E457 ^' V tf ^ *£• : %/ "V^^V %.*'^'\/* V*^^V v ^ C ^ ^ "i. ."' «*°«« ^ » v ^ ° '. ^ o ADDRESSES EY THE Hon. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW, LL.D., ON THE OCCASION OF THE Selekation of the Birthday of Abrahan? Lincoln AT Burlington, Vermont, Feb. 12th, 1895, 6on«ncement Exercises of the University of Ghicago, April 1st, 1895, AND AT His Birthday Dir^er, TENDERED HIM BY THE MONTAUK CLUB OR BROOKLYN, April 20tri, 1895 Gift Author (Perm s • j ! 2 COMPLIMENTS OF CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. ADDRESS OF Hon. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW, LL. D., ON THE OCCASION OF THE CELEBRATION OF THE Birthday of Abraham Lincoln, AT BURLINGTON, VERMONT, FEBRUARY 12th, 1895. Ladies and Gentlemen : The pleasure of appearing before you this after- noon is great, but marred by circumstances. I had supposed the occasion was to be the usual recrea- tion for a busy man of the after-dinner speech which pleasantly occupies the mind without tiring it. To have it transformed into an afternoon address or oration means a preparation, or the use of the Hor- atian method of the file and thumb-nail, and my conditions made that impossible. You will pardon the absence of formality and accept the earnest- ness with which I approach a subject so grand in it- self as the hero whose memory -we celebrate, and principles so enduring and vivifying as those of the party of which he is the greatest ornament. The tendency in all times has been for the people to grow so far apart from their National heroes that the hero becomes impossible. We cannot live with perfection ; we cannot have the cam- araderie of personal communion with saints. The force and effect of continuing leadership is to be in touch with the leader. We have idealized already the worthies of the revolutionary period, and especially Washington, so that they are out of the pale of humanity. To us they never possessed the foibles and weaknesses which are common to our race. I doubt if Washington ever did. I had oc- casion at the time of the Centennial to study closely his character and career. It was impossible to lower him to any plane where a horizontal view could be had of him. In the camp and in the cab- inet, in the Continental Convention and around the campfire, in the midst of his soldiers, or at the mess with his staff, he was always the same dignified, majestic and unapproachable figure. For the times in which he lived, for the mission to which he was destined, these lofty characteristics were appropri- ate. The revolution knew little of the fierce dem- ocracy. The classes and the masses were distinctly defined and separated. The pride of birth, of an- cestry and landed proprietorship was never more distinctly asserted and never more generally recognized. It is probable that for the purpose of bringing the wealth and the intelligence of the country to the support of the patriot cause it was necessary that one of this class who was infi- nitely superior to his fellows, and whose aim and ambition were only his country and its liberties, should lead the movement. The processes of evo- lution of democracy for one hundred years had created a condition where Washington would have been a failure in the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, his opposite in every respect, t because he was so different, was the most successful leader of any re- volution of modern or ancient times. As we study the characteristics which made Lin- coln great and successful, we find them not in the usual gifts of great statesmen. Others have been more cultured, others have had more genius, others have had more experience and training, but none of any time had as the motive power of every action an indomitable and resistless moral force. You may call it the principle of natural religion, or whatever you may. It was an instinct for the right, a comprehension of justice, a boundless sympathy and compassion, an intense and yearn : ing love for his fellows and their welfare which knew neither rank nor race, but gathered within its boundless charity all mankind. The force and effect of this power in Lincoln can be best illus- trated by the contrast between him and his great antagonist, Douglas. Douglas was born in Ver- mont ; about him were all the influences of this liberty-loving and intelligent commonwealth ; his father was a clergyman, a college graduate, a man of brains and culture, and his mother a worthy helpmeet for her minister husband. Every author- ity of environment and atmosphere was for right, justice and liberty. His struggles with poverty were not those which enervate or degrade, but those which inspire men of fiber, energy, ambition and genius to the efforts which make a career. His natural abilities, trained in the best of schools, made him a teacher, a lawyer, a judge, a legislator, a senator and the leader of his party. It made him the ablest of debaters in the United States Senate, the most formidable of foes upon the platform in a political campaign, and the most adroit of politicians in framing issues which should capture or mislead the people. In any condition of the country's affairs, when great moral questions were not at issue, Stephen A. Douglas would have been President. Lincoln, on the other hand, was born in a slave State, the son of a poor white, and lived during his early youth in a cabin of one room, under condi- tions of abject poverty and ignorance. His mother died, his shiftless father moved to Indiana, a log cabin was erected which had neither partitions nor floors and scarcely windows or doors, a few acres were cleared to get the bare necessaries of life, and almost at the period of manhood Lincoln had no education, was dressed in skins, was associated with semi-savages who relieved the hard conditions of their lives by brutal debauches and equally brutal fights among themselves, and yet he remained uncontaminated by the drinking, swearing, idle loafers, roughs or thugs who constituted his com- panionship. His energies would be shown occa- sionally with his enormous strength in protecting the weak or rescuing the defeated, and a promise of his future powers given by holding spellbound at times his rough auditors by his rustic eloquence, or entertaining them at night with his endless f and of anecdote, drollery and mimicry. An insatiable craving for knowledge led him to learn to read and to write. The only books within miles about him were Robinson Crusoe, a short history of the United States, Weem'sLifeof Washington, and Banyan's Pilgrim's Progress. These he soon knewb}^ heart. This master of the English tongue, this most felici- tous of phrase makers, this most eloquent of speakers, framed his sentences and formed his style by writing compositions with charcoal upon a wooden shovel or the shingles from the mill. A clerk in a store on starvation wages, a storekeeper without capital, and his business sold out by the sheriff, a surveyor earning ten or fifteen dollars a month, and a lawyer with no other equipment than Blackstone and the statutes of Illinois — such was Lincoln at a period when the accomplished and cultured Douglas was already the idol of his State. And yet thus, on the threshold of a career, with such surroundings, such teachings and such im- pressions, in the midst of a community which drank, Lincoln was a temperance man ; in the midst of a community that swore, Lincoln was free from blasphemy ; in the midst of a com- munity not highly moral, Lincoln w 7 as as pure as an angel ; in the midst of a com- munity which regarded the negro as no better 6 than the horse or the mule, Lincoln was an abol- itionist. Sailing down the Mississippi River upon a flat boat, with a crew composed of his rough comrades, who boasted they were half horse and half alli- gator, who anchored at night for roystering riots in the villages and continued them when they reached New Orleans, Lincoln was apart from them, while of them. He wandered one day into the slave market and saw a young girl put up at auction. He witnessed the brutal examination of her by the buyers and spectators, the coarse jokes that were exchanged in the crowd and the cynical beastliness of the auctioneer, and the slumbering tire of moral and religious wrath planted in him by his mother, or inherited from some saintly ances- tor, broke out with the declaration, "If I live, the day will come when I will hit slavery a blow from which it shall perish." That slave girl on the block aroused the moral forces within him which kept him from the temptations of his environ- ment and made him the hero and the martyr of liberty. The peoples in all ages have loved gladiatorial combats, whether of the mind or muscle. The keen delight of the Greek in the contests of his orators, and of the Roman in the bloody fights of his gladiators, illustrated the principle. The de- bate between Douglas, the leader of his party, the inventor of the phrase, "popular sovereignty," which was to stand both for the principle and the policy which would save his party from being over- whelmed by the rising spirit of liberty inthecoun- trj 7- , and the possible President of the United States, and a man who, though unknown, excited interest because the Republican party in his State deemed him worthy to be placed against the champion, was a picture which made Illinois the battle ground of freedom. If Lincoln had pos- sessed less of this controlling moral principle — if he had been actuated by the same motives which governed Douglas— if his God had been his per- sonal ambition more than the welfare of the race, or the Presidency more than patriotism — he would have defeated Douglas. The repeal of the Mis- souri Compromise had thrown open the territories of the great northwest to slavery. Douglas had met the rising tide of indignation and stemmed it by a proposition which apparently left the people of the territory to decide whether their institutions should be free or slave. The decision of the Su- preme Court in the Dred Scott case had shown that this alleged principle was a flimsy pretext. Never- theless it was generally accepted. The South was committed to slavery and regarded its extension as necessary to the existence of the system. The business of the North was bound up in the preser- vation of slavery. The press and the pulpit were largely with their congregations, their constitu- encies and their readers. "Abolitionist" was a term of reproach and opprobrium. " Anti- slavery " was little better. To touch slavery was 8 to touch the Union, and to touch the Union was to imperil the Republic, and so slavery became the cornerstone of the Republic. The Declaration of Independence was an empty sound for Fourth of July declamations and assaults upon the mon- archial systems of other countries. Lincoln wrote his speech. He read it to the leaders of his party. It was based upon this thought, couched in these words, " A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction ; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States — old as well as new, north as well as south." The leaders of the party with one voice said, "That speech defeats you and elects Douglas." u Ah ! " said Lincoln, " I know that, but I am looking beyond Douglas and be- yond the Senatorship. That sentiment appeals to the conscience of the north against the extension of slavery in the territories and against the system of slavery." It was the gauntlet of liberty thrown into the arena which began the battle that ended with the publication of the Proclamation of Emancipation. 