries, and for the absolute industrial independence of 
 the United States of all other countries. 
 
 The legislation of a hundred years had been purely 
 internal. We have built our steamboats, dug our 
 canals, constructed our railroads, strung the wires 
 upon our telegraph poles for American commerce 
 between the States and for the American factory 
 and the American farm to supplement and support 
 each other. Our limitless resources, our exhaustless 
 wealth of coal and iron and wood, our vast capacity 
 in gold and silver and our inventive genius brought 
 about the era of overproduction and exceeding cheap- 
 ness. Our population became restive and our politi- 
 cians warlike. It has been the device of kings from 
 time immemorial to allay popular discontent and 
 give employment to the idle by provoking wars. 
 That is not the way in which Republics should work 
 out their destiny or promote the happiness of the 
 people. We all saw, in the unrest of the country and 
 in the despair of the unemployed and of the people 
 of small means and small business the rapidly clos- 
 ing conditions for the eager seeking or acceptance 
 of war. A change has come almost in a night. That 
 change will make the United States of the twentieth 
 century stand for peace. The wildest dreamer of 
 even five years ago would not have predicted that the 
 products of our factories and mills could compete in 
 their own markets with the manufactures of the old 
 world. But the carpets of Yonkers are being sold at 
 Kidderminster, the rails of Pittsburg are being laid 
 down in Liverpool, and the great bridge which Hol- 
 land is to build over one of its inland seas was cap- 
 
84 
 
 tured by an American iron firm against all European 
 competition as to price, though denied the Americans 
 from patriotic motives. 
 
 The alarm over the competition of American goods 
 has been sounded in the Austrian and German Par- 
 liaments by their farsighted statesmen. It is seen 
 in the hasty legislation of France. Its restiveness is 
 felt in the public opinion of Great Britain. Our 
 democracy produces a skill and ambition in our ar- 
 tisans by which they do more and better work in 
 eight hours than their European competitors in ten. 
 Our coal and iron are cheaper at the factory and at 
 the furnace by far than the coal and iron of the old 
 world at their factories and furnaces. Our inventive 
 genius is constantly evolving better and more eco- 
 nomical methods of production, and the machine of 
 to-day is cast aside at once by the enterprising 
 Yankee for the better one of to-morrow, while his 
 European rival clings to the old machine until it is 
 worn out. Our low rates for transportation, which 
 are one-quarter those of European countries, have 
 annihilated space. They have brought our cheaper 
 raw material alongside our improved methods and 
 our more intelligent artisans, and are carrying the 
 product to our seaboard and the markets of the 
 world. '■ 
 
 For the twentieth century the mission of the 
 United States is peace; peace, that it may capture 
 the markets of the world; peace, that it may find the 
 places where its surplus products, not only of food, 
 but of labor, can meet with a profitable return. 
 
 President McKinley has struck the keynote of this 
 expanding policy of our country, and recognized that 
 
85 
 
 our mission has changed from purely internal devel- 
 opment to foreign commerce, in the note which he 
 has sounded so loudly and so clearly for peace. 
 
 Thus the twentieth century will reverse the nine- 
 teenth and the eighteenth, the seventeenth and the 
 sixteenth, and the United States will enter hopefully 
 upon its larger mission. 
 
speech upon taking the Chair as President ; 
 
 of the Republican Club of The City of \ 
 
 New York, January 17, 1898. j 
 
 Gentlernen : 
 
 I have assumed the gavel many times in the course 
 of a checkered and rather agreeable career, but 
 never with more pleasure than to-night. It is an 
 honor for any of its members to be elected the presi- 
 dent of the Republican Club. The conditions attend- 
 ant upon this annual meeting make the elevation to 
 the position one of peculiar significance and gratifi- 
 cation. 
 
 The differences in our party are more acute and in- 
 tense than they have been for a quarter of a century. 
 They found expression at the polls in the last elec- 
 tion, and are rapidly culminating in hostile organi- 
 zations. The Republicans of New York are not 
 alone in these troubles. They are found in Ohio, in 
 Maryland and in other States. All these warring 
 elements are conspicuously and ably represented in 
 our club. That they should have united and unani- 
 mously elected me president is at once a distinction 
 and imposes a great responsibility. It is full of 
 pleasant suggestions and prophetic promise of hap- 
 pier times for the future. It demonstrates that Re- 
 publicans can get together, and when the crisis be- 
 comes sufficiently marked they will discover some 
 method of party unity and party harmony. Happily 
 these differences are not upon National principles, 
 
88 
 
 policies or measures. In the present, as in the past, 
 upon the commercial seaboard of the Atlantic and on 
 the golden coast of the Pacific, amid the tropical pro- 
 ductions of the South and the industrial efforts of 
 the North, in the harvest fields of the West and the 
 workshops of the East, the Eepublican party is 
 agreed and enthusiastic for the principles which 
 have made our country great and our party one of 
 the most memorable of political parties in the his- 
 torj of free governments. 
 
 The growth of clubs is one of the most remarkable 
 things of our time. The gregarious tendency of 
 modern populations has developed this form of asso- 
 ciation in every considerable city in the world. For 
 generations the principal object of the club was 
 social. But in our time it has come to be the gather- 
 ing-place of people who have like views and like in- 
 terests. The political and religious club is rapidly 
 sapping the foundations and the prosperity of the 
 purely social organizations. Within the walls of 
 their own club-houses men who are interested in the 
 advocacy of political principles or the preservation 
 of religious dogmas can find in our busy life the way 
 to meet, to discuss and promote the things in which 
 they believe. The power and the influence of the 
 club which is both political and social have not yet 
 been fully felt in our country. It is a potential force 
 in the governments of the Old World. 
 
