Model Speeches For Practise Part 4

This might better account for those Caudle lectures which woman is in the habit of delivering, and some color is given to this theory, from the fact that husbands even down to the present day seem to inherit a general disposition to leave their wives behind.

The first woman, finding no other man in that garden except her own husband, took to flirting even with the Devil. The race might have been saved much tribulation if Eden had been located in some calm and tranquil land--like Ireland. There would at least have been no snakes there to get into the garden. Now woman in her thirst after knowledge, showed her true female inquisitiveness in her cross-examination of the serpent, and, in commemoration of that circ.u.mstance the serpent seems to have been curled up and used in nearly all languages as a sign of interrogation. Soon the domestic troubles of our first parents began.

The first woman's favorite son was killed with a club, and married women even to this day seem to have an instinctive horror of clubs. The first woman learned that it was Cain that raised a club. The modern woman has learned that it is a club that raises cain. Yet, I think, I recognize faces here to-night that I see behind the windows of Fifth Avenue clubs of an afternoon, with their noses pressed flat against the broad plate gla.s.s, and as woman trips along the sidewalk, I have observed that these gentlemen appear to be more a.s.siduously engaged than ever was a government scientific commission, in taking observations upon the transit of Venus.

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

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

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

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

Every nation has had its heroines as well as its heroes. England, in her wars, had a Florence Nightingale; and the soldiers in the expression of their adoration, used to stoop and kiss the hem of her garment as she pa.s.sed. America, in her war, had a Dr. Mary Walker. n.o.body ever stooped to kiss the hem of her garment--because that was not exactly the kind of a garment she wore. But why should man stand here and attempt to speak for woman, when she is so abundantly equipped to speak for herself. I know that is the case in New England; and I am reminded, by seeing General Grant here to-night, of an incident in proof of it which occurred when he was making that marvelous tour through New England, just after the war. The train stopt at a station in the State of Maine.

The General was standing on the rear platform of the last car. At that time, as you know, he had a great reputation for silence--for it was before he had made his series of brilliant speeches before the New England Society. They spoke of his reticence--a quality which New Englanders admire so much--in others. Suddenly there was a commotion in the crowd, and as it opened a large, tall, gaunt-looking woman came rushing toward the car, out of breath. Taking her spectacles off from the top of her head and putting them on her nose, she put her arms akimbo, and looking up, said: "Well, I've just come down here a runnin'

nigh onto two mile, right on the clean jump, just to get a look at the man that lets the women do all the talkin'."

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

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

But even the least serious of us, Mr. President, have some serious moments in which to contemplate the true n.o.bility of woman's character.

If she were created from a rib, she was made from that part which lies nearest a man's heart.

It has been beautifully said that man was fashioned out of the dust of the earth while woman was created from G.o.d's own image. It is our pride in this land that woman's honor is her own best defense; that here female virtue is not measured by the vigilance of detective nurses; that here woman may walk throughout the length and the breadth of this land, through its highways and byways, uninsulted, unmolested, clothed in the invulnerable panoply of her own woman's virtue; that even in places where crime lurks and vice prevails in the haunts of our great cities, and in the rude mining gulches of the West, owing to the n.o.ble efforts of our women, and the influence of their example, there are raised, even there, girls who are good daughters, loyal wives, and faithful mothers.

They seem to rise in those rude surroundings as grows the pond lily, which is entangled by every species of rank growth, environed by poison, miasma and corruption, and yet which rises in the beauty of its purity and lifts its fair face unblushing to the sun.

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

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

TRIBUTE TO HERBERT SPENCER

BY WILLIAM M. EVARTS

Gentlemen:--We are here to-night, to show the feeling of Americans toward our distinguished guest. As no room and no city can hold all his friends and admirers, it was necessary that a company should be made up by some method out of the ma.s.s, and what so good a method as that of natural selection and the inclusion, within these walls, of the ladies?

It is a little hard upon the rational instincts and experiences of man that we should take up the abstruse subjects of philosophy and of evolution, of all the great topics that make up Mr. Spencer's contribution to the learning and the wisdom of his time, at this end of the dinner.

