LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Accession .9.6.6.0.0. - Clots %<]$$ <\ THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER SCHOOL AND COLLEGE A COLLECTION OF EXTRACTS FROM THE SPEECHES OF HENRY CABOT LODGE, CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW, CHARLES H. PARKHURST, HENRY W. GRADY, JAMES G. ELAINE, JAMES A. GARFIELD, HENRY WARD BEECHER, WILLIAM H. SEWARD, WENDELL PHILLIPS, GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, AND OTHERS; SELECTED AND ADAPTED FOR USE IN DEC- LAMATION, AND IN THE STUDY OF AMERICAN ORATORY IN THE LATTER PART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY HENRY ALLYN FRINK, PH.D. Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Public Speaking in A nth erst College and formerly Professor of English Literature and Oratory in Hamilton College. BOSTON, U.S.A. GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS athenaeum 1898 COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY HENRY ALLYN FRINK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED fll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. EXTRACTS are published from"The Works of James A.Garfield," from James G. Elaine's " Political Discussions," from " The Works of William H. Seward," from " Speeches and Addresses of Wen- dell Phillips," from Henry Ward Beecher's " Patriotic Addresses," from Benjamin F. Taylor's "Mission Ridge and Lookout Moun- tain," from Thomas Hughes' "Tom Brown at Oxford," from Edwin A. Grosvenor's translation of " Andronike," from Lew Wallace's Ben Hur," from Charles H. Parkhurst's " Our Fight with Tammany," from various speeches and addresses of Henry Cabot Lodge, from " Orations of Chauncey M. Depew," and from ff Speeches of Henry W. Grady," through the kindness of Mrs. James A. Garfield, Mrs. James G. Blaine, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Messrs. Lee Shepard, Messrs. Fords, Howard & Hulbert, Mefcsrs. D. Appleton & Co., Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Messrs. Harper & Brothers, Messrs, Charles Scribner's Sons, the Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge, and Messrs. Cassell Co., respectively. There is also especial acknowledgment of the kindness of Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. 96600 PREFACE. MANY of the selections contained in this volume have in manuscript form been in popular use for several years in Amherst College. In compliance with numerous sugges- tions and requests, these declamations with a few additional and more familiar extracts are now given to the public as The New Century Speaker. The title of the collection is not wholly without significance. The new century will undoubtedly have, sooner or later, in our country as elsewhere, its own style of public speaking. The history of oratory shows, however, that it has been, like every other art, subject to the law of evolution. Its changes, as a rule, have not been sudden transitions, but a matter of growth. It is, therefore, reasonable to expect that American oratory will for a score or two of years be largely determined in its characteristics by what has been peculiar to our most effective forms of public speech in the last half of the pres- ent century. A few of the extracts in this volume are from speeches delivered before the Civil War, but they will be found to have most noticeably the spirit and style which mark our public speaking t to-day. The selections in general, however, are of comparatively recent date, and have to do with sub- jects not only of present moment but of future interest. Most of the declamations, as has been implied, have been tested in our rhetorical exercises, and have proved to be a helpful means of cultivating a direct, vigorous, and attractive style of public speaking. VI PREFACE. It will be observed that Part I has a number of selections which may be termed " drill pieces." Concrete and objec- tive in theme and treatment, they serve an important end in helping to develop power. In most students the ability to gain and hold the attention of an audience much more to persuade and to convince, which is the especial object of public speech is at first largely latent. One of the earliest efforts in wise training should be, therefore, to aid the stu- dent in the recognition and development of his resources. There is no more direct means to this end than a helpful selection. Most often, until there has been some measure of practice and training, this will not be one abstract in thought and unimpassioned in style. It will be a declama- tion of striking incident, varied description, earnest interro- gation, and spirited action, in which the speaker may easily lose self-consciousness and become earnestly interested in what he is speaking. Frequent rehearsals of a selection which has the elements that take hold of the student's im- agination and sympathies will in a surprisingly short time develop voice, feeling, energy, and freedom of action. But power once gained can with right training be turned in any direction. Hence, when the speaker has in this way come to know something of his resources, and has learned in a degree how to use them with skill and good taste, he will begin to be prepared to give effectively the extracts in Part II, and also those in Part I which relate to public affairs, social interests, and historic characters. What is to be the goal of the declaimer who is preparing for professional or public life or for the ordinary duties of citizenship, is indicated by the general character of this vol- ume. It is to acquire, as far as possible, the elements of power which have made so many of the speeches and ad- dresses here represented a commanding influence in our national and civic life. So that, while The New Century PREFACE. Vll Speaker is valuable in its unusual number, variety, and fresh- ness of " drill pieces/' it has peculiar worth in presenting in available form for declamation the most representative col- lection of extracts from our later eloquence that has been published. In compiling these extracts, the order of sentence or paragraph has been changed, and the expression has been condensed, when occasionally in the abridged form it would help to retain the full force of the argument or reproduce more of the peculiar features of the original presentation of the subject. The result is that in Part II, where the orator is represented by a number of selections, the extracts so fully indicate his scope, method, and characteristics that the book will prove most useful in the study of American oratory in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Not many of the declamations will require for delivery more than five minutes, and the others, when not used in competitive or public exercises, can, by the omission of a paragraph or two, be brought readily within the same time. HENRY ALLYN FRINK. AMHERST COLLEGE, 1898. CONTENTS. PART I. PAGE Boat Race, The . Thomas Hughes .... i Capture of Lookout Mountain, The . Benjamin F. Taylor . . 4 Career of Gordon, The Frederick J. Swift ... 6 Catherine de Medicis William M. Punshon . . 8 Confederate Sergeant, The .... Adapted . .... 10 Convict's Death, The Charles Dickens .... 12 Culture in Emergencies Adapted 14 Destruction of Jerusalem, The . . Frank D. Budlong ... 16 Doom of Claudius and Cynthia, The (Abridged) Maurice Thompson ... 19 Eulogy on Henry Ward Beecher . . Joseph Parker, D.D. . . 21 Fort Wagner Anna E. Dickinson . . 24 General's Client, The Adapted 27 Greatness of Obedience, The . . . Frederic W. Farrar . . 29 Guiteau the Assassin John K. Porter .... 31 Heroism of Horatio Nelson, The . . Frank V, Mills .... 33 Historic Codfish, The Richard W. Irwin ... 35 Homes of the People Parke Godwin .... 39 Jean Valjean's Sacrifice Victor Hugo 41 John Brown of Osawatomie . : . Anonymous 45 John A. Logan George R. Peck .... 47 Knights of Labor T. V. Powderly .... 49 Last Night of Misolonghi, The . . Edwin A. Grosvenor . . 52 Law and Humanity Raymond A 7 ". Kellogg . . 56 " Little David " of Nations, The . . William C. Duncan . . 58 Macaulay William M. Punshon . . 61 Man for the Crisis, The Adapted 63 Mission of Thomas Hood, The . . Adapted 67 Moral Courage Frederic W. Farrar . . 69 Napoleon's Ambition and Shelley's Doubt William De Shon ... 71 X . CONTENTS. PAGE Negro in American History, The . . Frank F. Laird .... 74 New Englander in History, The . . //. L. Wayland .... 76 Opening of the Mississippi in 1862, The William E. Lewis ... 78 Orator's Cause, The John D. Wright .... 80 Pathos of Thackeray and Dickens, The Jit lien M. Elliott ... 82 Poetry the Language of Symbolism . Frederick W. Robertson . 85 Plea for Enthusiasm, A Anonymotis 87 Race, The Lew Wallace 89 Realism of Dickens, The .... William A. Lathrop . . 92 Relief of Lucknow, The Adapted 94 Rescue, The '. Benjamin F. Taylor . . 97 Review of the Grand Army, The . . Adapted 98 Rights and Duties Frederick W. Robertson . 100 Russia the Enigma of Europe . . . Gilbert H. Grosvenor . . 102 Savonarola William M. Punshon . . 104 Shakespeare's Mark Antony . . . Walter B. Wine hell . . 106 Signal Man, The Charles Dickens .... 109 Signing of the Declaration, The . . George Lippard . . . . 1 1 1 Sir Walter Scott in Westminster . . John Hay 114 Slave of Boston, The Theodore Parker . . . 115 Spirit of Conquest, The . . . : . Thomas Corwin . . . . 117 Storming of Mission Ridge, The . . Benjamin F. Taylor . . 119 Sunday Newspaper, The Herrick Johnson, D.D. . 122 Sun of Liberty, The Victor Hiigo 124 Sydney Carton's Death Charles Dickens . . . . 126 Traitor's Deathbed, The George Lippard . ... 128 Two of Dickens' Villains .... Jttlien M. Elliott . . . 131 Two Queens Franklin Addington . . 133 Unconscious Greatness of Stonewall Jackson, The Moses D. Hoge, D.D. . . 135 Unknown Rider, The George. Lippard .... 138 Vengeance of the Flag, The . . . Henry D. Esterbrooke . . 140 Vesuvius and the Egyptian .... Edward Buhvcr Lytton . 143 Victor of Marengo, The Anonymous 146 Voyage of the " Fram," The . . . Arthur P. Hunt .... 148 War and Peace Frederick W. Robertson . 1 50 Waterloo /. T. Headlcy 152 Wolfe at Quebec Frank D. Budlong . . . 154 CONTENTS. XI PAGE PART II. HENRY CABOT LODGE. "Old Ironsides" 161 A Tribute to Massachusetts 164 Cuba and Armenia 166 The Venezuela Question 170 The Traditions of Massachusetts . 172 The Blue and the Gray 175 The Great Peril of Unrestricted Immigration 177 The Puritan of Essex County 179 Americanism 181 CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. The Capture of Andre 187 Andre and Hale 190 The Army of the Potomac 191 The Legacy of Grant 194 The Place of Athletics in College Life 196 / . The Lawyer and Free Institutions 198 Home Rule for Ireland 201 The Scholar in Public Life 203 CHARLES H. PARKHURST. The Corruption of Municipal Government 209 A Moral Crisis 211 Christian Citizenship 213 Piety and Civic Virtue 215 The Pulpit and Politics 217 HENRY W. GRADY. The University the Training Camp of the Future .... 223 The Southern Negro 225 Prohibition in Atlanta 227 The South and Her Problems 230 Centralization in the United States 232 The New South 234 JAMES G. ELAINE. The Death of Garfield 241 Chinese Immigration 242 The Permanence of Grant's Fame 244 American Shipbuilding 246 The Elements of National Wealth 248 The Amnesty of Jefferson Davis 249 Xll CONTENTS. PAGE JAMES A. GARFIELD. General Thomas at Chickamauga 251; An Appeal to Young Men 257 Immortality of True Patriotism 259 Macaulay's Prophecy 261 Abraham Lincoln 263 The Graves of Union Soldiers at Arlington 265 HENRY WARD BEECHER. Compromise of Principle 269 Suppressed Repudiation * 270 Wendell Phillips 272 The National Flag 274 Loss of the " Arctic " 276 The North and the African 278 WILLIAM II . SEWARD. A Plea for William Freeman 283 The American and the Corsican 285 Daniel O'Connell's Epitaph 287 Welcome to Louis Kossuth - . 290- Defense of Alleged Conspirators against the Michigan Cen- tral Railroad Company 291 WENDELL PHILLIPS. The Scholar's Distrust 297 <*^fhe Murder of Lovejoy 299 Napoleon Bonaparte and Toussaint L'Ouverture .... 301 Toussaint L'Ouverture's Place among Great Men .... 303 Daniel O'Connell the Orator 306 Daniel O'Connell's Power over the Irish People 309 Idols 311 William Lloyd Garrison 313 Public Opinion 315 What We Owe the Pilgrims 317 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. A Rub-a-dub Agitation 321 Burgoyne's Surrender 323 Paul Revere's Ride 325 The Spirit of Puritanism 327 The Cause of Bunker Hill 329 Samuel Adams and the New England Town Meeting . . . 331 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE BOAT RACE, FROM "TOM BROWN AT OXFORD." THOMAS HUGHES. THE crew had just finished their early dinner. Hark ! the first gun ! The St. Ambrose crew fingered their oars, put a last dash of grease on their rowlocks, and settled their feet against the stretchers. "Shall we push her off?" asked "bow." "No, I can give you another minute," said the coxswain, who was sitting, watch in hand, in the stern ; " only be smart when I give the word. Eight seconds more only. Look out for the flash. Remember, all eyes in the boat." There it comes, at last the flash of the starting gun. Long before the sound of the report can roll up the river the whole pent-up life and energy which has been held in leash, as it were, for the last six minutes is let loose, and breaks away with a bound and a dash which he who has felt it will remember for his life, but the like of which will he ever feel again ? The starting ropes drop from the cox- swain's hands, the oars flash into the water, and gleam on the feather, the spray flies from them, and the boats leap forward. The crowds on the bank scatter and rush along, each keeping as near as it may be to its own boat. Some of the men on the towing path, some on the very edge of, often in, the water some slightly in advance, as if they could help to drag their boat forward some behind, where they can see the pulling better but all at full speed, in wild excite- 2 THE NEW. CENTURY SPEAKER. ment, and shouting at the top of their voices to those on whom the honor of the college is laid. " Well pulled, all ! " " Pick her up there, five ! " " You're gaining, every stroke ! " " Time in the bows ! " " Bravo, St. Ambrose ! " On they rushed by the side of the boats, jostling one another, stum- bling, struggling, and panting along. For the first ten strokes Tom Brown was in too great fear of making a mistake to feel or hear or see. His whole soul was glued to the back of the man before him, his one thought to keep time, and get his strength into the stroke. But as the crew settled down into the well-known long sweep, consciousness returned. While every muscle in his body was straining, and his chest heaved, and his heart leaped, every nerve seemed to be gathering new life and his senses to wake into unwonted acuteness. He caught the scent of the wild thyme in the air, and found room in his brain to wonder how it could have got there, as he had never seen the plant near the river or smelt it before. Though his eye never wandered from the back of the man in front of him, he seemed to see all things at once ; and amid the Babel of voices, and the dash and pulse of the stroke, and the laboring of his own breathing he heard a voice coming to him again and again, and clear as if there had been no other sound in the air: " Steady, two ! steady ! well pulled ! steady, steady ! " The voice seemed to give him strength and keep him to his work. And what work it was ! he had had many a hard pull in the last six weeks, but " never aught like this." But it can't last forever ; men's muscles are not steel, or their lungs bull's hide, and hearts can't go on pumping a hundred miles an hour long without bursting. The St. Ambrose's boat is well away from the boat behind. There is a great gap between the accompanying crowds. And now, as they near the Gut, she hangs for a moment or % THE BOAT RACE. 3 two in hand, though the roar from the banks grows louder and louder, and Tom is already aware that the St. Ambrose crowd is melting into the one ahead of them. " We must be close to Exeter ! " The thought flashes into him and into the rest of the crew at the same moment. For, all at once, the strain seems taken off their arms again. There is no more drag. She springs to the stroke as she did at the start ; and the coxswain's face, which had dark- ened for a few seconds, lightens up again. "You're gain- ing ! you're gaining!" now and then he mutters to the captain, who responds with a look, keeping his breath for other matters. Isn't he grand, the captain, as he comes for- ward like lightning, stroke after stroke, his back flat, his teeth set, his whole frame working from the hips with the steadiness of a machine ? As the space still narrows, the eyes of the fiery little coxswain flash with excitement. The two crowds are mingled now, and no mistake ; and the shouts come all in a heap over the water. " Now, St. Ambrose, six strokes more ! " " Now, Exeter, you 're gaining ; pick her up!" ''Mind the Gut, Exeter!" "Bravo, St. Ambrose ! " The water rushes by, still eddyingfrom the strokes of the boat ahead. Tom fancies now he can hear the voice of their coxswain. In another moment both boats are in the Gut, and a storm of shouts reaches them from the crowd. " Well steered, well steered, St. Ambrose ! " is the cry. Then the coxswain, motionless as a statue till now, lifts his right hand and whirls the tassel round his head : " Give it her now, boys ; six strokes and we are into them!" And while a mighty sound of shouts, murmurs, and music went up into the evening sky, the coxswain shook the tiller ropes again, the captain shouted, " Now, then, pick her up !" and the St. Ambrose boat shot up between the swarming banks at racing pace to her landing-place, the lion of the evening. 4 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE CAPTURE OF LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. BENJAMIN F. TAYLOR. IT was a formidable business Hooker and his brigades had in hand: they were to carry a mountain and scale a precipice near two thousand feet high, in the teeth of a battery and the face of two intrenched brigades. Climbing Signal Hill, I could see volumes of smoke rolling to and fro, like clouds from a boiling cauldron. The mad surges of tumult lashed the hill till they cried aloud, and roared through the gorges till you might have fancied all the thunders of a long summer tumbled into that valley together. And yet the battle was unseen. It was like hearing voices from the under-world. The bugles of this city of camps were sounding high noon when, in two parallel columns, the troops moved up the mountain, in the rear of the enemy's rifle-pits, which they swept at every fire. Ah, I wish you had been here. It needed no glass to see it ; it was only just beyond your hand. And there, in the center of the columns, fluttered the blessed flag. ""My God! what flag is that?" men cried. And up steadily it moved. We could think of nothing but a gallant ship-of-the-line grandly lifting upon the great billows and riding out the storm. It was a scene never to fade out. Pride and pain struggled for the mastery, but faith carried the day. We believed in the flag and took courage. Volleys of musketry and crashes of cannon, and then those lulls in a battle even more terrible than the tempest. Night was closing rapidly in, and the scene was growing sublime. The battery at Moccasin Point was sweeping the road to the mountain. The brave little fort at its left was playing like a heart in a fever. The cannon upon the top THE CAPTURE OF LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. 5 of Lookout were pounding away at their lowest depression. The flash of the guns fairly burned through the clouds ; there was an instant of silence, here, there, yonder, and the tardy thunder leaped out after the swift light. For the first time, perhaps, since that mountain began to burn beneath the gold and crimson sandals of the sun it was in eclipse. The clouds of the summit and the smoke of the battle had met halfway and mingled. Here was Chattanooga, but Lookout had vanished ! It was Sinai over again, with its thunderings and lightnings and thick darkness, and the Lord was on our side. Then the storm ceased, and occa- sional dropping shots told off the evening till half past nine, and then a crashing volley and a rebel yell and a desperate charge. It was their good night to our boys ; their good night to the mountain. They had been met on their own vantage ground ; they had been driven one and a half miles. The Federal foot touched the hill, indeed, but above still towered the precipice. At dawn Captain Wilson and fifteen men of the Eighth Kentucky crept up among the rocky clefts, handing their guns one to another, and stood at length upon the summit. And there, just as the sun was touching up the old Depart- ment of the Cumberland, Captain Wilson and his fifteen men, near where the gun had crouched and growled at all the land, waved the regimental flag, in sight of Tennessee, Ala- bama, Georgia, in sight of the old " North State" and South Carolina, waved it there, and the right of the Federal front, lying far beneath, caught a glimpse of its flutter, and a cheer rose from regiment to regiment through whole brigades and broad divisions, till the boys away round in the face of Mission Ridge passed it along the line of battle. " The sight of that gridiron did my soul good," said General Meigs. " What is it ? Our flag ? Did I help put it there ? " mur- mured a poor wounded fellow, and died without the sight. 6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE CAREER OF GORDON. FREDERICK J. SWIFT. SPRUNG from a race of soldiers, Charles Gordon early dis- played the military spirit. It was in the trenches before Sebastopol that he began his heroic career which to-day reads like a romance of the Crusades. Later, in a campaign of daring adventure and military strategy, he crushed the T'ai P'ing rebellion, and is henceforth known to fame as " Chinese " Gordon. But perhaps the most beautiful portion of his career, in all respects, was his life at Gravesend, whither he had been sent after the Chinese rebellion, to improve the defenses of the Thames. Here he was a self-sacrificing missionary, ministering to the wants of the poor, the unfortunate, the sick, the dying. Literally following in the footsteps of his Divine Master, he here devoted himself to doing good as each day and hour gave opportunity. But a strange providence awaits him in Central Africa, which is to round into still finer proportions his grand and beautiful life. The slave trade must die. Gordon's must be the hand to strike the fatal blow. So well was his task accomplished in that portion of the Dark Continent that the Egyptian Khedive sends him to free from this great evil his vast sandy possessions in the Soudan. To-day, the story of his three years' labors in that land which no man ever wanted and which once possessed has ever proved a curse to its owner, is the story of the mightiest heroism, the noblest self-sacrifice of our age. Strange history that repeats itself ! In China again as a peace-maker! Once more, alas, in the Soudan ! For a year he seeks to undo the results of Egyptian tyranny. " But all in vain." He is alone in the desert with naught but a feeble THE CAREER OF GORDON. 7 foreign garrison. He asks for aid. Finally, the English govern- ment, unable longer to resist the popular will, orders Lord Wolseley to his relief. The commander sails for Egypt and moves on to Khartoum by the way of the Nile. Slowly and laboriously he struggles on his tortuous way. The months slip by, freighted with a thousand anxious thoughts of the brave Christian warrior and his garrison. Wolseley reaches the conjunction of the Blue and White Nile. Yonder lies Khartoum ! But where is the flag that so long has "waved defiance " to the Arab ? What means this ominous silence ? Alas ! " It is the valley of the shadow of death." A blind- ing storm of bullets tells the whole sad story. Khartoum has fallen; Gordon and the garrison are cold in death. Too late, England ! Too late, Wolseley ! All useless now are murmurings. What matters it that the Suakim route might have saved Khartoum and its intrepid commander ! What matters it that Wolseley chose the Nile route, with its months of toil and danger. All is over with Gordon. Wolseley's terrible mistake can never be condoned. England is put to shame. One of the bravest Christian warriors of the nineteenth cen- tury is sacrificed for naught, Stupendous wickedness of delay that robbed the world of one of its brightest, purest souls, its noblest representative of manhood, the fair and consummate flower of Christian valor. A unique character, an individuality in which were blended imperiousness and tenderness. 8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. CATHERINE DE MEDICIS. W. M. PUNSHON. THE character of Catherine de Medicis is a study. Remorseless without cruelty and sensual without passion a diplomatist without principle and a dreamer without faith a wife without affection and a mother without feeling we look in vain for her parallel. See her in her oratory ! Devouter Catholic never told his beads. See her in the council room ! Royal caprice yielded to her commanding will ; soldiers faltered beneath her glance who never cowered from sheen of spears nor blenched at flashing steel ; and hoary-headed statesmen who had made politics their study confessed that she outmatched them in her cool and crafty wisdom. See her in disaster ! More philosophical resigna- tion never mastered suffering; braver heroism never bared its breast to storm. Such was Catherine de Medicis, the sceptered sorceress of Italy. We gaze upon her with a sort of constrained and awful admiration, as upon an embodi- ment of power but power cold, crafty, passionless, cruel the power of the serpent, with basilisk eye, and iron fang, and deadly gripe, and poisonous trail. But it is in connection with the massacre of St. Bartholo- mew that we think of Catherine de Medicis. On the 24th of August, 1572, at the noon of night, the queen mother and her two guilty sons were shivering in all the timidness of cruelty in the royal chamber. They maintained a sullen silence, for conscience had made cowards of them. As they looked out into the oppressed and solitary night a pistol shot was heard. Remorse seized upon the irresolute mon- arch, and he issued orders to arrest the tragedy. It was too late, for the royal tigress at his side, anticipating that his purpose might waver, had already commanded the CATHERINE DE MEDICIS. 9 signal ; and even as they spoke the bell of St. Germain aux Auxerrois tolled, heavy and dooming, through the darkness. Forth issued the courtly butchers to their work of blood. At the onset the brave old Admiral de Coligny was mas- sacred, and the Huguenots in the Louvre were despatched by halberdiers. Armed men, shouting " For God and the king," traversed the streets and forced the dwellings of the heretics. The populace, already inflamed by the sight of blood, followed in the track of slaughter, mutilating the corpses and dragging them through the kennels in derision. The leaders, riding fiercely from street to street, roused the pas- sion into frenzy by their cries; "Kill, kill ! Blood-letting is good in August! By the king's command! Death to the Huguenot ! Kill ! " On sped the murder, until city and palace were gorged. Men forgot their manhood and women their tenderness. The human was turned into the brutal. The roads were almost impassable from the corpses of men, women, and children. Paris became one vast Red Sea, whose blood waves had no refluent tide. The sun of that blessed Sabbath shone, with its clear, kind light, upon thousands of dishonored and desolate homes ; and the air, which should have been hushed from sound until the psalm of devotion woke it, carried upon its startled billows the yells of blasphemers, flushed and drunk with murder, and the shrieks of parting spirits, like a host of unburied wit- nesses, crying from beneath the altar unto God, " How long, O Lord, how long ! " The massacre was renewed in the provinces. For seven long days Paris was a scene of pillage. Fifteen thousand in the capital and one hundred thousand throughout the whole of France are supposed to have perished, many by the edge of the sword, and many more by the protracted perils of flight and famine. 10 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE CONFEDERATE SERGEANT. ADAPTED. IT was in the valley of the Shenandoah. General Stewart, with a rebel mob, was hanging on the Federal flank. His midnight camp was pitched on a hillside, while a little way up the hill lay a farmhouse, with two or three haystacks standing near. The general had just discovered, in a group of his ragged, wretched troopers, a little child, a boy, perhaps four years old. Turning to the sergeant in com- mand, he said, " sergeant, where did this child come from ? Take it at once to its mother." " Its mother is dead, general." "Dead?" "Yes, killed in the battle yesterday, when you led the boys over the stone fence by the farm- house on the hill. I found this little fellow in a fence corner, all a-shivering, his father and mother dead, shot down when we stormed the place." As the sergeant spoke, the child reached out a little flag he held in his hand, as if to make friends with the general, who was turning away as if to avoid him. " Sergeant, where did that Union flag come from ? " " The boy had it in his hand when I found him. He said his father gave it to him for the Fourth of July." The general turned, stooped, and caught the child in his arms. "Keep your pretty little flag, my boy," he said. " You don't know the difference, and I wish^ that I didn't know and never had known the difference. Here, sergeant, take care of this child. Boys, we killed his father yester- day ; let us take care of him. Maybe he will bring luck to some of us ; what do you say, boys ? " As the general strode away into the night, toward another part of the camp, the sergeant hoisted the child high on his colossal shoulders. But suddenly he turned THE CONFEDERATE SERGEANT. II to look and to listen, for there was a shout down the hill, and a sudden sharp volley of shots above beyond the hay- stacks. Yes, a large Federal force was in full pursuit of the little band of rebel night raiders. But one way of safety seemed open to him and his flying companions. It was up the stony hill to the haystacks. And up the hill, over the brush, through the woods, with the child on his shoulders, he led the flight. But suddenly the haystacks blaze out before him, and the whole scene is as light as day. The Federals have been waiting for the Confederates to come. And now, as they stand there, helpless and terrified, they see the haystacks in the path of their retreat and the Federal soldiers above them, behind them, around them, to shoot them down in the light they have kindled. Matchless and magnificent was that light. It pleased the child, excited, delighted him. What did he know of the death hiding down in every gleaming gun barrel of that compact mass of uniformed men before them ! And so, just as the Federal officer drew his sword and was giving the word, " Fire," the child, holding with one hand tightly on the sergeant's head, waved with the other his little Union flag above his head, there in the glow and the light. And in that awful stillness that comes before any dreadful catas- trophe, the child, raising himself higher on the sergeant's shoulder, shouted out in his brave little voice, " Fourth of July ! Fourth of July ! " As the boyish shout ceased the rebel sergeant waited for the fire of the guns that was to be his death. But put it on record in gold and in red that at the sight of that flag the line of blue divided, and the old gray Confederate ser- geant, with his charge on his shoulder still waving his tiny flag, passed on through the lines, saved by the child he bore, while cheer after cheer shook the bullet-ridden leaves of the old oaks overhead. 