 Everything has changed since the formation of 
 our government. The fathers of the Republic i)laced 
 the capital at Washington because they feared the 
 influence of great cities. The lessons of the French 
 Revolution had given them a terror of mobs. They 
 
89 
 
 souglit to place the capital where the population 
 would be purely official, and where Congress could 
 not be intimidated or overawed by a turbulent popu- 
 lace. We now see their short-sightedness. Washing- 
 ton, Jefferson, Adams and Madison were farmers, as 
 w^ere most of the leaders of the Eevolution and fram- 
 ers of the government. Hamilton and Jay, though 
 lawyers, loved the country and its life, and were in 
 harmony with rural ideas and prejudices. The coun- 
 try press were the moulders of public opinion. Now 
 the city daily newspaper penetrates every farmhouse 
 and is on the desk of every member of Congress. This 
 constant concentration of popular-ion and gregarious 
 madness is the most difficult problem of our time. It 
 weakens that strength of the individual which has 
 been the power in our institutions and their develop- 
 ment. It is to be lamented, but can not be helped, 
 and must be wisely met. As everything in our day is 
 drawn to cities, the great parties of the country 
 must be strongly and intelligently represented in 
 them. That government is more electrically in touch 
 with the public sentiment of the country which has 
 its legislative halls in the real capital of the Eepub- 
 lic. Washington or Albany will often be moved by 
 excitements created within the walls of the State 
 House, and not felt outside. They are like kettles, 
 which steam and snort and blow and throw off 
 steam, but the fire is only under the kettle. If both 
 our own Legislature and the National Congress were 
 in New York, they would feel instantly along the 
 wires which come from every centre, every locality 
 and every interest to the metropolis the wants, the 
 impulses and the judgment of the country. More 
 
90 
 
 and more as the years roll by will Cabinet Ministers, 
 Senators and Congressmen gather in New York. 
 More and more will the strong men of other States 
 find their business or their pleasure, at certain sea- 
 sons of the year, in this great city. 
 
 The two curses of power are flattery and isolation. 
 They prevent access to the great official or leader 
 and thej make his mind inhospitable to advice or 
 suggestions other than his desires. The easiest tran- 
 sition is from finding his wise and honest adviser 
 disagreeable to believing him to be his secret enemy. 
 
 Thus the political club must grow in importance 
 in our city. Our successful opponents in the recent 
 municipal election have already recognized this, and 
 the press and the town are ringing with the hun- 
 dreds who are admitted every night to the Demo- 
 cratic Club and the statesmen from all over the coun- 
 try of the Democratic faith who are asking to be en- 
 rolled among its members. 
 
 I once had an experience of how isolation affects 
 an official. Mayor Havemeyer had managed to get 
 at odds with his party, and lived in the exclusive as- 
 sociation of his appointees and employes. It was a 
 little court of fulsome flatterers and false friends. 
 An ordinance had been passed of great interest to 
 the New York Central railroad, which he had re- 
 fused to sign. I succeeded in entering his office one 
 day, and he said to me with great sternness: " I am 
 told that whenever you try to get a public official to 
 do something you always succeed, because you pre- 
 sent the matter in such a way that you persuade him 
 against his judgment and his duty, and I did not in- 
 tend to see you." 
 
91 
 
 " Well," I said, " Mr. Mayor, that is very flattering, 
 but it would ruin me in my official and professional 
 capacity if it was universally believed. Now, I will 
 tell you what I will do. I will let you do all the talk- 
 ing, and I will not say a word." 
 
 So he immediately began talking about himself, 
 his place, his power, and the popularity and the bene- 
 fits of his rule. He said, finally : " You see me here 
 all alone. Nobody comes in to visit me. There," he 
 said (pointing to Broadway), " is that stream of peo- 
 ple going up and down — business men, professional 
 men and laboring men. They never come here. They 
 don't even look over here, because they know the old 
 Dutch mayor is taking care of their interests." 
 
 I said : " Mr. Mayor, you have stated your posi- 
 tion, your power and the benefits of your official con- 
 duct so much more strongly than I could myself that 
 I can only accept them as the absolute facts, and as 
 one and a representative of those people who pass 
 up and down say that is their view." 
 
 He immediately signed the ordinance. 
 
 None of us has yet grasped the full meaning of 
 this greater city of New York. The movement of 
 people from all parts of the country to cities will be 
 immensely accelerated by New York becoming the 
 second, and soon the first, city of the world. The at- 
 traction of gravitation is resistless. London and 
 Paris and Berlin and Eome grow with infinitely 
 greater rapidity than any of the other cities of their 
 respective countries. New York will advance by 
 leaps and bounds, because of the irresistible attrac- 
 tion vv^hich crowds have for individuals. New York, 
 cosmopolitan and national, is to be not only the com- 
 
92 
 
 mercial and the financial, but the political, the reli- 
 gious, the literary and the intellectual, center of the 
 continent. Its greater opportunities for success or 
 failure, its instantaneous touch with all the world, 
 its concentration and diffusion of news and of busi- 
 ness, will bring here not only a permanent popula- 
 tion of enormous size, but the resident representa- 
 tives of every business, profession and interest in the 
 United States. More and more every day the busi- 
 ness man of America is coming to understand that 
 his highest business is the business of politics. Blow 
 after blow from the President or from Congress has 
 taught us that from Washington can come in a night 
 the paralysis of trade and the stoppage of industries, 
 or from Washington can come the legislation which 
 will energize and promote the business interests of 
 the country. 
 