9 There never was such a President — never such a ruler as Abraham Lincoln. He did not repre- sent hereditary privileges, for he came from the plainest of the plain people ; he did not repre- sent heredity, for he had none ; he did not represent the colleges or the universities, for he knew them not ; he did not represent capital and great accumulations, for he had neither ; but he did represent the toiler upon the farm, in the workshop, upon the highway, in the factory, any- where, everywhere where honest men and honest women were striving to better their conditions and to illustrate the dignity of labor and the nobility of American citizenship. Without this touch with the plain people his ability, his genius, would have made him distrusted, for it may be taken as almost an axiom that there is no career for great genius by popular vote. He knew the country, the lim- itations of his power, how far and how fast the administration could go in the great struggle, better than the cabinet, or Congress, or journalists, or advisers. "Call for troops to suppress the rebellion," shouted the northern press, the north- ern pulpit and the representatives in Congress. But he said, with the adoration that exists for the con- stitution and its strict interpretation, and for the Union, and with the dread there is of its dissolution, the flag must be assailed before a response can be had. Against the advice of every member of his cabinet he said, "Let us send provisions to the be- leaguered United States soldiers heroically defend- 10 ing the flag in Charleston Harbor." The unarmed provision ship was driven back, the flag fired upon, the fort was captured, the plain people who were his constituents understood then the situation, and millions of soldiers responded to his call. Mr. Greeley thundered in the Tribune, Mr. Sum- ner in the Senate, the clergymen in their pulpits, and the orators upon the platform, that he should destroy the confederacy at once by freeing the slaves. He knew as no other man did I he strength and power of the feeling which had grown up in the country of the sort of sacredness that hedged about property in slaves. But when defeat after defeat came, when there was despair of the result, when the future of the Republic looked dark, when the people had been educated to regard the Union as more sacred than slavery, then he promulgated his immortal proclamation. Other Presidents and other rulers have deemed their full duty performed in their annual communications to their congresses or their parliaments, but Lincoln every day was addressing letters by which he was counseling and arguing with the people upon the questions of the hour, the perils of the country and the duties and dangers that were before him. Now he writes to Mr. Greeley, now to the workiiigmen of Manchester. now to the workingmen of New York, now to a State Convention, now to a convocation of clergy- men ; but always to the people of the United States. Whenever his great brain and his great 11 heart welled up so that he seemed about to be suffocated by the difficulties of the situation, and by the impossibility of solving his problems, Lincoln poured his troubles out to the people of the United States, and asked for their sympathy, their advice and their support. The appeal was never made in vain. Politicians raved against him, and said that his utterances were unwise, and his actions indis- creet. Earnest men, who had the cause at heart, called conventions to prevent his renomination, and then to defeat him for re-election, but the plain people with whom he had been talking as with familiar friends, whose homes he had en- tered, at whose firesides he had sat, by whose bed- sides he had talked, in whose inmost circles and in the midst of whose family prayers he had been, re- sponded with an overwhelming support which gave him again the presidency, and the presidency by rjractically the unanimous voice of the people. Lincoln knew nothing of the dignity, so far as it is expressed in manner and dress, which belongs to high station. The instinctive sense of propriety and consciousness of superiority and greatness which hedged Washington was absent in him. In our time, in the fierce light of our publicity, with the scintillations of electricity rendering brilliant every nook and corner and cranny of a public man's existence and thought, the temptations to enlarge the wreath which the people place upon his head are almost irresistible. The test of greatness is the wearing of the halo. It destroyed 12 Napoleon, it ruined two-thirds of the generals in the war, it hasdriven great and little politicians, from the commencement of our Republic until now. into obscurity. But Lincoln was never troubled as to the size of his head. He never over- estimated nor underestimated who he was, what he was nor what he represented. He never for- got where he came from, and never lost sight of the fact that except by the accident of position he was neither better nor worse than those who placed him in the Presidential chair. He possessed what no other ruler ever did, or, if he did, no other ruler dared to use, the power of humor. The portentous solemnity of our public men per- vades our political atmosphere, even to depressing melancholy. The less the statesman knows the more solemn he is, the thicker his head the more owlish [his bearing. A President of the United States once said to me, " No man can ever succeed in this country who gives rein to his humor or his fun. The people no longer look upon him as a serious man, and only serious men are recognized in the consideration of public affairs." When Mr. Lincoln came to Washington he was unknown to the great leaders of the party. He had the courage, which only a very great man can have, of summoning them all into his Cabinet. The rule has been growing to summon only lesser men into the Cabinet. In modern times as soon as the Presi- dent has selected his constitutional advisers the wiiole detective agency of the newspapers is set to 13 work to find out who they are, where they come from and what they have done. The village attor- ney, the village scribe, the local philosopher bound upon the national platform with theories as broad as their environment, and as useful. The process has the merit of elevating the chief by the depre- ciation of his subordinates. Lincoln believed in more harmonious pictures. Napoleon, surrounded by the Marshals of France, every one of them a hero of a great battle, every one of them the demon- strated leader of a mighty army, himself the ac- knowledged chief and leader of them all, formed a picture that commanded the admiration of his time and has arrested the attention of posterity. This Illinois lawyer, orator and statesman, called to his aid the men who had demonstrated in the Senate, in the House and in the Courts that they were the leaders of men. What a spectacle ! This ungainly giant of the west, angular and awkward, uncouth of manner, inelegant of address, with the courtly Seward for Secretary of State, the stately Chase for Secretary of the Treasury, the worldly, dominant and shrewd Cameron for Secretary of War, and the imperious Stanton as his successor ! Chase turns to his friends and intimates that the country has a mountebank for President. Seward, ever anxious to be useful, writes a private note offering to perform all the duties of the Presidency and leave the orna- ments of its name and station to Lincoln. He re- ceives in reply a letter which ignores the insult but says in effect, " I will run the administration and 14 you run your department, except when I think that you had better run it in some other wa} r ." In less than a year everyone of those great leaders recog- nized that he was in the jDresence of his chief and superior. Lincoln under other conditions might have made a great playwright, or he might have been a great actor. He was unconciously dramatic. His dis- appearance at Harrisburg, on the way to Washing- ton for the first inauguration, his reappearance at the Capital when the thugs were waiting to assas- sinate him, was a dramatic surprise which excited the whole country. His arjpointment of Hooker to the command of the Army of the Potomac, in a letter which told him plainly his weaknesses and his failures and the reasons why he ought not to have the responsibility of the command placed upon him, was both a comedy and a tragedy. His offer to McClellan to borrow his army if he only knew what to do with it, as it was apparent McClellan did not know, was one of those strokes