12 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE CONVICT'S DEATH. CHARLES DICKENS. AT last, one bitter night, the old convict sank down on a doorstep faint and ill. The decay of vice and profligacy had worn him to the bone. His cheeks were hollow and livid; his eyes were sunken, and their sight was dim. And now the long-forgotten scenes of a misspent life crowded thick and fast upon him. He thought -of the time when he had a home, a happy, cheerful home, and of those who peopled it, until the forms of his children seemed to stand about him. So plain, so clear, and so distinct were they that he could touch and feel them. Looks that he had long ago forgotten were fixed upon him once more. Voices long since hushed in death sounded in his ears like the music of village bells. But it was only for an instant. The rain beat heavily upon him, and cold and hunger were gnawing at his heart again. Suddenly he started up in ttie extremity of terror. He had heard his own voice shouting in the night air, he knew not what or why. Hark! A groan ! Another ! His senses were leaving him ; half-formed and incoherent words burst from his lips, and his hands sought to tear and lacerate his flesh. He was going mad and he shrieked for help until his voice failed him. At last he raised his head and looked up the long, dismal street. In an instant his resolve was taken, his limbs received new life ; he ran quickly from the spot and paused not for breath until he reached the river-side. The tide was in, and the water flowed at his feet. The rain had ceased, the wind was lulled, and all was still and quiet. So quiet was it that the slightest sound on the opposite bank, even the rippling of the water against the barges that were moored there, was distinctly audible to his THE CONVICTS DEATH, 13 ear. The stream stole languidly and sluggishly on. Strange and fantastic forms rose to the surface and beckoned him to approach ; dark, gleaming eyes peered from the water and seemed to mock his hesitation, while the hollow mur- murs from behind urged him onward. He retreated a few paces, took a short run, a desperate leap, and plunged into the water. Not five seconds had passed when he rose to the water's surface but what a change had taken place in that short time in all his thoughts and feelings ! Life ! life in any form, poverty, misery, starvation, anything but death. He fought and struggled with the water that closed over his head, and screamed in agonies of terror. The shore but one foot of dry ground he could almost touch the step. One hand's breadth nearer and he was saved but the tide bore him onward under the dark arches of the bridge and he sank to the bottom. Again he rose and struggled for life. For an instant the buildings on the river's bank, the lights on the bridge, the black water and the fast-flying clouds were distinctly visible once more he sank, and once again he rose. Bright flames of fire shot up from earth to heaven and reeled before his eyes, while the water thundered in his ears and stunned him with its furious roar. Another instant a gasp a gurgle and the Thames had borne him down down from life and hope to the blackness of darkness of the suicide's death. A week after the body was washed ashore, a swollen and disfigured mass. Unrecognized and unpitied, it was carried to the grave, and there it has long since mouldered away. 14 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. CULTURE IN EMERGENCIES. ADAPTED. IT has been well said that the great moral victories and defeats of the world hang on the decision of the moment. Crises come, the seizing of which is triumph, the neglect of which is ruin. Nearly every battle turns on the one or two rapid movements, executed amid the whirl of smoke and thunder of guns, that jar the solid globe. In the very crisis of a duel a sword breaks ; in the moment of collision with the enemy the leader's horse is killed by a flash of light- ning. Such events paralyze the feeble mind, but in the man of instant decision they awake a terrific power. At Marengo word was brought to Desaix : " The bat- tle is completely lost." But before he gives the expected order to retreat there is a glance at the field, a look at his watch, an instantaneous decision, and the quick, lightning- like reply : " No matter if the battle is lost ; it is only ten o'clock, and we shall have time to gain another!" Then followed that famous cavalry charge which swept the field so suddenly and irresistibly that the victors became the vanquished. We would not decry culture ; but there is a kind of train- ing that deprives the mind of this moving, vitalizing power which belongs to the man of decision. Thus in great crises elegant and polished scholars have rarely been the men of the hour. Charlemagne could scarcely sign his own name; Cromwell was "inarticulate"; and the hand that would have throttled secession in its cradle, the hand of Andrew Jackson, belonged to one whom his biographer pronounces " the most ignorant man in the world." But such men, in critical moments, are not fettered by methods and rules and formalities. CULTURE IN EMERGENCIES. IS When the great obelisk, brought from Egypt in 1586, was erected in the square of St. Peter's, in Rome, the tackle was all arranged for the delicate and perilous work. To make all safe and to prevent the possibility of accident from any sudden cry or alarm, a papal edict had proclaimed death to any man who should utter a loud word, till the engineer had given the order that all risk was passed. As the majestic monolith moved up the populace closed in. The square was crowded with admiring eyes and beat- ing hearts. Slowly that crystallization of Egyptian sweat rises on its base five degrees ten degrees fifteen twenty there are signs of faltering ! No mutter no voice silence ! It moves again twenty-five thirty forty forty-three it stops ! See! Those hempen cables which like faithful servants have obeyed the mathematician have suddenly received an order from God not to hold that base steady another instant on those terms. The obedient masons look at each other, silent, and then watch the threatening masses of stone. Among the crowd, silence, silence everywhere, obedience to law, and the sun shone on the stillness and despair. Suddenly from out that breathless throng rang a cry, clear as the archangel's trumpet, "Wet the ropes! " The crowd turned to look. Tiptoe on a post, in a jacket of homespun, his eyes full of prophetic fire, stood a workman of the people. His words flashed like lightning and struck. From the engineer to his lowest assistant the cry had instant obedience. Water was dashed on the cables ; they bit fiercely into the granite ; the windlasses were manned once more, and the obelisk rose to its place and took its stand for centuries. And so often, where excessive culture in its timidity and inaction fail, native vigor and promptitude meet the crisis and win the victory. 1 6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. FRANK D. BUDLONG. " BEAUTIFUL for situation, the joy of the whole earth was Mount Zion, the city of the great King ! " Her streets, markets, and bazaars stretched along the slopes and down the valleys, while alone in isolated grandeur Mount Moriah rose, terrace upon terrace, high above the busy city. On its summit the temple stood out, a mass of showy marble and gold, glittering in the sunlight. Jerusalem was seemingly impregnable. With wall about wall, tower guarding tower, those massive bulwarks were apparently as enduring as " the mountains round about." Yet, impregnable as seemed Jerusalem, the time had come for the sad fulfillment of prophecy when the city was to fall. It was now the feast of the Passover, this last Passover of the Jewish people. For fifteen hundred years God's pro- tecting promise had been their shield. No nation had made war upon them, no man desired their land, when they had appeared before the Lord thrice in the year. Then the plains were dotted with the tents of a countless multitude ; the air was redolent with the perfume of flowers; the vast terraces crowned with blooming fruit trees. Now all is desolation. The whole plain had been devastated; blooming gardens and bubbling fountains had disappeared; fruit trees with their rich promise had fallen under the Roman axe. The air is dark with missiles from death-dealing engines, and mighty battering rams are at work. And now a new terror appeared within the walls. The great storehouse had been fired by the opposing factions, and the horrified populace saw their supplies swept away by the flames. With the scarcity of food, the fury of the insur- gents increased. Famine within, a pitiless foe without, THE DESTRUCTION OE JERUSALEM. \J it was a desperate, hopeless fight. Every kindred feel- ing, love, respect, affection, became extinct. The strong preyed upon the weak, the weak upon the dying. Children snatched the last morsel from the lips of parents, and mothers from their children. Whole families lay dying, while the streets were filled with unburied corpses some staring fiercely upwards, others with mute, appealing eyes as if asking pity from Heaven. Mothers watched the last sleep stealing upon their children without a pang ; their life and hope went out together. " There was no sorrow, no wailing ; they had no strength to weep.' 7 Silence deep and solemn brooded over the city, broken only by the marauders as they forced open the houses to plunder the dead. Repeatedly Titus summoned the Jews to surrender, but in vain. Then a night attack was ordered. But the Jews were on the watch, and as the Romans attempted to scale the walls, the defenders leaped down upon them, sword in hand, fighting like demons. Yet the steady courage of the Romans could not be repelled ; they pressed onward, foot by foot, and at last were in possession of the inner wall. And now the temple was the last refuge of the Jews. Even the hard-hearted Romans stood in awe at thought of pollut- ing this holy place. It was the evening of the tenth of August, a day already dark in the Jewish calendar. The Roman leader had retired to rest, intending next morning to make a general assault. The gentle, summer twilight came on, and the setting sun had shone for the last time on the snow-white walls and glistening pinnacles of the temple. Suddenly a wild and terrible cry is heard : " The temple is on fire ! The temple is on fire ! " A Roman soldier had cast a burning brand into one of the chambers. In a moment the fire has caught in the dry cedar, and tongues of flame rise hissing and roar- ing to the roof. The soldiers, not heeding the voice of their 1 8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. commander, rush like furies to the work of destruction. Brand after brand is thrown into the chambers, fire springs to meet fire, and the whole temple is a blaze of light. " Like wild beasts environed in a burning forest," the Jews see the awful circle of fire hem them in. What wonder that they stood with blanched cheeks and staring eyes, gasping, motionless. Here was a foe more terrible than any they had encountered, against which there was no human defense. There is only a choice of death. A feeling of revenge stirs their blood. They grasp their swords, and rush to the gates only to be cut down and trampled upon by the furious sol- diers. The way is choked with dead. The temple steps rnn with blood ; and still the awful carnage goes on. Those who fight and those who entreat mercy fall side by side. Higher and higher leap the flames, until the whole summit of the hill blazes like a volcano. It lights the city from wall to wall. It glows against the summer sky, and brings out in horrid relief the blood-stained Romans and heaps of dead. But at length the cries of the insurgents perishing within the courts grow fainter and fainter. One after another of the buildings fall. The lofty pinnacles totter and plunge with thundering crash into the fiery chasm. The beautiful temple is a shapeless ruin. So fell Jerusalem. Its destruction was not only a fulfill- ment of prophecy, but it also transmits to us its own impres- sive lesson "righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." THE DOOM OF CLAUDIUS AND CYNTHIA. IQ THE DOOM OF CLAUDIUS AND CYNTHIA. (Abridged.) MAURICE THOMPSON. IT was in the mid- splendor of the reign of the Emperor Commodus. The emperor was quite easily flattered and more easily insulted. Especially desirous of being accounted the best swordsman and the most fearless gladiator in Rome, he still better enjoyed the reputation of being the incompar- able archer. It can therefore be well understood how Claudius, by publicly boasting that he was a better archer than Commodus, had brought upon himself the calamity p r 11- ^l a public execution. The rumor was abroad in Rome that on a certain night a most startling scene would be enacted in the circus. The result was that on this particular night the vast building was crowded at an early hour. Commodus himself, surrounded by a great number of his favorites, sat on a high, richly cushioned throne, prepared for him about midway one side of the vast inclosure. All was still, as if the multitude were breathless with expectancy. Presently, out from one of the openings, a young man and a young woman, a mere girl, their hands bound behind them, were led forth upon the sand of the arena, and forced to walk around the entire circumference of the place. At length the giant circuit was completed, and the two were left standing on the sand, distant about one hundred and twenty feet from the emperor, who now arose and in a loud voice said : " Behold the condemned Claudius and Cynthia, whom he lately took for his wife. The crime for which they are to die is a great one. Claudius has publicly proclaimed that he is a better archer than I, Commodus, am. I am the emperor and the incomparable archer of Rome. 2O THE NE,W CENTURY SPEAKER. Whoever disputes it dies and his wife dies with him. It is decreed." It was enough to touch the heart of even a -Roman to see the tender innocence of that fair girl's face as she turned it up in speechless, tearless, appealing grief and anguish to her husband's. Immediately a large cage containing two fierce-eyed and famished tigers was brought into the arena and placed before the victims. The hungry beasts growled and howled, lapping their tongues and plunging up against the door. A murmur ran all round that vast ellipse a murmur of remonstrance and disgust ; for now every one saw that the spectacle was to be a foul murder without even the show of a struggle. Then a sound came from the cage which no words can ever describe, the hungry howl, the clashing teeth, the hissing breath of the tigers, along with a sharp clang of the iron bars spurned by their rushing feet. The circus fairly shook with the plunge of Death toward its victims. Look for a brief moment upon the picture : fifty thousand faces or more thrust forward gazing, the helpless couple, lost to everything but the horrors of death, quivering from foot to crown. Note the spotless beauty and the unselfish love of the girl. Mark well the stern power of the young man's face. Think how sweet life must be to them on the thres- hold of marriage. And now, oh ! now look at those bound- ing, flaming-eyed tigers. There came from the place where Commodus stood a clear musical note, such as might have come from the grav- est chord of. a lyre if powerfully struck, closely followed by a keen, far-reaching hiss, like the whisper of fate, ending in a heavy blow. The multitude caught breath and stared. The foremost tiger, while yet in mid air, curled itself up with a gurgling cry of utter pain, and with blood gushing from its eyes, ears, and mouth fell heavily down, dying. Again EULOGY ON HENRY WARD BEECHER. 21 the sweet, insinuating twang, the hiss, and the stroke. The second beast fell dead or dying upon the first. This explained all. The emperor had demonstrated his right to be called the Royal Bowman of the World. " Lead them out and set them free ! " he cried in a loud, heartless voice. " Lead them out and tell it everywhere that Commodus is the Incomparable Bowman ! " And then, when it was realized that the lovers had not been hurt, a great stir began, and out from a myriad over- joyed and admiring hearts leaped a storm of thanks, while with clash and bray of musical instruments, and with voices like the voices of winds and seas, and with a clapping of hands like the rending roar of tempests, the vast audience arose as one person and applauded the emperor. EULOGY ON HENRY WARD BEECHER. JOSEPH PARKER, D.D. AT one of the public meetings addressed by Mr. Beecher in England an organized opposition had taken possession of part of the hall. Six thousand people crowded the noble auditorium. The only self-possessed man in the seething mass was Mr. Beecher himself. " Mr. Chairman," said he, and instantly the hiss and groan of opposition were heard ; " Mr. Chairman," and again the angry storm mingled with the enthusiastic and reverberating cheers. In a moment Mr. Beecher's whole aspect changed. He was determined to " mount the whirlwind and direct the storm "; so, advanc- ing still nearer to the front of the platform, he exclaimed : " My friends, we will have an all-night session, but we will be heard." That suited the English temper, and the whole audience broke out into a thunder of applause which plainly 22 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. said : " Heard you shall be, though the enemy be hurled into the murky night." The inspired orator spoke, ex- pounded, appealed, fought, and conquered, and then sat down in such a storm of cheers as probably cannot be heard out of England. With Pauline astuteness, he conciliated his English audi- ences by exclaiming : " We bring back American sheaves, but the seed corn we got in England ; and if, in a larger sphere and under circumstances of unobstruction, we have reared mightier harvests, every sheaf contains the grain that has made old England rich for a hundred years." Then again he changed his tone, and said : " We ask no help and no hindrance. If you do not send us a man, we do not ask for a man. If you do not send us another pound of gun- powder, we are able to make our own gunpowder. If you do not send us another musket or cannon, we have cannon that can carry five miles already." When, after a minute historical statement, he said : " Then came that ever mem- orable period when the Fugitive Slave Bill was passed. Against that infamy my soul revolted and these lips pro- tested, and I defied the government to its face and told them : ' I will execute none of your unrighteous law. Send to me a fugitive who is fleeing from his master, and I will step between him and his pursuer/" we saw the philan- thropist who was neither to be bribed nor threatened into silence. Arid when he added : " Not once nor twice have my doors been shut between oppressor and the oppressed ; and the church itself over which I minister has been the unknown refuge of many and many a one," we felt that he conferred upon Plymouth Church a fame prouder than the renown which had been created for it by his own match- less eloquence. When we heard of the transformation of Plymouth Church into a paradise as the dead body of the immortal preacher . EULOGY ON HENRY WARD HEECHER. 23 lay there, we said surely this man was a poet, or so lovely a crown would not have been fashioned in his honor. When we heard the muffled drums and the measured tramp of soldiers, and saw the furled and draped banners, and watched five hundred men march to the house of death, we said surely a soldier has fallen a man, an officer, of whom his comrades were proud. And when we saw the colored clergymen of Brooklyn bowed down with sacred grief as they resolved to participate in the honors of the memorial, we said surely this man was a philanthropist and an eman- cipator of his brethren. So he was. He was poet and soldier and statesman and a deliverer of bondsmen. He was great in every aspect ; great when he spoke in the name of the united nation at Sumter, great when he denounced the sin of slavery, great when he opened his mouth for the dumb, great when he called his mutilated country back to brotherhood and mutual trust, great in prayer, great in suf- fering, great when he pronounced the matchless eulogy on Grant always great. Every man who knew Mr. Beecher fixes his attention upon some incident or sermon or prayer or speech which best represents the genius or the heart of the man. Had I an artist at command I could order pictures that gold would never buy. I could say to the artist : paint him in conver- sation, with all the April variety of his face, constant only in its truthfulness. Catch above all things the smile : the smile which began so far away, so dawn-like, and broadened into a summer morning. O painter, let me charge thee to seize that spirit smile. But, failing, I would have thee gather thy strength for one supreme effort ; nay, a miracle. Invoke all the ancestors of art and bid them help thee. Paint the church in which he worked ; the Sun- day benediction has been pronounced ; the sun has long retired ; the white-haired pastor lingers that he may have an 24 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. extra benediction through the medium of music ; his eyes are full of tears ; two little children unconsciously approach him and stand quite near; he turns, he sees them, he lays a hand on each young head; then he kisses the wayfarers, and with his hand upon them or around them the three walk away together, one of them never to return. FORT WAGNER. ANNA E. DICKINSON. THROUGH the whole afternoon there had been a tremen- dous cannonading of the fort from the gunboats and the land forces. About six o'clock there came moving up the island, over the burning sands and under the burning sky, a stalwart, splendid appearing set of men who looked equal to any daring and capable of any heroism. Weary, travel stained, with the mire and the rain of a two days' tramp ; weakened by the incessant strain and lack of food ; with gaps in their ranks made by the death of comrades who had fallen in battle but a little time before, it was plain to be seen of what stuff these men were made, and for what work they were ready. As this regiment, the famous Fifty-fourth, came up the island to take its place at the head of the storming party in the assault on Wagner, it was cheered from all sides by the white soldiers. The day was lurid and sultry. Great masses of cloud, heavy and black, were piled in the western sky, fringed here and there by an angry red, and torn by vivid streams of lightning. Not a breath of wind shook the leaves or stirred the high, rank grass by the water side ; a portentous and awful FORT WAGNER. 2$ stillness filled the air. Quiet, with the like awful and porten- tous calm, the black regiment, headed by its young, fair- haired, knightly colonel, marched to its destined place and action. A slightly rising ground, raked by a murderous fire ; a ditch holding three feet of water ; a straight lift of parapet thirty feet high an impregnable position, held by a desperate and invincible foe. Here the word of command was given : " We are ordered and expected to take Battery Wagner at the point of the bayonet. Are you ready ? " " Ay, ay, sir ! ready ! " was the answer. And the order went pealing down the line : " Ready ! Close ranks! Charge bayonets ! Forward! Double-quick, march ! " and away they went, under a scattering fire, in one compact line till within one hundred feet of the fort, when the storm of death broke upon them. Every gun belched forth its great shot and shell ; every rifle whizzed out its sharp-singing, death-freighted messenger. The men wavered not for an instant ; forward forward they went. They plunged into the ditch ; waded through the deep water, no longer of muddy hue, but stained crimson with their blood ; and commenced to climb the parapet. The foremost line fell, and then the next, and the next. On, over the piled-up mounds of dead and dying, of wounded and slain, to the mouth of the battery ; seizing the guns ; bayoneting the gunners at their posts ; planting their flag and struggling around it ; their leader on the walls, sword in hand, his blue eyes blazing, his fair face aflame, his clear voice calling out : " Forward, my brave boys ! " then plunging into the hell of battle before him. As the men were clambering up the parapet their color sergeant was shot dead. A nameless hero who was just behind sprang forward, seized the staff from his dying hand, and with it mounted upward. A ball struck his right arm ; but before it could fall shattered by his side, his left hand 26 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. caught the flag and carried it onward. Though faint with loss of blood and wrung with agony, he kept his place, the colors flying, up the slippery steep ; up to the walls of the fort ; on the wall itself, planting the flag where the men made that brief, splendid stand, and melted away like snow before furnace heat. Here a bayonet thrust met him and brought him down, a great wound in his brave breast, but he did not yield ; dropping to his knees, pressing his unbroken arm upon the gaping wound the colors still flew, an inspiration to the men about him, a defiance to the foe. At last when the shattered ranks fell back, sullenly and slowly retreating, he was seen painfully working his way down- ward, still holding aloft the flag, bent evidently on saving it, and saving it as flag had rarely, if ever, been saved before. Slowly, painfully he dragged himself onward step by step down the hill, inch by inch across the ground to the door of the hospital ; and then, while dying eyes brightened, while dying men held back their souls from the eternities to cheer him, gasped out : " I did but do my duty, boys, and the dear old flag never once touched the ground " - and then, away from the reach and sight of its foes, in the midst of its defenders who loved and were dying for it, the flag at last fell. The next day a flag of truce went up to beg the body of the heroic young chief who had so led that marvelous assault. It came back without him. A ditch, deep and wide, had been dug ; his body and those of twenty-two of his men, found dead upon and about him, flung into it in one common heap ; and the word sent back was : " We have buried him with his niggers." It was well done. Slavery buried these men, black and white, together, black and white in a common grave. Let Liberty see to it, then, that black and white be raised together in a life better than the old. THE GENERAL'S CLIENT. 27 THE GENERAL'S CLIENT. ADAPTED. IT was a sultry noon, and in the Jeffersonville court- house a murder trial was in progress. The prisoner, a strongly built and middle-aged negro, was evidently not im- " pressed by any sense of peril, though already a clear case of murder had been proved against him, and only his state- ment and the argument remained. No testimony had been offered for the prisoner. A man had been stabbed; had fallen dead, his hands clasped over the wound. From beneath this hand, when convulsively opened, a knife had fallen, which the prisoner's wife seized and concealed. So much had been proved by the state's witnesses. The prisoner took the stand to make his statement. He declared that he had killed the deceased in self-defense, that the knife which fell from the relaxing hand was the dead man's. He told the story simply and quietly; and as he began it a tall thick-set gentleman, with iron-gray hair and clad in a gray suit, entered the room and stood silently by the door. As the prisoner resumed his seat, the new- comer entered within the rail and sat down near him. The solicitor then arose and stated his case in a few cold words. This man had stabbed another wantonly. If the knife was the property of the deceased, why was it not produced in court? The prisoner's wife had picked it up. He passed the case to the jury, and the judge was preparing to deliver his charge when the old gentleman in gray, rose to his feet. " If it please your Honor," he said, " the prisoner is entitled to the closing argument, and, in the absence of other counsel, I beg you will mark my name for the defense." " Mr. Clerk," said the court, " mark General Robert Thomas for the defense." The silence was abso- 28 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. lute; the jurymen stirred in their seats; something new was coming. Only this old man, grim, gray, and majestically defiant, stood between the negro and the grave. Suddenly the lips of the general opened, and he said with quick but quiet energy : " The knife that was found by the dead man's side was his own. He had drawn it before he was stabbed. Ben Thomas is a brave man, a strong man; he would never have used a weapon upon him unarmed. A brave man who is full of strength never draws a weapon to repel a simple assault. The defendant drew when he saw a knife in the hand of his foe, not from fear, but to equalize the combat. Why do I say he was brave? Every man upon this jury shouldered his musket during the war. Some of you were perhaps at Gettysburg; I was there too." A murmur of applause ran round the room; the old man's war record was a household legend. " I and the only brother that God ever gave me. I well remember that fight. The enemy met our charges with a courage and a grit that could not be shaken. Line after line melted away during those days, and at last came Pickett's charge. As that magnificent command rushed in, a negro man, a cap- tain's body servant, stood behind it, shading his eyes with his hands and waiting. " You know the result. Out of that vortex of flame and that storm of lead and iron a handful drifted back. From one to another this man of black skin ran ; then turned and followed in the trail of the charge. On, on he went, gone one moment and in sight the next, on, up to the flaming cannon themselves. Then, there he stooped and lifted a form from the ground; and then, stumbling, staggering under his load, made his way back across that field of death, until, meeting him halfway, I took the burden myself from the hero and bore it myself to safety. That burden was the senseless form of my brother " here he paused, THE GREATNESS OF OBEDIENCE. 2Q and walked rapidly towards the prisoner, his arm raised on high, his voice ringing like a trumpet, " gashed and bleed- ing and mangled, but alive, thank God! And the man who bore him out, who brought him to me in his arms as a mother would a sick child, himself torn by a fragment of a shell until the great heart was almost dropping from his breast, that man, oh, my friends, sits under my hand. See if I speak not the truth." He tore open the prisoner's shirt, and laid bare his breast on which streamed the silent splendors of the afternoon sun; a great ragged scar marked it from left to right. " Look," he cried, " and bless the sight, for that scar was won by a slave in an hour that tried the courage of free men and put to its highest test the best manhood of the South. No man who wins such wounds can thrust a knife into an unarmed assailant. I have come seventy miles in my old age to say it." It may have been contrary to the evidence, but the jury without leaving their seats returned a verdict of "not guilty " ; and the solicitor, who bore a scar on his face, smiled as he received it. THE GREATNESS OF OBEDIENCE. F. W. FARRAR. OBEDIENCE, the true school of empire, has two appli- cations. In the narrower sense it means loyalty, humility, modesty of character, cheerful submission to just authority; in its wider it means the law of duty cheerfully accepted as the law of life. Respect for authority is a sacred duty, as it is also a divine command. Never has there been an age where that command has been violated which has not be- 3O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. come a corrupt age. Never a country where it was neglected which has not been a despicable country. In loyalty, in humility, in obedience have ever rested a nation's hopes. You thirst for honor you do well ; but before honor is humility, and without humility there can be no true obedience. And this is the rule of every great society, as it is, in truth, the rule of the universe of God. Wherein lay the sole greatness of Sparta? Was it not revealed on that epitaph over the Three Hundred at Thermopylae : Go, tell the Spartans, them that passest by, That here obedient to their laws we lie ! Wherein lay the true majesty of Rome? Was it not on the solid bases of filial and national obedience that she built the magnificent superstructure of universal power? If you would know why Rome was great, consider that poor Roman soldier whose armed skeleton was found in a recess near the gate of Pompeii. When on that guilty little city burst the sulphurous storm it would have been easy for him, as for so many, to escape. Why did he not? Because to escape would have been to abandon his post, and so the unnamed hero rather than disobey, just dropped the visor of his helmet and stood there to die. And need I go to Greece and Rome? Is not obedience is not simple loyalty to simple duty the basis of all that is greatest in England's honor, too? Is not this the glory of Balaklava? Forward, the Light Brigade ! Take the guns, Nolan said ; Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. GUITEAU THE ASSASSIN. 31 And was there not another such instance at the wreck of the Birkenheadt The good ship had crashed at sunset against a sunken rock; the boats were too few, the sea was rushing in ; sharks were thrusting their horrible black fins through the white breakers of the boiling surf ; and amid the shrieks of women and children some one clamored that all should save themselves who could. Then, clear and loud, rang out the voice of the good colonel, bidding the men to their ranks. That order meant nothing less than death death in those raging waters death among those savage sharks but it was instantly obeyed. In perfect order the boats were pushed from the shattered vessel, row- ing the women and children to the shore, while, inch by inch, the ship sank down and down, but still under stead- fast men, till the last great wave rolled over her, and, "obedient even unto death," brave men loyal to their chief, loyal to England, loyal to God sank to their noble burial under the bloody surf. GUITEAU THE ASSASSIN. JOHN K. PORTER. IN the Guiteau trial, Mr. Porter, commenting on Mr. Reed's reference to Charlotte Corday, said : The world had lived since the French Revolution in ignorance of the fact that the beautiful Charlotte Corday was insane. It was left to Mr. Reed to announce that fact. She cannot turn in her grave to belie it, but there are some of us who know some- thing of the history of that wonderful woman's true patriot- ism, which led to an assassination that was justified if ever an assassination was justified. She was no sneaking coward. 