 These Southern, Western, Pacific Coast, Mountain 
 State and New England men in our midst remain in 
 close association with their own localities at the 
 same time that they are nominally New Yorkers. 
 They are open-minded and free from prejudice. 
 Their politics are selfish, but it is the selfishness 
 which promotes the best interests of the country and 
 gives the largest employment to its capital and 
 labor. These representative men are largely Repub- 
 licans; their home should be a Eepublican club. 
 This organization has the age, the experience, the 
 membership and the possibilities to make it such a 
 home. It should be divorced from everything that is 
 petty or small or local or individual. It should have 
 no care and no voice in the selection of candidates 
 or in the organization politics of the ward or the city 
 
93 
 
 or the locality. It should welcome upon its rolls 
 every Kepublican who is a Republican by profession, 
 by faith and by practice on National lines. Our 
 Democratic friends are building up a club whose 
 avowed object is to have New York city control the 
 policy of the Democratic party in the State and in 
 the country. Our purpose in this club should be 
 broader. It should be to have this club the repre- 
 sentative, and the intelligent representative, of the 
 Republican opinion of the whole country— Republi- 
 can opinion crystalized from the judgment and dis- 
 cussion of intelligent Republicans from every part 
 of the country. This is a large programme, but it is 
 in harmony with that great city which on January 
 1st took its place among the mighty municipalities 
 of ancient and modern times. 
 
 Our membership should be numbered by the thou- 
 sands, should be limited only by the boundaries of 
 the Republic of the United States, and our organiza- 
 tion should be the home where the Senator, the Con- 
 gressman, the business man, the lawyer, the artisan 
 and the labor leader from all over the country can 
 find hospitality and congenial minds, and our Repub- 
 lican Club should be known as the National Republi- 
 can Club. 
 
speech as President of the Republican Club 
 : I of The City of New York at the Banquet at 
 Delmonico's, Celebrating the Birth- 
 day of Abraham Lincoln, 
 February 12, il 
 
 Gentlemen : 
 
 For nearly two decades this club has celebrated 
 the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. Some of these 
 occasions have been memorable for the brilliancy of 
 the oratory, the importance of the principles enun- 
 ciated, and the discriminating and eloquent tributes 
 to the character, life and services of this great pa- 
 triot and Republican leader. In some years our 
 meetings have been held in the despair of defeat, and 
 in others while flushed with victory; but whether 
 the political conditions were gloomy or bright, the 
 sentiment of the meeting has always been full of 
 hope and inspiration. 
 
 The truth and the courage to speak it, no matter 
 whom it hurts or where it hits, is the spirit of this 
 night. No good cause was every injured, and every 
 good cause is always helped by fidelity to the truth. 
 
 When we came together on the 12th of February, 
 1892, we were enjoying with all our countrymen the 
 unequaled prosperity of that period. The adminis- 
 tration of President Benjamin Harrison, one of the 
 wisest and ablest of our chief magistrates, had just 
 ended, and left behind a glorious legacy. The flood 
 
96 
 
 of national wealth and employment was at its 
 height, and Father Time cut deep in the memorial 
 post which records the rising tide — the notch which 
 had never been reached before, and never has been 
 reached since. A year later the receding tide had 
 left the shores littered with the wrecks of business, 
 of fortunes and of families; 1894 was still darker, 
 and 1895 saw the country in industrial paralysis 
 from general distrust. In 1896 the greatest battle of 
 the century between the economic forces of the land 
 and with the currency theorists had been settled by 
 the vote of the people for the Republican principle of 
 the protection of American industry, and the Eepub- 
 lican and honest Democratic principle of sound 
 money. The response of capital and labor to our vic- 
 tory is heard in the humming of the spindles and the 
 roar of machinery, and is seen in the fires of the fur- 
 naces and the factories, and in the employment of 
 hundreds of thousands of the unemployed, who are 
 now laboring and enjoying the fruits of their labors. 
 We have won but half the fight, and yet there is this 
 satisfactory result. But the victory can not be per- 
 manent, the conditions of prosperity can not be last- 
 ing, the factors of credit can not be complete until 
 the other principle, the one of honest money, is im- 
 pregnably placed upon the statute books of the Re- 
 public. The fight is on and must be fought to the 
 finish. 
 
 The responsibility of those who believe there can 
 be no lasting prosperity until the standard of value 
 is fixed and we are placed beyond question in har- 
 mony with the commercial nations of the world is 
 limited by the boundaries of no single State or group 
 
97 
 
 of States. When a Senator from this greatest of 
 business commonwealths easts one-half of the vote 
 of New York for the silves basis we have the same 
 duty imposed upon us as rests on the Republicans of 
 Kansas or Colorado. It is to agitate, agitate and 
 again agitate until our currency is no longer a politi- 
 cal question. 
 