of genius in expression which removed the popular idol and broke it. . A messenger summoned the cabinet to the White House. The first to enter was the stately, the dignified, the always proper Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. The President looked up from his book and said, " Mr. Chase, I was just reading a most interesting work, which I have enjo3^ed more than anything I have met with in a long time. Let me read you a part of it." And thereupon he began reading to him 15 Ar tenuis Ward's lecture on " Wax Figgers." The astonished and irritated Secretary of the Treasury, listening as the other members of the cabinet gathered, indignantly exclaimed, " Mr. President, we did not come here to hear this idiotic nonsense. For what are we summoned?" Mr. Lincoln put his hand in his drawer, pulled out a paper and said, "Gentlemen, I summoned you to submit this paper ; not to ask your advice as to whether I should issue it or not, because I intend to issue it no matter what your advice maybe ; but to ask sug- gestions as to its form." And he read to them the immortal Proclamation of Emancipation ; the docu- ment which was to set four millions of human beings free ; the document which was to relieve the Constitution from the curse of slavery ; the docu- ment which was to make the Declaration of Inde- pendence for the first time in our history the vital force in the principles and in the policies of the United States ; the document which was to remove the stain which made us a by-word and reproach among all civilized people ; the document which carried out in letter and spirit the vow made so many years before when the fiat-boatman saw the girl sold in the shambles at New Orleans. A few suggestions were made, a few hesitating protests against the fierce determination of the President for publication, an earnest request for delay until a victory should come, and that most memorable of Cabinet meetings in the history of the United States adjourned, and as they Hied out this incomprehen- 16 sible President put the Proclamation of Emancipa- tion back in the drawer and resumed the reading of Artemus Ward. I remember as if it was yesterday an afternoon with Mr. Lincoln. I was but a boy, though Secre- tary of ~New York State. Horatio Seymour was the Democratic Governor, and the Legislature was Republican. The soldiers' vote was to be obtained. The Republican Legislature would not trust the Governor, and it devolved upon me the duty of collecting the soldiers' vote. Mr. Lincoln looked up as I pressed my way through the crowd in his reception room and said : " Well, Depew, what can I do for you ? " I said : ' ; Mr. President, I do not want anything ; I am in Washington on a mission from our State to get out from the armies our New York soldiers' vote, and I simply called to pay my respects." He said : " It is so rare that anyone comes here who wants nothing, please wait and I will get rid of these people in a few minutes." The room was soon emptied, the faithful " Jerry " was guarding the door, and on the lounge the tired President was rocking to and fro, holding his long knees in his arms and telling story after story to relieve his mind, and he said : " Depew, they say I tell a great many stories. I think I do. They say I lower the dignity of the Presidential office by these broad anecdotes. Possibly that is true. But I have found, in the course of a long ex- perience, that the plain people of the country take them as they are, and are more easily reached and 17 influenced and argued with through the medium of a humorous illustration than in any other way." While I was there Mr. John Gfanson, of Buffalo, was a member of Congress. His face and his head were hairless and polished like a billiard ball. He was a Democrat, but supported the President. The conditions of the army were very blue in the East and in the West. Ganson came in one day and said : " Mr. President, I am risking my re-election in supporting your war measures. The campaign seems very unsatisfactory. Of course I will not give out anything you tell me. What is the situa- tion at the front?" Mr. Lincoln, in his searching and sad way, looked at him for a moment as if he was about to reveal the secret of the whole army, and then tumbled Ganson out of the recejjtion room by saying, ' w Ganson, how clean you shave." Lord Lyons, who was a bachelor, went up to announce the marriage of the Princess Alexandra. As is usual on such occasions, the Secretary of State had prepared a formal reply to the address of the Eng- lish Minister. Mr. Lincoln fumbled in his pockets, and, unable to find Mr. Seward's courtly response, grasped Lord Lyons cordially by the hand and said, " Lyons, go thou and do likewise." As I sat in his room that afternoon, it was not Congressmen who crowded about him, it was not Senators, but it was wives and mothers who wanted to get to the front, and whom the War Department would not permit to go where their loved ones lay wounded in the hospitals. It was wives and 18 mothers and fathers pleading for husbands and sons condemned to be shot. No petitioner for mercy ever left Lincoln with his petition not granted. I was dining one night with General Sherman, and, except Mr. Choate and myself, all the guests were commanders of armies in the war. They were all lamenting how Mr. Lincoln had im- paired discipline by pardoning the men who had been court-martialed and condemned to be shot, and the proceedings of the court-martial approved by them, and finally Slocum said, "Sherman, what did you do?" That stern old warrior answered grimly, " I shot them first." But with Mr. Lincoln it was impossible to approve a death warrant. To the father pleading for his son he gave a respite, and, when the father wanted something more, his answer was, " If your boy lives till that sentence is carried out, he will be so old that the world will think Methuselah was a baby in years when he died." On his first visit to General Grant's headquarters the driver of the mules was arguing with his team in that picturesque fashion which the army teamster thinks can be best understood by the mule. Mr. Lincoln's rebuke of the blasphemy, which he detested, was unique. "My friend," said he, "are you an Episcopalian?" "No, Mr. Presi- dent, I am a Methodist." "Oh!" said Mr. Lin- coln, "I thought you were an Episcopalian, be- cause my Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, some- times talks that way, and he is a warden in the Episcopal Church in Auburn." 19 It is significant of our time and of the questions interesting to us, as we celelebrate the birthday of this saviour of the Republic, this foremost of statesmen, this plainest and most honest of mortals, this most dignified, most humorous, most serious, most sad of men, this most gentle of human beings, this leader in his time, and of all time, of the Re- publican party, that his first speech was for a pro- tective tariff. He was first, last and all the time an American ; an American when Napoleon, invading Mexico, would have broken up the Union, an American when Great Britain would have inter- fered for the purpose of destroying the Republic — because, as Lord Salisbury said, we kept shop and were her rivals in business — an American in his earnest devotion to the Union and the Constitution, an American in his love of liberty, an American in his belief that within the borders of the United States should be manufactured all that the people of the United States might require for themselves. He loved the Union above all things. He was the representative of the cult which was started by Daniel Webster. The world little knows what it owes to that great brain. " The Union, one and inseparable, now and forever" was the inspiration of the schools. It created a mighty wave of unreasoning worship of the Union. Lin- coln absorbed it, Lincoln understood it. In his in- augural address — the first one— it was the Union ; in his inaugural address — the second one— it was the Union, in all his letters and speeches it was the 20 Union. It was the Union with slavery, or the Union without slavery, but always the Union of the States. We cannot pass by this celebration, Ave cannot relegate again to the books and the libraries this heroic and majestic figure without enforcing by his example and teachings the sentiment of the hour. There are always great crises coming periodically in the history of nations. It was the Revolutionary War which gave us our Republic. It was the debates with Hayne and with Douglas which gave us the love of union. It w 7 as the Civil War which ended slavery, and now it is the mighty contest of industrial forces, of economic principles, of the proper relations of the currency and the credit of the United States tc its trade and credit in other countries, upon which are builded our hopes or our fears. We have had a civil war in which no blood has been shed, but there have been more desolated homes, more closed industries, more sacrifices of property, more ruin and misery than was occasioned by the war from 1861 to 1865. This has been caused by the same forces, springing largely from the same territory, coming largely from the same pale of intelligence and motives in different sections as that which precipitated the great struggle. The generation which followed the Civil War knew what the Dem- ocratic party in pow T er meant, and kept it in the minority for a quarter of a century. The world is fond of experiments, and experiments run in cycles. 