32 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. She left the house in which she was reared to deliver France, to stay the hand of revolutionary slaughter, to lay her own head beneath the guillotine in order to save the effusion of blood. She believed it her duty to the France she loved, and she made her way to her heroic deed with deliberate preparation, sane in mind and devoted in purpose. She succeeded in getting access to the man who held in his right hand the lives of millions of Frenchmen, and who, by jot- ting a mark of blood opposite their names, could hurry them into a dismal, dark dungeon from which there was no escape except through the guillotine. She insane ? She who, when called to execution, rose from her knees with a crucifix clasped to her breast ? Forsooth, Mr. Reed would place this murderer by the side of the girl who gave her life that others might live. Another case is that of John Wilkes Booth. Still, for him there were circumstances which tended to mitigate in some degree the horror we feel at his crime. He had an idea of patriotism, and became infatuated not insanely, but wildly with the idea that if he did the act he would render a service to his portion of the country. But what is this case ? Are there any of the mitigating circumstances that attach themselves even to the memory of the murder of Lincoln ? No. True, Booth shot from behind. But, feeling that he might be justified by his coun- trymen, he leaped upon the stage, mounted his horse, and rode for life or for death. He rode to death, and within the blazing flames of the building in which he was penned as God pens all murderers he still presented the lion front of a'brave man, and, although crippled in body, he died like a stag at bay. But this man, this coward, this cold-blooded murderer who prepared death for his victim and safety for himself, would you compare him to Wilkes Booth ? THE HEROISM OF HORATIO NELSON. 33 Gentlemen of the jury, so discharge your duty that by your action at least, political assassination shall find no sanc- tion to make it a precedent hereafter. He who has ordained that human life shall be shielded from human crime by human law, presides over your deliberation ; and the verdict which shall be given or withheld to-day will be recorded where we all have to appear. THE HEROISM OF HORATIO NELSON. FRANK V. MILLS. THERE is a difference worth while to note between the man of heroic deeds and the man of heroic life. The one may be an Alcibiades, a Mark Antony, nay a Benedict Arnold. But the other is one whom all the ages hail as hero. Such a hero was Horatio Nelson. When, at his burial, his flag was about to be lowered into his grave, the sailors who knew him as but few commanders have ever been known ; who had seen him at Tenerife peril- ing his own life to save his perishing men, and refusing to be taken into their ship lest his wounds should dishearten the crew ; who had heard him say to the surgeon rushing to his aid as he lay wounded at the Battle of the Nile : " No, no. I '11 take my chances with my brave fellows " - these sailors caught the flag before it touched the grave, and tore it into fragments, so that each man might have a relic of him whom the gunner of the Victory had called their saint as well as their hero. The lost child sitting by the brookside, and to the anxious inquiry if he felt no fear, replying : " Fear ? I never knew fear. What is it ? " and the officer who, to save his ship and 34 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. crew, boldly pushed his boat through the surf lashed to fury by the gale is but the boy become a man. In the Battle of Copenhagen Nelson showed the unchange- able will essential to the true hero. Before attacking the enemy, he was compelled for days and nights to buoy the intricate channel leading to the chosen position. At last the signal was given to advance, and the whole force joy- fully sprang to their posts. Nelson, with quick and vigor- ous steps, paces the deck. The struggle begins, his face is all aglow, his eyes flash, and he sports with death as Scaevola of old sported with the flames. As the commander- in-chief, seeing the terrible odds against which the English battled, raised the signal for retreat, Nelson laughingly placed the glass to his sightless eye and exclaimed : " I see no signal ! " But he saw his country's honor in peril and the object of the expedition about to be lost ; and, although to disobey the signal meant death if unsuccessful, he cried out : " Keep mine for close battle flying ; nail it to the mast ! " That order saved the day, and gave to England the supremacy of the northern seas, and to Nelson a place among England's nobility. His life closed with a befitting death at the post of duty. For two years he had sought to engage the French squadron in battle. But on the morning of October 19, 1805, an English ship, with all her sails set and with cannon booming, bears down upon the fleet with the joyful news that the enemy is getting under way. With a cheer the men spring to the rig- ging, and quickly the fleet is in pursuit. For two days they eagerly follow, led by the guns and rockets of the ships in advance, until, on the morning of the 2ist, the enemy's fleet appears in battle array off Cape Trafalgar. The signal to form line and prepare for action is given. Suddenly from the Victory's maintop, by order of Nelson, floats the signal : " England expects every man to do his THE HISTORIC CODFISH. 35 duty." The enthusiasm knows no bounds ; cheer after cheer rends the air until the very sea reechoes. A shot is fired, but it falls harmless into the water ; another and another follow. The rigging is pierced. The Victory is almost stopped in her course by the enemy's fire. Every timber trembles, her decks are already strewn with the dead and dying ; still she presses towards the enemy's center, her men still bravely waiting the order to engage. It comes at last, and the shouts of the men blend with the roar of cannon. Broadside follows broadside in rapid succession. Still the undaunted admiral urges forward his men. He has scarcely given the order to cease firing upon the disabled enemy when a shot from her mainmast bears him bleeding to the deck. "They have done for me at last," he said as he was carried below. But as news came to him of the victory the eyes of the dying man lit up with joy, and he said: "Now I am satisfied. Thank God, I did my duty." And as the roar of the last gun died away, with it passed from earth the heroic soul of Horatio Nelson. THE HISTORIC CODFISH. RICHARD VV. IRWIN. MR. SPEAKER: I rise to ask you to place in the new House of Representatives, as it was in the old, the emblem of the codfish. I pray that we who put.it in its new posi- tion may be as fervent in our patriotism and love of liberty and right, as brave to act, and as willing to suffer as those who, over a century ago, hung it high in yonder hall. Is it plain and humble ? It has always been so of emblems that tell of deeds and purposes really great. 36 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Whence came the word " Puritan " but from a word of derision, adopted afterwards in honor and pride ? Whence the song of " Yankee Doodle," to whose tune Burgoyne laid down his arms at Saratoga and Cornwallis at Yorktown ? What song but that of " John Brown's Body," born on the march from soldiers' thought, led our country on through the long and flaming way to the freedom of the slave and a nation's regeneration ? The rugged bear has for years rep- resented the strength of the Russians. The symbol of the bee told of the great Napoleon. England's chancellors for hundreds of years have sat upon the woolsack in front of the throne. The rose and the simple cross of St. George tell the story of England's morning drumbeat. It was under the lilies of France that men followed the plume of Navarre. In all ages of the Church the brazen serpent has been the emblem of Christianity, and the cross upon which our Savior suffered has been the symbol under and before which a whole world worships. The plain codfish has, too, its own story. This nation's proudest glory is a story of war by sea, and Massachusetts has no greater honor than that her seamen stood upon the ships and manned the frigates by which those memorable and renowned victories were won. For it was with the fishermen of the capes and banks that Paul Jones drove before him, like petrels before the storm, the captains who fought under Nelson at Trafalgar. It was these seamen who went with Decatur up the harbor of Tripoli. It was our own Isaac Hull before whose flaming guns the Guerriere went down. These men manned the guns of the Constitu- tion and the President. They brought back the dead body of Lawrence up yonder harbor, wrapped in his country's flag; and in a. war which else had ended in disaster they taught England that her daughter was an empress of the sea. THE HISTORIC CODFISH. 37 Nor was their patriotism or valor confined to the seas which were their home. The little fishing town of Marble- head alone sent a whole regiment to the War of the Revolu- tion ; and there stands upon Commonwealth Avenue in this great city, whose wealth came largely from the cod fisheries, a statue telling how General Glover of Marblehead and his men carried Washington and his army across the almost impassable Delaware, and thus saved the Continental Army, its immortal leader, and its glorious cause. They were men from our own coast and harbors. They were your sons, Gloucester, gray Marblehead, and wind-scourged Essex. Nay, more, they were your sons, O proud and beautiful, our mother state. This emblem speaks in vibrant tones of danger met and glorious victories won. We hear the yearly uttered cry of sorrow and of anguish from Marblehead and Gloucester, when the fleet comes back bringing its pitiful story of acci- dent and death. It tells us of the remorseless sea that kills and buries not its dead ; of the young and strong that are torn from life by crushing ice and ravenous waves ; of the widow and her clinging orphans set face to face with poverty ; of eyes that weep uncomforted ; of hearts that break and never mend. For over a century that symbol has hung in the House of Representatives, for over a century in which Massa- chusetts has won her proud preeminence among the states. It saw there Lafayette, Kossuth, and the determined and silent Grant. It has seen most of our governors inaugurated with formal pomp and state. It heard Webster, Choate, and Shaw, as they discussed the constitution of the common- wealth. It heard the matchless voice of Phillips as he pleaded for the freedom of the slave and demanded the impeachment of the unjust judge. It may have heard Andrew as he prayed in his room at midnight that his 38 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. country might be spared, and again, after the sad years, in the council room which it faces, singing, when the news came that Vicksburg had fallen and Gettysburg was won, the old doxology of thanksgiving. It has heard coming up the windows, as they passed by the State House, the cheer- ing shouts, the playing bands, and the martial tread of marching men, as Massachusetts through four long years sent forth her chosen, her bravest, and her tenderest to free- dom's war. It knew when Bartlett of Pittsfield went by at the head of his regiment, the man in whom Sidney lived, fought, and died again; it heard the solemn, determined step of the colored regiment which Robert Shaw led on, in hope- less charge, to. death at Fort Wagner. It saw the Massa- chusetts dead brought tenderly back from Baltimore, the state's first sacrifice upon the bloody altar of war. And then, when the war was over and a nation builded anew, it saw that glad home coming when the battle flags came back; when up the streets and past the cheering thousands and through the wide gates of the capitol came the regiments, thin and shattered and wounded, bearing their crimsoned flags of war, and moving in a cloud of glory which time shall never dim. Let us take this emblem in reverence and honor and place it on high as one of the proudest decorations of this great hall ; and let it remain there so long as this State House shall stand, a memorial of the Pilgrim, his privations, and simplicity ; an emblem significant of the hardiness, courage, and faith of those who dare and defy the seas, and daily telling of the great and surpassing glories of Massa- chusetts and her sons. HOMES OF THE PEOPLE. 39 HOMES OF THE PEOPLE. PARKE GODWIN. WHEN I was a boy I read a book which was called, I think, Asmodeus. Although I have quite forgotten its con- tents, I remember the author represented his hero as capable of taking off the roofs of all the houses, and so exposing the goings on of the occupants. The object of this device was satirical. It was that he might picture by the contrast within and without the pretension, falsehood, selfishness, and hypocrisy that lurked behind the fairest external appearances. And now let us assume this Asmodean power of taking off the roofs of the houses in this city, for the sake of truth and charity. We shall show you as we lift the roofs that 700,000 persons, or nearly half the population of New York City, are huddled together in lodgments that would better suit the beasts or the savages than civilized human beings. As you and I know it, the home is the resort of peace and joy and love, the center of the sweetest and tenderest ties, diffusing its gentle influence outward over all society. By the magic of its charms, it sweetens all the intercourse of life and lifts our existence to the very precincts of the court of heaven. But are these rayless holes in the walls, are these musty and broken garrets, which the rains and winds of the welkin pierce but cannot cleanse, are these to be called our homes ? Alas ! They are the only homes which many of our people ever know. They are the places where intemperance is nursed ; where crime is cradled ; where pale-eyed famine and flushed fever lodge ; where the instincts of innocent childhood are stifled in their birth ; where modesty of girl- hood finds no sheltering veil ; where the sobs and sighs of mothers and wives go out in despair, while around them 4O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. roar the curses of drunken ribaldry and the cries of brutal violence. Need we wonder that from these cold and repulsive lairs, men hurry gladly to the light and warmth and temporary oblivion of the billiard saloon and the bar room? Need we wonder that ever and anon we read in our journals of those " God's loveliest temples " turned to ruin, whom, The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver, But not the black arch, Or the deep, flowing river. And who : Mad from life's history, Glad to death's mystery Swift to be hurled ; Anywhere, anywhere Out of the world. As out of the heart are the issues of individual life, so out of the home are the issues of social life. The home is an instrument of good or ill, mightier than the school or the press or the pulpit. You have your public schools, maintained at great expense of money and care, but you have also more powerful private schools, which unlearn what you teach and undo what you do. Nearly three hun- dred spires are rising from the bosom of our city to point, like finger posts, the way to the skies ; and in the stately structures they crown, three hundred eloquent voices every week ring out the words of wisdom and truth, but do those voices penetrate the bank of cloud that settles over the slums? Indeed, could the seed be sown in such soils, would it spring up in fruits and flowers and all lovely verdure, or in prickly brambles and choking weeds? My friends, you will return from this place to comfortable homes. As you enter a genial warmth will compensate the rigors of the weather, and perhaps a crackling fire upon JEAN VALJEAN S SACRIFICE. 4! the hearth will glow and smile its welcome. From the walls delicious landscapes, which the delicate fingers of art have transferred from every clime, will flash their springs and summers across the winter's cold. But, oh ! then remember that thousands like you have gone home to-night but to suffering and darkness; to gloomy and grimy chambers ; to children stricken with disease, or to hear of a brother's ruin or a sister's shame, or to start at a father's late returning tread, not with eager joy, but a shudder of fear. And re- member that what these are you, under other environ- ments, might have been, and what you are they, under other environments, might have become. JEAN VALJEAN'S SACRIFICE. VICTOR HUGO. JEAN VALJEAN, whose soul the good bishop had bought from evil and given to God, had kept his word. He had become a good man, a man with another but an honored name, a man of wealth and of noble deeds ; yes, he was even a mayor, so far had he escaped from his old life of the convict, the galley slave. But now another man had been mistaken for himself, his old self, for Jean Valjean. And so, as Victor Hugo tells us, Jean Valjean soliloquizes : " What if I denounce myself? I am arrested; this man is released; I am put back in the galleys; that is well and what then? What is going on here? Ah! here is a country, a town ; here are factories, an industry, workers, both men and women, aged grandsires, children, poor peo- ple ! All this I have created ; all these I provide with their 42 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. living. Everywhere where there is a smoking chimney it is I who have placed the brand on the hearth and meat in the pot. I have created ease, circulation, credit; before me there was nothing. I have elevated, vivified, informed with life, stimulated, enriched the whole country-side ; lack- ing me, the soul is lacking ; I take myself off, everything dies. " Well, this man is going to the galleys; it is true, 'but has he not stolen? There is no use in my saying that he has not been guilty of theft, for he has ! I remain here ; I go on ; in ten years I shall have made ten millions. It is not for myself that I am doing it; industries are aroused and animated ; factories and shops are multiplied ; fami- lies, a hundred families, a thousand families, are happy; wretchedness disappears, and with wretchedness debauchery, prostitution, theft, murder; all vices disappear, all crimes. Ah ! I was a fool ! I was absurd ! Yes, he thought, this is right; I am on the right road; I have the solution; let things take their course; this is for the interest of all, not for my own. I am Madeleine, and Madeleine I remain. Woe to the man who is Jean Valjean! I am no longer he." .He proceeded a few paces further; then he stopped short. " Come ! " he said, " I must not flinch before any of the consequences of the resolution which I have once adopted ; there are still threads which attach me to that Jean Valjean; they must be broken." He fumbled in his pocket, drew out his purse, opened it, and took out a small key. A secret receptacle opened, a sort of false cupboard constructed in the angle between the wall and the chimney-piece. In this hiding place there were some rags, a blue linen blouse, an old pair of trousers, an old knapsack, and a huge thorn cudgel shod with iron at both ends. Those who had seen Jean Valjean in October, 1815, could easily have recognized all the pieces in this JEAN VALJEAN S SACRIFICE. 43 miserable outfit. He had preserved them as he had pre- served the silver candlesticks, in order to remind himself continually of his starting-point. After the lapse of a few seconds, the room and the oppo- site wall were lighted up with a fierce, red, tremulous glow. Everything was on fire ; the thorn cudgel snapped and threw out sparks to the middle of the chamber. He did not look at the fire, but paced back and forth with the same step. All at once his eye fell on the two silver candlesticks, which shone vaguely on the chimney-piece through the glow. "Hold!" he thought; "the whole of Jean Valjean is still in them. They must be destroyed also." He stirred the live coals with one of the candlesticks. A minute more, and they were both in the fire. At that moment it seemed to him that he heard a voice within him shouting: " Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean! " His hair rose upright ; he became like a man who is lis- tening to some terrible thing. " Yes, that 's it ! finish ! " said the voice. " Complete what you are about ! Destroy these candlesticks ! Anni- hilate this souvenir ! Forget the bishop ! Forget every- thing ! That is good ! Be an honest man yourself ; remain Monsieur le Maire ; remain honorable and honored ; enrich the town; nourish the indigent; rear the orphan; live happy, virtuous, and admired ; and during this time, while you are here in the midst of joy and light, there will be a man who will wear your red blouse, who will bear your name in ignominy, and who will drag your chain in the galleys. Yes, it is well arranged thus. Ah, wretch ! Jean Valjean, there will be around you many voices, which will make a great noise, which will talk very loud, and which will bless you, and only one which no one will hear, and which will curse you in the dark. Well! listen, infamous man! All these benedictions will fall back before they 44 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. reach heaven, and only the malediction will ascend to God." He now recoiled in equal terror before both the resolu- tions at which he had arrived in turn. There was a moment when he reflected on the future. Denounce himself, great God! Deliver himself up! With immense despair he faced all that he should be obliged to leave, all that he should be obliged to take up once more. He should have to bid farewell to that existence which was so good, so pure, so radiant, to the respect of all, to honor, to liberty. He should never more stroll in the fields; he should never more hear the birds sing in the month of May ; he should never more bestow alms on the little children. Great God! instead of that, the convict gang, the iron necklet, the red waistcoat, the chain on his ankle, fatigue, the cell, the camp bed, all those horrors which he knew so well ! If he were only young again! but to be addressed in his old age as "thou" by any one who pleased; to be searched by the convict guard; to receive the galley sergeant's cudgellings; to wear iron-bound shoes on his bare feet ; to have to stretch out his leg night and morning to the hammer of the roundsman who visits the gang; to submit to the curiosity of strangers, who would be told : " That man yonder is the famous Jean Valjean." Oh, what misery ! Can destiny, then, be as malicious as an intelligent being, and become as monstrous as the human heart? And, do what he would, he always fell back upon the heart-rending dilemma which lay at the foundation of his revery: " Should he remain in paradise and become a demon? Should he return to hell and become an angel? " Ought he to denounce himself? Ought he to hold his peace? He only felt that, to whatever course of action he made up his mind, something in him must die ; that he was entering a sepulchre on the right hand as much as on the JOHN BROWN OF OSAWATOMIE. 45 left ; that he was passing through a death agony, the agony of his happiness or the agony of his virtue. Thus did this unhappy soul struggle in its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being in whom are summed up all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity had also long thrust aside with his hand, while the olive trees quivered in the wild wind of the infinite, the terrible cup which appeared to Him dripping with darkness and overflowing with shadows in the depths all studded with stars. JOHN BROWN OF OSAWATOMIE. (Anonymous.) THE heroism and perfection of John Brown's life and character quickened the cold lips of Ralph Waldo Emerson into words of praise like these : " His death has made the gallows glorious like the crown." He was great in the gran- deur of that mission which he accepted as his life work, and Christlike in dying for those whom he sought to save. The woes of the dusky children of the South sank deep into his heart. But when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was repealed, then the waters of the great deep in John Brown's rugged nature were broken up. Could he stand idly by while the pledges of years were unblushingly broken in Kansas, while pro-slavery rolled up her majorities at elec- tions by fraud and force ? Could he, John Brown, that grand defender of human rights, be party to the filching of Kansas ? No, never ! It was the crowning act of a half century of domineering that awoke in his breast that terri- ble resistance which never after rested nor slept. When we 46 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. read of the Battle of Osawatomie, we begin to realize that even in these latter days, with God and right on his side, one man can chase a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight. The purpose of John Brown to invade the South was not executed until his sons arrived at manhood. There were not men enough in all the North to make that crusade with him. He had to rear them up. But now that his sons were grown, hopefully, resolutely, prayerfully he went about his work. Gathering all his energies, he struck one brave blow and failed. Failed ! Oh, that more such failures were scattered along the shores of American history. Battle of Harper's Ferry ! Sublime spectacle ! On the one hand the united host of slavery. On the other, old John Brown with four sons and a score of devoted followers. Though he fought with the energy of Cceur de Lion, yet he failed. But if his Kansas struggle ended in defeat, his invasion of Virginia was a triumph. You saw him in Kan- sas where he went to purify the temple ; now see him in Virginia, writing on the Great Natural Bridge : " Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." See him on the floor of the engine house, mangled and torn, lying in his blood for thirty hours, questioned by politicians, insulted by the mob. Now see him as he marches forth to die. The mightiest sermon of his life he preached on that triumphal journey. You remember the lines : John Brown of Osawatomie, they led him out to die, When lo, a poor slave mother with her little child crept nigh ; Then the bold blue eyes grew tender and the old harsh face grew mild, As he stooped amid the jeering crowd, and kissed the negro child. With a countenance transfigured by the " peace of God," he ascends the scaffold and exchanges a " felon's cap " for the " Crown of Righteousness." JOHN A. LOGAN. 47 JOHN A. LOGAN. GEORGE R. PECK. ILLINOIS is proud and happy. Waiting patiently for a fitting time, she opens all her welcoming gates and bids the world take note what breed of men she rears. Here is the product of her soil, and here she brings a mother's exultant heart to be enshrined. Some are here to whom it seems but yesterday. They remember the clustering pines, the thickets, dark with the foliage of July, the spires of Atlanta wooing them forward yet a little further, and they remember, too, as they will remember always, the message, speeding like an arrow in its flight, that told how McPherson lay dead in his harness ere yet his fame had passed its dawn. On that day, July 22, 1864, John A. Logan was born to immortality. Here we place his image for all generations. Here we salute the soldier, the statesman, and the man, in memory of that sublime moment when he took into his keeping the flag, the issue, and the cause. The soldier in battle does not conspicuously arrange dra- matic situations. When John A. Logan, summoned by destiny, rode, sabered and spurred, along those bleeding lines, beautiful in the deep sense that makes the heroic always beautiful, he little thought of the banners that wave for him to-day. That day at Atlanta had none of the romantic surroundings which give artificial renown to battle- fields. No pyramids, hiding the grim secrets of the cen- turies, looked down upon them. It was not Lodi, where a general could dash across a bridge to victory. There were no narrow paths to glory. It was breast-to-breast fighting, such as seldom comes in any war, a confused mass strug- gling against an enemy that was everywhere. And in the midst of them was Logan, chief not because of his 48 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. epaulets, but because the command had fallen on one who knew what to do and could not breathe until it was done. He is past all flattery. Shall we call him brave ? Others have worn that crimson badge. Great men become types. The people single them out with the ready common sense which belongs to no man but to all men. Logan is our great volunteer. So they have named him, and so will he be known when we are forgotten. Whatever is heroic they can make classic. In calling him the great volunteer we have, unwittingly, done injustice to Logan. He was not a mere fighter. He had a rare genius for leadership. Ask those who served with him, and they will answer : " Men whom Logan led never turned back." Only a comprehen- sive mind can take events as they come and mould them to its will as if they had been ordered in advance. Regiment, brigade, division, corps, army, these are the steps he took. He, more than any other, created the Grand Army of the Republic, that organization which makes us remember what we are prone to forget. Here his form will sleep forever, guarded by them and by those who follow them. I greet you, comrades, in memory of our great commander, and in memory of the old days and the old cause. It was he who gaye us the sweet observance of Memorial Day. Only a poet could have thought it ; only a poet could have made it come true. It is above all others our best-loved holiday, our festival of memory, love, and beauty. We shall keep it forever, with all the flowers that grow upon the prairies and in the gardens of Illinois. And there will be tears. Men of the South, the Grand Army welcomes you, the Loyal Legion welcomes you, Illinois welcomes you, and the nation greets you with an open hand. Brave men cannot hate you forever. If we conquered you once, you have, in a beautiful sense, conquered us to-day, when you mingle your love with ours for the heroic, for the patriotic, and KNIGHTS OF LABOR. 49 surely I may say it for the flag which has been saved for us all. Here we make a sacred place. Here we consecrate a name already consecrated in our bravest annals. We give the statue to the world, in the presence of the wife he loved and honored, and whom we love and honor. His children and his children's children are here to learn how great a name they bear. He is not ours alone ; but yet we claim him. In coming years the throngs that crowd the avenue will see a silent figure always on duty. They will know and all the world will know it is Logan. Illinois has kept her trust. KNIGHTS OF LABOR. T. V. POWDERLY. WE are Knights of Labor because we believe that law and order should prevail, and that both should be founded in equity. We are Knights of Labor because we believe that the thief who steals a dollar is no worse than the thief who steals a railroad. To remedy the evils we complain of is a difficult and dangerous undertaking. The need of strong hearts and active brains was never so great as at the present time. The slavery that died twenty-two years ago was terrible, but the lash in the hands of the old-time slave owner could strike but one back at a time, and but one of God's poor, suffering children felt the stroke. The lash of gold in the hands of the new slave owner falls not upon one slave alone, but upon the backs of millions, and among the writhing, tortured victims, side by side with the poor and the ignorant, are to be found the well-to-do and the educated. The power of the new slave owner does not end when the ordinary day laborer bends beneath his rule ; it reaches out OF - 50 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. still further, and controls the mechanic, the farmer, the mer- chant, and the manufacturer. It dictates not alone what the price of labor shall be, but regulates the price of money as well. Do I overestimate its power? Have I made a single misstatement ? If my word is not sufficient, turn to the pages of the history of to-day, the public press, and you will find the testimony to prove that what I have said is true. The lash was stricken from the hand of the slave owner of twenty-five years ago, and it must be taken from the hand of the new slave owner as well. The monopolist of to-day is more dangerous than the slave owner of the past. Monopoly takes the land from the people in million- acre plots; it sends its agents abroad, and brings hordes of uneducated, desperate men to this country; it imports igno- rance, and scatters it broadcast throughout the land. While I condemn and denounce the deeds of violence committed in the name of labor during the present year, I am proud to say that the Knights of Labor, as an organization, is not in any way responsible for such conduct. He is the true Knight of Labor who with one hand clutches anarchy by the throat and with the other strangles monopoly. The man who still believes in the " little red schoolhouse on the hill " should take one holiday and visit the mine, the factory, the coal breaker, and the mill. There, doing the work of men, he will find the future citizens of the Republic, breathing an atmosphere of dust, ignorance, and vice ! The history of our country is not taught within these walls. The struggle for independence and causes leading to that struggle are not spoken of there ; the name of Washington is unknown, and the words that rang out trumpet-tongued from the lips of Patrick Henry are never mentioned. The little red schoolhouse must fail to do its work properly, since the children of the poor must pass it by on the road to the workshop. How can they appreciate the duties of citizen- KNIGHTS OF LABOR. 