The most ancient nations, even in their primitive condition, saw the folly of this, and when one wished either to be inspired with the thoughts of others or to be himself a diviner of the thoughts of others, fasting was necessary, and a people from whom I think a great many things might be learned for the good of the people of the present time, have a maxim that will commend itself to your common-sense. They say the continually stuffed body can not see secret things. Now, from my personal knowledge of the men I see at these tables, they are owners of continually stuffed bodies. I have addrest them at public dinners, on all topics and for all purposes, and whatever sympathy they may have shown with the divers occasions which brought them together, they come up to this notion of continually stuffed bodies. In primitive times they had a custom which we only under the system of differentiation practise now at this dinner. When men wished to possess themselves of the learning, the wisdom, the philosophy, the courage, the great traits of any person, they immediately proceeded to eat him up as soon as he was dead, having only this diversity in that early time that he should be either roasted or boiled according as he was fat or thin. Now out of that narrow compa.s.s, see how by the process of differentiation and of multiplication of effects we have come to a dinner of a dozen courses and wines of as many varieties; and that simple process of appropriating the virtue and the wisdom of the great man that was brought before the feast is now diversified into an a.n.a.lysis of all the men here under the cunning management of many speakers. No doubt, preserving as we do the ident.i.ty of all these inst.i.tutions it is often considered a great art, or at least a great delight, to roast our friends and put in hot water those against whom we have a grudge.

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

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

THE EMPIRE STATE[3]

MR. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW

Mr. President and Gentlemen:--It has been my lot from a time whence I can not remember to respond each year to this toast. When I received the invitation from the committee, its originality and ingenuity astonished and overwhelmed me. But there is one thing the committee took into consideration when they invited me to this platform. This is a Presidential year, and it becomes men not to trust themselves talking on dangerous topics. The State of New York is eminently safe. Ever since the present able and distinguished Governor has held his place I have been called upon by the New England Society to respond for him. It is probably due to that element in the New Englander that he delights in provoking controversy. The Governor is a Democrat, and I am a Republican. Whatever he believes in I detest; whatever he admires I hate. The manner in which this toast is received leads me to believe that in the New England Society his administration is unanimously approved. Governor Robinson, if I understand correctly his views, would rather that any other man should have been elected as Chief Magistrate than Mr. John Kelly. Mr. Kelly, if I interpret aright his public utterances, would prefer any other man for the Governor of New York than Lucius Robinson, and therefore, in one of the most heated controversies we have ever had, we elected a Governor by unanimous consent or a.s.sent in Alonzo B. Cornell. Horace Greeley once said to me, as we were returning from a State convention where he had been a candidate, but the delegates had failed to nominate the fittest man for the place: "I don't see why any man wants to be Governor of the State of New York, for there is no one living who can name the last ten Governors on a moment's notice." But tho there have been Governors and Governors, there is, when the gubernatorial office is mentioned, one figure that strides down the centuries before all the rest; that is the old Dutch Governor of New York, with his wooden leg--Peter Stuyvesant. There have been heroines, too, who have aroused the poetry and eloquence of all times, but none who have about them the substantial aroma of the Dutch heroine, Anneke Jans.

It is within the memory of men now living when the whole of American literature was dismissed with the sneer of the _Edinburgh Review_, "Who reads an American book?" But out of the American wilderness a broad avenue to the highway which has been trod by the genius of all times in its march to fame was opened by Washington Irving, and in his footsteps have followed the men who are read of all the world, and who will receive the highest tributes in all times--Longfellow, and Whittier, and Hawthorne and Prescott.

New York is not only imperial in all those material results which const.i.tute and form the greatest commonwealth in this constellation of commonwealths, but in our political system she has become the arbiter of our national destiny. As goes New York so goes the Union, and her voice indicates that the next President will be a man with New England blood in his veins or a representative of New England ideas.

And for the gentleman who will not be elected I have a Yankee story. In the Berkshire hills there was a funeral, and as they gathered in the little parlor there came the typical New England female, who mingles curiosity with her sympathy, and as she glanced around the darkened room she said to the bereaved widow, "When did you get that new eight-day clock?" "We ain't got no new eight-day clock," was the reply. "You ain't? What's that in the corner there?" "Why no, that's not an eight-day clock, that's the deceased; we stood him on end, to make room for the mourners."