21 What has been will be. So, after thirty years we have tried the Democratic party in power once more. We gave them the Presidency and Congress, and we have had repeated, industrially and finan- cially, the experiences of the Democratic party in power, as it was evidenced in their rule prior to 1860. The Democratic party stands for nothing national. Its principles in the east are antagonistic to its principles in the west. Its ideas in the west are hostile to its ideas in the south, and its views on the Pacific coast have no relations to its principles or ideas or views anywhere else in the country. Mr. Lincoln might have lived and added to his greatness by a speedier settlement of the issues which arose out of the Civil War. Mr. Cleveland was President for four years without power, and had he never been re-elected, with a Democratic party on his hands, he might, with the halo which was thrown around him, have gone down to poster- ity as one of the great Presidents of the country. But Cleveland was re-elected and did have the Democratic party on his hands, and what might have been is not, and Cleveland is not regarded as one of the great Presidents of the country. We have won our victory. It is the victory of returning common sense, the victory of experience over hope. We are not yet out of the woods. The Republican party can only hold the country where it is and prevent further damage until it assumes the responsibilities of power. The difficulty with the democracy is not only of inexperience, but of in- 22 competence. The evolution of the student is first his devotion to phrases, and the more vague they mav be the more wise they seem, and from the phrase he comes to theory. The theory makes him a sceptic in religion and a mugwump in politics. Then he either settles down to the stern realities of life and successful solutions of his problems, or he becomes bankrupt in business and in faith. The Democratic party captured the country by the phrases " free raw materials," fc ' the tariff is a tax," u the markets of the world." We have lost the markets of the world, we have little left to tax, and our raw materials and manufactured articles and labor are all free, because there are so few pur- chasers or employers. We are governed by the party whicn gave us the Gorman tariff, which has left solvent only the business upon which Repub- lican protection is continued, the party which reversed the good old policy that you should pay your debts with money which you earned, and adopted the new one of paying them with borrowed money. Micawber is its financial authority. That party is suspending credit by the eyelids and busi- uess by the hair in the effort to solve the currency problem, which needs little better solution than to leave it alone. After thousands of years of hopeless experiments the Democratic leaders are still striving to square the circle and lift one's self over the stone wall by the straps of one's boots; they are still striving to pay debts without assets ; still striving to give money where none has been earned and dis- 23 tribute currency where there is no property to exchange for it ; still striving to give value to the air and to coin and mint theories, and they have re- duced the national credit so that the Government has to pay three and three-quarters per cent, inter- est where the citizen can borrow for three per cent. Against that the Republican party puts in prac- tice the maxims of "Poor Richard" and the principles which have made commercial nations prosperous and commercial peoples rich. This is not the time nor is there occasion for despair. The hand of the Republican engineer is on the throttle, and the train can no longer run away. The conductor can stop the momentum or side-track the cars, but the engineer will not let him derail them. The Republican House of Rep- resentatives is the living protest of the country against paralysis and despair, and it will hold the fort until in 1896 the relief comes and the country is saved. At the siege of Lucknow a handful of soldiers were defending their own lives and the lives of their wives and little ones against the hordes of Sepoys about them. The food was giving out, the hunger belt was drawn closer ; it seemed that the day of relief and salvation would never come. Suddenly the keen ears of the Scotch woman heard the distant bagpipes, and she shouted: "Dinna ye hear the slogan % It is Havelock and his High- landers." " Dinna ye hear the slogan V It came in the last election and gave the Republicans the House of Representatives. "Dinna ye hear the 24 slogan?" It came from the breaking of the solid South. "Dinna ye hear the slogan?" It came from Missouri, from Maryland, from Tennessee, from West Virginia. "Dinna ye hear the slo- gan?" It is the marching of the army which answered once, " We are coming, Father Abra- ham, three hundred thousand more," to the victory of 1896. Then the Republican Senate will respond to the Republican House, and the Republican House will respond to the Republican President, and the country will receive prosperity, happiness and peace. ADDRESS OF Hon. Cliauncey M. Depew, LLD., COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES OF THE UNI- VERSITY OF CHICAGO, AT THE AUDITORIUM, Monday Evening, April 1st, 1895. THE PRESENT, ITS OPPORTUNITIES AND PERILS. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : — In the career of a young man are several climacterics. They are well defined and in- tensely interesting if he has the advantages of a liberal education. Broadly stated they are his entering college, the day of his graduation, the career he adopts and his marriage. His gradu- ation day and the selection of his career come so close together that they may almost be ac- cepted as one. His university and the learned faculty have equipped and trained him for his life work. His reliance thereafter is upon him- self. He leaves college and enters the world 26 under poetic, even romantic conditions. His situation is like that of the knight in the ancient tournament whose valor and skill were witnessed by throngs of gallant gentlemen and beautiful ladies, and who, if successful, had the supreme happiness of crowning some one as the queen of love and beauty. As this modern knight of the college curriculum stands upon the commence- ment platform he is surrounded by admiring relatives, by happy and sympathetic friends and a joyous and applauding multitude. The entrance of a young man into the world is commonly described in the vocabulary of the literature of the battle-field, but that characteri- zation is wholly inadequate. Not only is it in- adequate, but it is untrue. The ambitious aspir- ant for the rewards and honors of life does not expect to win them by the defeat and destruc- tion of his competitors. Blood and treasure are not poured out in a successful career in litera- ture, the professions or business. It is an igno- ble and a mean view which relies upon the ruin of an opponent in order to secure his place. Success in life, with all its hot competitions, is rather a contest like some of the rames of Olympia and some of the athletic feats of our own times in which the swifter runner or the 27 more skillful oarsman may win the prize, but there are honors and cheers, there are places and rewards for those who fail in securing the su- preme positions. Of course we know of fortunes which have been made by the misfortunes of others and positions which have been won by the overthrow of others, but the man whose ac- cumulations, however great and glittering they may be, represent simply the ruin of tens, or hundreds, or thousands is nothing but a legal- ized brigand. It is the misfortune of our com- plex civilization that the law has not compre- hended and covered in its prohibitions and pen- alties all the opportunities of sinning against the persons and properties of a community. It is not the least of the glories of our period that a liberal education has become popular and the university the ambition of all the people. For nearly a thousand years the university was only for the select few. The plain people had no lot or part or interest or opportunity in its advantages. The medieval foundation which is the ancestor of the modern college was only for the benefit of a fraction of the population. Originally it was only for the church. It took centuries to embrace in a liberal education what are known as the professions. It is only 28 in our own time and in America that journalism has been recognized as one of the liberal profes- sions. There is nothing so conservative as the college. It follows last in the procession of progress ; it distrusts innovations and discredits theories. Its faculty by the very peculiarity of their existence learn to respect the traditions and the teachings of the past. They point to the long line of men, eminent in every depart- ment of human thought and activity, whom the colleges have created, and they naturally inquire most critically into the innovation which prom- ises to improve upon the Abelards and the Bacons, upon the Miltons and the hundreds of others who have illumined literature ; upon the innumerable line of statesmen and orators and the grand body of preachers and thinkers. The university in Europe has about it the medieval flavor. It is not a school of the people. It is still an institution for classes and not for the masses. Its training and its objects are for the professions, the sciences, literature and heredi- tary statesmanship. It is the American devel- opment which has^brought the college home to the people. Harvard and Yale, the parents of all the American colleges, were founded origi- nally simply J:o educate men for the pulpit. It 29 is a curious fact that for a hundred years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock there was not a lawyer in New England. In every community the minister was not only the pastor of his flock, the curator of souls and the administrator of the church, but he was also the authority in political matters and the judge in neighborhood disputes. His sacred office, his education and his superior training made him the leader of the people in all matters affecting their relations with each other or with their God. There are nearly four hundred colleges in the United States to-day and their number evidences the aspirations of the farm and the workshop for a higher education for their boys and their girls. This rapid evolution of the uni- versity toward popular ideas and popular bases in our country has made acute the question whether our education should be specifically for