5! ship when we do not take the trouble to teach them that to be an American citizen is greater than to be a king, and that he upon whom the mantle of citizenship is bestowed should part with his life before surrendering one jot or tittle of the rights and liberties which belong to him. Turn away from these hives of industry, stand for a moment on a street corner, and you will see gayly capari- soned horses driven by a coachman in livery; a footman occupying his place at the rear of the coach is also dressed in the garb of the serf. On the coach door you will find the crest or coat of arms of the illustrious family to whom it belongs. If you speak to the occupant of the coach con- cerning our country, her institutions, or her flag, you will be told that they do not compare with those of foreign coun- tries. The child who graduates from the workshop dons the livery of a slave, covers his manhood, and climbs to the footman's place on the outside of the coach. The man who apes the manners and customs of foreign noblemen occupies the inside. The one who with strong heart and willing hands would defend the rights and liberties of his country has never learned what these rights or liberties are. The other does know, but has learned to love the atmosphere of monarchy better than that which he breathes in this land. Between these two our freedom is in danger, and that is why we as Knights of Labor most emphatically protest against the introduction of the child to the workshop until he has attained his fourteenth year, so that he may be enabled to secure for himself the benefits of an education that will enable him to understand and appreciate the blessings of our free institutions and, if necessary, defend them with his life. $2 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE LAST NIGHT OF MISOLONGHI, FROM "ANDRONIKE." Translated from the Greek by EDWIN A. GROSVENOR. IT was eight o'clock at night. The besieged, at the given signal, had gathered at the eastern batteries of Rhegas and Montalembert, from which they purposed to make their sortie. Three thousand combatants, some of them wounded and convalescent, were to head the sally, and cut a way for the thousand artisans and five thousand women and children who followed. " This is the plan of the sortie," said Notis Botsaris, the Nestor of the day. " By these four wooden bridges we shall pass out in the utmost silence. We shall collect in front of our bastions, Rhegas and Montalembert. You," he said, turning to the soldiers, " will fall on your faces and remain so until we give the signal to attack. Then rush against those two towers, which Ibrahim Pasha has built over against us. You," he said, turning to the guard, " as soon as you receive the signal, will divide into two bodies. One body, composed of all the guards on that side of the bastion of Montalembert, will cut through the middle of Reshid's camp. The Albanians are there, so it will be the most difficult part of the undertaking. The rest, with the women and children and the unarmed, are to strike through the Arabs of Ibrahim. All those who survive are to meet at the vineyard of Cotzicas, that is, at the foot of Mount Aracynthus near the Monastery of Saint Symeon. " It is time to separate. Courage, brothers ! Patience and courage ! We stand alone, and yet all Europe admires our valor. Immortal is he who falls to-night, and thrice im- mortal whoever survives to take vengeance for the slain." THE LAST NIGHT OF MISOLONGHI. 53 Only ten minutes later the pathetic scene of separation was enacted on the seashore. The aged, the sick, and many of the inhabitants, who, unwilling to leave the place of their birth, were to stay in the city, in tears were embrac- ing and parting from their children, brothers, parents, kin- dred, and friends. Those moments were heartbreaking. Families were being torn asunder. Each last kiss was followed by a moan. The fiercest warriors wept upon that blood-stained soil, and many a stolid heart was moved, hesitated, and shrank back. An aged, gray-haired man advanced and wished to speak. It was the primate Chrestos Capsalis. A sad silence for a moment interrupted the lamentations. " Come, unconquered souls of my sacrifice, end all this. For the name of Christ, let the rest go out ! " cried the primate. " These moments are precious. Follow me! I will lead you to a place where, if the barbarians dare approach, you shall find greater glory than these kindred from whom you are now separated." So ended this scene of parting. Chrestos Capsalis led the women and children and the few volunteers, who were to stay, inside the powder magazine, where were thirty kegs of powder. There he was prepared to make to Ares a burnt offering, not indeed of quadrupeds, of bulls and horses, but of human lives. At that same moment the women and children, with the rest, issued from the city. The hail of hostile bullets whistled all around them. In the storm wide graves yawned for the vanguard of the Greeks. Yet neither the cannon balls nor the lances nor the hand-arms of the Arabs were able to check the onset of the first line. Quickly they swept beyond the place of greatest slaughter, dispersed the infantry, leaped upon the outworks, and cut down like cattle the Egyptian gunners and the French officers beside their own guns. 54 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. But on the way they came upon a thousand other inhab- itants in a straggling rabble. While ready to divide into two sections, as Notis Botsaris had directed, and to follow their intrepid vanguard, they had suddenly become panic- stricken and fallen into confusion. Every tongue began to shout the fatal cry: "Back! back to Misolonghi!" No one knows who uttered it first, or why any heart gave way. Huddled together, they were crowding to the city as the Mussulman masses, rolling back and around, poured in from the other end or entered with them. Picture those barbaric hordes, which through thirteen months had been thirsting for the city's blood. Each street became a slaughterhouse, each house a human altar. The mothers of western Greece were not the Sciot women of Ionia. The old men and the sick still had drops of warlike blood in their veins. Three times the Mussulmans rushed upon them, and three times they were driven back by stones and sticks and the chance weapons of despair. Here valor was pitted against valor, despair against feroc- ity, self-sacrifice against cruelty, heroism against rapine, scorn and contempt against threats and blasphemies. Inter- mittent pistol shots, clash of swords, conflagration of houses and bastions, moans of the expiring, wild yells of the con- querors, taunts of the despairing repeated on earth the scenes of hell. There might be seen some barefooted maiden with marble bosom and bare arm intrepidly defend- ing a dying brother. There, a mother was throwing a babe into a well and then springing after it, that she might not become the prey of the dissolute Mussulman who was seek- ing to enslave her. In those black streets, in the dust of the ground, on the balconies of the houses rolled Greek and Arab, Greek and Turkoman, Greek and Albanian, locked in close embrace, teeth set in each other's flesh, THE LAST NIGHT OF MISOLONGHI. 55 struggling each to destroy the other, agonizing each to thrust his sword first into the other's breast. During those crucial moments Capsalis passed from one end of the house containing the powder to the other, encouraging all. The Turks thought that here were concealed all the treasures of the city. As they heard no gunshots, but only women's voices, their idea became confirmed, and they rushed upon it in crowds from every direction. Some tried to get in by the windows, others by breaking down the doors, others by climbing on the roof, in hopes of cutting their way through, and so leaping in. The doors were already broken through, the steel of the Mussulman clanged ominously, when Chrestos Capsalis, standing, said : " Remember us, Lord, in thy kingdom ! To the everlasting life, brothers ! " He plunged in his torch and the awful explosion fol- lowed. The solid ground was torn open, and the sea from the lagoon poured in. Some were drowned, who, after being shot into the air, fell back, half burned to the earth. Two thousand Turks found death around Capsalis, and five hundred more in the neighboring houses. We are not reck- oning on the Greeks. Out of the six thousand only twelve hundred mutilated beings survived to endure slavery. That was the most awful night which the Greek revolution saw. 56 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. LAW AND HUMANITY. RAYMOND N. KELLOGG. THE noted divine, Richard Hooker, once said, " Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world ; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power." This is the ideal of law. It is a power which is to be the stronghold of the weak, the refuge of the op- pressed, and the vindication of wrong. And yet how long have the centuries waited to make actual this ideal. The Greek, with all his splendid achievements in art and litera- ture, had no thought of law as one with humanity. In his statutes, written or unwritten, he was little better than the savage. Hooker gave the world his ideals three centuries ago; yet even up to the middle of the present century humanity was bound in chains. Not until then, did slavery hear in our own land a young senator from Massachusetts proudly assert that the Constitution of the United States did not recognize slavery, that slavery was sectional, that liberty was national. Nor was it until the tread of Sherman's soldiers echoed through the state represented by John Rutledge, half a century before, that we could ask, was not John Rutledge wrong when he said, " Religion and humanity have nothing to do with this question " ? and was not George Mason right, as he declared, " Providence punishes national sin by national calamities"? Then it was, but not until then, that we could say with the Oxford student who chose America for his home because America is the home of liberty, that, " Above all nations is humanity." Yes, above all nations is humanity, and Charles Sumner expressed again this same sentiment in the last words which he ever LAW AND HUMANITY. 57 publicly spoke in Massachusetts, when he said, " Nor would I have my country forget at any time, in the discharge of its transcendent duties, that the greatest nation is that which does the most for humanity." The history of social progress may be read, not in the magnificent material monuments of our age for other ages have reared monuments still more magnificent but on the statute books in those laws which condemn cruelty, which limit power, which restrain the strong and protect the weak. Listen to Lord Shaftsbury as in the English Parliament he pleads the cause of the children. Through his ceaseless efforts the mines have been investigated, and in them have been found children from four to twelve years of age doing the labor of beasts, because human flesh and blood have been cheaper than the labor of horses. All day long, from twelve to fourteen hours, these little slaves toiled wearily on in dark and horrible labyrinths. And so day and night, little children worked in the factories, amidst the burring din of machinery, in the sickening smell of oil with which the axles of thousands of wheels and spindles were bathed. For all day, the wheels are droning, turning ; Their wind comes in our faces, Till our hearts turn, our heads with pulses burning, And the walls turn in their places : Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling, Turns the long light that drops adown the wall, Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling, All are turning, all the day, and we with all. And all day, the iron wheels are droning, And sometimes we could pray, O ye wheels, Stop ! be silent for to-day. Yes, Mrs. Browning's " Cry of the Children " was indeed heard. The law, through the devotion of Lord Shaftsbury 58 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. to their sad cause, threw about them its protecting arm and made this outrage upon humanity illegal. Let us add another chapter to that record of advancing civilization which this closing century shall have to its account; and, with all this great advance in the embodiment of humanity and law, may we not believe that the prophecy of Victor Hugo is something more than a dream, when he tells us, that " a day will come when the only battlefield will be the market open to commerce and the mind opening to new ideas. A day will come when a cannon ball will be exhibited in public museums, just as an instrument of tor- ture is now. A day will come when the United States of America and the united states of Europe shall be seen extending the hand of fellowship across the ocean, exchang- ing their products, their industries, their arts, their genius, clearing the earth, peopling the deserts, improving creation under the eye of the Creator, and uniting for the good of all, these two irresistible and infinite powers, the fraternity of men and the power of God." THE "LITTLE DAVID" OF NATIONS. WILLIAM C. DUNCAN. AMONG the inspiring pictures that history has given us, few make the pulse beat quicker, or the heart glow with a warmer sympathy than the story of the stripling David and his battle with the giant Philistine. Fresh from the simple life of a Jewish shepherd boy, he reached the field of battle to find the army of his people in dismay, and a haughty giant heaping insults on the God he feared. With childlike wonder he asked the question : " Who is this uncircumcised THE "LITTLE DAVID" OF NATIONS. 59 Philistine that lie should defy the army of the living God ? " and, with the simple courage of the young hero he was, he resolved to stake his life for his people and his people's God. More than three thousand years have passed since that country lad, with his shepherd's sling, put to flight the army of the Philistines and slew their champion, Goliath of Gath. No giant of enormous stature threatens our lives or blas- phemes our God, but the old battle between the hordes of the Philistines and the army of the living God is still on. We have seen the Ottoman Empire, insolent, cruel, and haughty in its disregard for the Christian nations, commit atrocities upon the helpless Armenian and Cretan Chris- tians, which make the very stones cry out for vengeance ; and we have seen the nations of Christ the King hesitating, trembling, doubting, dismayed before the bold defiance of the " unutterable Turk." The champion of a barbaric faith has stood forth, like Goliath of old, and cried : " I defy the Armies of Israel this day; give me a man that we may fight together " ; and among all the company of the Nations of the Living God it is Greece, the little shepherd boy from the pastures of Thessaly, who has taken up the seemingly unequal contest. And even this is not sufficient. The David of long ago fought against apparently overwhelming odds, but the battle once begun all Israel cheered him on. Greece in her struggle of to-day did not have even the aid of the neutral- ity of those who should be her strongest allies. On the contrary, she looked about her to see the Ottoman Empire in arms against her, and Christian Europe ready to tie her hands, or drive her altogether from the field. Diplomacy, political ambition, and the "balance of power," and, most contemptible of all, financial considerations closed the ears of Europe's rulers against the demands of Christianity and common justice. 6O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. It is a humiliating spectacle. Humiliating to the man who feels anything of the shame and disgrace which must be attached to the name " Christian " in the eyes of the world at large; humiliating to the man who fosters one spark of deep, religious sentiment in his being; humiliating to the man who believes the law of nations should be the law of God. But, thank God, it is a glorious spectacle, too ! We have seen Greece, the " Little David " of nations, least of all his kin, step boldly forward in the name of all his truest nature holds dear and sacred, and, with no fear in his heart but the fear of his God, fit the pebble to the shep- herd's sling. And, if there is still a God in heaven, I believe, whatever the prudential criticism of a commercial age, he looks down on that brave little people and cries : " Well done, thou good and faithful servant! " Only a few months ago, Greece saw a revival of the old Olympic games, the glory of her proudest days. She saw alien after alien win the olive branch of victory, and heeded it not. But when the Marathon race was on, the old spirit awoke, and Greece, the conqueror of the world, was alive again. Every Greek breast heaved and every Greek heart beat fast during those painful hours of suspense. It was not the sturdy runner of to-day toiling toward that goal. It was Phidippides of old, panting, struggling, dying even, but bringing the glad news of victory. And when the foremost runner swept into view, and the vast assembly knew that it was a Greek breast that should cut the silken cord at the finish, tears of joy coursed down the dusky cheeks of his countrymen, for the honor of Greece had been upheld. May that glorious victory be but the earnest of a greater triumph in some not distant day, when the Armies of the Aliens shall bow before the servants of the true God and the " Little David " of nations be victorious ! MACAULAY. 6l MACAULAY. WILLIAM M. PUNSHON. IT has not been an unfrequent charge against Macaulay that he had no heart. He who has no heart of his own cannot reach mine and make it feel. There are instincts in the soul of a man which tell him unerringly when a brother soul is speaking. Let me see a man in earnest, and his earnestness will kindle mine. I apply this test in the case of Macaulay. I am told of the greatest anatomist of the age suspending all speculations about the mastodon and all analyses of the lesser mammalia, beneath the spell of the sorcerer who drew the rout at Sedgemoor and the siege of Derry. I see Robert Hall, lying on his back at sixty years of age, to learn the Italian language, that he might verify Macaulay's description of Dante, and enjoy the " Inferno " and the " Paradise " in the original. Who cannot remem- ber the strange, wild heart throbs with which he reveled in the description of the Puritans, and the first article on Bun- yan ? There is something in all this more than can be explained by artistic grouping or by the charms of style. The man has convictions and sympathies of his own, and the very strength of those convictions and sympathies forces an answer from the " like passions " to which he appeals. Critics charge him with carelessness, but it is in flippant words. If he is said to exaggerate, not a few of them out- Herod him. Moreover, for the very modes of their censor- ship they are indebted to him. They bend Ulysses' bow. They wield the Douglas brand. His style is antithetical, and therefore they condemn him in antitheses. His sen- tences are peculiar, and they denounce him in his own tricks of phrase. There can be no greater compliment to any man. The critics catch the contagion of the malady 62 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. which provokes their surgery. The eagle is aimed at by the archers, but " he nursed the pinion which impelled the steel." Before Macaulay wrote, history for the masses of English readers was as the marble statue ; he came, and by his genius struck the statue into life. We thank him that he has made history readable. We thank him that it is not in his page the bare recital of facts, names, and deeds inven- toried as in auctioneer's catalogue, but a glowing portraiture of the growth of a great nation, and of the men who helped or hindered it. We thank him that he has disposed forever of that shallow criticism, that the brilliant is always the superficial and unworthy, and that in the inestimable value of his work he has confirmed what the sonorous periods of John Milton, and the long-resounding eloquence of Jeremy Taylor, and the fiery passion tones of Edmund Burke had abundantly declared before him, that the diamond flashes with a rarer luster than the spangle. We thank him for the vividness of delineation by which we can see statesmen like Somers and Nottingham in their cabinets, marshals like Sarsfield and Luxembourg in the field, and men like Buck- ingham and Marlborough, who dallied in the council room and plotted at the revel. Above all, we thank Macaulay for the English-heartedness which throbs through his writings, and which was so marked a characteristic of his life. It may be well said of him, as he said of Pitt, " he loved his country as a Roman the city of the Seven Hills, as an Athenian the city of the Violet Crown." How he -kindles at each stirring or plaintive memory in the annals he was so glad to record! Elizabeth at Tilbury, the scattering of the fierce and proud Armada, the thrilling agony and bursting gladness which succeeded each other so rapidly at the siege of Derry, the last sleep of Argyle, the wrongs of Alice Lisle, the prayer upon whose breath fled the spirit of Algernon Sydney, they touch his THE MAN FOR THE CRISIS. 63 very soul, and he recounts them with a fervor which becomes contagious, until his readers are thrilled with the same joy or pain. Not far from the place of his sepulture are the tablets of Gay, and Rowe, and Garrick, and Goldsmith. On his right, sleeps Isaac Barrow, the ornament of his own Trinity Col- lege ; on his left, no clamor breaks the slumber of Samuel Johnson. From a pedestal at the head of the grave, serene and thoughtful, Addison looks down. From the opposite sides Shakespeare, the remembrancer of mortality, reminds us from his open scroll that the " great globe itself, and all that it inhabit, shall dissolve, and, like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a rack behind "; and Handel, comforting us in our night of weeping by the glad hope of immortality, seems to listen while they chant forth his own magnificent hymn : " His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth forevermore." THE MAN FOR THE CRISIS. ADAPTED. THAT General Garfield was the man for the crisis is illus- trated by his famous ride from General Rosecrans to General Thomas, during the critical Battle of Chickamauga. In this battle the Army of the Cumberland was almost routed. In order to enable General Thomas to meet the rebel General Longstreet, it was necessary for him to know the condition of Rosecrans' forces. It is at this crisis that, as chief of staff, Garfield proposes to undertake the fearful ride. Rosecrans hesitates, then says : " As you will, general." Giving Garfield his hand, 64 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. he adds while his face shows his emotion : " We may not meet again. Good-by ; God bless you ! " Then they part, and Garfield begins his perilous ride. To guide the way, Captain Gaw and two orderlies go with Garfield. They make a wide detour to avoid the Con- federates, and by the route they take, it is eight miles of tangled wood and open road before they can get to Thomas, while at any turn they may come upon the enemy. They have left Rossville a thousand yards behind, when suddenly from along the left of the road a volley of a thou- sand minie balls falls among them, thick as hail, wounding one horse, killing another, and stretching the two orderlies on the ground lifeless. Garfield is mounted on a magnificent horse that knows his rider's bridle hand as well as he knows the fence which he leaps into the cotton field. The opposite fence is lined with gray blouses, and a single glance tells Garfield that they are loading for another volley. He has been in tight places before, but this is the tightest. Putting his lips firmly together, he says to himself : " Now is your time ; be a man, James Garfield." He speaks to his horse, and, putting the rowels into his side, Garfield takes a zigzag course across the cotton field. It is his only chance ; he must tack from side to side, for he is a dead man if they get a steady aim upon him. Up the hill he goes, tacking, when another volley bellows out from the timber. His horse is struck a flesh wound but the noble animal only leaps forward the faster. Scattering bullets whiz by the rider's head, but he is within a few feet of the summit. Another volley echoes along the hill when he is half over the crest; but in a moment more, as he tears down the slope, a small body of mounted bluecoats gallop forward to meet him. At their head is General McCook, his face anxious and pallid. " My God, Garfield ! " he cries, " I THE MAN FOR THE CRISIS. 65 thought you were killed. How you have escaped is a miracle." Garfield's horse had been struck twice, but no matter ; at a breakneck pace they go forward through plowed fields and tangled woods, and over broken and rocky hills, for four weary miles, till they climb a wooded crest and are within sight of Thomas. Shot and shell and canister plow up the ground all about Garfield, but in the midst of it he halts, and with uplifted right arm and eyes full of tears, he shouts as he catches sight of Thomas : " There Tie is, God bless the old hero ! he has saved the army ! " Then he plunges down the hill through the fiery storm, and in five minutes more is by the side of Thomas, and has delivered his message. Turn now to another scene in the life of General Garfield. It was the morning after President Lincoln's assassination. The country was excited to its utmost tension, and New York City seemed ready for the scenes of the French Revo- lution. The intelligence of Lincoln's murder had been flashed by the wires over the whole land. Fear took pos- session of men's minds as to the fate of the government. It was a dark and terrible moment. Eleven o'clock was the hour set for the meeting. Fifty thousand people had gathered, cramming and jamming and wedged in tight as men could stand together. Not an hurrah was heard, but for the most part dead silence, or a deep ominous muttering, which ran like a rising wave up the street toward Broadway, and again down toward the river on the right. Soon two long pieces of scantling crossed at the top like the letter " X " stood out above the heads of the crowd. As a dozen men followed its slow motion through the masses, " Vengeance " was the cry. On the right suddenly the shout arose: "The World! The World! The office of the 66 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. World!" It was a critical moment; what might come next no one could tell. Police and military would have availed little, for a telegram had just been read from Wash- ington : " Seward is dying." Just at that juncture a man stepped forward with a small flag in his hand, and beckoned to the crowd. "Another telegram from Washington." And then, in the awful silence of the crisis, a right hand was lifted skyward, and a voice, clear and steady, loud and distinct, spoke out : " Fellow citizens, clouds and darkness are round about Him. His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. Justice and judgment are the establishment of His throne. Mercy and truth shall go before His face. Fellow citizens, God reigns and the government at Washington still lives." The effect was instantaneous. The crowd stood riveted to the ground, gazing at the motionless orator, thinking of God and the security of the government. As the boiling wave subsides and settles to the sea when some strong wind beats it down, so the tumult of the people sank and became still. What might have happened had the swaying and mad- dened mob been let loose, none can tell. The man for the crisis was on the spot. It was the hero of the famous ride of Chickamauga. THE MISSION OF THOMAS HOOD. 6/ THE MISSION OF THOMAS HOOD. ADAPTED. THERE is no more worthy mission for the poet than to teach the doctrine of human brotherhood. This Thomas Hood selected as his mission. He could not, like Peabody, build hospitals, nor, like Cooper, open the avenues of educa- tion to all, nor, like Howard, descend to the dungeons of crime ; but he entered the garret and cellar of pinching poverty, beheld their secret miseries, despairs, and dumb agonies, and then unrolled them to the sight of Christendom. But his mission was not simply to point out sorrow in the dwellings of the lowly. The great heart of England must be set throbbing with loving kindness, its people stirred to a grand human impulse. In a cheerless London attic sits a seamstress. The stars shine through the broken roof; the shivering wind creeps in and stings her through her scanty robe. In her wretched- ness she is not unknown. She has become the subject of elaborate essays ; eloquent divines have protested against her miseries in the name of Christ ; statesmen have viewed her at a distance; and, although the ear of England has been reached, its sluggish heart is yet unstirred. But the poet sits beside her, counts with pitying eye the stitches of her weary needle, looks at the testimony of her bitter tears, hears her helpless groans, and then, rising, vows in the name of humanity that her wrongs shall be known to the limits of the race. And so you hear the voice of the po.or in the verse of the poet philanthropist, now choking under the pressure of its sorrow, now sinking down to the whisper of weakness, now shuddering up into the laughter of despair : O, men, with sisters dear ! O, men, with mothers and wives ! 68 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. It is not linen you 're wearing out, But human creature's lives. Stitch, stitch, stitch, In poverty, hunger, and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread A shroud as well as a shirt. England pauses, listens, and takes up the energy of a more vital charity. The poet has given that " one touch of nature" which " makes the whole world kin." The old paralysis of national selfishness, if not healed, is lessened, and Hood's song becomes the potent rebuke of greed and cold-hearted- ness in every home, and the inspiration of love as the law of nations. It is a rare and most solemn praise of any man to say of him that he has bettered mankind. Thomas Hood has fully earned that plaudit. He altered the tone of public feeling, expounded the humane sentiment, and employed the genius of a poet in fields which others may not explore. Sternest and most inflexible virtue must needs melt under the fire of his love for the forlorn creature who has flung herself from London Bridge into the dark waters of the Thames. As he stands over the poor dead child of sin, what does he find to say ? He goes down to the depths of her miseries, tries her before the bar of his own soul, and the verdict is : Touch her not scornfully ; Think of her mournfully, Gently, and humanly. Not of the stains of her ; All that remains of her Now is pure womanly. It is not for you, unspotted man, pure woman, to sit in hard inquest, but MORAL COURAGE. 