 Our motto to-night and for this discussion is the 
 maxim of our Great Chief, uttered in sympathy and 
 sorrow when pleading with our misguided Southern 
 brethren to return to their allegiance to the Union, 
 " With malice toward none and with charity for all." 
 There is not a Republican leader nor a Democratic 
 leader who does not need in this discussion to crawl 
 under some corner of the mantle of charity. That 
 there has been such an earnest, wide-spread and hon- 
 est belief in the free coinage of silver, in other words 
 in depreciated and irredeemable currency, is due to 
 the teachings of nearly all of our leaders and most of 
 our organs of public opinion. The results demon- 
 strate that when you compromise with the Devil the 
 Devil will get you in the end. A distinguished Sena- 
 tor said to me in Washington last week, " I have 
 been teaching bimetalism to my constituents for 
 years in order to beat fiat money and free silver, and 
 never woke up until within a year to the fact that I 
 had made a mistake, and was really stimulating the 
 heresies against which I was contending." The most 
 gigantic and universal system of university teaching 
 ever engaged in during a Presidential canvass was 
 conducted by the business interests of the country 
 during our late Presidential campaign, and after all 
 the tremendous effort nearly one-half the people of 
 7 
 
98 
 
 the country voted for the heresy of fiat money. It 
 was in our platform, and therefore in fulfillment of 
 one of our pledges, that we should try European 
 countries to see if there could be international bi- 
 metalism. The result, however, of that, and of the 
 attitude of our party leaders in Congress and upon 
 the stump has been seen in the elections this fall. 
 Multitudes of voters, though only partially convinced 
 that gold is the true standard of value, cast their bal- 
 lots for McKinley and Hobart and sound money, but 
 the moment that they saw anywhere any wavering 
 on the question they came to the conclusion that, 
 after all, the plea for honest money was only a cam- 
 paign cry, and that in our heart of hearts we still be- 
 lieved that bimetalism was wedded with prosperity. 
 History is ever repeating itself. Periods of financial 
 and industrial distress breed economic fallacies. 
 Millions accept them as measures of relief, as drown- 
 ing men grasp at straws. The experience of the past, 
 the proof of their repeated trials and failures, the cur- 
 rent opinions of the prosperous and solvent commer- 
 cial nations of the world are disregarded on the plea 
 that our conditions are exceptional. The truth 
 stated and reiterated with calmness and courage is 
 the cure, and the only one. Palliatives, compro- 
 mises and substitutes which partly admit or half- 
 heartedly deny financial heresies reveal the weak- 
 ness of the advocates and confirm the faith of the 
 votaries of irredeemable currency or double or fluc- 
 tuating standards of value. It is utterly futile to at- 
 tempt to convert the heathen by fooling with the 
 fetich. You must smash it. Then he sees that it has 
 no divinity. Demetrius of Ephesus understood this 
 
99 
 
 principle when he raised the riot which drove out 
 Paul. He knew that if Paul destroyed Diana the 
 business of selling her images was ended. It was 
 a frightful and brutal desecration of art which led 
 the early Christians to destroy the masterpieces of 
 Praxiteles in the Parthenon and at Olympia, but the 
 early Christians knew that Paganism in art had as- 
 sumed the livery of Heaven and captured the souls 
 of men, and only by proving its earthly character 
 could the eyes of the darkened soul be opened to the 
 light. Our Puritan forefathers, those fearful icono- 
 clasts, those enemies of images and pomp and cere- 
 monials and vestments and cathedrals, shocked the 
 learning, the piety and the culture of generations by 
 their ruthless raids upon them all, but they made 
 possible that faith which gives to us civil and reli- 
 gious liberty. 
 
 Thank Heaven, the clear and superb utterance of 
 President McKinley at the Manufacturers' banquet 
 two weeks ago, and the impregnable front of the 
 Republican members of the House of Representa- 
 tives, have cleared the atmosphere. Those two things 
 have done much for National credit and Republican 
 hope. Now the representative must take one side or 
 the other. The " good Lord and good Devil " period 
 has passed. There is no room any more for that 
 large class of preachers of whom I remember one as 
 an illustrious example. The village church had been 
 disrupted by a free-thinking lay member, whose in- 
 tellectual equipment was too much for the old pas- 
 tor, who was more a shepherd of the flock than a 
 militant theologian. So the elders called a gentle- 
 man who had the reputation of being a popular 
 
100 
 
 preacher and was famous for smoothing over difflcul- 
 ties. Evangelists and infidels gathered to hear him, 
 and he said : " My brethren and sisters, I understand 
 that some of you believe that there is a God, and 
 some of you think that there is no God. The truth 
 must be somewhere between the two." 
 
 It has been the gloiy of the Republican party, as 
 distinguished from the Democratic party, that its 
 principles and its policies were national. The Demo- 
 cratic party might be free trade in a free-trade State, 
 and protectionist in a protection State, and sound 
 money in a sound-money State, and fiat money in a 
 fiat-money State, and for free silver in free-silver 
 commonwealths, but the Republican, whether of the 
 North, or of the South, or of the East or of the West, 
 belonged to one party, which stood upon one plat- 
 form, and had only one kind of principles for every 
 latitude and longitude. I have no patience with the 
 now loudly-professed doctrine of expediency. The 
 Whig party went to its grave practicing compromise 
 and expediency; the Republican party went to de- 
 feat in its first great canvass, because it dared not 
 proclaim the full truth, nor express the whole of its 
 belief. The birth of victory for the Republican party, 
 the beginning of its triumphant career, was at 
 Springfield, when Abraham Lincoln made the speech 
 with which he entered the canvass for Senator 
 against Stephen A. Douglass. He submitted his 
 speech to the conference of the State leaders, and 
 they all said : " Mr. Lincoln, if jou make that speech 
 we are doomed to defeat, not only in this contest, 
 but in the national election two years hence." Lin- 
 coln's reply was: " I would rather go to defeat on a 
 
