Modern Eloquence Volume Iii Part 33

Practically, as little is known of the great West by you of the East as was known a century ago of New England by our British cousins. Your interest in us is, unfortunately, largely the interest on our mortgages, your att.i.tude toward us is somewhat critical, and the New England heart is rarely aroused respecting the West except when some n.o.ble Indian, after painting himself and everything else within his reach red, is sent to his happy hunting grounds. [Laughter.] Yet, toward the savage, as in all things, do not blame us if we follow the Christian example set us by our forefathers. We read that the Court at Plymouth, more than fifty years after the colony was founded, ordered "That whosoever shall shoot off any gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game whatsoever, except an Indian or a wolf, shall forfeit five shillings for every such shot"; and our pious ancestors popped over many an Indian on their way to Divine worship. [Laughter.] But when in Colorado, settled less than a generation ago, the old New England heredity works itself out and an occasional Indian is peppered, the East raises its hands in horror, and our offending cowboys could not find admittance even to an Andover Probation Society. [Laughter.]

Where we have a chance to work without precedent, we can point with pride of a certain sort to methods at least peaceful. When Mexico was conquered, we found ourselves with many thousand Mexicans on hand. I don't know how they managed it elsewhere, but in Colorado we not only took them by the hand and taught them our ways, but both political parties inaugurated a beautiful and generous custom, since more honored in the breach than in the observance, which gave these vanquished people an insight into and an interest in the workings of republican inst.i.tutions which was marvellous: a custom of presenting to each head of a household, being a voter, on election day, from one to five dollars in our native silver. [Great laughter.]

If Virginia was the mother of Presidents, New England is the mother of States. Of the population of the Western States born in the United States, some five per cent, are of New England birth, and of the native population more than half can trace a New England ancestry. Often one generation sought a resting-place in Ohio, and its successor in Illinois or in Iowa, but you will find that the ancestor, less than a century ago, was a G.o.d-fearing Yankee. New England influences everywhere predominate. I do not mean to say that many men from the South have not, especially since the war, found homes and citizenship in the West, for they have; and most of them are now holding Federal offices. [Laughter.]

It is nevertheless true that from New England has come the great, the overwhelming influence in moulding and controlling Western thought.

[Applause.]

New England thrift, though a hardy plant, becomes considerably modified when transplanted to the loam of the prairies; the penny becomes the dime before it reaches the other ocean; Ruth would find rich gleanings among our Western sheaves, and the palm of forehandedness opens sometimes too freely under the wasteful example which Nature sets all over our broad plains; but because the New England ancestor was acquisitive, his Western descendant secures first of all his own home.

[Applause.] The austere and serious views of life which our forefathers cherished have given way to a kindlier charity, and we put more hope and more interrogation points into our theology than our fathers did; but the old Puritan teachings, softened by the years and by brighter and freer skies, still keep our homes Christian and our home life pure. And more, far more than all else, the blood which flows in our veins, the blood of the st.u.r.dy New Englanders who fought and conquered for an idea, quickened and kindled by the Civil War, has imbued and impregnated Western men with a patriotism that overrides and transcends all other emotions. Pioneers in a new land, laying deep the foundations of the young commonwealths, they turn the furrows in a virgin soil, and from the seed which they plant there grows, renewed and strengthened with each succeeding year, an undying devotion to republican inst.i.tutions, which shall nourish their children and their children's children forever. [Prolonged applause.]

An earnest people and a generous! The Civil strife made nothing right that was wrong before, and nothing wrong that was right before; it simply settled the question of where the greater strength lay. We know that

"Who overcomes By force, hath overcome but half his foe,"

and that if more remains to be done, it must come because the hearts of men are changed. The war is over; the very subject is hackneyed; it is a tale that is told, and commerce and enlightened self-interest have obliterated all lines. And yet you must forgive us if, before the account is finally closed, and the dead and the woe and the tears are balanced by all the blessings of a reunited country, some of us still listen for a voice we have not yet heard; if we wait for some Southern leader to tell us that renewed partic.i.p.ation in the management of the affairs of this nation carries with it the admission that the question of the right of secession is settled, not because the South was vanquished, but because the doctrine was and is wrong, forever wrong.