69 Cross her hands humbly, As if praying dumbly, Over her breast. Owning her weakness, Her evil behavior, And leaving, with meekness Her sins to her Savior. Oh, that is the Christlike spirit ! It whitens not the black aspect of sin, but it turns the sympathy of the heart in the channel of the love of that Christ, who went to the worst grades of human life to seek and save that which was lost. The "Song of the Shirt" and the "Bridge of Sighs" embody the mission of Thomas Hood. Into the strong heart of the world's indifference they have thrust pity for the poor and sinful, and warmth into the blighted life of the lonely and sunken. Tearing off the covering of vice, they have implanted a stronger hatred of it, and have given currency to the grand old principle of charity. MORAL COURAGE. F. W. FARRAR. ONE morning among the high Alps, I happened to be standing on a glacier which lay deep beneath a circle of stupendous hills, when the first beam of sunrise smote the highest summit of Monte Rosa. As I gazed from, the yet unbroken darkness of the valley, so vivid was the luster of that ray of gold upon the snow, that it looked like a flame of intensest crimson ; and even while I gazed, the whole " pomp and prodigality of heaven " began to be unfolded before me. Mountain crest after mountain crest caught the 7O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. splendor, and it flowed down their mighty crags in rivers of ever-broadening gold, until not only was the east full of glowing flame, but the west, too, echoed back the dawn in bright reflection. The peaks which had caught the earliest blaze were lost in blue sky and boundless light and it was day. So I never think of the heroes of earth without recalling to memory those sunlit hills. And, oh, it is good for us thus to lift up our eyes unto the hills ! It is good for us, in the midst of lives so inconsistent, so dwarfed, so conventional as ours, to bear in mind how much greater and better others have been. Their high examples teach us how we may rise above our nothingness. They show us how little we are when we live the selfish life of the world ; how great we may be, if we live as the Sons of God. But, since it would be vague to bid you excel in all virtues, I will point oat but one, such that, if you have it, all the rest will follow it. That virtue is moral courage. That courage which braves opinion in the cause of right, that courage which confronts tyranny to protect the weak. Take one of the most conspicuous instances which history affords. The veteran Stilicho had conquered Alaric and his Goths. The Romans invite the hero and his ward, a stupid, cowardly boy, to gladiatorial games in honor of the victory. The empire had been Christian for more than a hundred years, yet those infamous and brutalizing shows still continue. The games begin. Tall, strong men enter the arena. The tragic cry echoes through the amphitheater : " Hail, Caesar ! Death, we salute thee ! " The swords are drawn, and at an instant's signal down into the arena leaps a rude, ignorant monk, who, however rude and ignorant, can tear to pieces by the strength of moral courage all these devil's cobwebs of guilty custom and guilty acquiescence. " The gladiators shall not fight ! " he exclaims. " Are you NAPOLEON'S AMBITION AND SHELLEY'S DOUBT. 71 going to thank God by shedding innocent blood ? " A yell of execration rises from those eighty thousand spectators. " Who is this impudent wretch who dares to set himself up as knowing better than we do ? Who dares to accuse eighty thousand people, Christians too, of doing wrong ? Down with him ! Pelt him ! Cut him down ! " Stones are hurled at him. The gladiators, angry at his interference, run him through with their swords. He falls dead, and his body is kicked aside. The games go on, and the people, Christians and all, shout applause. Ay, the games go on, but for the last time ! The eyes of the people are opened. The blood of a martyr is on their souls ; shame stops for- ever the massacre of gladiators ; and because one poor, ignorant hermit has moral courage, " one more habitual crime is wiped away from the annals of the world." Is not looking at such a life as this like looking at a hill- top fired with the first beams of a rising sun ? We may be wandering in the darkness, but such lives as his are proof that the sun is risen. Such heroes are the prophecies of the coming day. NAPOLEON'S AMBITION AND SHELLEY'S DOUBT. WILLIAM DE SHON. THERE is an opinion that littleness must necessarily be mean, degrading, weak. But this is not so. Greatness is the child of inspiration. Without this divine power it becomes error ; and error, in any form, is littleness. Unin- spired greatness, therefore, is superior littleness. The genius of Napoleon embodied the three essential characteristics of a great general, forethought, abstraction, will. But underneath and permeating all was the stern pur- 72 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. pose that brooked no opposition, that knew no defeat. There are certain subterranean streams which roll their hidden waters through slowly wasting channels for many patient centuries. We look at the smiling hills above them, and say they are everlasting. But in the far-off future, every cascade will shimmer in the disfigured face of an undermined mountain. So beneath its calm exterior flowed the current of his will, biding patiently the time when it should burst its barriers to sweep away the thrones of kings and bear on its resistless tide the wreck of empires. Ambition was the all-absorbing littleness of Napoleon. Not that hackneyed word of many meanings, under which the nineteenth century has classed two-thirds of the human passions, but that ambition whose subtle purity Shakespeare defines, whose superior littleness Milton has demonized. Its flame kindled at the storming of the barricades in 1789, burned with its full glory at Austerlitz, paled at burning Moscow, flickered at Waterloo, arid went out in the tempest at St. Helena. Yet it had its mission. Forms, dogmas, bigotries, and exploded theories clogged the wheels of civilization. Con- servatism was powerless. Europe clamored for a reform. A fanatic appears. The sobs of a discarded wife, the death cry of a poor German bookseller, the wail of nations over their dead heroes hymn his march to empire. Armies slept unsentineled. Thrones tottered, Europe trembled. The world wondered. Then came Waterloo ; civilization resumed its joyful march, and the superior littleness of Napoleon had accomplished its mission. Percy Shelley was one of the few great-hearted men the world has seen. Endowed with a subtile purity and keen- ness of intellect, a classic beauty of expression, a yearning tenderness towards all of God's creatures, no poet appeals so tenderly to our love for the pure, the beautiful, the true, NAPOLEON'S AMBITION AND SHELLEY'S DOUBT. 73 to our respect for our fellow-men, to our heartfelt charity for human weakness, as Shelley. And yet the blue Mediterra- nean chanted a troubled requiem, when the light of his life went out in its waters. The sunny Italian sky looked grimly down when the sea sang hoarsely to rest her laureate. Doubt was the littleness of Shelley. At the foot of Mont Blanc, under the shadow of its awful presence, within sight of its eternal snows, within hearing of its sweeping ava- lanches, the startled traveler sees written on the face of the living rock : " P. Shelley, Atheist." Atheist ! and the sub- lime reverence of every snow-capped summit acknowledging the Creator. Atheist ! and the breathless solitude, unbroken save by the anthems of the avalanches, thrilling with divin- ity. No God ! and he a child of nature, a lover of the sim- plest flower, a worshiper of the tiniest bird. An infidel philanthropist ! and God alone the source of love. A doubt- ing reformer ! and right triumphing only through faith in the infinite. Mythology has it that Achilles, when a child, was dipped by his mother in the Styx to render him invulnerable. Through her oversight, however, a Greek hero, who had passed through countless battles unharmed, perished at last from a wound in the heel. So Mother Nature may immerse her children in the water of a pure humanity, thinking to render them invulnerable to the attacks of littleness ; but because of her mistake she will see the world's great battle- field strewn with her dead. 74 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN HISTORY. FRANK F. LAIRD. IT is an August day, 1620. A Dutch man-of-war has just anchored in the James River. A boat leaves the vessel, and as it approaches the little village on the right, the eager watchers on the beach catch a glimpse of its occupants, a group of captives. Thus opens the sad chapter that saddens every other chapter of our history. True, for nearly two hundred years the threatening shadow of the great wrong of slavery falls but lightly on the pages of the new world's annals. Yet it is always there, a present rebuke, a future menace. For thirty years the little band of Abolitionists exhausted argu- ment, appeal, denunciation. Politicians were bribed to silence, free speech was muzzled, the pulpit timorous or antagonistic, the press powerless. But justice could not be stifled, and civil war began. Tradition tells us of a blind old king who, unable to fight, rode into the thickest of the fray and fell ; and when the victors unfurled the tattered banner they found these words: " I serve." Actuated by the same heroic spirit, the negro responded to the call of our country. Not with the desper- ation of a patriot holding at bay the tyrant trampling upon his rights for, in the hour of our great need, the negro had no rights in the land which he defended ; not with the blind enthusiasm of mere soldiers rushing to a battle whose great aim and scope they little cared to know ; but with an intelligent loyalty and a sublime faith in the ultimate justice of the nation that kept every man firm in his place, and as true to his duty as the needle to the pole. On the morning of the 2Qth of September, 1864, the enemy held New Market Heights, on the north side of the THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 75 James River. On the plain below, by the side of that river, at whose mouth, nearly two and a half centuries before, had landed the first American slave, is an army of three thousand colored troops. Clear and distinct rings out the order : " That fort must be taken by the might of your column ; no shot must be fired ; your watchword shall be : ' Remember Fort Pillow.' Forward ! March ! " Steadily they advance till within one hundred yards of the fortress, when a murderous fire rains upon their column. The first line gives way, the second takes its place, and over the bodies of its fallen com- rades presses on to victory. But again comes that terrible fire. The colored sergeant advances reels falls. He regains his feet, and, summoning all his remaining strength, he shouts : " Come on, my boys, a little further ..." That sentence is never ended ; the boy falls mortally wounded. With his last dying breath he gasps : " Place the old flag on the heights." The line rushes forward with a yell, and the enemy never stop running for four miles. Hepworth Dixon once said : " In a fight one white man is worth ten negroes. The blacks will never stand fire." Ah, Mr. Dixon, you must have forgotten San Domingo and her negro hero ; forgotten that little color bearer who in the thickest of the fight said he would " carry the old rag till he fell"; forgotten Port Hudson, Battery Wagner, and New Market Heights. And now that through a nation's blood and struggles the negro has been emancipated and enfranchised, need it be said that he must be protected and educated in his rights as a citizen ? This is the warning which Theodore Parker once said : " The shadows of the empires buried long ago would send back from the inferno of the nations to our young republic : ' Tell him that justice is the unchangeable, everlasting will to give each man his rights. I knew it broke it, and am lost ; bid him keep it and be saved.' ' /6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE NEW ENGLANDER IN HISTORY. H. L. WAYLAND. THE honored daughter of Connecticut, the author of Uncle Tom and Dred, has said : " What is called good- ness is often only want of force." A good man, according to the popular idea, is one who does not get in anybody's way. A man who is dead is out of the way. We live in the home which he built, and are not disturbed by the chips and sawdust and noise, and perhaps the casualties and mis- takes, which attended its building. I will offer a definition, without charge, to the editors of the magnificent Century Dictionary : " Saint, a man with convictions who has been dead a hundred years ; canonized now, cannonaded then." We are building monuments now to the Abolitionists. It is quite possible that when a hundred winters shall have shed their snows upon the lowly grave at North Elba, the Old Dominion will take pride in the fact that she for a little while gave a home to the latest, I trust not the last, of the Puritans. And so it is quite possible that the traveler in 1959, as he goes through Harper's Ferry, may see upon the site of the old Engine House, looking out upon the regener- ate commonwealth, cunningly graven in bronze, copied per- haps from the bust in your own Union League, the undaunted features of John Brown ; and the South that is to be, stand- ing uncovered beside the grave of the Union soldier, will say : " It was for us, too, that he died," and will render beside the tomb of the capital city of Illinois a reverence akin to that which she pays amid the shades of Mt. Vernon. I pass over the time, two centuries ago, when Cromwell and Hampden, those New Englanders who had never seen New England, made themselves exceedingly offensive to Charles I, and gave him at last a practical lesson touching THE NEW ENGLANDER IN HISTORY. 77 the continuity of the spinal column. Later, when our fellow- citizens desired to " wallop their own niggers " and to carry the patriarchal institutions wherever the American flag went, they were naturally irritated at hearing that there was a handful of meddling fanatics down in Essex County who, in their misguided and malevolent ingenuity, had invented what they called liberty and human rights. Presently, when it was proposed to break up the Union in order to insure the perpetuity of slavery, then a man, plain of speech, rude of garb, descended from the Lincolns of Hingham in Plymouth County, sounded a rally for union and freedom. And hark ! there is the tramp, tramp of the fishermen from Marblehead ; there are the Connecticut boys from old Litchfield ; and there is the First Rhode Island ; and there are the sailors from Casco Bay ; and the farmers' sons from old Coos and from along the Union River, their hearts beating with the enthusiasm of liberty, while their steps keep pace with the drumbeat that salutes the national flag. And see ! is that a thunder cloud in the North ? No; it is the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, made up of American citizens of African descent, officered by the best blood in Suffolk, and at their head Robert Gould Shaw, going down to die in the trenches before Fort Wagner. And there is the man, descended from the Shermans of Connecticut, preparing for the march which is to cleave the Confederacy in twain. And there is the silent man, eight generations removed from Matthew Grant, who landed at Dorchester in 1630, destined to make the continent secure for liberty, and to inaugurate the New South, dating from Appomattox, with traditions of freedom teeming with a prosperity rivaling that of New England, a prosperity begotten of the marriage of labor and intelligence. 78 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE OPENING OF THE MISSISSIPPI IN 1862. WILLIAM E. LEWIS. RISING in the pine forests of the North, gathering with far extending arms the raindrops of a half continent, a royal river seeks the sea. The rebellion barred this river; so from the beginning of our civil war one purpose animated the great Northwest. It was the opening of the Mississippi. " On to Richmond ! " was the battle cry of the East ; " On to New Orleans!" the rallying shout of the West. Said General Sherman : " The possession of the Mississippi is the possession of America." On the 1 4th of March, 1862, our fleet, accompanied by a land force of forty thousand infantry, moved southward. Forts Henry and Donelson, on the Tennessee and Cumber- land, had been stormed and mastered; Columbus, "the Gibraltar of the West," evacuated. Then followed other victories. Besieged Fort Pillow yielded ; blustering Mem- phis capitulated ; the Union colors floated once more from the Chickasaw Bluffs; and on the ist of July the heroes of Island No. 10 and New Orleans mingled their cheers under the battlements of Vicksburg. Let us glance at other struggles even fiercer and grander which consummated this meeting. About seventy miles below New Orleans stood two magnificent fortresses with bastions and casemates of solid masonry. Below, an immense chain boom locked up the river. Above, to make New Orleans secure, to preclude the possibility of ascent, rams, gunboats, and fire rafts were stationed. " No fleet," said the South, " can pass up the river without miraculous inter- position." But Farragut was undaunted. " I came here to pass or reduce the forts and take New Orleans," he said, " and I shall try it." THE OPENING OF THE MISSISSIPPI IN 1862. 79 On the 1 6th of April the mortar boats open fire on Fort Jackson. Thirteen-inch shells whirl athwart the sky like meteors. Thrice a thousand rise from forts and fleet before evening falls. Four days of dissonance still the bombardment a failure. There is no sign of yielding. Far- ragut resolves on a desperate course, to cut the cable, run the batteries, capture or sink the rebel navy, and subdue the city. A midnight attack severed the boom. On the evening of April 23 all is in readiness. Up goes the signal to fall into line. Guided by the lurid glare of rebel beacon fires, the attacking squadrons breast the current in three columns. The forts open fire ; as the fleet draws near they become volcanoes, their casemates crevices of continuous flame. The foremost vessel, the Cayuga, steams toward the break in the boom, encounters a volley of red-hot shot ; reels ; recovers ; dashes through the chasm. One by one the armada follows. Now abreast, now above the forts. The pilots see beyond a gleam of light. It grows brighter. What is this new danger ? A river all aflame ! Turn back ? Repass the batteries ? Never! "Close action !" signals the Hartford, and leads the way. Nearer and nearer come the fire rafts. Higher and higher rise their billows of flame. The ram Manassas crowds a blazing raft against the flagship. Fiery flames lick the deck, leap up into the rigging, and envelop the frigate. Ashore and afire, sorely beset, yet her commander does not despair. The pumps are manned. The boarding flames are repelled. The Manassas is beaten off, and the " good old Hartford" dashes once more into the thickest of the fight. Who can recount the heroic achievements of that eventful night? How the Brooklyn swept through the fight, all aglow with incessant broadsides ! How the Varuna dashed into the midst of the enemy, fired her last shot, and went 8O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. down in the turbid waters, a fit casket for her noble dead. Titanic the conflict, decisive the victory. The rebel squad- ron is destroyed, the strongholds and city are conquered, the river is speedily opened to Vicksburg. The opening of the Mississippi terminated a crisis in the war. The North gained needed inspiration ; the South stood paralyzed before this omen of final defeat. The possession of the Mississippi was indeed the possession of America. THE ORATOR'S CAUSE. JOHN D. WRIGHT. IT is the popular cry now that the age of orators has passed in America. I tell you that there is enough true eloquence running latent in business and professional chan- nels to shake this mighty nation to its very roots. I rejoice at this seeming lack of orators. It is the most flattering sign of the peace and prosperity of these United States. Look over the world to-day, or look into history, and tell me at what periods nations have been renowned for their orators. Is it when their course was one of peaceful prosperity ? Far from it ! In our own land it was the days of the Revolution, of the anti-slavery struggle, and of the great war that freed the bondsmen. Why are the Irish a race of orators ? It is a pitiful answer. Because for centuries there have been tyranny and oppression goading them on to des- perate protests, forcing them to plead, and compelling them to threaten. Because this tyranny has left no place for him to speak who does not utterly forget himself, and thus become the living mouthpiece of the men and principles that he represents. THE ORATOR'S CAUSE. 81 But never, perhaps, in the history of the world has elo- quence produced more marvelous results than did that of Mr. Beecher in his brief anti-slavery campaign in England. It was a question of Parliament declaring for the Southern Confederacy, and you know what that meant. A vast mul- titude had gathered in Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, where Mr. Beecher was to speak. There were many desperate men there that night who were determined that he should not be heard. Men came armed, and certain bold friends of the North, going into the boxes, drew their revolvers and said : " The man who shoots here first shall rue it." There stood Mr. Beecher, perfectly calm and self-possessed, amid this frightful tumult. He had been told that his life was in danger, but on his knees, in the quiet of his chamber, he had yielded himself absolutely to his God and to the cause of the slave. For an hour and a half he battled with that vast assembly. The hissing and abuse made the blood course through his veins like molten lead, and when he at last gained control there poured forth a mighty torrent of eloquence that swept all before it; and at the vote the " Ayes " came out like the roaring of the sea. Was it the man who conquered that audience ? Yes ; but the eternal principles of right, justice, and equality had conquered and inspired the man. There was no resisting the mighty force that stood behind him. He spoke for the freedom of three millions of slaves; aye, for the freedom of the world from the bonds which stopped its progress. Mr. Beecher outdid himself that night. There were depths and heights in his nature unsuspected till this crisis revealed them. Once in the course of a sermon he told the story of a feudal knight, far back in the dark ages, who, owning two castles on opposite sides of a deep gorge, conceived the idea of making a huge ^Eolian harp by stretching from castle to 82 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. castle great wires. He did so. The winds came, but no music broke the silence ; and the people in the valley laughed at the prince. Years passed. At length one night there arose a mighty tempest. The turrets rocked to and fro. Desolation threatened, but as the terrible blast swept over the great iron wires the huge harp burst forth into har- mony, and far down in the sheltered valley the villagers heard the wonderful melody, and thought it was the choir of heaven. So that night, as the storm of hisses and yells swept over the orator's soul, great chords were set vibrating which only a tempest could move. And so it is that far down in the depths of a man's nature are hidden chords, which can only break forth into music when all self has been swept away, and the great rough hand of some momentous crisis is drawn harshly over them. THE PATHOS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS. JULIEN M. ELLIOTT. " THACKERAY had no heart/' says popular criticism. " In cutting satire his stroke was keen and true to the mark, but in large-heartedness and pathos he must yield to his brother author, the sympathetic Dickens." But all will not agree with the popular critic. Many a reader recalls too vividly the page at which the eye has moistened and the pulse gained a thicker throb to say that Thackeray was inferior to Dickens in power of pathos. Unlike the pathos of Dickens, that of Thackeray borrows but little aid from the subject. He calls for our tears when the theme would seem to awaken no emotion of sympathy or love. Such is the pathos of the closing lines of his lecture THE PATHOS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS. 83 on George III. As we read of the poor, deranged, blind, old monarch " driven off his throne, buffeted by rude hands, with his children in revolt, the darling of his old age killed before him untimely " even we Americans, born and bred, lay aside our prejudice and hate to say "Amen" to the appeal : " O brothers ! speaking the same dear mother tongue ! O comrades ! enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together, as we stand by this royal corpse, and cry a truce to battle! Hush ! Strife and quarrel over a solemn grave ! Sound, trumpets, a mournful march ! Fall, dark curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy." Dickens, with his tastes as an actor, too often makes the pathos of his scenes depend on the telling effects of the stage, the turning down of the lights and the slow music of the melodrama. Thackeray, artist as he was, sought no applause from an admiring crowd by any such daubs or glaring colors. When the death of George Osborne was to be told, a Dickens or a Hugo, to heighten the dramatic effect and deepen the pathos, would have sought to make terribly real the horrors of the field of Waterloo. We should have heard the hoofs of the horse at full trot striking on the ground, the rattling of musketry, the clanking of sabers, the wild shouts for King George or of Vive PEm- pereur, and the still wilder cry of despair, as " rider and horse rush headlong into the death-waiting ravine, rolled together pellmell, grinding each other, making common flesh in the dreadful gulf." Then we should have seen the retreat, the dead and dying, and George Osborne suffering all that gives sadness and terror to a death on a field of battle. But nothing of this in Thackeray. One stroke of the pen- cil, and the story is told, " The pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on the field dead, with a bullet through his heart." 84 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. When the chapter describing the death of Paul Dombey was read for the first time by Thackeray he said : " There is no use writing against such power as this one has no chance." Inimitable, indeed, is Dickens' description of the death of little Paul. Yet Thackeray has sketched a scene no less powerful in pathos. It is the death of Helen Pen- dennis, " The moon had risen by this time ; and Arthur recollected well, afterwards, how it lighted up his mother's s-weet, pale face. ... As they were talking the clock struck nine, and Helen reminded him how, when he was a little boy, she used to go up to his bedroom at that hour, and hear him say ' Our Father.' And once more, O, once more, the young man fell down at his mother's sacred knees, and sobbed out the prayer which the Divine Tenderness uttered for us, and which has been echoed for twenty ages since by millions of sinful and humbled men. As he spoke the last words of the supplication, the mother's head fell down on her boy's ; her arms closed around him, and together they repeated the words * Forever and ever ' and ' Amen.' ' The sainted woman was dead. Thackeray a cynic, a man who " had no heart, no love for his kind " ? No ! No ! An apostle, rather, a God-sent man, with a God-given power to reclaim from evil and lead to worthier things, holier aims,, and a purer life. POETRY THE LANGUAGE OF SYMBOLISM. 85 POETRY THE LANGUAGE OF SYMBOLISM. F. W. ROBERTSON. POETRY is not imagination, but imagination shaped. Not feeling, but feeling expressed symbolically. The form of poetry, therefore, may be that of symbolic action. Perhaps you have read the anecdote of the Earl of Warwick in one of his last battles, probably that of Earner, when he found the day going against him. Dismounting from his favorite charger, before all his army he plunges his sword into its heart. By this act he cuts off the possibility of escape and expresses his resolve there to win or fall. Conceive Warwick putting that into direct words. Conceive his attempting to express all that was implied in that act, the energy of despair, the resolve, the infinite defiance ; ancf conceive then the influence upon the troops, how it must have said to any recreant waverer in the ranks : " Stand like a man and dare to die ! " No less is the language of strong emotion always figura- tive, symbolic, and rich in metaphors. Therefore, we are all susceptible of its influences. Hence a man who thinks he has no taste for poetry, because he does not chance to feel it in one of its forms, rhythmic words, is yet no stranger to its power. Why is it that on the battlefield there is ever one spot where the sabers glitter faster, and the pistol's flash is more frequent, and men and officers crowd together in denser masses ? They are struggling for a flag or an eagle or a standard. Strip it of its symbolism, take from it the meaning with which the imagination has invested it, and it is nothing but a bit of silk rag, torn with shot and black- ened with powder. Now go, with your common sense, and tell the soldier he is madly striving about a bit of rag. See if your common sense is as true to him as his poetry. 86 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Among the achievements of Sir Charles Napier was his subjugation of the robber tribes of the Cutchee Hills, in the north of Scinde. Those warriors had been unsubdued for six hundred years. They dwelt iri a crater-like valley, sur- rounded by mountains, through which there were but two or three narrow entrances, and up which there was no access but by goat paths, so precipitous that brave men grew dizzy and could not proceed. It was part of the masterly plan by which Sir Charles Napier had resolved to storm the strong- hold of the robbers, to cause a detachment of his arms to scale the mountain side. A service so perilous could hardly be commanded. Volunteers were called for. There was a regiment, the 64th Bengal Infantry, which had recently been disgraced in consequence of mutiny at Shikarpoor, their colonel cashiered, and their colors taken from them. A hundred of these men volunteered. " Soldiers of the 64th," said the commander, who knew the way to the soldier's heart, " your colors are on the top of yonder hill ! " I should like to have seen the precipice that would have deterred the 64th regiment after words like those from the lips of the conqueror of Scinde ! And, now, suppose that you had gone with common sense and economic science, and proved to them that the colors they were risking their lives to win back were worth but so many shillings value tell me, which would the stern workers of the 64th regiment have found it easier to under- stand, common sense or poetry ? Which would they have believed, Science which said, " It is manufactured silk," or Imagination, whose kingly voice had made it " colors " ? It is in this sense that the poet has been called, as the name imports, creator, namer, maker. He stamps his own feeling on a form or symbol, names it, and makes it what it was not before, giving to feeling a local habitation and a name by associating it with form. A PLEA FOR ENTHUSIASM. 