101 
 
 declaration of the real principle of our party than 
 to win by any compromivse, because, in that defeat 
 will be the courage and the education which will 
 win us the Presidency two years hence." That im- 
 mortal declaration which frightened the timid, 
 scared the politicians and nerved the conscience of 
 the Nation, was this : ^' A house divided against 
 itself can not stand. I believe this government can 
 not endure permanently half slave and half free. I 
 do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not ex- 
 pect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to 
 be divided. It will become all one thing or all the 
 other." That declaration made Abraham Lincoln 
 President of the United States; that declaration led 
 to the Emancipation Proclamation; that declaration 
 reunited and recemented the union of the States; 
 that declaration has never failed in its spirit to lead 
 the Eepublican party to victor}^ 
 
 It is almost an axiom in Washington that the ut- 
 terances of McKinley, Gage, Reed and Dingley are 
 good principles, but bad politics. But temporary 
 success is worse than defeat v/hen it is won upon the 
 maxim recently enunciated by Mark Twain that 
 " faith is believing what you know is not so." The 
 story of a great battle stirs the blood. When the 
 war is in progress the news of a victory thrills every 
 nerve and fibre, and the victorious general becomes 
 a demi-god. There are battles in the representative 
 halls of as great moment to the country, requiring 
 as much courage and skilled leadership as those 
 which move armies and carry on great campaigns 
 and win the decisive conflicts of history. There has 
 been no more inspiring and no more hopeful spec- 
 
102 
 
 tacle, no more dramatic picture of the battle in the 
 forum than when the silver resolution, which meant, 
 as we believe, if successful, disaster to public credit 
 and private business, came down from the Senate. 
 With the prestige of the most august body in our 
 government behind it, its descent upon the House 
 was like the charge cf the Old Guard at Waterloo. 
 But the Old Guard bit the dust and crumbled to 
 pieces upon the impregnable squares of honest 
 money led by that greatest parliamentarian of our 
 times — Speaker Thomas B. Beed. 
 
 The plain duty of the House of Representatives is 
 to pass a sound currency bill. The able and experi- 
 enced delegates to the Indianapolis convention have 
 furnished an admirable basis for action. As often 
 as the Senate rejects it, pass it again. Defeat will 
 promote discussion, and in debate will be encouraged 
 and revealed an overwhelming popular sentiment 
 which will surely succeed. 
 
 Our wreaths to-night crown the statue, and are 
 strewn about the monuments of Abraham Lincoln. 
 W^e hail his memory dead as his countr3'-men hailed 
 him living. We hail him as the man of the i^eople 
 illustrating the possibilities of American citizenship. 
 We hail him as the great statesman who proved the 
 second savior of his country. We hail him as the 
 jxenial humorist whose wit and stories will forever 
 prevent his being elevated above the plane of our 
 common humanity. We love him because his name 
 and fame are the inspiration and education, and the 
 continuing leadership of the Republican party. 
 
Address at the Concert given at the Astoria 
 
 Hotel, March 4, 1898, for tlie Benefit of the 
 
 Widows and Orphans of those who 
 
 Perished on the Warship Maine. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen : 
 
 I fear a speech will be a false note in the exquisite 
 harmony which is to be given by the artists who 
 have volunteered their services this evening. But 
 the call to participate and introduce the exercises 
 of an occasion like this is too imperative to be ques- 
 tioned or denied. It is singularly appropriate that 
 art in one of its most agreeable forms — music — 
 should pay tribute to the memory of the heroes who 
 went down with the battleship Maine, and call to- 
 gether the audience which contributes to the sup- 
 port of the families of those who died. 
 
 The great apostle gave as the virtues, faith, hope 
 and charity, and the chief of these is charity. Char- 
 ity is broader far than mere helpfulness to those in 
 distress. The tragedy which calls us together has 
 given it a patriotic, as well as benevolent signifi- 
 cance. By the exercise of its spirit the judgment of 
 the country is suspended until the facts are ascer- 
 tained. By the exercise of its spirit we not only do 
 justice to the dead and care for the living, but we be- 
 lieve, until the fact shall prove otherwise, that the 
 crime, which might be possible, is so unworthy of a 
 brave people as to be utterly improbable. 
 
104 
 
 Notwithstandiug that our strength is upon the 
 land and our territory is so vast, we have always had 
 a national fondness for the sea. There has been lit- 
 tle hitherto in our conditions or our relations with 
 the nations of the world to call for the enormous 
 naval armaments which they deem necessary for 
 their well-being or their safety. But nothing so stirs 
 the blood and fires the imagination of Americans as 
 a victory upon the wa.ter. The Continental Army of 
 the Revolution, the little force which conquered 
 Mexico, the deeds of valor of federal and confederate 
 soldiers in the Civil War arouse our pride and enthu- 
 siasm. There is, hov/ever, an element of romance 
 about the battleship upon the ocean which elicits a 
 deeper and a keener interest. The factors of land 
 warfare are thoroughly understood, but the sailor 
 meets not only the usual dangers of battle, but also 
 the perils of the deep. His ship is his country, and 
 ours. He must keep it afloat, with the flag flying, 
 aaainst both the destructive forces of nature and the 
 power of the enemies of his country. It is the glory 
 of the American Navy that it has never disappointed 
 either the hopes or the ambitions of our people. Its 
 record is brilliant with victories which keep alive 
 the national spirit and promote patriotism. 
 