the pursuit which the student has selected as his vocation, or whether upon ancient and tried lines it should develop him first by discipline, by training, and by teaching to the full growth and command of all his faculties, and then let him select his pursuit. I acknowledge the position and the usefulness of the business college, the manual training 30 school, the technological institute, the scientific schools and the schools of mines, medicine, law and theology. They are of infinite importance to the youth who has not the money, the time, or the opportunity to secure a liberal education. They are of equal benefit to the college gradu- ate who has had a liberal education in training him for his selected pursuit. But the theorists, or rather the practical men who are the archi- tects of their own fortunes, and who are pro- claiming on every occasion that a liberal educa- tion is a waste of time for a business man, and that the boy who starts early and is trained only for his one pursuit is destined for a larger success, are doing infinite harm to the ambitious youth of this country. It has been my lot in the peculiar position which I have occupied for over a quarter of a century of counsel and adviser for a great cor- poration and its creators, and of the many suc- cessful men in business who have surrounded them, to know how men who had been denied in their youth the opportunities for education feel when they are possessed of fortunes and the world seems at their feet. Then they pain- fully recognize their limitations ; then they know their weakness ; then they understand that 31 there are things which money cannot buy, and that there are gratifications and triumphs which no fortune can secure. The one lament of all those men has been " Oh, if I had been educated ! I would sacrifice all that I have to attain the opportunities of the college ; to be able to sustain not only conversation and discussion with the educated men with whom I come in contact, but competent also to enjoy what I see is a delight to them beyond anything which I know." The college, in its four years of dicipline, training, teaching and development makes the boy the man. His Latin and his Greek, his rhetoric and his logic, his science and his phil- osophy, his mathematics and his history have little or nothing to do with law or medicine or theology, and still less to do with manufacturing, or mining, or storekeeping, or stocks, or grain or provisions. But they have given to the youth when he has graduated, the command of that superb intelligence with which God has endowed him, by which for the purpose of a living or a fortune, he grasps his profession or his business and speedily overtakes the boy who, abandoning college opportunities, gave his nar- row life to the narrowing pursuit of the one 32 thing by which he expected to earn a living. The college-bred man has an equal opportunity for bread and butter, but beyond that he becomes a citizen of commanding influence and a leader in every community where he settles. Within his home, however humble it may be and how- ever limited his income to support it, he has enjoyment among his books and in the grasp and discussion of the questions of the hour, which are denied to the man who has not drunk at or who refused to o-o to the fountain of knowledge and the well-spring of inspiration which flows only in the college or the university. The best proof of the value of a college education in all the pursuits of life is to be found in the eminent success of those who have enjoyed it in the higher walks of the profes- sions, of statesmanship and even in business. As de Tocqueville pointed out and as Bryce has discovered, ours' is a lawyers' government. The vast majority of our Presidents, our Cabinet Ministers, of the members of our House of Rep- resentatives and of the Senate have been law- yers. The reason has not been because the lawyers are better fitted to make laws or to legislate than the farmer or the business man, but because the lawyers have been better trained 33 from having been in the past almost universally educated at the college. The legislation of the Parliament of Great Britain during the past fifty years has been as liberal and as advanced as that of any government in the world. It has been a constant succession of measures for the emancipation of the sufferage, the emancipation of trade, and the emancipation, upon philan- thropic lines, from the penal laws which repre- sented the barbarism of the Middle Ages. Very few of the members of Parliament have been lawyers, but ninety one-hundreths of the members were graduates of the great universities of Great Britain, and there they secured that university training which gave to them that broadness of understanding, that fullness of grasp, that touch with the questions of the hour, that knowledge of the present and of the past, and insight into the future which made them the statesmen of the British Empire. The world which our' young man enters to- day is a very different one from that which his father or his grandfather or his ancestor of a hundred years ago knew anything about. Fifty years ago he would have graduated at a denom- inational college and fallen into the church of 34 his fathers and of his faculty. Fifty years ago he would have dropped into the party to which his father belonged. He would have accepted his religious creed from the village pastor and his political principles from the national platform of his father's party. But to-day he graduates at a college where the denominational line is loose- lv drawn, and finds that the members of his fam- ily have drifted into all churches and are profess- ing all creeds, and he must select for himself the church in which he shall find his home, and the doctrines upon which he shall base his faith. He discovers that the ties of party have been loosened by false leaders or incompetent ones, and by the failure of party organizations to meet the exigencies of the country and the demands of the tremendous development of the times. Those who should be his advisers say to him, " Son, judge for thyself and for thy country." Thus at the very threshold he requires an equip- ment which his father did not need for his du ties as a citizen or for the foundations of his faith and principles. He starts out at the close of this marvelous nineteenth century to be told from the pulpit and the platform and by the press, and to see from his own observations that there are revolutionary conditions in the 35 political, the financial and the industrial world which threaten the stability of the state, the po- sition of the church, the foundations of society and the safety of property. But while precept and prophesy are of disaster he should not de- spair. Every young man should be an optimist. Every young man should believe that to-morrow will be better than to-day and look forward with unfaltering hope for the morrow, while doing his full duty for to-day. That the problems are difficult, and the situa- tion acute, we all admit. But it is the province of education to solve problems and remove acute conditions. Our period is the paradox of civil- ization. Heretofore our course has been a mat- ter of easy interpretation and plain sailing by the navigation books of the past. But we stand five years from the twentieth century facing conditions which are almost as novel as if a vast convulsion had hurled us through space and we found ourselves sitting beside one of the canals of Mars. Steam and electricity have made the centu- ries of the Christian era down to ours count for nothing. They have brought about a unity of production and markets which upset all the calculations and all 36 the principles of action of the past. They have united the world in an instantaneous communication which has overthrown the limi- tations which formerly were controlled by time and distance or could be fixed by legislation. The prices of cotton on the Ganges or the Ama- zon, of wheat on the plateaus of the Himalayas or in the delta of the Nile, or in the Argentines, of this morning, with all the factors of currency of climate and wages which control the cost of their production, are instantly reflected at noon at Liverpool, at New Orleans, at Savannah, at Mobile, at Chicago and at New York. They send a thrill or a chill through the plantations of the South and the farm-houses of the West. The farmers of Europe and America are justly complaining of their conditions. The rural popu- lations are rushing to the cities and infinitely in- creasing the difficulties of municipal government. Capitalists are striving to form combinations whichjshall float with the tide or stem it, and labor organizations with limited success are endeavor- ing to create a situation which they believe will be best for themselves. The tremenduous pro- gress of the last fifty years, the revolutions which have been worked by steam, electricity and invention, the correlation of forces working 37 on one side of the globe and producing instan- taneous effects upon the other, have so changed the relations of peoples and industries that the world has not yet adjusted itself to them. The reliance of the present and future must be upon education, so that supreme intelligence may brincr order out of the chaos produced by this nineteenth century earthquake of opportunities and powers. There have always been crises in the world. They have been the efforts and aspirations of mankind for something better and higher, and have ultimately culminated in some tremendous movement for liberty. These revolutions have been attended by infinite suffering, the slaughter of millions and the devastation of provinces and kingdoms. The crusades lifted Europe out of the slavery of feudalism, the French Revolution broke the bonds of caste. Napoleon was the leader and wonder worker, though selfishly so, of modern universal suffrage and parliamentary o-overnment. The aspiration of all the centuries has been for liberty and more liberty. The expec- tation has been, that when liberty was gained there would be universal happiness and peace. The English speaking peoples have secured liberty in its largest and fullest sense; that 38 liberty where the people are their own govern- ors, legislators and masters. The paradox of it all is that with the liberty which we all hold as our greatest blessing has come a discontent greater than the world has ever known. The socialist movement in Germany grows from a hundred thousand votes ten years ago to some millions in 1894. The Republican elements in France become more radical and threatening month by month. The agrarian and labor troubles of Great Britain are beyond any ability of her statesman to overcome except by make- shifts from day to day. There was an anarchist riot in Chicago, when only the disciplined valor of a small corps of policemen saved the great city from the horrors of pillage and the sack. A single man created an organization of railway employees in a few months so strong that under his order twenty millions of people were paralyzed in their industries, and their movements, and all the elements which constitute the support of com- munities temporarily suspended. So potential was this uprising that two governors surrendered and the mayor of one of our Western Metropolis took his orders from the leader of the revolt. Industrial and commercial losses of incalculable extent were averted only by the strong arm of the Federal Government. 