87 A PLEA FOR ENTHUSIASM. (Anonymous.) No power so completely sways the hearts and wills of mankind as that of enthusiasm. History is but a chronicle of the results of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of individuals, the enthusiasm of sects, the enthusiasm of nations. With- out its inspiration, how life itself would lose its interest, its power. What is it but enthusiasm which marks one wide difference between the brute and the man ? The brute eats, sleeps, and dies. These three words cover the whole range of its existence. Man, on the other hand, has motives, hopes, aspirations. By these every act of his life is influ- enced. These give him energy, courage, faith, purpose, in a word, enthusiasm. And what is the result ? Why, increas- ing activities mark his days and years, and it is this growth and gain that constitute true life. An army was in full retreat. The enemy had surprised, attacked, and routed them. Panic-stricken, they were turn- ing from the battlefield in headlong flight. Men threw aside their guns, their knapsacks, anything that hindered their escape. Horse and foot were mingled in wild confu- sion. All was in terror and dismay. Suddenly the foremost beholds dashing down the road toward them a black horse and his rider ; the rider waves his sword, and they hear the command : " Halt ! " Catching the fire of his eye, they turn and reform ; and as General Sheridan rides swiftly down the lines the men greet him with loud and hearty cheers. And now, as if swayed by one mighty impulse, those lines of blue that but a moment before were flying terror-stricken, turn fiercely upon the enemy, wrest the victory from their hands, and drive them in utter rout from the field. The tide of victory is turned ; the day is saved. What was the power, 88 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. the influence, that was able to transform defeat into victory? Was it anything else than the spirit of enthusiasm in the great leader himself, kindling a like spirit into flame in the hearts of his men ? Enthusiasm recognizes no obstacle, and knows not the word failure. There is a legend of a man who came up against a king. The king had a force of thirty thousand men, and when he learned that this general had only five hundred, he sent a messenger to him offering to 'treat him and his followers mercifully if they would surrender. The general turned to one near him, and said : " Take that dagger and drive it to your heart "; the man did so and fell dead at his commander's feet. Turning to another, he said : " Leap into yonder chasm " ; the man obeyed, and was dashed to pieces on the rocks below. Then said he to the messenger : " Go tell your king that I have five hundred such men. Tell him that we may die, but we shall never surrender." The messenger returned ; his story struck terror into the heart of that king and so demoralized his troops that they were scattered like chaff before the winds. That is the power of enthusiasm. " We may die, but we never surrender." Look through history and note its influence. See in religion, in literature, in science, in art, in everything to which man has put his hand this spirit working its results and bringing success. O you who are decrying enthusiasm, calling it zeal without knowledge, know you not the meaning of that word "God in us " ? Find quickly the object to which you will devote your life ; let it be right, let it be worthy, and then give yourself to it with all your God-given powers. " God in us"; and what is God himself but an endless activity ever working, never ceasing? The farthei we are removed from the brute and the nearer we approach the divinity within us, the more shall we be moved by the spirit of enthusiasm. THE RACE, FROM "BEN HUR." 89 THE RACE, FROM "BEN HUR." LEW WALLACE. THE preparations were now complete. Straightway the stir of the people and the hum of their conversation died away. Every face near by and every face in the lessening perspective turned to the east, as all eyes settled upon the gates of the six stalls which shut in the competitors. The trumpet sounded short and sharp. Forth from each stall, like missiles in a volley from so many great guns, rushed the six fours ; and up the vast assemblage arose, electrified and irrepressible, and, leaping upon the benches, filled the Circus and the air above it with yells and screams. The arena swam in a dazzle of light ; yet each driver looked first for the rope, then for the coveted inner line. So, all six aiming at the same point and speeding furiously, a col- lision seemed inevitable. Nothing daunted, the Roman shook out his long lash, loosed the reins, leaned forward, and, with a triumphant shout, took the wall. " Jove with us ! Jove with us ! " yelled all the Roman faction, in a_frenzy of delight. The race was on ; the souls of the racers were in it ; over them bent the myriads. For a moment Ben Hur was half-blinded by the light in the arena; yet he managed to catch sight of his antagonists and divine their purpose. At Messala, who was more than an antagonist to him, he gave one searching look. He saw the soul of the man, as through a glass, cruel, cunning, desperate. In a time not longer than was required to turn to his four again Ben Hur felt his own resolution harden to a like temper. At whatever cost, he would humble this enemy ! Yet there was no passion, no blinding rush of heated blood from heart to brain and back again. He had his plan, and he settled to the task, never more observant, never more capable. gO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Ben Hur yielded the wall for the time. He drew head to the right, and with all the speed of his Arabs darted across the trails of his opponents, and took the course neck and neck with Messala. And now, racing together side by side, a narrow interval between them, the two neared the second goal. "Down, Eros ! up, Mars !" Messala shouted, whirling his lash with practiced hand. " Down, Eros ! up, Mars ! " he repeated, and caught the well-doing Arabs of Ben Hur a cut the like of which they had never known. Then, invol- untarily, down from the balcony, as thunder falls, burst the indignant cry of the people. The four sprang forward as with one impulse, and forward leaped the car. Where got Ben Hur the large hand and mighty grip which helped him now so well ? Where but from the oar with which so long he fought the sea ? And what was this spring of the floor under his feet to the dizzy, eccentric lurch with which in the old time the trembling ship yielded to the beat of staggering billows, drunk with their power? So he kept his place, and gave the four free rein ; and before the fever of the people began to abate he had back the mastery. Nor that only ; on approaching the first goal, he was again side by side with Messala, bearing with him the sympathy and admiration of every one not a Roman. " Ben Hur ! Ben Hur ! " they shouted. " Speed thee, Jew ! " " Take the wall now ! " " On ! Loose the Arabs ! Give them rein and scourge ! " Either he did not hear or could not do better, for halfway round the course and he was still following. And now, to make the turn, Messala began to draw in his left-hand steeds. His spirit was high ; more than one altar was richer of his vows ; the Roman genius was still presi- dent. On the three pillars only six hundred feet away were fame, increase of fortune, promotions, and a triumph ineffa- bly sweetened by hate, all in store for him ! . That moment THE RACE, FROM "BEN HUR." 9 1 Ben Hur leaned forward over his Arabs, and gave them the reins. Out flew the many-folded lash in his hand ; over the backs of the startled steeds it writhed and hissed, and hissed and writhed again and again ; and, though it fell not, there were both sting and menace in its quick report ; and as the man passed thus from quiet to resistless action, his face suf- fused, his eyes gleaming, along the reins he seemed to flash his will; and instantly not one, but the four as one answered with a leap that landed them alongside the Roman's car. Messala, on the perilous edge of the goal, heard, but dared not look to see what the awakening portended. From the people he received no sign. Above the noises of the race there was but one voice, and that was Ben Hur's. In the old Aramaic, as the sheik himself, he called to the Arabs. " On, Atair ! On, Rigel ! What, Antares ! dost thou linger now ? Good horse oho, Aldebaran ! I hear them singing in the tents. I hear the children singing, and the women singing of the stars, of Atair, Antares, Rigel, Aldebaran, victory ! And the song will never end. Well done ! Home to-morrow, under the black tent home ! On, Antares ! The tribe is waiting for us, and the master is waiting ! 'T is done ! 't is done ! Ha, ha ! We have overthrown the proud. The hand that smote us is in the dust. Ours the glory ! Ha, ha ! Steady ! The work is done soho ! Rest ! " The thousands on the benches understood it all. They saw the signal given, the magnificent response ; the four close outside Messala's outer wheel, Ben Hur's inner wheel behind the other's car all this they saw. Then they heard a crash loud enough to send a thrill through the Cirfcus, and, quicker than thought, out over the course a spray of shining white and yellow flinders flew. Down on its right side toppled the bed of the Roman's chariot. There was a rebound as of the axle hitting the hard earth ; another Q2 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. and another ; then the car went to pieces, and Messala, entangled in the reins, pitched forward headlong. The people arose, and leaped upon the benches, and shouted and screamed. Those who looked that way caught glimpses of Messala, now under the trampling of the fours, now under the abandoned cars. He was still ; they thought him dead ; but far the greater number followed Ben Hur in his career. They had not seen the cunning touch of the reins by which, turning a little to the left, he caught Mes- sala's wheel with the iron-shod point of his axle, and crushed it ; but they had seen the transformation of the man, and themselves felt the heat and glow of his spirit, the heroic resolution, the maddening energy of action with which, by look, word, and gesture, he so suddenly inspired his Arabs. And such running ! It was rather the long leaping of lions in harness ; but for the lumbering chariot, it seemed the four were flying. When the Byzantine and Corinthian were halfway down the course Ben Hur turned the first goal. And the race was WON ! (Copyright, 1880, by Harper and Brothers.) THE REALISM OF DICKENS. WILLIAM A. LATHROP. DID you ever pause before a painting of some familiar yet almost forgotten landscape, so real and so distinct that you seemed to stand among its scenes ? And as you paused did you fancy that you inhaled the perfume of its meadows and heard the hum of the bees among its flowers ? The charm, the power of that picture was realism. It is with like vivid pictures that realism has crowded the pages of literature. First among English writers who have this power is Charles Dickens. Look upon any scene as he paints it, THE REALISM OF DICKENS. 93 and you will recognize his right to be called the master of realism. Perhaps it is only the play of the wind as it frolics with the leaves; as it whistles through the arches of the tower and makes the old beams creak and groan; as it whisks away the little dust heaps from the rafters ; or as it swings to and fro the spiders that dangle on their silken threads ; and shakes the swallows in their nests under the eaves. But the patient detail, the fidelity to nature's law have made it something more than a description. It is a wind whose frolic we have laughed at, whose power we have felt. But it is not in nature alone that the realism of Dickens is seen at its best. It is in his men and women. They live our lives, share our joys, our sorrows, our work. His heroes suffer and endure not as heroes in the world of romance, but as men and women about us suffer and endure. You will see this power in his humorous Dick Swiveller. With his insinuating assurance, wealth of promise, and poverty of fulfillment, he is as real as the last good-natured vagabond, who cajoled you out of a dollar that you know he will never pay. So is the hopeful Micawber, the guileless Pickwick, and the not so guileless but ever faithful Sam. But the ebb-tide is as strong as the flow, and the realism of Dickens is no less powerful in tragedy. You see it in the life of the convict, mad with the remembrance of a life of vice and profligacy, plunging into the Thames, while the glimmer of the lights in the water, the cry, the struggle, the death complete the picture. You see it in the flight of the murderer with the ghastly figure of his victim. following closely at his heels, its garments rustling in the leaves, and " every breath of wind laden with the last low cry." No less is it this same realism that gives power to the pathos of Dickens, as in the story of Stephen wandering in the night, despised, misjudged, dishonored by a crime of 94 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. which he is guiltless. Falling into the pit long unused, as he lies there bruised and bleeding, he see's way up through the pit's black mouth a single star, that seems to shine divine beauty to soothe the mortal pain of his poor shattered body. And so, when they find him not a word of blame or reproach he only tells how " It ha' shined upon me in my pain and trouble down below. It ha' shined into my mind. I ha' look'n at 't, thowt o' thee, Rachel, till the muddle in my mind have cleared awa ; and often as I coom to myseln, and found it shinin' on me down there in my trouble, I thowt it were the star as guided to our Savior's home." As the light faded from the tired eyes the spirit left the frail body. " The star had shown him where to find the God of the poor, and through humility and sorrow and forgiveness he had gone to the Redeemer's rest." The brush of the artist appeals but to the eye. The chisel of the sculptor brings forth the faultless statue that with all its beauty is cold and pulseless. But the pen of Dickens, the realist, creates men and women that live, whose hearts throb with our hopes, ambitions, emotions. And the secret is realism, the Pygmalion touch that quickens into life and reality the beings of imagination. THE RELIEF OF LUCKNOW. ADAPTED. FOR eighty days the fort of Lucknow had held out against fifty thousand rebel Sepoys. Disease, famine, and the fire of the enemy had thinned the ranks of the little garrison until but twenty remained. Day after day the garrison had hoped for relief, but now hope itself had died away. The THE RELIEF OF LUCKNOW. 95 Sepoys, grown desperate by repulse, had decided to over- whelm the fort with their whole force. The engineers had said that within a few hours all would be over, and not a soul within Lucknow but was prepared for the worst. A poor Scotch girl, Jessie Brown, had been in a state of excitement all through the siege, and had fallen away visibly within the last few days. A constant fever consumed her, and her mind wandered, especially on that day, when, as she said, she was " lukin far awa, far awa upon the craigs of Duncleuch as in the days of auld lang syne." At last, overcome with fatigue, she sank on the ground, too tired to wait. As the Sepoys moved on to the attack, the women, remem- bering the horrible scenes of Cawnpore, besought the men to save them from a fate worse than death, by killing them with a volley from their guns. The soldiers for the last time looked down the road whence the long-looked-for relief must come ; but they see no signs of Havelock and his troops. In despair they load their guns and aim them at the waiting group ; but suddenly all are startled by a wild, unearthly shriek from the sleeping Scotch girl. Starting upright, her arms raised, and her head bent forward in the attitude of listening, with a look of intense delight breaking over her countenance, she exclaimed: " Dinna ye hear it? Dinna ye hear it ? Ay, I 'm no dreamin'; it 's the slogan o' the Highlanders ! We 're saved, we 're saved ! " Then, flinging herself upon her knees, she thanked God with passionate fervor. The soldiers were utterly bewildered ; their English ears heard only the roar of artillery, and they thought poor Jessie still raving. But she darted to the batteries, crying inces- santly to the men : " Courage ! Hark to the slogan to the Macgregor, the grandest of them a' ! Here 's help at last ! " For a moment every soul listened in intense anxiety. 96 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Gradually, however, there was a murmur of bitter disap- pointment, and the wailing of the women began anew as the colonel shook his head. Their dull Lowland ears heard nothing but the rattle of the musketry. A few moments more of this deathlike suspense, of this agonizing hope, and Jessie, who had again sunk to the ground, sprang to her feet, and cried in a voice so clear and piercing that it was heard along the whole line : " Will ye no believe it noo ? The slogan has ceased, indeed, but the Campbells are comin'. D 'ye hear ? D 'ye hear ? " At that moment they seemed to hear the voice of God in the distance, as the bagpipes of the Highlanders brought tidings of deliverance ; for now there was no longer any doubt of their coming. That shrill, penetrating, ceaseless sound which rose above all other sounds could come neither from the advance of the enemy nor from the work of the sappers. Yes ! It was indeed the blast of the Scottish bagpipes, now shrill and harsh as the threatening vengeance of the foe, then in softer tones seeming to promise succor to their friends in need. Never, surely, was there such a scene as that which followed. Not a heart in the residency of Luck- now but bowed itself before God. All by one simultaneous impulse fell upon their knees, and nothing was heard save bursting sobs and the murmured voice of prayer. THE RESCUE. 97 THE RESCUE. BENJAMIN F. TAYLOR. YEARS ago, on a grim December night, the city of New York was scourged with what was then the mightiest con- flagration on the continent. The flames that lit the skies, and brought out the profile of every tattered cloud and scud and spray of vapor, swept a narrow ring upon the sea of human creatures. Beyond it, way out in the darkness, heaved and surged like turbulent waves the multitude. Bloody tongues lapped the eaves and licked, up the cor- nices, and the tops of the buildings rocked like a ship's deck in a heavy sea. Upon the lofty roof of a stately struc- ture was a human creature. To and fro he strode, turning hither and thither. There was no hope. And all the while the multitude was dumb. Then all at once a figure stood on the balcony below. He was a sailor. In his hand a coil of rope, with an appended hook ; he reeled it slowly off upon his bent elbow and open hand. Round after round the rope was coiled until the hook was in his grasp. At last he threw, and the rope shook itself free, and straightened toward the eaves. The hook almost caught not quite and fell back to the balcony. The heart of the multitude sank within it. The roof fairly lurched like a foundered ship. Again the sailor coiled the rope, more slowly, more carefully than before. Again he threw, and the hook just caught upon the eaves, and vibrated as if it were death's own pendulum telling off the last precious seconds for that desolate crea- ture. As the man on the roof saw the glittering curve of the hook he crouched like a panther, and crept stealthily to it by a curved approach, as if it were a living thing. He bent over it, but he never touched it. His soul was in his 98 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. eyes, and his eyes were on the hook. It could not have been more precious had the Kohinoor sparkled on its curve. And yet the multitude was dumb. At last he stretched his arm, brought his hand beside the bended iron the ringers bent to grasp it. Ah, the woe of a false touch ! Then with a convulsive clutch he had the hook, he sprang to the battlement, he flung the rope around it, he swung himself over the eaves, he came down hand over hand, he stood upon the solid ground he was numbered among the living. The roof gave a plunge. The fiery grave clamored vainly for its own and then the dumb multitude awoke. The long acclamation for the rescued man and the rescuer went up into the midnight air like the voice of many waters. THE REVIEW OF THE GRAND ARMY. ADAPTED. GENERAL SHERMAN tells the story of his experience in Georgia. Says he : One day as I was riding through the state I spied a plantation. I was thirsty, and so rode up to the gate and dismounted. I walked up to the porch, where there sat an old gentleman probably sixty years of age. I got into conversation with him, and the troops drifted along, passing down the roadway closely by fours, and every regi- ment had its banner, sometimes furled and sometimes afloat. Said the old gentleman : " General, what troops are these passing down ? " As the color bearer came by, I said : " Throw out your colors ! That is the 73d Iowa." "The 73d Iowa ! 73d Iowa ! Iowa ? 73d ? What do you mean by the 73d Iowa ? " . " Well," said I, " generally a regiment when organized consists of one thousand men." " Do you THE REVIEW OF THE GRAND ARMY. 99 pretend to say that Iowa has sent seventy-three thousand men into this cruel war ? " "I think that may be inferred," I said. "Why," said he, "where is Iowa?" "Iowa is a state bounded on the east by Mississippi, on the south by Missouri, on the west by the unknown country, and on the north by the north pole." " Why," said he, " I don't know anything about that place. I did n't dream the North could send so many men as are here." And so with me. I never realized what this country was and is, as on the day when I first saw some of these gentle- men of the army and navy. It was when, at the close of the war, our army came back and marched in review before the President's stand at Washington. I do not care whether a man was a Republican or a. Democrat, a Northern man or a Southern man, if he had any emotion of nature he could not look upon the scene without weeping. God knew that the day was stupendous, and cleared the heaven of clouds and mist and chill, and spread the blue sky as a triumphal arch for the returning warriors to pass under. From Arlington Heights the spring foliage shook out its welcome, and the sparkling waters of the Potomac tossed their gold at the feet of the battalions, as they came to the long bridge and in almost interminable line passed over. Passing as they did in silence, yet I seemed to hear in every step the thunder of the conflicts through which they had waded, and seemed to see dripping from their smpke-blackened banners the blood of our country's martyrs. For the best part of two days we stood, and watched the filing on of what seemed endless battalions, brigade after brigade, host beyond host, ever moving, ever passing marching, inarching tramp, tramp, tramp, arms shouldered, columns solid, shoulder to shoulder, wheel to wheel, charger to charger, nostril to nostril. These men came from Minnesota ; those from the Illinois IOO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. prairies ; these were often hummed to sleep by the pines of Oregon ; those were New England lumbermen. Side by side in one great cause, consecrated through fire and storm and darkness, brothers in peril, they were on their way home from Chancellorsville, and Kenesaw Mountains, and battlefield after battlefield, in lines that seemed infinite. We gazed and wept and wondered, lifting up our heads to see if the end had come. But no ; looking from one end of that long avenue to another, we saw them still, in solid column, host beyond host, wheel to wheel, charger to charger, nostril to nostril, coming, as it were, from under the Capitol. Forward ! Forward ! Their bayonets, caught in the sun, glimmered and flashed and blazed till they seemed one long line of silver, ever and anon changed into a river of gold. But hush ! Uncover every head ! Here they pass, ten men, the remnant of a full regiment. Silence ! Widowhood and orphanage look on and wring their hands. But wheel into line, all ye people. North, South, East, and West, all decades, all centuries, all millenniums. Forward, the whole line. RIGHTS AND DUTIES. F. W. ROBERTSON. PEOPLE talk of liberty as if it meant the liberty of doing what a man likes. I call that man free who is master of his lower appetites, who is able to rule himself. I call him free who has his flesh in subjection to his spirit. I call him free who fears doing wrong, but who fears neither man nor devil besides. We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights. We hear of the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, RIGHTS AND DUTIES. IOI the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's. But the way in which we expound those rights, alas ! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas ! alas ! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous divine world than his rights. The cry of " My rights, your duties," I think we might change to something nobler. If we could learn to say "My duties, your rights," we should come to the same thing in the end ; but the spirit would be different. All we are gain- ing by this cry of " Rights " is the life of the wild beast, and of the wild man of the desert whose hand is against every man, and every man's hand against him. Nay, the very brutes, unless they had an instinct which respects rights even more strongly than it claims them, could never form anything like a community. Did you never observe in a heronry or a rookery that the new-made nest is left in per- fect confidence by the birds that build it ? If the others had not learned to respect those private and sacred rights, but began to assert each his right to the sticks which are woven together there, it would be some time before you could get a heronry or a rookery ! My rights are, in truth, my duties ; my rights are lim- ited by another man's rights. For example, I have a per- fect right to build a wall on my own estate. The language of the law is that to whomsoever the soil belongs is his all up to the skies. But within three yards of my wall is my neighbor's window. What becomes of the right that I was talking of ? My right is limited ; it is my duty, because limited by his right. Now, democracy, if it means anything, means government by the people. It has for its very watchword equality to all men. Now, let us not endeavor to make it ridiculous. It IO2 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. does not mean that the Bushman or the Australian is equal to the Englishman. But it means this : that the original stuff of which all men are made is equal, that there is no reason why the Hottentot and the Australian may not be cultivated so that in the lapse of centuries they may be equal to Englishmen. And I suppose that all free institutions mean this. I suppose they are meant to assert : let the people be edu- cated ; let there be a fair field and no favor ; let every man have a fair chance, and then the happiest condition of a nation would be that when every man has been educated morally and intellectually to his very highest capacity, there should then be selected out of men so trained a government of the wisest and the best. RUSSIA THE ENIGMA OF EUROPE. GILBERT H. GROSVENOR. ALL day the wild strains of Oriental music have been echoing through the streets of Moscow. All day the sacred chimes in the cathedral towers have been pealing " Te Deums." In the majestic Kremlin the destiny of Russia, yes, of all Europe, is to be intrusted to one man. To-day Nicholas II crowns himself the Czar of all the Russias. Gathered in the imperial palace, stones of .whose won- drous splendor are fairy tales in every land, is an assembly vast, dazzling, magnificent. Here the remotest ends of the earth have sent their grandest figures to do the new Czar homage. Here kneel fearfully before him his own subjects of every race and creed. Here, too, his unofficial vassals, envoys from Persia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, cringe in RUSSIA THE ENIGMA OF EUROPE. IO3 his presence. Solemn and impressive is the spectacle of this small, slight young man as the center of such over- whelming glory. But why does Europe tremble as she watches the corona- tion scene ? Is there anything terrible in the outward glitter of this pompous ceremony ? Is it not simply a parade of empty vanity to gratify a monarch's whim or a nation's bar- barous conceit ? No, there is a far deeper significance. The coronation is no idle show, no mere procession of richly dressed nobles. Every gorgeous envoy, every titled diplo- matist, every cringing vassal at that court stands a warning of Russia's enormous power, of her inexhaustible resources. That vast empire realizes her gigantic strength. She defies the world, and flings down her defiance in true Oriental style. To-day Russia dictates the foreign politics of European nations. Her diplomatists are solving according to her wishes the great problems of the East. Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro, by their very existence as independent nations, testify to the influence of modern Russia; but, more than all, they are witnesses to the noble purposes and splendid results for which that power has often been employed. But an ambition for even greater empire, for a more world-wide sway, inspires the Slavic race. Destiny, they believe, has ordained that they shall become the dominant people of the Old World. Confined in their land-locked empire, they have patiently waited until the time should come for them to real- ize their destiny. But once patient in their weakness, they now grow restless in the consciousness of their strength. Once more, I ask you to turn to the coronation cere- monies. The last scene in that historic drama is to be now enacted. Upon Khodinsky Plain without the city officers of the new-crowned Czar are to distribute free gifts among the peasants. Thither, allured by the promise of a royal pres-. IO4 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. ent, hasten crowds of Russian yeomen. The thousands increase to tens, and the tens to hundreds of thousands, until, dazed at the sight of such multitudes, the officers scatter the souvenirs among them. There is one mad rush. Savage men, frenzied women, screaming children fight like beasts. That fierce, writhing mob shows no pity. The weak, choked and crushed, are trampled beneath the callous mass, but the brutish struggle goes on. Ten thousand wretches perish, a sacrifice to frightened, hasty leaders and to their own unchecked passions. A shudder of horror shakes Europe to her very depths. She who but now marveled at the unrivaled, almost fabulous resources of her enemy trembles at this sudden, immense revelation of their nature. The wild mob of Russian peasants in a death struggle for a tin mug presents a vivid picture of Russian character. The hungry and grasping spirit, the hardened, insensible mind, the brutal passion, the irresponsible, uncontrollable temper that made this scene possible will find another out- let. The conflict is inevitable. The result none can prophesy ; but the convulsion will change the face of the earth. SAVONAROLA. W. M. PUNSHON. IN the church of San Marco is the pulpit from which Savonarola spoke ; in the adjoining convent is the cell in which he wrote ; and in the Piazza Gran Duca the fountain of Neptune stands upon the spot where his soul went out in fire. He stood among the ages, midway between two great periods, orphan of the old, prophet of the new. While SAVONAROLA. 10$ behind him there was the thick darkness, and before him the glorious morning, he lived and died in the gloaming. A vigorous reformer both in church and state, he gath- ered against himself the hatred of that relentless enemy which dogs its victims to the death. " Do you ask me," he says, " in general, what will be the end of this conflict? I answer ' Victory.' But if you ask me in particular, I answer * Death.' " The first effort of the Pope to silence him was an attempt at bribery. " Give him a red hat, and make him at once a cardinal and a friend." Savonarola answered from the pulpit of San Marco : " I will have no other red hat than that of martyrdom, colored with my own blood." Florence, however, was not so brave, and her cowardly magistrates became the betrayers of the man who deserved so well of their city. On the 23d of May, 1498, a platform was erected in front of the palace. In the presence of the multitude the bishop pronounced his degradation : " I sep- arate thee from the Church Militant and from the Church Triumphant." " Nay ! " cried the intrepid spirit, " from the Church Militant, if you please, but not from the Church Triumphant." Before the flames of the martyr fire were quenched the reaction set in. They could not kill his living words nor his immortal memory. Even at this day the friends of religious freedom inscribe his name upon their banners ; and as his words of fire, " Italy shall be renewed," pass monthly into thousands of Italian homes, they stir every worthy purpose into life. Yes ! Italy shall be renewed. There is an inner truth which, like a sound of power, goes ringing through the ages in Savonarola's prophetic words. The light which was morn- ing light to him has climbed higher up the sky, and is fast broadening into a noon of splendor. Yes ! Italy shall be renewed. The pure truth shall win its way, in spite of insult, against banded foes or traitorous IO6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. friends. The flowers upon the martyr's grave suggest the harvest which their offspring may gather, till They who have strewn the violets reap the corn, And, having reaped and garnered, bring the plow, And draw new furrows, 'neath the healthy morn, * And plant the great hereafter in the now. SHAKESPEARE'S MARK ANTONY. WALTER B. WINCHELL. A ROMAN, an orator, and a triumvir, a conqueror when all Rome seemed armed against him only to have his glory "false played " by a woman " unto an enemy's triumph," such is Shakespeare's story of Mark Antony. Passion alter- nates with passion, purpose with purpose, good with evil, and strength with weakness, until his whole nature seems changed, and we find the same and yet another man. In Julius Ccesar Antony is seen at his best. He is the one triumphant figure of the play. Caesar falls. Brutus and Cassius are in turn victorious and defeated, but Antony is everywhere a conqueror. Antony weeping over Caesar's body, Antony offering his breast to the daggers which have killed his master, is as plainly the sovereign power of the moment as when over Caesar's corpse he forces by his mag- netic oratory the prejudiced populace to call down curses on the heads of the conspirators. Caesar's spirit still lives in Antony, a spirit that dares face the conspirators with swords still red with Caesar's blood and bid them, Whilst their purpled hands do reek and smoke, fulfill their pleasure, a spirit that over the dead body of Caesar takes the hand of each and yet exclaims : SHAKESPEARE'S MARK ANTONY. 