 Many of us have wandered through the great gal- 
 leries of Europe and lingered in the salons where 
 upon the walls were pictured the battles and the 
 naval engagements which had saved the country or 
 increased its power. We have no national gallery; 
 we have no salon of battle pictures, but every Ameri- 
 can boy has painted for himself Paul Jones sweeping 
 the ocean with his little sloop in the Eevolutionary 
 
105 
 
 War, the frigate " Constitution " — Old Ironsides — 
 bearing down all before her and giving for the time 
 the sea power to the Amerean Navy, Porter serenely 
 sailing through shot and shell past the batteries of 
 Vicksburg, and Farragut, lashed to the shrouds, in 
 the bay at Mobile, winning new laurels for Ameri- 
 can seamen. And our blood moves at the narration 
 of the incident as hotly as did that of our fathers in 
 the midst of the strife when we read of Commodore 
 Perry abandoning to the enemy his helpless ship, 
 going in his little boat to another, and with her re- 
 conquering his flagship and causing the surrender of 
 all the vessels in the enemy's fleet. 
 
 The tragedy of the Maine has its value. Sad as 
 are such occurrences, they reveal that idealism has 
 not been killed by the materialism of our times. We 
 all of us know men who are chips and sawdust. 
 Their lives are exhausted in ceaseless efforts to get 
 more of that of which they already have more than 
 they need. They serve their purpose on the material 
 side of the country's growth, but they are not the 
 nation. The same spirit which fired the farmer's 
 shot at Lexington that echoed around the world, 
 which stood behind the breastworks of Bunker Hill, 
 which pledged and periled fortune and life in the 
 Declaration of Independence, which left office and 
 pulpit, and farm and factory, and store and count- 
 ing-room to save the Union, animates to-day the 
 American people. Let the national honor, or the 
 national flag, or the territory of the nation be as- 
 sailed and the hot pursuit of money, vv^hich is our 
 characteristic, is abandoned, and we are all soldiers 
 and sailors. We are apt to believe when peace has 
 
106 
 
 prevailed long enough for generations to grow to 
 maturity who know not war and sacrifices for coun- 
 try that the active principle of patriotism which 
 gives all for country is paralyzed or dead. Paul 
 Revere and his midnight ride, Nathan Hale and his 
 youthful sacrifice, the last words of the dying Law- 
 rence, " Don't give up the ship," the thousand inci- 
 dents where a brigade or a regiment or a company 
 or a soldier or a sailor has stood at the post of duty 
 and welcomed death to save the day are the history 
 of the past, but the marine, standing at his post, un- 
 disturbed after the frightful explosion, waiting to 
 report and receive orders, presenting arms and salut- 
 ing as his captain rushes up on the deck of the Maine, 
 is Paul Revere and Nathan Hale and Lawrence and 
 all the rest of them alive to-day, as they were alive in 
 their day, equal to the emergency in their hour. 
 
 There is nothing so magnificent and awe-inspiring 
 as the conservatism of power. It belongs to our 
 times; it existed in no other age. Power has been 
 the symbol at all periods in the world's history of 
 carnage, robbery, lust, murder, and ruthless spolia- 
 tion. It has oppressed the weak, it has robbed the 
 defenseless, it has enslaved the conquered. We have 
 learned to control the power of nature for the benefit 
 of man; we have taken the destructive forces of the 
 earth, the water, and the air, and harnessed them to 
 machinery to stimulate production, create wealth, 
 promote prosperity, and extend happiness. The 
 United States is the strongest country in the world. 
 Its isolation, its defence of three thousand miles of 
 ocean, its ten millions of available soldiers, its vigor- 
 ous youth, its martial spirit, and its exhaustless 
 
107 
 
 wealth and resources, make the Republic the ideal 
 expression of power. It is a power that has been 
 created by peace and civilization. It is a power con- 
 trolled by intelligence, patriotism, and Christianity. 
 It is a power whose prestige and influence are used 
 not to oppress, attack or absorb its weaker neigh- 
 bors, but to protect them against encroachments 
 upon their territory or sovereignty by the govern- 
 ments of Europe. 
 
 The majesty of civilized power was never better il- 
 lustrated than in the attitude of the United States 
 in the present crisis. This nation may be easily 
 moved to passionate excitement; it may rise to great 
 heights of intensity and enthusiasm, but the greater 
 the peril the nobler its calm. Captain Sigsbee, barely 
 extracting himself from the perils of the explosion 
 and the ruins of his ship, had every incentive for 
 harsh language and passionate accusation, but, like 
 the true American sailor that he is, calmest when the 
 danger is greatest, he penned the message to his 
 countrymen, " Suspend your judgment until you 
 know the facts." President McKinley, feeling be- 
 hind him an uprising which threatened to sweep the 
 country into war, right or wrong, said to the people: 
 " Suspend your judgment until you know the facts." 
 And Congress and the people follow with the same 
 calmness the investigation and await the verdict of 
 the Court of Inquiry. 
 
 Our sympathies are with the Cubans who are 
 struggling for liberty, as our sympathies are with 
 every people seeking to govern themselves. But 
 with sympathy and sorrow and anger the dominant 
 emotions of the hour, the confidence of the nation is 
 
108 
 
 firm in its President, and its judgment is unmoved 
 by prejudice or passion. 
 