39 A Congress which has just adjourned nominally represented several parties, but recognized allegi- ance to none, and its ignorance and incom- petence were the wonder of the world and the amazement of the country. Its idiocy nearly wrecked the credit and business of the country. It could formulate no policy, nor devise any scheme of relief. Each of its little groups had its pet theories and plans. Its faults and failures were due to ignorance. There was not enough of educated intelligence to concentrate upon meas- ures which could start once more the wheels of industry and give profitable employment on the farms, and in the factories, the mines and the railroads. The times are ripe for ignorant dema- gogues and educated patriots, and our colleges are the recruiting stations for the patriots. All these are not revolutions. They are symptoms ; symptoms of conditions which must be grasped, understood, met and solved. We need fear no revolution, because revolution only comes, as it has in the past, when there is an under and oppressed class seeking to break the crust of caste or privilege. We have no caste or priv- ilege. The people who are discontented are the governors and rulers and must solve their own problems. They can elect their own Con- 40 gresses and presidents. They cannot revolt against themselves nor cut their own throats, Sooner or later and in some way or other they will solve their problems, but it will be by and through the law. It will be by destructive or constructive methods. The inquiry is natural, " With all the pros- perity and progress of the world, why this dis- content?" The rapidity of invention and the opportunities afforded by electricity and steam have destroyed in the last twenty-five years sixty per cent, of the capital of the world and thrown forty per cent, of its labor out of employ- ment. The triple expansion engine, the inven- tion of a new motor, the reduplication of forces by a new application of machinery makes use- less all the old ones. It does more, it compels the skilled artisan, in the loss of the tool by which he earned his living, and which is no longer of any use, to fall back into the vast mass of com- mon laborers. At the same time these very forces which have thus destroyed the majority of values and thrown out of employment so many people, have created new conditions which have added beyond the power of calculation to the wealth of the world and the opportunities of its people for living, comfort and happiness. 41 But to enjoy its opportunities, its comfort and its happiness a better education becomes neces- sary. Another of the Paradoxes of our quarter of a century is that every artisan and mechanic and the laborer in every department to-day, with shorter hours of labor, receives twenty-five per cent, and in many cases fifty percent more than he did thirty years ago. While he receives thus one third more than he did thirty years ago, his dollar will buy in clothes and food twice as much as it would thirty years ago. One would think that the laborer ought to be supremely happy when he compares the past with the present, and that beyond his living he ought to be laying up in the savings bank the fund which would speedily make him a capita- list. And yet he feels a discontent which his father thirty years ago with one-third the wages and his dollar buying only half as much, never knew. This all comes of education. Education has made possible the marvelous growth of our country, and the wonderful op- portunity it affords for employment and fortunes, but it has lifted our people out of the methods and habits of the past, and we can no longer live as our fathers did. 42 The common school and the high school, with their superior advantages, have cultivated us so that the refinements of life make broader and more intelligent men and brighter, more beauti- ful and more laro-e souled women. It lifts them above the plane of the European peasant. While education and liberty have made Ameri- cans a phenomenal people, they have also, in a measure, raised the standards of living and its demands in the older countries of Europe. The Indian laborer can live under a thatch in a single room with breech clout for clothes and a pan of rice for his food. But the American mechanic wants his home with its several rooms. He has learned, and his children have learned, the value of works of art. They have all become familiar with the better food and che better clothinp- and the better life which con- stitute not luxury but comfort and which makes up and ought to make up the citizens of our Republic. Masterful men of oreat foresight and courage have seized upon the American opportunity to accumulate vast fortunes. The masses who have not been equally fortunate look upon them and say " we have not an equal share in these opportunities." This is not the place nor have I 43 time to even hint at the solution of these diffi- culties, or the solving of these problems. That the genius exists among - us to meet them if need be by legislation, if need be by other processes no man in his senses can doubt. We require for our time more education, more college students, and more college opportunities. Every young man who goes out from these foundations into the world goes out as a mis- sionary of light and knowledge. He will stand in the community where he will settle for an intelligent, broad and patriotic appreciation of the situation of the country and in his neighbor- hood. The graduates of the four hundred Uni- versities of the country are the lieutenants and the captains, the colonels the brigadier generals and the major generals of that army of Ameri- can progress to which we all belong. We are fighting the battles not only of to-day but for all times ; we are developing this country not only for ourselves but also for posterity. We have overcome slavery, we have extirpated polygamy and our only remaining enemy is ig- norance. The best use to which wealth can be applied is to assist these great universities which are thus educating the youth of our land. This institution which owes its existence to the beneficence of Rockefeller is in itself a monu- ment of the proper use of wealth accumulated by a man of genius. So is Cornell, so is Vanderbilt, and so are the older colleges, as they have received the benefactions of generous, appreciative and patriotic wealth. But in view of the dangers which are about us and of the difficulties which are before us we cannot rely alone upon what the rich may do or what philanthropy, or generosity or wisdom may sug- gest. The State has already done well in the common school ; it has done better in the high school, and better still in the final opportunity which it gives in many cases for a liberal educa- tion. It would be a long step forward in populariz- ing hiofher education if the Government should establish at Washington a great National Uni- versity. As at Oxford or at Cambridge there are historic colleges with foundations running back for hundreds of years, and each having its own traditions, but all part of the University, so in every state there would be colleges, each one of them having its own merits and traditions and all of them belonging to the Grand University which will represent the cul- ture of the new world, the University of the United States. ADDRESS OF Hon. Chaimcey M. Depew, LL. D., At His Birthday Dinner Tendered Him by The Montauk Club, of Brooklyn, Saturday Evening, April 20th, 1895. Marvellous in its fullness and enthusiasm was the spirit of good-fellowship which surrounded Chaun- cey M. Depew at his sixty-first birthday dinner at the Montauk Club, in Brooklyn, last night. It was a memorable night to every clubman present, and Mr. Depew' s speech was a triumph, his voice was strong and resonant, and his words fell on willing- ears. It was 10 o'clock before dinner was over. At every plate was a big peach, and Mr. Depew smiled as he saw them. Before President Charles A. Moore, of the club, introduced Stephen A. Gris- wold, who in turn introduced Mr. Depew, six "brownies " bearing a peach-tree well loaded with fruit came in and deposited it in front of Mr. Depew. 