107 Had I as many eyes as thou hast wounds, Weeping as fast as they stream forth thy blood, It would become me better than to close In terms of friendship with thine enemies. Permission is granted Antony to speak a farewell word over the body of Caesar in the crowded market place. Before the populace, hostile and prejudiced, Antony stands as the friend of Caesar. Slowly, surely, making his ap- proach step by step, with consummate tact he steals away their hearts and paves the way for his own victory. The honorable men gradually turn to villains of the blackest dye. Caesar's mantle, which but a moment before had called forth bitter curses, now brings tears to every Roman's eye. The populace fast yields to his eloquence. He con- quers every vestige of distrust as he says : I am no orator, as Brutus is ; But, as you know me all, a plain, blunt man,- That love my friend ; and that they know full well That gave me public leave to speak of him." And now the matchless orator throws off his disguise. With resistless vehemence he pours forth a flood of eloquence which bears the fickle mob like straws before its tide : I tell you that which you yourselves do know ; Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths, And bid them speak for me ; but were I Brutus, And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue In every wound of Caesar, that should move The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny. The effect is magical. The rage of the populace is quick- ened to a white heat ; and, baffled, beaten by a plain, blunt man, the terror-stricken conspirators ride like madness through the gates of Rome. IO8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. The acknowledged leader of the triumvirate, Antony becomes a terror to all those who stand in the way of his ambition. Proscription begins its horrid work. Friend- ships are sacrificed, the ties of kindred broken. Little now the bold triumvir heeds the voice of conscience. His mind is a delirium. The rapid gathering of momentous events leaves no time for the consideration of right and wrong. The rush of war is upon him, and he must prepare to meet his old enemies on the battlefield. Well for Antony, well for Brutus and Cassius, had Antony been taken at his word when over Caesar's body he asked death at their hands in those memorable and almost pro- phetic words : Fulfill your pleasure. Live a thousand years, I shall not find myself so apt to die. Then might have been avoided defeat for the conspirators, and Antony's name, without its glory, perhaps, but unstained, would stand fair in history. But it was not to be. The bugles sound to arms. The plain of Philippi becomes the theater of death, and when night comes on the stars look down upon the bodies of Brutus and Cassius slain by their own hands, upon a second triumph for the reckless, dashing Antony. THE SIGNAL MAN. THE SIGNAL MAN. CHARLES DICKENS. " HALLOO, below there ! " When the signal man heard my voice he was standing at the door of his box with a flag in his hand. His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side a dripping wet wall of jagged stone shut out all view but a strip of sky. The prospective in one direction was a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon ; the shorter prospective in the other terminated in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a tunnel in whose massive architecture there was a depressing and forbidding air. After a short conversation in the signal man's box, I said as I rose to leave : " You almost make me think that at last I have, met with a contented man." " I believe I used to be so," said he, " but now I am troubled, sir, I am troubled. The trouble would be hard to impart, but if you ever make me another visit I will try to tell yon." " Then I will come at eleven to-morrow night," said I. Punctual to my appointment, I placed my foot on the first notch of the zig- zag descent just as the distant clocks were striking eleven. The signal man met me at the bottom with his white light turned on, and together we walked side by side to his box, entered it, closed the door, and sat down. " I have made up my mind, sir, that you shall not have to ask me twice what it is that troubles me. Last night when you called to me I took you for some one else. That it is that troubles me, that some one else. Who he is I do not know. I never aw the face. The left arm is across the brow, and the right arm waved, violently waved. One moonlight night I was sitting here before the fire when I heard a voice call out : ' Halloo, below there ! ' I started IIO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. up, and, looking from that door, saw this unknown some one else standing by the red light just outside the blackness of the tunnel. His voice was hoarse with shouting, and it cried : ' Below there ! ' and again, * Look out ! Look out ! For God's sake, clear the way ! ' I snatched up the lantern, turned it on red, and ran toward the figure, crying : 'What 's wrong ? What has happened ? ' I ran right up to it, and stretched out my arm to drag the sleeve from off the face, when it was gone. I rushed on into the tunnel five hundred yards, stopped, and, holding my lantern above my head, saw the figure in the measured distance, the black stains streaming down the walls and trickling through the arch. I rushed back again, and telegraphed both ways : * An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong ? ' And the answer came back : ' All 's well/ Six hours after the appearance of that figure the most memorable accident on this line happened, and the bodies of the dead and wounded were brought through the tunnel and over the very spot where that specter stood. " Seven months passed, when one morning as the day was breaking I, looking from that door, saw that specter again. It was silent. It leaned against the shaft of the red light with both hands before its face. That very day as a train was passing through the tunnel a beautiful young lady died in- stantaneously in one of the compartments, and her body was brought in here and laid down there on the floor between us. " A week ago that specter appeared again. Since then I have had no rest, no peace. It calls to me constantly from the mouth of the tunnel : * Halloo, below there ! Look out ! Look out ! For God's sake, clear the way ! ' all the time keeping its left arm before its face and violently waving its right." I saw that, for the poor man's sake as well as for public safety, what I had to do was to calm his mind, and I did not THE SIGNAL MAN. Ill leave him till two in the morning. Next evening the sun had not quite set as I traversed the field path along the brink of that deep cut. Before pursuing my way, 1 stepped to the brink and mechanically looked down. I cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me when I saw the figure of a man just outside the mouth of the tunnel, his left arm across his face, passionately waving his right arm. With an irresistible feeling that something was wrong, I descended the notched path with as much speed as I could make. " What is the matter ? " I asked the man. " Signal man killed," he replied. " He was cut down by my engine. Coming around the curve in the .tunnel, I saw him standing at the other end. There was no time to check speed, and I knew he was a careful man. As he did not seem to heed the whistle, I shut it off and called to him with all my might : ' Halloo, below there ! Look out ! Look out ! For God's sake, clear the way ! ' Oh, it was a dreadful time, sir, and I put my arm across my face, violently waving my right arm, and did not leave off calling to the last. But it was no use." Then, with bared heads, they showed me the mangled remains of the signal man whose warnings had at last overtaken him. THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION. GEORGE LIPPARD. IT is a cloudless summer day ; a clear blue sky arches and expands above a quaint edifice, rising among the giant trees in the center of a wide city. That edifice is built of plain red brick, with heavy window frames, and a massive hall door. Such is the state house of Philadelphia, in the year of our Lord 1776. 112 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. In yonder wooden steeple, which crowns the summit of that red brick state house, stands an old man with snow- white hair and sunburnt face. He is clad in humble attire, yet his eye gleams, as it is fixed on the ponderous outline of the bell suspended in the steeple there. By his side, gazing into his sunburnt face in wonder, stands a flaxen-haired boy with laughing eyes of summer blue. The old man ponders for a moment upon the strange words written upon the bell, then, gathering the boy in his arms, he speaks : " Look here, my child. Will you do this old man a kindness ? Then hasten down the stairs, and wait in the hall below till a man gives you a message. for me ; when he gives you that word, run out into the street and shout it up to me. Do you mind?" The boy sprang from the old man's arms, and threaded his way down the dark stairs. Many minutes passed. The old bell keeper was alone. " Ah," groaned the old man, " he has forgotten me." As the word was upon his lips a merry, ringing laugh broke on his ear. And there, among the crowd on the pavement, stood the blue-eyed boy, clapping his tiny hands while the breeze blew his flaxen hair all about his face, and, swelling his little chest, he raised himself on tiptoe, and shouted the single word, " Ring ! " Do you see that old man's eye fire ? Do you see that arm so suddenly bared to the shoulder ? Do you see that with- ered hand grasping the iron tongue of the bell ? That old man is young again. His veins are filling with a new life. Backward and forward, with sturdy strokes, he swings the tongue. The bell peals out ; the crowds in the street hear it, and burst forth in one long shout. Old Delaware hears it, and gives it back on the cheers of her thousand sailors. The city hears it, and starts up, from desk and workshop, as if an earthquake had spoken. Under that very bell, pealing out at noonday, in an old THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION. 113 hall, fifty-six traders, farmers, and mechanics had assembled to break the shackles of the world. The committee, who have been out all night, are about to appear. At last the door opens, and they advance to the front. The parchment is laid on the table. Shall it be signed, or not ? Then ensues a high and stormy debate. Then the faint-hearted cringe in corners. Then Thomas Jefferson speaks his few bold words, and John Adams pours out his whole soul. Still there is a doubt; and that pale-faced man, rising in one corner, squeaks out something about " axes, scaffolds, and a gibbet." A tall, slender man rises, and his dark eye burns, while his words ring through the halls : " Gibbets ! They may stretch our necks on every scaffold in the land. They may turn every rock into a gibbet, every tree into a gallows ; and yet the words written on that parchment can never die. They may pour out our blood on a thousand altars, and yet, from every drop that dyes the axe or drips on the sawdust of the block, a new martyr to freedom will spring into existence. What ! are these shrinking hearts and faltering voices here, when the very dead upon our battlefields arise and call upon us to sign that parchment, or be accursed forever ? " Sign ! if the next moment the gibbet's rope is around your neck. Sign ! if the next moment this hall ring with the echo of the falling axe. Sign ! by all your hopes in life or death, as husbands, as fathers, as men ! Sign your names to that parchment ! " Yes ! were my soul trembling on the verge of eternity, were this voice choking in the last struggle, I would still, with the last impulse of that soul, with the last gasp of that voice, implore you to remember this truth : God has given America to the free. Yes ! as I sink down into the gloomy shadow of the grave, with my last breath I would beg of you to sign that parchment." 114 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. SIR WALTER SCOTT IN WESTMINSTER. JOHN HAY. A CLEVER French author made a book some years ago called The Forty-first Armchair. It consists of brief biog- raphies of the most famous writers of France, not any of whom have been members of the Academy. The astonish- ment of a stranger who is told that neither Moliere nor Balzac was ever embraced among the " Forty Immortals " is very like that which often affects the tourist who, searching among the illustrious names and faces which make this Abbey glorious, has asked in vain for the author of Waverley. It is not that he has ever been forgotten or neglected. His spirit is everywhere ; he is revered wherever the English speech has traveled. I doubt if anywhere his writings have had a more loving welcome than in America. I have heard from my father, a pioneer of Kentucky, that in the early days of this century men would saddle their horses and ride from all the neigh- boring counties to the principal post town of the region, when a new novel by the author of Waverley was expected. Through all those important formative days of the Republic Scott was the favorite author of Americans. The romances of courts and castles were specially appreciated in the woods and plains of the frontier, where a pure democracy reigned. The poems and novels of Scott, saturated with, the glamor of legend and tradition, were greedily devoured by a people conscious that they themselves were ancestors of a redoubt- able line whose battle was with the passing hour, whose glories were all in the days to come. Both mentally and morally Scott was one of the greatest writers who ever lived. His magic still has power to charm all wholesome and candid souls. Although so many years have passed since his great heart broke in the valiant strug- THE SLAVE OF BOSTON. I I $ gle against evil fortune, his poems and his tales are read with undiminished interest and perennial pleasure. He loved with a single, straightforward affection man and nature, his country and his kind. He has his reward in a fame forever fresli and unhackneyed. The poet who as an infant clapped his hands and cried " Bonnie " to the thunderstorm, and whose dying senses were delighted by the farewell whisper of the Tweed rip- pling over its pebbles, is quoted in every aspect of sun and shadow that varies the face of Scotland. The man who blew so clear a clarion of patriotism lives forever in the speech of those who seek a line to describe the love of country. The robust, athletic spirit of his tales of old, the royal quarrels, the instinctive loves, the staunch devotion of the unconquer- able creations of his inexhaustible fancy, all these have their special message for the minds of our day. His work is a clear, high voice, from a simpler age than ours, breath- ing a song of lofty and unclouded purpose, of sincere and powerful passion, to which the world, however weary and preoccupied, must needs still listen and attend. THE SLAVE OF BOSTON. THEODORE PARKER. BOSTON has seen sad days before now. When the Stamp Act came here, in our fathers' time, it was a sad day. They tolled the bells all over town, and Mayhew wished " they were cut off that trouble you." It was a sad day when the tea came here, although, when it went down the stream, all the hills of New England laughed. It was a sadder day still, the i yth of June, 1775, when our fathers fought and Il6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. bled on yonder hill, all red from battle at Concord and Lex- ington. But it was the saddest day of all, when a man was kidnapped in Boston by the men of Boston, and your court- house hung with chains. Last Thursday night when odious beasts of prey, that dare not face the light of heaven, prowl through the woods, those ruffians of the law seized on their brother man. They lie to the bystanders, and seize him on a false pre- tense. There is their victim they hold him fast. His faithless knife breaks in his hand ; his coat is rent to pieces. He is the slave of Boston. Can you understand his feel- ings ? Let us pass by that. His " trial ! " Shall I speak of that ? He has been five days on trial for more than life, and has not seen a judge ! A jury? No, only a commis- sioner ! O justice ! O republican America ! Is this the liberty of Massachusetts ? Well, these are only the beginning of sorrows. There will be other victims yet ; this will not settle the question. What shall we do ? Keep the law of God. Next I say, resist not evil with evil ; resist not now with violence. Why do I say this ? Will you tell me that I am a coward ? Perhaps I am ; at least, I am not afraid to be called one. Why do I say, then, do not now resist with violence ? Because it is not time just yet ; it would not succeed. If I had the eloquence that I sometimes dream of, which goes into a crowd of men, and gathers it in its mighty arm, and sways them as the pendant boughs of yonder elm shall be shaken by the sum- mer breeze next June, I would not give that counsel. I would call on men, and lift up my voice like a trumpet through the whole land, until I had gathered millions out of the North and the South, and they would crush slavery for- ever, as the ox crushes the spider underneath his feet. But such eloquence is given to no man. It was not given to the ancient Greek who " shook the arsenal and fulmined THE SPIRIT OF CONQUEST. II? over Greece." No man has it. The ablest must wait for time. It is idle to resist here and now. It is not the hour. If in 1765 they had attempted to carry out the Revolution by f6rce, they would have failed. Had it failed, we had not been here to-day. There would have been no little monu- ment at Lexington " sacred to liberty and the rights of man- kind," honoring the men who "fell in the cause of God and their country." No little monument at Concord ; nor that tall pile of eloquent stone at Bunker Hill to proclaim that " Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." .Success is due to the discretion, heroism, calmness, and forbearance of our fathers ; let us wait our time. THE SPIRIT OF CONQUEST. THOMAS CORWIN. SINCE I have heard so much about the dismemberment of Mexico, I have looked back to see how in the course of events, which some call "Providence," it has fared with other nations who engaged in this work of dismemberment. I see that, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, three powerful nations, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, united in the dismemberment of Poland. They said, too, as you say, " It is our destiny." They "wanted room." Doubtless, each of these thought, with his share of Poland, his power was too strong to fear invasion or even insult. One had his California, another his New Mexico, and the third his Vera Cruz. Did they remain untouched and incapable of harm ? Alas ! no ; far, very far, from it. Re- tributive justice must fulfill its destiny, too. Il8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. A few years pass away and we hear of a new man, a Corsi- can lieutenant, the self-named " armed soldier of democracy," Napoleon. He ravages Austria, covers her land with blood, drives the northern Caesar from his capital, and sleeps in his palace. Austria may now remember how her power trampled upon Poland. But has Prussia no atonement to make ? The thunders of Napoleon's cannon at Jena pro- claim the work of retribution for Poland's wrongs. But how fares it with the autocrat of Russia? Is he secure in his share of the spoils of Poland ? No ; suddenly we see six hundred thousand men marching to Moscow. Does his Vera Cruz protect him now? Far from it. When Moscow burned it seemed as if the earth were lighted up that nations might behold the scene. As that mighty sea of fire gathered and heaved, and rolled upward and yet higher, till its flames licked the stars and fired the whole heavens, it did seem as though the God of nations was writing, in characters of flame, on the front of his throne, that doom that shall fall upon the strong nation which tramples in scorn upon the weak. And what fortune awaits the appointed executor of this work when it was all done ? He, beneath whose proud foot- steps Europe trembled, is now an exile at Elba, and finally a prisoner on the rock of St. Helena ; and there on a barren island, in an unfrequented sea, in the crater of an extin- guished volcano, there is the deathbed of the mighty conqueror. All his annexations have come to that. His last hour is now come, and he, the man of destiny, he who had shaken Europe as with the throes of an earthquake, is now powerless still ; even as the beggar so he died. On the wings of a tempest that raged with unwonted fury, up to the throne of the only power that controlled him while he lived, went the fiery soul of that wonderful warrior, another witness to that eternal decree, that they who do not rule in THE STORMING OF MISSION RIDGE. IIQ righteousness shall perish from the face of the earth. He has found room at last ; and France, she, too, has found room. Her eagles no longer scream along the banks of the Danube, the Po, and the Borysthenes ; they have returned home to their old eyrie between the Alps, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees. So shall it be with yours. You may carry them to the loftiest peak of the Cordilleras, they may wave in insolent triumph in the halls of the Montezumas, the armed men of Mexico may quail before them ; but the weakest hand in Mexico, uplifted in prayer to the God of justice, may call down against you a power in the presence of which the iron hearts of your warriors shall be crumbled into ashes. THE STORMING OF MISSION RIDGE. BENJAMIN F. TAYLOR. IMAGINE a chain of Federal forts, built in between with walls of living men, the line flung northward out of sight and southward beyond Lookout. Imagine a chain of moun- tains crowned with batteries and manned with hostile troops through a six-mile sweep, set over against us in plain sight, and you have the two fronts, the blue, the gray. Imagine the center of our line pushed out a mile and a half towards Mission Ridge, and you have the situation as it was on the morning before Thanksgiving. And what a work was to be done ! One and a half miles to traverse, with narrow fringes of woods, rough valleys, sweeps of open fields, rocky acclivi- ties, to the base of the Ridge, and no foot in all the breadth withdrawn from rebel sight. The base attained, what then ? A hill struggling up out of the valley four hundred feet, I2O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. rained on by bullets, swept by shot and shell ; another line of works, and then, up like a Gothic roof, rough with rocks, a-wreck with fallen trees, four hundred more ; another ring of fire and iron, and then the crest, and then the enemy. To dream of such, a journey would be madness; to devise it, a thing incredible ; to do it, a deed impossible. But Grant was guilty of them all, and was equal to the work. The bugle swung idly at the bugler's side. The warbling fife and rumbling drum were unheard. There was to be louder talk. Six guns at intervals of two seconds, the signal to advance. Strong and steady a voice rang out : " Number one, fire! Number two, fire ! Number three, fire!" It seemed to me the tolling of the clock of destiny. And when at " Number six, fire ! " the roar throbbed out with the flash, you should have seen the dead line that had been lying behind the works all day, all night, all day again, coihe to resurrection in the twinkling of an eye, leap like a felade from its scabbard, and sweep with a two-mile stroke toward the Ridge. From divisions to brigades, from brigades to regiments, the order ran. A minute, and the skirmishers deploy. A minute, and the first great drops begin to patter along the line. A minute, and the musketry is in full play, like the crackling whips of a hemlock fire. Men go down here and there before your eyes. But I may tell you they did not storm that mountain as you would think. They dash out a little way, and then slacken ; they creep up, hand over hand, loading and firing, and wavering and halting, from the first line of works toward the second ; they burst into a charge with a cheer and go over it. Sheets of flame baptize them ; plunging shot tear away comrades on left and right. It is no longer shoulder to shoulder; it is God for us all. Ten fifteen twenty minutes go by like a reluctant century. The bat- teries roll like a drum. The hill sways up like a wall THE STORMING OF MISSION RIDGE. 121 before them at an angle of forty-five degrees ; but our brave mountaineers are clambering steadily on up upward still ! And what do these men follow ? Your heart gives a great bound when you think what it is, the regimental flag, and, glancing along the front, count fifteen of those colors that were borne at Pea Ridge, waved at Shiloh, glorified at Stone River, riddled at Chickamauga. Three times the flag of the 2yth Illinois goes down. And you know why. Three dead color sergeants lie just there ; but the flag is immortal thank God ! and up it comes again, and the men in a row of inverted V's move on. I give a look at the sun behind me ; it is not more than a handbreadth from the edge of the mountain. Oh, for the voice that could bid that sun stand still ! I turn to the battle again. Those three flags have taken flight. They are upward bound ! The race of the flags is growing every moment more terrible. The iron sledge beats on. Hearts, loyal and brave, are on the anvil all the way from base to summit of Mission Ridge, but those dreadful hammers never intermit. Things are growing desperate up aloft; the enemy tumble rocks upon the rising line ; they light the fuses and roll shells down the steep ; they load the guns with handfuls of cartridges in their haste ; and, as if there were powder in the word, they shout " Chickamauga ! " down upon the mountaineers. But all would not do, and just as the sun, weary of the scene, was sinking out of sight, with magnificent bursts all along the line, exactly as you have seen the crested seas leap up at the breakwater, the advance surged over the crest and in a minute those flags fluttered along the fringe where fifty guns were kenneled. The scene on that narrow plateau can never be painted. As the bluecoats surged over its edge, cheer on cheer rang like bells through the valley of the Chickamauga. Men flung themselves exhausted upon 122 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. the ground. They laughed and wept, shook hands, em- braced, turned round, and did all four over again. It was wild as a carnival. The general was received with a shout. " Soldiers," he said, " you ought to be court-martialed, every man of you. I ordered you to take the rifle-pits, and you scaled the mountain ! " THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPER. HERRICK JOHNSON, D.D. WHAT is the Sunday newspaper ? Let us be honest. It is not the newspaper in partnership with Sunday, to promote mutual interests and share the profits. The only mutual' interests that are promoted are those represented by the maxim of the boy in tossing up the penny- : " Heads, I win ; tails, you lose." The profits all go to the newspaper, and Sunday stands all the losses. The Sunday paper is simply the daily paper thrust into Sunday. When the newspaper first appeared on Sunday it changed its clothes a little. It was padded with pious homily, as they pad the sacred concerts with " Sweet By and By " and the " Doxology in long meter"; but the wolf soon got tired of trying to look like a sheep, and now the wolf enters Sunday with scarcely a bit of the woolly fleece left that he put on when he was keeping up appearances. It is a vast blanket of information. Some of it, a great deal of it, not inherently unwholesome ; but all of it secular, worldly, of the earth, earthy; and some of it, very often a great deal of it, pernicious and unclean. Why is it here ? Some say, " Because the people wanted it." This is a free country, and I would be behind no one in defense of personal liberty and the rights of the people. THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPER. 12$ But let that doctrine be pressed, push it far enough, let it once be understood that what the people want the people must have, and we have begun to play sad havoc with our morals. I suppose the people out in Utah wanted polyg- amy; they would vote for it to-day, by a rousing majority, but the government does not intend to let them have it. Down South they wanted slavery, and, alas ! the government was disposed to foster it and compromise with it ; but in the thunder of our civil war God said, "Let my people go." The Anarchists of Haymarket Square, Chicago, wanted a larger liberty ; but American justice took anarchy by the throat and hanged it by the neck till it was dead, and buried it out of sight. Clearly, what the people want is not always best that the people should have. Again, it is pleaded that it is a necessity of our times. But there is Toronto, a city of no mean repute. It has no Sunday newspaper. " Yes," say New York and Chicago, " but Toronto is rural, a slow coach, a country town, hardly in touch with the times. No Sunday paper may do for Toronto, but it won't do for a city astir with modern enter- prise and vast populations." Well, there is London. London is large enough, is it not ? London is enterprising enough, is it not ? It is five or six times as large as Chicago, and two or three times as large as New York. Yet London has no Sunday newspaper. Don't you see that the plea of necessity is simply an absurdity ? The Sunday newspaper is here simply for the money there is in it. But is there no religious reading in these Sunday papers ? Oh, yes ! Here are the bits of lamb-like fleece, by exact mathematical measurement, furnished on a certain Sunday. The New York Tribune published eighty-one columns of political, special, sensational, criminal, and gossipy matter, and three-fourths of a column devoted to religion ; the New York Herald, eighty-four columns, with three-fourths of a 124 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. column devoted to religion ; the New York World, ninety columns, with half a column devoted to religion ; the New York Sun, ninety-seven columns, with one and three-eighths columns devoted to religion ; the New York Times, sixty- eight columns, with one-eighth of a column devoted to religion. It would be difficult to imagine what possible effect that little homeopathic pill of " sweetness and light " N could possibly have alongside that vast dose of crime, world- liness, and sensationalism. Oh, for a breath of the old Puritan ! Doubtless he often looked as if all hope had been washed out of his face. I believe his Sabbath was a little too grim. But what men it made ! Men of the martyr spirit, men of heroic mould. Men of the stuff that is food for the stake and the rack. You could trust them, lean on them, depend on them. They were great fearers of God, but they feared neither man nor the devil. THE SUN OF LIBERTY. VICTOR HUGO. WE are in Russia. The Neva is frozen. They build houses on it ; heavy carriages roll on its surface. It is no longer water ; it is rock. The passers-by go and come on this marble which has been a river ; they improvise a city ; they trace out the streets ; they open the shops ; they sell, they buy, they drink ; they eat, they sleep, they light fires on this water. They can permit themselves anything. Fear nothing, do what they please, laugh, dance it is more solid than dry land. It actually sounds under the foot like granite. Long live winter ! Long live ice ! There is ice, and it shall stand forever. And look at the heavens ! Is it THE SUN OF LIBERTY. 125 day? Is it night ? A gleam, wan and pale, crawls over the snow. One would say that the sun is dead. No ; thou art not dead, Liberty. On a day, and at the moment when they least expect it, at the hour when they had most profoundly forgotten thee, thou shalt arise. O dazzling sight ! One will see thy starlike face suddenly come out from the earth and shine on the horizon. On all this snow, this ice, this hard, white plain, on this water- become block, thou shalt dart thy golden arrow, thy bright and burning ray, thy light, thy heat, thy life. And then ! do you hear that dull sound? Do you hear that cracking, deep and dreadful ? It is the breaking of the ice ! It is the Neva which is tearing loose ! It is the river which retakes its course ! It is truth, which is coming again. It is progress, which recommences. It is humanity, which again begins its march, which drifts full of fragments, which draws away, roots out, carries off, strikes together, mingles, crushes, and drowns in its waves, like the poor, miserable furniture of a ruin, not only the upstart empire of Louis Bonaparte, but all the establishments and all the results of ancient and eternal despotism. Look at all this pass by. It is disappearing for- ever. You will never see it more. See that book half sunk ; it is the old code of iniquity. That trestlework which has just been swallowed up is the throne ! And this other trestlework which is going off, it is the scaffold ! And for this immense engulfing, and for this supreme victory of life over death, what has been the power necessary? One of thy looks, O Sun ! One of thy rays, O Liberty ! 