 One of the most dramatic situations in our history 
 was Garfield meeting the maddened mob bent upon 
 the murder and the spoliation of every sympathizer 
 with the South at the time of the assassination of 
 Lincoln, and staying their march and dispersing 
 them to their homes with the solemn admonition, 
 " God reigns and the Kepublic at Washington still 
 lives." That message of Garfield's is our lesson for 
 to-day: " God reigns and the Government at Wash- 
 ington still lives." That government will protect 
 our interests and preserve our honor; that govern- 
 ment will find out the right, and, finding out the 
 right, will perform it; that government will do what 
 is just to Spaniard, to Cuban, and to ourselves. 
 
 God grant that the result of the inquiry will be 
 the verdict which we all want, and that is that the 
 tragedy of the Maine was not a conspiracy, but an 
 accident. It would be a shock not only to us, but to 
 the civilized world, if it should prove otherwise. As 
 the days roll by and the situation becomes clearer, 
 whatever may be our feeling in regard to the strug- 
 gle in Cuba, we exonerate a brave nation from the 
 crime of assassination. 
 
 The President knows that at his call the people of 
 this country stand ready to give him their lives and 
 their fortunes. There is no limit to the men, no 
 limit to the money that are at his command if men 
 and money should be deemed necessary for the na- 
 tional defense and the national honor. Our duty as 
 plain citizens is performed for the present in sending 
 to him this message on the one hand, and, on the 
 
109 
 
 other hand, as we do here to-night, in paying sweet 
 and loving tribute to the memory of the men who 
 went down with the Maine — because they were there 
 to fight our battles if need be — and in contributing 
 as we may to make comfortable those whom they 
 loved and left behind among us. 
 
Speecli as President of tlie Empire State Society 
 of the Sons of the American Revolution, at 
 the Annual Banquet on the Anniversary 
 of the Fall of Lord North's Min- 
 istry, March 19, 1898. 
 
 Gentlemen : 
 
 Our annual meeting always commemorates a sig- 
 nificant event in American history. It revives recol- 
 lections which inspire patriotism and opens wide 
 fields both for research and speculation. To-night 
 we follow the line in recalling the anniversary of a 
 crisis in the history of Great Britain which was of 
 momentous consequence to the United States, to 
 England and mankind. 
 
 There has been much carping criticism of late upon 
 all societies whose membership requires ancestry. 
 When ever the press assails with ridicule or invec- 
 tive a principle, a man, a cause or an organization, 
 there is some good reason for it. The only objection 
 to the marksmanship of the newspapers is that it 
 does not always discriminate and shoots into the 
 crowd. There are societies and societies for the cul- 
 tivation of the past in its relations to the present. 
 When Americans claim to trace their lineage back 
 to the early kings of Europe or to be the lineal de- 
 scendants of the Barons of Runnymede, the world 
 laughs and the satirist and the caricaturist have a 
 happy time. There are said to be sixty thousand 
 
112 
 
 titles in France, of which only six thousand are 
 known to be genuine, while the others run the whole 
 range from doubt to deceit. In Russia, where every 
 member of the family and the family's family have 
 titles, there are reported to be thirty thousand 
 Prince Gallatzins. It is a source of honest pride, 
 however, to an American when his ancestors for 
 many generations in this country have done their 
 part as self-supporting citizens in their several 
 periods for their neighborhood, their colony, their 
 State and their country. It is a gratification to 
 know that none of them were hanged, or in jail or in 
 the poorhouse. It is a great gratification to know 
 that at the birth of the republic, or in the period of 
 its peril, they contributed to the creation of this gov- 
 ernment of the United States and the independence 
 of America. We have none but the kindliest feeling 
 toward those of our fellow-citizens who arrived in 
 this country too late to participate in these great 
 events. Their ancestors were in Europe at the same 
 time that our ancestors had the foresight and cour- 
 age to cross the ocean in insecure and insignificant 
 craft, and the foresight and wisdom to create the 
 conditions which their descendants have enjoyed for 
 centuries. The later comer who finds in the second 
 greatest city in the world the handicap to employ- 
 ment and opportunity which comes from the com- 
 petition of crowding populations, should not blame 
 us because we discovered the possibilities and the 
 future of New York when the whole island of Man- 
 hattan could be bought for twenty-four dollars. 
 
 The Sons of the American Revolution have alone 
 done much to rescue from oblivion, by tablet and 
 
lis 
 
 monument, places which will increase in interest as 
 the centuries roll by. 
 
 In 1732 two boys were born who were destined to 
 influence beyond any other men of their period and 
 almost of any period, the history of the world and 
 the happiness of the human race. One had all the 
 advantages that birth, rank, education and position 
 could give him in Great Britain, and the other had 
 the same opportunities in the New World. One, by 
 education, habits of mind and association, embodied 
 the spirit of the past; the other the awakened spirit 
 of the age. The one was Lord North, the other 
 George Washington. Lord North was a believer in 
 the autocratic authority of the middle ages. He be- 
 lieved in the divine right of kings and in the concen- 
 tration of all power in the throne. He never under- 
 stood the people nor could he comprehend that they 
 had any rights in the administration of government. 
 He was a Tory of the Tories and a Bourbon of the 
 Bourbons. His great ability and high character only 
 gave him a larger place and opportunity for the en- 
 forcement of his ideas and the misleading of his 
 king. Washington breathed the air of freedom in 
 the fields and the forests of the New World. On the 
 farm, at the hustings, in the Legislature, in politics 
 and in war, he mingled with the people. He early 
 learned their intelligence and capacity for self-gov- 
 ernment. The lesson of civil and religious liberty 
 was taught him by example and precept until, far 
 beyond his years or his contemporaries, he knew the 
 meaning of liberty and law. In the ordering of the 
 great events of the period, Lord North, the most 
 hidebound of conservatives, became the most dan- 
 8 
 