Up to within fifty years ago all roads in New England led to Boston; but within the last fifty years every byway and highway in New England leads to New York. New York has become the capital of New England, and within her limits are more Yankees than in any three New England States combined. The boy who is to-day ploughing the stony hillside in New England, who is boarding around and teaching school, and who is to be the future merchant-prince or great lawyer, or wise statesman, looks not now to Boston, but to New York, as the El Dorado of his hopes. And how generously, sons of New England, have we treated you? We have put you in the best offices; we have made you our merchant-princes. Where is the city or village in our State where you do not own the best houses, run the largest manufactories, and control the princ.i.p.al industries? We have several times made one of your number Governor of the State, and we have placed you in positions where you honor us while we honor you. New York's choice in the National Cabinet is the distinguished Secretary of State, whose pure Yankee blood renders him none the less a most fit and most eminent representative of the Empire State.

But while we have done our best to satisfy the Yankee, there is one thing we have never been able to do. We can meet his ambition and fill his purse, but we never can satisfy his stomach. When the President stated to-night that Plymouth Rock celebrated this anniversary on the 21st, whilst we here did so on the 22d, he did not state the true reason. It is not as he said, a dispute about dates. The pork and beans of Plymouth are insufficient for the cravings of the Yankee appet.i.te, and they chose the 21st, in order that, by the night train, they may get to New York on the 22d, to have once a year a square meal. From 1620 down to the opening of New York to their settlement, a constantly increasing void was growing inside the Yankee diaphragm, and even now the native and imported Yankee finds the best-appointed restaurant in the world sufficient for his wants; and he has migrated to this house, that he may annually have the sensation of sufficiency in the largest hotel in the United States.

My friend, Mr. Curtis, has eloquently stated, in the beginning of his address, the Dutchman's idea of the old Puritan. He has stated, at the close of his address, the modern opinion of the old Puritan. He was an uncomfortable man to live with, but two hundred years off a grand historic figure. If any one of you, gentlemen, was compelled to leave this festive board, and go back two hundred years and live with your ancestor of that day, eat his fare, drink his drink, and listen to his talk, what a time would be there, my countrymen! Before the Puritan was fitted to accomplish the work he did, with all the great opportunities that were in him, it was necessary that he should spend two years in Leyden and learn from the Dutch the important lesson of religious toleration, and the other fundamental lesson, that a common school education lies at the foundation of all civil and religious liberty. If the Dutchman had conquered Boston, it would have been a misfortune to this land, and to the world. It would have been like Diedrich Knickerbocker wrestling with an electric battery.

But when the Yankee conquered New York, his union with the Dutch formed those sterling elements which have made the Republic what it is. Yankee ideas prevailed in this land in the grandest contest in the Senate of the United States which has ever taken place, or ever will, in the victory of Nationalism over Sectionalism by the ponderous eloquence of that great defender of the Const.i.tution, Daniel Webster. And when failing in the forum, Sectionalism took the field, Yankee ideas conquered again in that historic meeting when Lee gave up his sword to Grant. And when, in the disturbance of credit and industry which followed, the twin heresies Expansion and Repudiation stalked abroad, Yankee ideas conquered again in the policy of our distinguished guest, the Secretary of the Treasury. So great a triumph has never been won by any financial officer of the government before, as in the funding of our national debt at four per cent., and the restoration of the national credit, giving an impulse to our prosperity and industry that can neither be stayed nor stopt.

When Henry Hudson sailed up the great harbor of New York, and saw with prophetic vision its magnificent opportunities, he could only emphasize his thought, with true Dutch significance, in one sentence--"See here!"