[Great applause.]

We are a plain people, too, and live far away. We find all the excitement we need in the two great political parties, and rather look upon the talk of anybody in either party being better than his party, as a sort of cant. The hypercritical faculty has not reached us yet, and we leave to you of the East the exclusive occupancy of the raised dais upon which it seems necessary for the independent voter to stand while he is counted. [Applause and laughter.]

We are provincial; we have no distinctive literature and no great poets; our leading personage abroad of late seems to be the Honorable "Buffalo Bill" [laughter], and we use our adjectives so recklessly that the polite badinage indulged in toward each other by your New York editors to us seems tame and spiritless. In mental achievement we may not have fully acquired the use of the fork, and are "but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood." We stand toward the East somewhat as country to city cousins; about as New to Old England, only we don't feel half so badly about it, and on the whole are rather pleased with ourselves. [Laughter.] There is not in the whole broad West a ranch so lonely or so remote that a public school is not within reach of it. With generous help from the East, Western colleges are elevating and directing Western thought, and men busy making States yet find time to live manly lives and to lend a hand. All this may not be aesthetic, but it is virile, and it leads up and not down. Great poets, and those who so touch the hearts of men that the vibration goes down the ages, must often find their inspiration when wealth brings leisure to a cla.s.s, or must have "learned in suffering what they teach in song." We can wait for our inspired ones; when they come, the work of this generation, obscure and commonplace, will have paved the way for them; the general intelligence diffused in this half century will, unknown or forgotten, yet live in their numbers, and the vivid imaginations of our New England ancestors, wasted in depicting the joys and torments of the world to come, will, modified by the years, beautify and enn.o.ble the cares of this. [Applause.]

There are some things even more important than the highest culture. The West is the Almighty's reserve ground, and as the world is filling up.

He is turning even the old arid plains and deserts into fertile acres, and is sending there the rain as well as the sunshine. A high and glorious destiny awaits us; soon the balance of population will lie the other side of the Mississippi, and the millions that are coming must find waiting for them schools and churches, good government, and a happy people:

"Who love the land because it is their own, And scorn to give aught other reason why; Would shake hands with a King upon his throne, And think it kindness to his Majesty."

We are beginning to realize, however, that the invitation we have been extending to all the world has been rather too general. So far we have been able to make American citizens in fact as well as name out of the foreign-born immigrants. The task was light while we had the honest and industrious to deal with, but the character of some of the present immigration has brought a conviction which we hope you share, that the sacred rights of citizenship should be withheld from a certain cla.s.s of aliens in race and language, who seek the protection of this Government, until they shall have at least learned that the red in our flag is commingled with the white and blue and the stars. [Great applause.]

In everything which pertains to progress in the West, the Yankee reinforcements step rapidly to the front. Every year she needs more of them, and as the country grows the annual demand becomes greater.

Genuine New Englanders are to be had on tap only in six small States, and remembering this we feel that we have the right to demand that in the future even more than in the past, the heads of the New England households weary not in the good work. [Laughter and applause.]

In these later days of "booms" and New Souths and Great Wests; when everybody up North who fired a gun is made to feel that he ought to apologize for it, and good fellowship everywhere abounds, there is a sort of tendency to fuse; only big and conspicuous things are much considered; and New England being small in area and most of her distinguished people being dead, she is just now somewhat under an eclipse. But in her past she has undying fame. You of New England and her borders live always in the atmosphere of her glories; the scenes which tell of her achievements are ever near at hand, and familiarity and contact may rob them of their charms, and dim to your eyes their sacredness. The sons of New England in the West revisit her as men who make pilgrimage to some holy shrine, and her hills and valleys are still instinct with n.o.ble traditions. In her glories and her history we claim a common heritage, and we never wander so far away from her that with each recurring anniversary of this day, our hearts do not turn to her with renewed love and devotion for our beloved New England; yet--

"Not by Eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But Westward, look, the land is bright!"