46 Mr. Depew, in responding to an address of wel- come by ex-Senator Griswold, spoke as follows : Mr. President and Gentlemen : On the 23d of April Shakespeare, St. George and myself were born, and I am the only survivor. It is hardly a case of the survival of the fittest. This annual compliment which you pay me is highly ap- preciated and valued. There is always somewhere, however, either a Hy or the remains of one in the purest amber. In my case it is the necessity on these recurring anniversaries to make a speech to substantially the same three or four hundred gen- tlemen who honor me, when the only subject before the house is the person whose birthday is cele- brated. As he is forbidden by every rule to talk of himself, how shall he meet this annual obligation ? He is in serious danger of having the guests cry out, as one of them did at a hotel where I was recently in the South, who, after the tenth day, as the evening banquet closed, remarked in a loud voice (I do not know that I get his chapter and verse correctly), " Hebrews xiii, 2." The indignant landlady after awhile said to him : " Sir, some of the best families which I have in my hotel are Jews, and they are hurt at this reference to them." He replied : " Madam, I did not refer to them. It was simply a tribute to your daily dinner which I in- tended to convey by quoting a verse which reads, ' The same yesterday, to-day and forever.' " There is represented here every profession and 47 business of our American life. The clergyman, the lawyer, the doctor, the man of affairs and the man of literature sit to-night within the hospitable walls of this most hospitable of clnbs. The year since we last met has been so significant of events of mo- ment to the well-being of the State and society that they impress the lesson of progress and cheer the heart of the optimist by the evidences of continued improvement in the world. It has been particularly a year of revolt, of independence and of the results of beneficent revolution. Our platform in the Mon- tauk is as broad as the universe and as liberal as truth. After one serious break which broke the breakers, our discussions are free. It is understood that we are of all creeds and faiths in religion and politics. It is understood that we are here not as Repub- licans, nor as Democrats, nor as Prohibitionists, nor as Mugwumps, nor as Independents. We are here under the genial banner of good fellowship, to say what we please, so long as it is uttered with charity toward all and with malice toward none. We start with the maxim that no party has a monopoly of virtue and no party a corner on vice. It is the party in power out of which virtue oozes and which gradually accumulates vice. Hence we have the con- ditions which have led to the phenomenal overturn- ing since last we were here. When Kings County changes 50,000 votes, when a Republican Mayor of New York, by the changing of 70,000 votes one 48 way to 40,000 the other, is elected, when for the first time in ten years a Republican Governor and a Republican Legislature get into power by 150,000 majority, it is not a party victory. It is because the good men of the majority, finding it impossible to purify municipal or State government within the organization, join the minority party to teach their rulers, organizers and leaders a drastic lesson. It is the plain teachings of such events that the lucky recipients of this combination of party fidelity and party disgust have it in their power to hold a sufficient number of the independent and thoughtful elements which came to them, to con- tinue for a period the power in their own hands, or else they can so use their opportunities for personal, or selfish, or purely party purposes as not only to drive away the men who had joined them temporarily, but a large body of their own inde- pendent following. In this way it is quite possible, if we may make such a metaphor, for a party to experience within a twelvemonth alternations from zenith to zero. The despair of the publicist and the sociologist has been the government of cities. The inrushing from the country and from abroad of desirable and undesirable peoples and the rapidity of settlement, making impossible the processes of assimilation, have made the municipal problem the despair of the statesman. But the last twelvemonth has 49 solved that problem — solved it on the side of liber- ty, and American liberty. It has demonstrated that the vox popull is the vox Dei, providing the voice of the people can find some medium through which it can be heard. How shall the voice be registered in legislation % When a committee of a hundred or a committee of seventy of the best citizens that all parties may have, who have the confidence of their fellow-citi- zens, present a programme, and that programme is adopted by the public vote, it carries with it two instructions — one, that this committee, whose pro- gramme was accepted, and the officers who were elected are the chosen representatives of the people, upon whom the people have put the responsibility, and in whom the people repose the confidence to frame the legislation which shall do away with the evils under which they have suffered and bring to them the reforms and good government for which they have fought and voted. Any declaration by statesmen, however wise, however experienced, however conscientious, from distant communities, that these committees and the officers elected on the wave of reform are novices in politics, that they do not know what the people want, that they do not un- derstand the needs of great populations, that their bills are foolish and their measures idiotic, is full of danger to the party organization, of which these gentlemen are the leaders, and its success in the 50 future. It may be that the measures are idiotic ; it may be that they are not wise, but the peo- ple whose representatives have framed them, as soon as they are defeated, will believe that they are the wisest measures ever devised by man, and the oftener they are defeated the more they will in- sist upon having them, or punish the party which defeated them. An event has occurred during the year, little noted, and yet of the greatest interest. I arrived in Chicago a few weeks ago to find candidates lost sight of in the popular discussion of a principle. The cabman who drove me around, the porter who carried my bag, the waiter who stood behind my chair in the hotel, the clerk who handed me the book in which to register my name, the ticket- agent in the railway depot, and the conductor on the horsecar, the clerk in the big drygoods store, and the elevator boy who carried us to the infinite heights of the Chicago building, all wanted to know what I thought of Civil Service Reform. The Legislature had passed a bill submitting to the people whether their offices should all be put upon Civil Service principles or should be the patronage of party leaders as theretofore. The result of this discussion in that most polyglot and cosmopolitan of Western cities was a majority of 50,000 for Civil Service. I remember when reformers with so-called fads, like the late George William Curtis, suggested Civil Service twenty years ago, how it was scouted by all parties. 51 We all of us who were active in politics believed that parties could not be run except by patronage, and we all of us— and I as readily as the rest— de- clared that without patronage a party leader could not hold his place nor a party retain its power. It was for the patronage with which to control the organization that Weed and Greeley split their party in two ; it was for the same high purpose that Conkling, on the one side, and all the leaders against him on the other, kept us in an internecine war ; it was for the same lofty object that the State machine, headed by Daniel Manning, and the city machine, headed by John Kelly, disrupted the Democratic party ; and patronage, with its sup- posed power and influence, has those eminent knights, armed cap-a-pie, with lance at rest, at either end of the lists, waiting for the signal to charge, Grover Cleveland and David Bennett Hill. And yet the people of Chicago, defying the poli- ticians, have taught them that government can get along without patronage. Civil Service applied to cities solves the question of municipal machines and municipal bossism. To that must be added the separation of city elections from the State and general elections. So a man can vote against a thief or an incompetent man in his own party for mayor or sheriff without destroying the tariff or passing the bill for the free coinage of silver. The processes for political power are simple. A few masterful men, whose business is iiolitics, and 52 who believe that the end justifies the means, get control of the machinery of the dominant party in the municipality. They elect their mayor and their board of aldermen, which secures for them the public works, the docks, water, gas and electricity, and that gives them the patronage. Then they appoint the judges of the police courts and the civil justices, and that gives them infinite power over the liberty and property of the citizen. Then they elect their members of the legislature, and that prevents the governing body from inter fering with them. And then they intimidate the higher courts, so that no complaints will be enter- tained. This accomplished, the great city is abso- lutely in the hands of a feudal baron, with his feudatories around him, intrenched in the City Hall. The city treasury supports from ten to twenty thousand retainers who are dependent absolutely upon the barony for their subsistence. Through them the baron holds the primaries, controls the organization, overawes inspectors, manages the count, owns the court and carries the legislature in his pocket. Then we have this amazing condi- tion, that the processes of liberty are capable of greater tyranny than the autocratic will of the despot. Despotism is tempered by the opportuni- ties of assassinating the tyrant. Against a semi- republican and semi-oligarchical government like that of France there can be revolution, but against a municipal tyranny owning the polls, controlling 53 the courts, managing the finances and masters of the party organization, frequent elections pre- vent revolt, and there is nobody to assassinate. I may be criticised for saying that the processes of liberty can be made more tyrannical than the edicts of a Czar, but you all remember in the mar- vellous revelations of the Lexow Committee