114 
 
 geroiis of revolutionists, while Washington, the 
 leader of the Revolution, became the embodiment of 
 conservatism. Lord North, by enforcing the edicts 
 of arbitrary power, created a revolt which lost to 
 the British crown the greater part of its colonial 
 possessions, inaugurated the era of political expan- 
 sion and created the democracy which drove him 
 from power and ultimately elevated to the control of 
 the destinies of his country the masses of his coun- 
 trymen whom he so distrusted and despised. Wash- 
 ington guided a revolt against authority, govern- 
 ment and law so wisely, so conservatively and with 
 such fairness that upon the ruins of the government 
 which he destroyed and of the laws which he defied 
 he built a republic with the rights of life, of liberty, 
 of happiness and of property so embedded in its 
 constitution that the institutions of the United 
 States alone of all the nations of Christendom have 
 survived the shock of the social and political evolu- 
 tions of the nineteenth century. 
 
 After one hundred years. Lord North is remem- 
 bered only because his ashes fertilize free institu- 
 tions. After one hundred years Washington is re- 
 vered as the founder of the most beneficent govern- 
 ment the world has ever known, and as the foremost 
 man in all the elements of patriotism, heroism and 
 statecraft of his own time and of every age. i Lord 
 North, deserted by his king, his party and his friends, 
 passed his declining years lamenting, not his blind- 
 ness from the loss of sight, but his blindness in not 
 seeing the tendencies of the time and the rising 
 spirit of English and American liberty. Washing- 
 ton passed his declining years possessing the love 
 
115 
 
 and the gratitude of his country and the admiration 
 of the world. 
 
 There was another young man, contemporary with 
 Washington and Lord North, who had so thoroughly 
 imbibed the teachings and the spirit of Chatham and 
 Burke and Fox that he remained out of power dur- 
 ing the whole of the Revolutionary War because he 
 believed the Americans were right. His first act on 
 coming into the cabinet on the fall of the ministry 
 of Lord North was to recognize the independence of 
 the United States and make the Jay treaty of alli- 
 ance between the two countries — that great treaty 
 of peace and arbitration between these two English- 
 speaking peoples, the spirit of which grows stronger 
 and more beneficent year by year, and never was so 
 strong as it is to-day. This statesman was the Earl 
 of Shelburne. He had the greatest affection and 
 friendship for Benjamin Franklin, the closest rela- 
 tions with John Jay and a reverential admiration for 
 George Washington. At his request Washington sat 
 for a full-length portrait of himself. Five years ago 
 that portrait appeared for sale one morning in the 
 gallery of Agnew, the Bond street picture dealer. 
 Before night it was the property of another British 
 statesman, v/ho has enjoyed a great career, and is 
 destined to a greater one, who knows the United 
 States better than any other Englishman living, and 
 whose friendship for America and Americans is ever 
 most cordial and sympathetic. That statesman is 
 the Liberal leader, Lord Roseberry. This portrait of 
 Washington, the best one of him I have ever seen, 
 occupying the place of honor in the home of Rose- 
 berry, is really a pictorial monument of the fall of 
 
116 
 
 the North ministry, of the recognition of American 
 independence, of the birth and marvelous growth 
 from the American Revolution of liberal ideas in 
 Great Britain and in Europe. It has also its lesson 
 for to-day. One power alone in Europe sympathized 
 with Lord North and George III in their attack upon 
 the rights of the American people, one power alone 
 in Europe held off till the last — until long after 
 Great Britain herself had acted — in the recognition 
 of the independence of the United States. That 
 power was Spain. She had at that time the most 
 magnificent of colonial empires, she possessed nearly 
 one-half, and the most productive half, of the conti- 
 nent of North America, the whole of the Isthmus of 
 Darien, the whole of South America, and nearly all 
 the islands of the adjoining seas. She feared that 
 the example of the American Revolution would 
 spread to her own colonies. Had she learned the les- 
 son of the American Revolution she might still have 
 been an imperial power. That lesson in colonial em- 
 pire was home rule and self-government for the peo- 
 ple of the colonies and the working out of their own 
 destinies according to the conditions of the country 
 in which they lived and had their surroundings. 
 This lesson cost Great Britain the fairest of her pos- 
 sessions, but by adopting the policy which it taught 
 her colonies now encircle the globe. It was one of 
 the sights of the century to see in the jubilee proces- 
 sion last summer the representatives of every conti- 
 nent and climate of the earth, of every race and reli- 
 gion, loyally following the Queen as subject to her 
 authority in an imperial sense, and sovereign them- 
 selves in their own home governments. Spain has 
 
 L 
 
 RBons 
 
117 
 
 persistently clung to the ideas of Lord North, and 
 worse than that, to the Eoman pro-consular system, 
 which recognized prosperous colonies only as oppor- 
 tunities for the rapacity of imperial rulers. The 
 spirit of the age has broken her power, has wrested 
 from her her marvelous possessions and has reduced 
 the empire of a quarter of the globe to a few fertile 
 islands in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Too late she 
 recognizes, when all is lost in Cuba, the folly of her 
 past and of her present. With the independence of 
 Cuba will disappear from the face of the earth the 
 last remnant of that kind of power which was repre- 
 sented by Lord North and which fell with his 
 ministry. 
 
^H'i 
 
f 
 
 i 
 

 
 inH!|!l!li|i!!|iiiiiH|!!|if!i|i!fpi||}f|f^^^^ 
 
 »