[Hearty applause.]

LORD WOLSELEY

(GARNET JOSEPH WOLSELEY)

THE ARMY IN THE TRANSVAAL

[Speech of Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, at a dinner given by the Authors' Club, London, November 6, 1899. Dr. Conan Doyle presided.]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--I think that all people who know anything about the Army should rejoice extremely that our first experiment in mobilization has been as successful as it has been.

[Cheers.]

Your Chairman has mentioned the name of one, a most intimate friend of mine, the present Military Secretary. [Lord Lansdowne.] I think the nation is very much indebted to him not only for the manner in which this mobilization has been carried out, but still more so for having laid the foundation on which our mobilization system is based, and for making those preparations which led to its complete success. [Cheers.]

There are many other names I might mention, others who have also devoted themselves for many years past in a very quiet manner, and with all the ability which now, I am glad to say, so largely permeates the Army, to making these preparations and to try to bring this curious army of ours up to the level of the modern armies of the world. [Cheers.]

Although I say it myself, I think I may claim for myself and for those who have worked with me a certain meed of praise, for we have worked under extreme difficulties. Not only under the ordinary difficulties in dealing with a very complicated arrangement, but we have had to work in the face of the most dire opposition on the part of a great number of people who ought to have been the first to help us. ["Hear! Hear!"] The Chairman has referred to the opposition of the Press; but that has been nothing to the opposition we have met with in our own profession--the profession of ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago, when great reforms were begun in the Army by the ablest War Secretary who has ever been in office--I mean Lord Cardwell. His name is now almost forgotten by the present generation, and also the names of many other distinguished officers in their day, whose names were a.s.sociated with many of the brightest moments of English victory and English conquest, and who set their faces honestly against alteration, and firmly believed that the young men of those days were a set of madmen and a set of Radicals who were anxious to overturn not only the British Army, but the whole British Const.i.tution with it. [Laughter.] This prejudice spread into high places, until at last we were looked upon as a party of faddists who ought to be banished to the farthest part of our dominions. [Renewed laughter.] But I am glad to say that the tree we planted then took root, and there gradually grew up around us a body of young officers, men highly instructed in their profession, who supported us, carried us through, and enabled us to arrive at the perfection which, I think, we have now attained. ["Hear! Hear!"]

There has been abroad in the Army for a great many years an earnest desire on the part of a large section, certainly, to make themselves worthy of the Army and worthy of the nation by whom they were paid, and for whose good they existed. That feeling has become more intensified every year, and at the present moment, if you examine the Army List, you will find that almost all the Staff Officers recently gone out to South Africa have been educated at the Staff College, established to teach the higher science of our profession and to educate a body of men who will be able to conduct the military affairs of the country when it comes to their turn to do so. Those men are now arriving at the top of the tree, thank G.o.d! while many of those magnificent old soldiers under whom I was brought up have disappeared from the face of the earth, and others who are to be seen at the clubs have come round--they have been converted in their last moments [laughter]; they have the frankness to tell you they made a mistake. They recognize that they were wrong and that we were right. [Cheers.]