that widow whose friends contributed a few hundred dollars for her to have a cigar store with which to support herself and her four children. She kept house in one room and sold her cigars in the other ; she sent her children to the public school, and she was doing everything which a good, virtuous, masterful, motherly woman could do to bring a family up respectably and keep out of the poor- house. The ward policeman wanted the contribution which she could not pay. Refusing, she was hauled to the police station, taken before the police judge, and sent to the penitentiary for six months, and when, on her release, she returned to her home she found her little stock of guods had been divided among the ministers of the law and her children had disappeared. It only required a policeman, a captain and a police justice to make possible an outrage which could not be per- petrated in any other country or in any other city in this wide world. Now civil service in municipal affairs makes this sort of crime impossible. Masterful men will always be leaders. They will always have a following, they will always 54 be dominant in the control of party organizations, but under civil service there will be no thousands or tens of thousands of retainers supported out of the city treasury to defeat the taxpayers who pay them. These officers will be relieved from party pledges and party control, and the leaders must appeal to the people. There will always be leaders, and so X say, "All hail the leader who, like Andrew Jackson, or Henry Clay, or James G. Blaine, or William E. Gladstone, the people can follow." And now, gentlemen, the year having proved so eventful, I have been struck with the questions which are brought to me by the interviewer. I have found that if you wish to know what the people are talking about it is first developed by the man with the pad and pencil who drops into your house or office and wants your opinion on it. Two questions seem to have been started sud- denly, and each assumed at once world-wide im- portance. The first, from the hitherto unknown Dr. Nordau, of Germany, is: "Is the world de- generating?" The second is Bismarck's wonder- ful remark in his eightieth-birthday speech, that he never received any happiness from his succes- ses. I beg leave to differ with both of these eminent men. The facts which I have just recited show that the world is not degenerating, and Bismarck, when he made the startling observation that suc- cess brought no happiness, ignored the fact that his success had brought to him on his eightieth 55 birthday the homage and devotion of the German peoples, not only in their own land, but wherever they might be all over the world ; that this hom- age was received for his success in establishing German unity, and for his success in illustrating the possibilities of German brains and German en- ergy and what they could accomplish, and that this tribute of love and affection and veneration, coming from all over the world, gave to him on his eightieth birthday more happiness than had been concentrated, in all the days and all the years of his past exist- ence. "Is the world degenerating V says the news- paper interrogator. Certainly it is not in the liberties which are being gained for the people, because they are increasing year by year. Certainly it is not in the education which is afforded by the Government, for that is enlarging and becoming better all the time. Certainly it is not in standards of morality. Twenty-five years ago Palmerston was Prime Minis- ter of England and Disraeli the leader of the opposi- tion. Palmerston at eighty had been detected in an intrigue of which the proofs were clear and positive. The party leaders went to Disraeli and said : "Let us drive him from office." Disraeli's answer was : " If you start that movement, I resign, because it will lead to his becoming so popular that he will remain permanently in power." Ten years after- ward the same thing drove Dilke from public life, and later did infinite injury to Parnell, and to-day there is no man in America or in Eng- 56 land, in public life, who could survive the clear proofs of a violation of the Seventh Command- ment. Ail these things, which are taken as evidences of degeneration, are simply the nine- teenth century cleaning house for its new ten- ant, the twentieth century. There are always about the old house rubbish, unused furniture, old rags and the remnants of tilth and disease. The good tenant does not leave these evidences for the new one to discover the family weaknesses and criticise the family habits. The nineteenth century is a good tenant and it is sweeping out fads and humbugs of every nature and description. It is gathering them up and putting them in shape, either to bury or burn them, to carry them away, or to put them in the apartment which is reserved for things which are to be brought out hereafter. We have labor troubles, and yet with the various solutions of paternalism in government, of arbitra- tion, of co-operation and educational advantages bringing capital and labor nearer together, the nine- teenth century bids fair to solve the problem be- fore the twentieth century comes in. We have had our stage flooded with plays which made the heroine anything but what she ought to be, until the play- wright believed that without such a heroine the play was impossible, and we have simply brought her out in the closing years of the century to ex- pose her hideousness in order that the twentieth might not find her in the house. We have had 57 aestheticism and have cultivated it, and praised it, and honored it, and finally, when we found it was filth covered with flowers, we have buried it in a felon's cell with Oscar Wilde. We have had our literature, which the German scientist especially deprecates, where the good eld novel which amused and inspired us and brought us in contact with humanity and with nature for the betterment of our mind and soul was succeeded by the modern experiment. The new novel came from Zola and Tolstoi and Ibsen and their like. It came to preach doctrines. The new novel bored us with sermons, and sent us to bed with the headache, because of problems and possi- bilities which threatened the disruption of society, of the family and of all in which we had invested our hearts, our hopes and our future. The closing hours of the nineteenth century are getting rid of those novels by rushing frantically, with out- stretched arms and mouths wide open, to human nature, humble, fascinating, plain, common, human nature, in Trilby. The transparent lesson to us of the closing hours of the nineteenth century is that while the century dies, we should live as long as we can. We can only live by getting out of life all there is in it. What is happiness, anyway ? While I do not dis- credit the future world, but, on the contrary, be- lieve in it, according to the doctrines of the Church which I attend, yet we do not personally know, 58 either from those who have come from the other world, or from revelations received from there, pre- cisely what is the happiness of the next world. Our problem is not so much to long for that as to find our happiness here. Where is it ? It is in a healthy mind, a healthy soul and a healthy body, and. even if your body is not healthy, you can keep the other two in fair condition. The secrets of happiness and. longevity, in my judgment, are first, cherish and cultivate cheerful, hopeful and buoyant spirits. If you haven't them, create them. Enjoy things as they are. The rag- gedest person I ever saw was a Turkish peasant standing in the field, clothed in bits of old carpet. But the combination of color made him a thing of beauty, if not a joy forever. Let us never lose our faith in human nature, no matter how often we are deceived. Do not let the decep- tions destroy confidence in the real, honest good- ness, generosity, humanity and friendship that ex- ist in the world. They are overwhelmingly in the majority. I have lost twenty-five per cent. of all I have ever made in loaning money and in- dorsing notes, and have incurred generally the enmity of those I have helped because I did not keep it up. But every once in a while there was somebody who did return in such full measure the credit for the help that was rendered, that faith was kept alive, and the beauty and the goodness of our human nature were made evident. 59 I have appointed about one thousand men to office and employment which gave them support and the chance to climb to positions of greater responsi- bilit}' and trust if they had the inclination and ability. About nine out of every ten of them throw stones at me because I did not do better for them, and keep pushing them, and yet there are a hundred or so who, by the exercise of their own ability, their own grasp of the situation, have gone onto the accomplishment of such high ambitions and successes, and have appreciated in so many ways the help extended to them by helping others, that again my faith in human nature remains undimin- ished. And my last recipe for happiness is to keep in touch with the young. Join in their games, be a partner in the dance, romp the fastest and turn the quickest in the Virginia reel or the country dance, go up to the old college and sit down and light your pipe and sing college songs, take the children to the theatre and howl with them at the roaring farce, and laugh with them at the comedy and cry with them at the tragedy, be their confi- dant in their love affairs, and if they are not equal to it, write their love letters, and never stop writing- some for yourself. Thus, gentlemen, will the twentieth century, with its cleaner purposes, its higher endeavor and its limitless opportunities, welcome us older fellows as the youngest and most vigorous of those who are to solve its problems and make its record. ~zm st-s •" O. ^c^c 4O 3 cy . i • » "^ ^ •i *P*^ *Scr ^ »°-n*. ,-» W A V «^ • a Vv ^ : jP^. v o. V*^ vpC,' A* '-** *r>& ++Q< i lkrahv binding ^T-^^l ~ °^ ^S^SOXX^X * i»» 0>«*> -^lOP* .S^p °WWS$* A V -X N