When the Yankee came and settled in New York, he emphasized his coming with another sentence--"Sit here!"--and he sat down upon the Dutchman with such force that he squeezed him out of his cabbage-patch, and upon it he built his warehouse and his residence. He found this city laid out in a beautiful labyrinth of cow-patches, with the inhabitants and the houses all standing with their gable-ends to the street, and he turned them all to the avenue, and made New York a parallelogram of palaces; and he has multiplied to such an extent that now he fills every nook of our great State, and we recognize here to-night that, with no tariff, and free trade between New England and New York, the native specimen is an improvement upon the imported article. Gentlemen, I beg leave to say, as a native New Yorker of many generations, that by the influence, the hospitality, the liberal spirit, and the cosmopolitan influences of this great State, from the unlovable Puritan of two hundred years ago you have become the most agreeable and companionable of men.

New York to-day, the Empire State of all the great States of the Commonwealth, brings in through her grand avenue to the sea eighty per cent. of all the imports, and sends forth a majority of all the exports, of the Republic. She collects and pays four-fifths of the taxes which carry on the government of the country. In the close compet.i.tion to secure the great Western commerce which is to-day feeding the world and seeking an outlet along three thousand miles of coast, she holds by her commercial prestige and enterprise more than all the ports from New Orleans to Portland combined. Let us, whether native or adopted New Yorkers, be true to the past, to the present, to the future, of this commercial and financial metropolis. Let us enlarge our terminal facilities and bring the rail and the steamship close together. Let us do away with the burdens that make New York the dearest, and make her the cheapest, port on the continent; and let us impress our commercial ideas upon the national legislature, so that the navigation laws, which have driven the merchant marine of the Republic from the seas, shall be repealed, and the breezes of every clime shall unfurl, and the waves of every sea reflect, the flag of the Republic.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Speech of Chauncey M. Depew at the seventy-fourth anniversary banquet of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1879.

MEN OF LETTERS

BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

Sir Francis Grant, Your Royal Highness, My Lords, and Gentlemen:--While I feel most keenly the honor which you confer upon me in connecting my name with the interests of literature, I am embarra.s.sed, in responding, by the nature of my subject. What is literature, and who are men of letters? From one point of view we are the most unprofitable of mankind--engaged mostly in blowing soap-bubbles. From another point of view we are the most practical and energetic portion of the community.

If literature be the art of employing words skilfully in representing facts, or thoughts, or emotions, you may see excellent specimens of it every day in the advertis.e.m.e.nts in our newspapers. Every man who uses a pen to convey his meaning to others--the man of science, the man of business, the member of a learned profession--belongs to the community of letters. Nay, he need not use his pen at all. The speeches of great orators are among the most treasured features of any national literature. The orations of Mr. Grattan are the text-books in the schools of rhetoric in the United States. Mr. Bright, under this aspect of him, holds a foremost place among the men of letters of England.

Again, sir, every eminent man, be he what he will, be he as unbookish as he pleases, so he is only eminent enough, so he holds a conspicuous place in the eyes of his countrymen, potentially belongs to us, and if not in life, then after he is gone, will be enrolled among us. The public insist on being admitted to his history, and their curiosity will not go unsatisfied. His letters are hunted up, his journals are sifted; his sayings in conversation, the doggerel which he writes to his brothers and sisters are collected, and stereotyped in print. His fate overtakes him. He can not escape from it. We cry out, but it does not appear that men sincerely resist the liberty which is taken with them.

We never hear of them instructing their executors to burn their papers.

They have enjoyed so much the exhibition that has been made of their contemporaries that they consent to be sacrificed themselves.

Again, sir, when we look for those who have been most distinguished as men of letters, in the usual sense of the word, where do we find them?

The famous lawyer is found in his chambers, the famous artist is found in his studio. Our foremost representatives we do not find always in their libraries; we find them, in the first place, in the service of their country. ("Hear! Hear!") Owen Meredith is Viceroy of India, and all England has applauded the judgment that selected and sent him there.

The right honorable gentleman (Mr. Gladstone) who three years ago was conducting the administration of this country with such brilliant success was first generally known to his countrymen as a remarkable writer. During forty years of arduous service he never wholly deserted his original calling. He is employing an interval of temporary retirement to become the interpreter of Homer to the English race, or to break a lance with the most renowned theologians in defense of spiritual liberty.