I quite endorse what the Chairman says about the success of the mobilization, and I will slightly glance at the state of affairs as they at present exist in South Africa. I have the advantage of having spent some time in South Africa, and of having been--not only General Commanding, but Governor and High Commissioner, with high-sounding t.i.tles given me by her Majesty. I know, consequently, not only a little of South Africa, but a good deal of Boer character. During my stay as Governor of the Transvaal, I had many opportunities of knowing people whom you have recently seen mentioned as the princ.i.p.al leaders in this war against us. There are many traits in their character for which I have the greatest possible admiration. They are a very strongly conservative people--I do not mean in a political sense at all, but they were, I found, anxious to preserve and conserve all that was best in the inst.i.tutions handed down to them from their forefathers. But of all the ignorant people in that world that I have ever been brought into contact with, I will back the Boers of South Africa as the most ignorant. At the same time they are an honest people. When the last President of the Transvaal handed over the government to us--and I may say, within parentheses, that the last thing an Englishman would do under the circ.u.mstances would be to look in the till--there was only 4_s._ 6_d._ to the credit of the Republic. [Laughter.] Within a few weeks or days of the hoisting of the British flag in the Transvaal a bill for 4 10_s._ 4_d._ came in against the Boer Government, and was dishonored. [Renewed laughter.] The Boers at that time--perhaps we did not manage them properly--certainly set their face against us, and things have gone on from bad to worse, until the aspiration now moving them is that they should rule not only the Transvaal, but that they should rule the whole of South Africa. That is the point which I think English people must keep before them. There's no question about ruling the Transvaal or the Orange Free State--the one great question that has to be fought out between the Dutch in South Africa and the English race is, which is to be the predominant Power--whether it is to be the Boer Republic or the English Monarchy. [Cheers.] Well, if I at all understand and know the people of this nation, I can see but one end to it, and it will be the end that we hope for and have looked for. [Cheers.]

But I would warn every man who takes an interest in this subject not to imagine that war can be carried on like a game of chess or some other game in which the most powerful intellect wins from the first. War is a game of ups and downs, and you may rest a.s.sured that it is impossible to read in history of any campaign that it has been a march of triumph from beginning to end. Therefore, if at the present moment we are suffering from disappointments, believe me, those disappointments are in many ways useful to us. We have found that the enemy who declared war against us--for they are the aggressors--are much more powerful and numerous than we antic.i.p.ated. But at the same time, believe me, that anything that may have taken place lately to dishearten the English people has had a good effect--it has brought us as a nation closer together. The English-speaking people of the world have put their foot down, and intend to carry this thing through, no matter what may be the consequence. [Cheers.]

I have the greatest possible confidence in British soldiers. I have lived in their midst many years of my life, and I am quite certain of this, that wherever their officers lead they will follow. If you look over the list of our casualties lately, you will find that the British officer has led them well. Certainly he has not spared himself; he has not been in the background. [Cheers.] He has suffered unfortunately, and expects to suffer, and ought to suffer; and I hope most sincerely and truly, whatever may be in store for us, whatever battles there may be in this war, that when we read the list of casualties there will be a very large proportion of officers sufferers as well as men. It would be most unworthy of our Army and of our nation if our officers did not lead, and if they lead they must suffer as well as those who follow. I am extremely obliged to you for the compliment that has been paid to me. It has been a very great pleasure for me to come here. I had no idea I was to listen to such an admirable speech from your Chairman. I thank you sincerely for having listened to me, and hope you will make every allowance for any defect in a speech which certainly had not been prepared. [Loud cheers.]

WU TING-FANG

CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES

[Speech of Wu Ting-Fang, Chinese Minister to the United States, at the annual dinner of the New York Southern Society, New York City, February 22, 1899. William M. Polk, the President of the Society, occupied the chair. Minister Wu responded to the sentiment, "To our newest and nearest neighbor on our Western border, the most ancient of Empires, which until now has always been in the Far East, and to her distinguished diplomatic representative--_persona grata_ to our Government and to this Society."]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--It is never too late to learn, and since I have been here I have learned that my ancient country, which has always been known as an Eastern country, has now turned to be a Western country. I do not regret to hear this, because Western countries have always been looked on as very powerful nations. [Applause.] In that sense I would not be sorry to see my own country a.s.sume the position that your Western countries have always taken. I do not know whether you would wish to have your great Nation become an Eastern country in the sense in which Eastern countries are popularly known.

When the invitation to dine with you on this occasion was conveyed to me I gladly accepted it because the occasion occurred on the anniversary of the birth of George Washington, who is widely and popularly known as the Father of your country. Long before I came to the United States as the representative of my country, even when I was a boy, I had heard of George Washington, and from what I could learn about him I formed a profound respect for his name and memory. At this banquet you appropriately recall to mind the n.o.ble character of your Washington, his great deeds, and his unselfish devotion to his country.

It is interesting to know that time changes not only the opinions of individuals and parties, but also the traditional policy of a nation. I understood when I was a boy that the policy of George Washington was to confine his attention and his ambition to the country in which he governed. That policy has been followed by all of his successors up to very recently. [Laughter and applause.] But the recent momentous events have necessitated a new departure. You have been driven to a position that you never dreamed of before. You have entered the path of Expansion, or, as some call it, Imperialism.

If I understand your chairman correctly, Imperialism practically means the power and wisdom to govern. This is not the first time that I have heard such a definition of imperialism. I once heard an eminent American divine say that imperialism meant civilization--in an American sense.

[Laughter.] He also added the word liberty, and with your permission I would like to make a still further addition: that is, fairness, and just treatment of all cla.s.ses of persons without distinction of race or color. [Cheers.] Well, you have the Philippines ceded to you, and you are hesitating whether to keep them or not. I see in that very fact of your hesitation an indication of your n.o.ble character. Suppose a precious gift entailing obligations is tendered to a man; he would accept it without any thought or hesitation if he were wholly lacking in principle; but you hesitate because of your high moral character, and your sense of responsibility. I express no opinion as to whether or not you should keep the Philippines. That is for you to decide. I am confident that when this question has been thoroughly threshed out, you will come to the right decision. I will say this: China must have a neighbor; and it is my humble opinion that it is better to have a good neighbor than an indifferent one.

Should your country decide to keep the Philippines, what would be the consequences? A large trade has been carried on for centuries between those islands and China. Your trade would be greatly increased and to your benefit. Aside from this the American trade in China has been increasing largely in the last few years. I have often been asked whether we Chinamen are friendly to America. To show you how friendly we are, I will tell you that we call your nation a "flowery flag" and that we call your people "handsome." Such phrases clearly show that we are favorably disposed toward you. If we did not like you, we would not have given you such nice names. The officials of China, as well as the people, like Americans, and our relations, officially and commercially, are cordial.

There is, however, one disturbing element--one unsatisfactory feature--I refer to your Chinese Immigration law. Your people do not know and do not understand my people. You have judged all of my people from the Chinese in California. Your Chinese exclusion law has now been in operation for fifteen or sixteen years, but it cannot be said to have been satisfactory even to yourselves. Those laws were intended to keep the Chinese cheap labor out of your country, but they have also kept out the better cla.s.s of my countrymen whom I am satisfied the laws did not intend to exclude. I desire to throw no blame on any of your officials for their zeal in enforcing the laws. They simply do their duty. But I want to point out to you that those laws do not bring about the results intended by your legislators. Besides, their existence gives the impression in our country that your people do not like our people. I personally know that is not so, but I would like to see this disturbing element removed by a modification of the laws. Once remove that disturbing element and our people would welcome your Americans to China with open arms.

As to the character of our people I can refer you only to those who have been in China. I will refer you to the opinion of a man who for a great many years was in China at the head of the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank.

After twenty-five years' service, he resigned, and on the eve of his departure he was given a banquet by foreigners, not by Chinese, mind; and in the course of his speech he went out of his way to speak of his relations with Chinese merchants. As I remember, the substance of his speech was that during all those years in China, he had had dealings with Chinese merchants aggregating hundreds of millions of dollars, and he said that, large as were those dealings, he had never lost a cent through any Chinese merchant. That testimony was given unsolicited by a man long resident in China, and shows indisputably the character of our merchants.

Now that you have become our neighbor, and if you want to deal with China, here is the cla.s.s of people you have to deal with; and if you see your way clear to modify the only obstacle that now stands in the way of respectable Chinese coming here, and doing away with the false impression in the minds of our people, I have no doubt that such a step would redound to the benefit of both parties. If you look at the returns furnished by your consuls or by our customs returns, you will find that your trade in China has increased to a remarkable degree. China is constructing a railway from north to south, and she is practically an open door for your trade purposes. There is a great field for you there; and with all our people favorably disposed toward you, I am sure you will receive further benefits through the means of still further increased trade. [Loud applause.]

WALTER WYMAN