126 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. SYDNEY CARTON'S DEATH. CHARLES DICKENS. ALONG the Paris .streets the dead carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils are carrying the day's wine to la guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate monsters imag- ined since imagination could record itself are fused in the one realization guillotine. As the somber wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to plow up a long, crooked furrow among the populace in the streets. Ridges of faces are thrown to this side and to that, and the plows go steadily onward. There is a guard of sundry horsemen riding abreast of the tumbrils, and faces are often turned up to some of them, and they are asked some question. It would seem to be always the same ques- tion, " Which is Evremonde ? " for the answer is always fol- lowed by a press of people toward the third cart. He stands at the neck of the tumbril, with his head bent down to converse with a mere girl who sits on the side of the cart and holds his hand. Here and there in the long Street of St. Honore' cries are raised against him. " Down, Evre- monde ! To the guillotine, all aristocrats ! Down, Evremonde ! " The clocks are on the stroke of three, and the furrow plowed among the populace is turning round, to come on into the place of execution, and end. The ridges thrown to this side and to that now crumble in and close behind the last plow as it passes on, for all are following to the guillo- tine. In front of it, seated in chairs as in a garden of pub- lic diversion, are a number of women busily knitting. The tumbrils begin to discharge their loads. The ministers of Saint Guillotine are robed and ready. Crash ! A head is held up, and the knitting women, who scarcely lifted their SYDNEY CARTON'S DEATH. 127 eyes to look at it a moment ago when it could think and speak, count One. The second tumbril empties and moves on ; the third comes up. Crash ! and the knitting women, never faltering or pausing in their work, count Two. The supposed Evremonde descends, and the seamstress is lifted out next after him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in getting out, but still holds it, as he promised. He gently places her with her back to the crashing engine that constantly whirs up and falls, and she looks into his face and thanks him. The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing, have qome together on the dark high- way, to repair home together and to rest in her bosom. They solemnly bless each other. She goes next before him is gone ; the knitting women count Twenty-two. " I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord ; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward in a mass like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-three. They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the peacefulest man's face ever beheld there. If he had given any utterance to his thoughts, and they were prophetic, they would have been these : " I see the lives for which I lay down my life peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. 128 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. " I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants generations hence. I see Jjwrt child, who lay upon her bosom and bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well that my name is ma^Je illustri- ous there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honored men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to thj.s place then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice. " It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done ; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." THE TRAITOR'S DEATHBED. GEORGE LIPPARD. FIFTY years ago, in a rude garret near the loneliest suburbs of the city of London, lay a dying man. He was but half dressed, though his legs were concealed in long military boots. An aged minister stood beside the rough couch. The form was that of a strong man grown old through care more than age. There was a face that you might look upon but once, and yet wear it in your memory forever. Ay, there was something terrible in that face, something so full of unnatural loneliness, unspeakable despair, that the aged minister started back in horror. But look ! those strong arms are clutching at the vacant air ; the death sweat stands in drops on that bold brow ; the man is dying. Throb, throb, throb, beats the death watch in the THE TRAITOR'S DEATHBED. 129 shattered wall. " Would you die in the faith of the Christian ? " faltered the preacher, as he knelt there on the damp floor. The white lips of the death-stricken man trembled, but made no sound. Then, with the strong agony of death upon him, he rose into a sitting posture. For the first time he spoke. " Christian ! " he echoed, in that deep tone which thrilled the preacher to the heart ; " will that give me back my honor ? Come with me, old man, come with me, far over the waters. Ha! we are there! This is my native town. Yonder is the church in which I knelt in childhood ; yonder the green on which I sported when a boy. But another flag waves there, in the place of the flag that waved when I was a child. And listen, old man. Were I to pass along the streets, as I passed when but a child, the very babes in their cradles would raise their tiny hands and curse me ! The graves in yonder churchyard would shrink from my footsteps, and yonder flag would rain a baptism of blood upon my head ! " Suddenly the dying man arose; he tottered along the floor, threw open a valise, and drew thence a faded coat of blue, faced with silver, and the wreck of a battle-flag. " Look ye, priest ! This faded coat is spotted with my blood ! " he cried, as old memories seemed stirring at his heart. " This coat I wore when I first heard the news of Lexington ; this coat I wore when I planted the banner of the stars on Ticonderoga ! That bullet hole was pierced in the fight of Quebec ; and now I am a let me whisper it in your ear ! " He hissed that single burning word into the minister's ear. " Now help me, priest ! help me to put on this coat of blue ; for you see " and a ghastly smile came over his face " there is no one here to wipe the cold drops from my brow, no wife, no child. I must meet death alone ; but I will meet him, as I have met him in battle, without a fear." I3O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. And while he stood arraying his limbs in that worm-eaten coat of blue and silver the good minister spoke to him of that great faith which pierces the clouds of human guilt and rolls them back from the face of God. " Faith ! " echoed that strange man who stood there erect with the death chill on his brow; " Faith ! Can it give me back my honor ? Look ye, priest ! There, over the waves, sits George Washington, telling to his comrades the pleasant story of the eight years' war ! There, in his royal halls, sits George of England, bewailing, in his idiotic voice, the loss of the colonies ! And here am I I, who was the first to raise the flag of freedom, the first to strike a blow against that king here am I dying ! oh, dying like a dog ! " The awe-stricken preacher started back from the look of the dying man, while throb, throb, throb, beats the death watch in the shattered wall. " Hush ! silence along the lines there ! " he muttered in that wild, absent tone, as though speaking to the dead. " Silence along the lines ! not a word not a word on peril of your lives ! Hark you, Montgomery ! we will meet in the center of the town ; we will meet there in victory, or die ! Hist Hist ! silence, my men ; not a whisper as we move up those steep rocks ! Now on, my boys ; now on ! Men of the wilderness, we will gain the town ! Now up with the banner of the stars ! Up with the flag of freedom, though the night is dark and the snow falls ! Now ! now one more blow, and Quebec is ours ! " The aged minister unrolls that faded flag ; it is a blue banner gleaming with thirteen stars. He unrolls that parch- ment ; it is a colonel's commission in the Continental Army, addressed to Benedict Arnold. And there, in that rude hut, while the death watch throbbed like a heart in the shattered wall, there, unknown, unwept, in all the bitterness of deso- lation, lay the corpse of the patriot and the traitor. TWO OF DICKENS VILLAINS. 13! TWO OF DICKENS' VILLAINS. JULIEN M. ELLIOTT. DICKENS has painted many portraits of villainy. But no two are in more striking contrast than his familiar charac- ters of James Steerforth in David Copperfield and Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist. For the betrayer of virtue, refined, courte- ous, insinuating, society has scarcely more than a frown ; but from a Bill Sykes it recoils as from a maddened tiger. Yet a Bill Sykes strikes no deadlier blow than can be dealt with a pistol or a bludgeon, but the Steerforths are the murderers of souls. Widely separated in life as gentleman and ruffian, they come together at last as villains ; and, as if meeting on the borders of time the vengeance of God, go down alike to an unnatural death. A storm is breaking on the coast of England. It nears the Yarmouth Beach and the house of the old fisherman whom the villainy of Steerforth has robbed of his little Emily. It is months and years since was heard that wail of anguish : " Her that I 'd have died for, and would die for now, is gone, gone ! " But the hour of retribution is at hand. A ship heaves in sight, strained, shattered, dismasted. It rises to the top of an enormous wave, rides it, and again sinks from view. As the moon breaks through the clouds and throws its light upon the struggling vessel, from the men and women along the shore comes the cry : " God help them she is parting amidships." There was a bell on board, and as the vessel rolled and reeled on her side it was heard through the storm as if tolling a funeral knell. At length the form of a man is seen clinging to a broken mast. There was a wave of a sailor's hat, but the beckoning signal seemed to have its only 132 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. answer in the bell as it rang out above the roar of the sea its mocking, warning note of despair. An hour after a human form was washed ashore. And there, as if directed by some retributive hand, " among the ruins of the home he had wronged," lay the lifeless body of James Steerforth, cast up by the sea. The murder of Nancy by Sykes, his remorse, flight, and death, form a very different picture; yet the lesson is the same. All the savage brutality of the outlaw's nature rises within him as he fancies himself betrayed. He hastens to the hovel, where lies in slumber his unsuspecting victim, rouses her, and deals the fatal blow. The cold gray light of the morning breaks in upon that room before he has the courage to move. At length desperation seizes him. Whither can he flee to escape the sight of those eyes that glare upon him with a light not of earth? As he leaves the city every object becomes the semblance of some fear- ful thing. The very trees seem to point their fingers at him. As he turns here and there, he can see the ghastly figure of his morning's work following closely at his heels. Everywhere that he goes those widely staring eyes, so luster- less and so glassy, glare upon him, mocking and driving him mad. At last he resolves to venture to London. " There 's some one to speak to there, at all events," he says. He reaches one of his old haunts, but all turn from him in fear and terror. Hark, the knocking, knocking at the gate ! The infuriated crowd of pursuers are close upon him they are breaking the door. In wild despair he reaches the roof of the house, and Watches them from above. A rope is in his hands ; he fastis it to a chimney, striving to escape on the other side. " At the very instant when he brought the loop over his head, the murderer, looking behind him on the roof, threw his arms above his head, uttered a yell of terror, TWO QUEENS. 133 'the eyes!' again, 'the eyes!' He staggered and fell back. The noose was on his neck, the rope ran up with his weight, and left him swinging in mid-air." The quiver- ing hemp tightened, slackened again, leaving a dark, miser- able picture against the light ground of the house. Surely, " the wages of sin is death." TWO QUEENS. FRANKLIN ADDINGTON. THE combatants are women, the weapons treachery and intrigue, the object a crown. Deadly enemies in life, their claims are the sharpest fought in death. And yet they are women, ruling nations at peace ; women bound together by ties of blood; women who never ceased to call each other by the sweet name of sister. The character of " good Queen Bess " is a study. Child- ish, frivolous, vain, she could trample down pride, repel insult, brave danger. To-day, aping a girl of sixteen ; to- morrow, outmatching with her wisdom hoary-headed states- men ; to-day, the laughing stock of her maids; to-morrow, defying Europe from her island throne. Mary Stuart, lacking in some degree Elizabeth's wisdom and prudence and, above all, Elizabeth's self-control, was more rapid, more daring, more decided. More amiable than her rival, she was more selfish ; more womanly, she was more remorseless. See her in prosperity ; how earnestly she urges the claims of a poor old servant. See her a " dethroned outcast," in the midst of her flight ; with her own hand she writes to her rival, " fierce, dauntless, haughty as ever." See her in prison ; not for liberty, not for life will she " sell her birthright." 134 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. The " defender of Protestantism," Elizabeth is the ally of Spain and at war with France. Her realm is exhausted, disordered, treacherous, " steadfast enemies, but no stead- fast friends." Within, as about her, is going on a tragic struggle. A struggle of prudence and sense against woman's inclination, woman's weakness, woman's love. " Name, throne, and very soul " are in peril. Meanwhile her quick-witted rival is on the alert, pursuing without scruple, without remorse, her aim. Believing herself a " favorite of fortune," Mary is resolute, earnest. Now it is that human wickedness, as " sudden, as awful as a divine dispensation," seems to take upon itself the working out of this royal tragedy. Rizzio is killed, and the woman becomes a fiend. Darnley is murdered, an,d the " hopeful champion of Popish and Spanish intrigue " is a hunted murderess, a betrayed guest, a prisoner for life. Henceforth it is Elizabeth who prospers. Henceforth Mary's story is the story of her wrongs, her sufferings, her death. The last scene came to these rivals with the same force of contrast. Mary Stuart died by " vile hands and viler practise," indeed, but with friendly hearts near her, and with Europe to look on, " to admire, to applaud, to bewail her." Elizabeth, the renowned, the feared, the " idol at home, the terror abroad," lies on her palace floor gradually wasting into death under the terrible fangs of remorse. " Helpless, hopeless, comfortless," her last words an acknowledgment of her rival's claims, her last act an act of despair, " a dumb appeal to God or man." The great Queen Elizabeth, who, " for the sake of her country," denied herself the dearest things to woman's existence, wins no man's heart in life, no man's sympathy in death. Mary Stuart yet walks the earth " an enchantress." Her name is a synonym for all that is winning, all that is fascinat- THE GREATNESS OF STONEWALL JACKSON. 135 ing in woman. Mary Stuart had all she sought but the throne of England. Elizabeth, all the queen could ask, nothing the woman wanted, longed for ; no happiness in youth, no love in life, no consolation in death. THE UNCONSCIOUS GREATNESS OF STONEWALL JACKSON. MOSES D. HOGE, D.D. THE greatness of Stonewall Jackson was an unconscious greatness. It was the supreme devotion to what he thought was duty. Hence he studied no dramatic effects. When among the mountains, pyramids older than those to which the first Napoleon pointed, he did not remind his men that the centuries were looking down upon them. When on the plains he drilled no eagles to perch upon his banners, as the third Napoleon is said to have done. The letter written to his pastor at Lexington the day after the first battle of Manassas gives the keynote to his char- acter. Preceding any accurate account of that event, a crowd had gathered around the post office, awaiting with intensest interest the opening of the mail. The first letter was handed to the Rev. Dr. White. It was from General Jackson. " Now we shall know all," said his reverend friend. But he opened the letter to read : MY DEAR PASTOR : In my tent last night, after a fatiguing day's service, I remembered that I had failed to send you my contribu- tion to our colored Sunday school. Inclosed you will find my check for that object. Yours faithfully> THOMAS J. JACKSON. 136 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Not a word about a conflict which electrified a nation ! Not an allusion to the splendid part he had taken in it ! Not a reference to himself beyond the fact that it had been a fatiguing day's service ! And yet that was a day ever mem- orable in his history memorable in all history when he received the name destined to supplant the name his parents gave him, Stonewall Jackson. When his brigade of twenty-six hundred men had for hours withstood the iron tempest which broke upon it ; when the Confederate right had been overwhelmed in the rush of resistless numbers, General Bee rode up to Jackson, and with despairing bitterness exclaimed : " General, they are beating us back." " Then," said Jackson, " we will give them the bayonet." Bee seemed to catch the inspiration of his deter- mined will, and, galloping back to the broken fragments of his overtaxed command, exclaimed : "There is Jackson stand- ing like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians !" From that time Jackson's was known as the " Stonewall Brigade," a name henceforth immortal, for the christening was in the blood of its author. And that wall of brave hearts was on every battlefield a steadfast bulwark of their country. In the state where all that is mortal of this great hero sleeps there is a natural bridge of rock whose massive arch, fashioned with grace by the hand of God, springs lightly toward the sky, spanning a chasm into whose awful depths the beholder looks down bewildered and awe-struck. But its grandeur is not diminished because tender vines clamber over its gigantic piers or because sweet flowers nestle in its crevices. Nor is the granite strength of Jackson's character weakened because in every throb of his heart there was a pulsation ineffably and exquisitely tender. The hum of bees, the fragrance of clover fields, the tender streaks of dawn, the dewy brightness of early spring, the mellow glories of matured autumn, all in turn charmed and tranquilized him. THE GREATNESS OF STONEWALL JACKSON. The eye that flashed amid the smoke of battle grew soft in contemplating the beauty of a flower. The ear that thrilled with the thunder of the cannonade drank in with innocent delight the song of birds and the prattle of children's voices. The voice whose sharp and ringing tones had so often been heard uttering the command, " Give them the bayonet ! " culled even from foreign tongues terms of endearment. And the man who filled two hemispheres with his fame was never so happy as when telling the colored children of his Sunday school the story of the Cross. It was in the noontide of his glory that he fell. What a pall of sadness shrouded the whole land ! And where in the annals of the world's sorrow was there such a pathetic imper- sonation of a people's grief as was embodied in the old muti- lated veteran of Jackson's division who, as the shades of evening fell and the doors of the Capitol were being closed for the last time, was seen anxiously pressing through the crowd to take his last look at the face of his beloved leader. They told him that he was too late, that they were closing the coffin for the last time. But the old soldier, lifting the stump of his right arm toward the heavens, and with tears running down his face, exclaimed : " By the right arm which I lost for my country, I demand the privilege of seeing my general once more." So irresistible was the appeal that the governor ordered the ceremonies to be stayed until the humble comrade had dropped his tear upon the face of his dead leader. 138 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE UNKNOWN RIDER. GEORGE LIPPARD. IT was the yth of October, 1777. Horatio Gates stood before his tent, gazing steadfastly upon the two armies, now arrayed in order of battle. It was a clear, bracing day, mellow with the richness of autumn. The sky was cloudless ; the foliage of the woods scarce tinged with purple and gold. But the tread of legions shook the ground ; from every bush shot the glimmer of the rifle barrel ; on every hillside blazed the sharpened bayonet. But all at once a smoke arose, a thunder shook the ground, and a chorus of shouts and groans yelled along the darkened air. The play of death had begun. The two flags, this of the stars, that of the red cross, tossed amid the smoke of battle, while the sky was clouded with leaden folds, and the earth throbbed with the pulsations of a mighty heart. Suddenly, Gates and his officers were startled. Along the height on which they stood came a rider upon a black horse rushing toward the distant battle. Look ! he draws his sword, the sharp blade quivers through the air ; he points to the distant battle, and lo ! he is gone, gone through those clouds, while his shout echoes over the plains. Wherever the fight is thickest, there, through intervals of cannon .smoke, you may see, riding madly forward, that strange soldier, mounted on his steed black as death. Look at him as, with face red with British blood, he waves his sword and shouts to his legions. Now you may see him fighting in that cannon's glare, and in the next moment he is away off yonder, leading the forlorn hope up that steep cliff. Look for a moment into those clouds of battle. There bursts a band of American militiamen, fleeing before that company of redcoat hirelings, who come rushing forward, THE UNKNOWN RIDER. 139 their solid front of bayonets gleaming in the battle light. In the moment of their flight a horse comes crashing over the plains. The unknown rider reins his steed back on his haunches, right in the path of these broad-shouldered militia- men. " What ! are you Americans, men, and flee before British soldiers ? " he shouts. " Back again, and face them once more, or I myself will ride you down ! " Their leader turns ; his comrades, as if by one impulse, follow his example. In one line, but thirty men in all, they confront thirty sharp bayonets. The British advance. " Now upon the rebels, charge ! " shouts the redcoat officer. They spring forward at the same bound. At this moment the voice of the unknown rider is heard : " Now let them have it ! Fire ! " A sound is heard, a smoke is seen, twenty Britons are down. The remaining ten start back. " Club your rifles and charge them home ! " shouts the unknown. That black horse springs forward, followed by the militiamen. Then a confused conflict, a cry for quarter, and a vision of twenty farmers grouped around the rider of the black horse, greeting him with cheers. Thus it was all the day long. Wherever that black horse and his rider went, there followed victory. At last, toward the setting of the sun, the crisis of the conflict came. That fortress yonder on Bemis' Heights must be won, or the American cause is lost ! That cliff is too steep, that death is too certain. The officers cannot persuade the men to advance. The Americans have lost the field. Even Morgan, that iron man among iron men, leans on his rifle and despairs of the field. But look yonder ! In this moment, when all is dismay and horror, here, crashing on, comes the black horse and his rider. And now look ! as that black steed crashes up that steep cliff. That steed quivers ! he totters ! he falls ! No ! No ! Still on, still up the cliff, still on toward the fortress. The rider turns his face and shouts : I4O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. " Come on, men of Quebec ! come on ! " That call is need- less. Already the bold riflemen are on the rock. Now, British cannon, pour your fires, and lay your dead in tens and twenties on the rock. Now, redcoat hirelings, shout your battle cry if you can ! For look ! there, in the gate of the fortress, as the smoke clears away, stands the black horse and his rider. That steed falls dead, pierced by a hundred balls; but his rider, as the British cry for quarter, lifts up his voice and shouts afar to Horatio Gates, waiting yonder in his tent : " Saratoga is won ! " As that cry goes up to heaven he falls, with his leg shattered by a cannon ball. Who was the rider of the black horse ? Do you not guess his name ? Then bend down and gaze on that shattered limb, and you will see that it bears the mark of a former wound. That wound was received in the storming of Quebec. That rider of the black horse was Benedict Arnold. THE VENGEANCE OF THE FLAG. HENRY D. ESTERBROOKE. IT was on the night of April 14, 1865, that the shot was fired which killed Abraham Lincoln, and its reverberation will last forever. On the morning following, at precisely 8:18 of the clock, Abraham Lincoln yielded up the ghost. The fatal moment is notched on the scythe of time. Even the watchmakers, those wardens of the hours, have em- balmed that moment in the sign of their calling. In every city of the Union, North and South, East and West, you have seen that great dumb, wooden horologe pointing back- ward to the dread event. Look at it whenever you will, it is always 8: 18. THE VENGEANCE OF THE FLAG. 14! The murder of Lincoln was the most appalling tragedy ever witnessed in a theater. On this mortal night the President had sought to be amused. He wished to laugh, to be made to laugh ; and for this he had been criticised. Why should he wish to laugh when every click of the tele- graph was the death tick of a soldier ? Why should he ? Why should he not ? There has been too much of tragedy, and now this laughter-loving man would gain surcease from the long tension on his heartstrings by forgetting fact in fiction, the real in the apparent. The box which the presidential party was to occupy had been appropriately draped with the Union flag so arranged as to frame the portrait of George Washington, whose serene and august face smiled from out its ample folds as from an aureole of glory. Midway of the performance, and shortly after ten o'clock, a young man came down the outer aisle and presented his card to the President's messenger. Before the messenger could fairly glance at the card, the young man had pushed past him and entered the narrow passage immediately behind the box in which the President was seated. Going to the door opening into the box, he peered at the occupants through a small aperture, also previously made for the purpose. Surely the noble Lincoln must have felt some vague con- sciousness of evil. We may never know. In a moment the door was opened, the murderer entered. There was a sharp detonation, a moment's dread paralysis, a wild commotion, a clutch at the fleeing assassin, a fierce imprecation, and the savage slash of the knife as he freed himself from the detaining grasp, his leap to the stage, his mock heroics, his rehearsed magniloquence, and the startled, bewildered cry : " The President is murdered ! " Instantly with the pistol shot the President had fallen forward. The dear head dropped, never to rise again ; the 142 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. loving heart fluttered into rest, and Abraham Lincoln, offered by the All Wise as a mediator and an exemplar to his distracted countrymen, was with the " undying dead." But what of the assassin ? Maniacally bold as now seems this murderer, the chances of capture had been weighed by the murderer and reduced to a minimum. His route to the South had been chosen and carefully studied. His confed- erates were numerous and discreet. His finances were ample, his equipment was complete. And yet we are told that, except for the accident of his foot, as he leaped from the proscenium box, catching in the flag, his escape would have been inevitable. But why call it an accident ? It was no accident, but a miracle of gratitude, the vengeance of the flag. Washington was there. Washington, the father who begot and brought it forth, seemed for the moment to live again in its embrace. Lincoln, the savior who had redeemed it from the sin of slavery, was even then dying that it might live, the last quiverings of his heart pulsing in all its breathing folds. It was no accident. In the absence of human interven- tion, the flag itself became an avenger. It reached forth and grappled with the assassin. It clove to him like the bloody garment of old mythology. It shrieked, and was rent in twain, but clung clung clung, writhing about and binding him like a python in its coils. The flag was the captor. The flag was its country's Nemesis. All hail the flag, sparkling with its stars, conscious of itself, its God, and its America ! Look up, my countrymen ! Look up, poor human race, look up to it in reverence and with a prayer of gratitude ! What wonder that it seems like a gift from the spirit world, as though Father Abraham had reached it forth from beyond the stars, and said : " Take it, my children ; study it, learn it, know it, and love it always." VESUVIUS AND THE EGYPTIAN. 143 VESUVIUS AND THE EGYPTIAN, FROM ff THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII." EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. " GLAUCUS, the Athenian, thy time has come," said a loud and clear voice ; " the lion awaits thee." The keeper, who was behind the den, cautiously removed the grating ; the lion leaped forth with a mighty and a glad roar of release. Glaucus had bent his limbs so as to give himself the firmest posture at the expected rush of the lion, with his small and shining weapon raised on high, in the faint hope that one well-directed thrust might penetrate through the eye to the brain of his grim foe. But, to the unutterable astonishment of all, the beast halted abruptly in the arena ; then suddenly it sprang forward, but not on the Athenian. At half speed it circled round and round the space, turning its vast head from side to side with an anxious and perturbed gaze, as if seeking only some avenue of escape. Once or twice it endeavored to leap up the parapet that divided it from the audience, and, on failing, uttered rather a baffled howl than its deep-toned and kingly roar. The first surprise of the assembly at the apathy of the lion soon grew converted into resentment at its cowardice ; and the populace already merged their pity for the fate of Glaucus into angry compassion for their own disappoint- ment. Then there was a confusion, a bustle, voices of remon- strance suddenly breaking forth, and suddenly silenced at the reply. All eyes turned,, in wonder at the interruption, towards the quarter of the disturbance. The crowd gave way, and suddenly Sallust appeared on the senatorial benches, his hair dishevelled breathless heated half- exhausted. He cast his eyes hastily around the ring. 144 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. " Remove the Athenian ! " he cried ; " haste he is inno- cent ! Arrest Arbaces, the Egyptian ; he is the murderer of Apaecides ! " " Art thou mad, O Sallust ? " said the praetor, rising from his seat. "What means this raving ? " " Remove the Athenian ! Quick ! or his blood be on your head. Praetor, delay, and you answer with your own life to the emperor ! I bring with me the eyewitness to the death of the priest Apaecides. Room there ! stand back ! give way ! People of Pompeii, fix every eye upon Arbaces there he sits ! Room there for the priest Calenus ! " " The priest Calenus ! Calenus ! " cried the mob. " Is it he ? No it is a dead man." " It is the priest Calenus," said the praetor. " What hast thou to say ? " " Arbaces of Egypt is the murderer of Apaecides, the priest of Isis ; these eyes saw him deal the blow. Release the Athenian ; he is innocent ! " " It is for this, then, that the lion spared him. A miracle ! a miracle ! " cried Pansa. " A miracle ! a miracle ! " shouted the people. " Remove the Athenian ! Arbaces to the lion /" And that shout echoed from hill to vale, from coast to sea : " Arbaces to the lion ! " " Hear me," answered Arbaces, rising calmly, but with agitation visible in his face. " This man came to threaten that he would make against me the charge he has now made, unless I would purchase his silence with half my for- tune. Were I guilty, why was the witness of this priest silent at the trial ? Then I had not detained or concealed him. Why did he not proclaim my guilt when I proclaimed that of Glaucus ? " " What ! " cried Calenus, turning around to the people, " shall Isis be thus contemned ? Shall the blood of Apae- cides yet cry for vengeance ? Shall the lion be cheated of his lawful prey ? A god ! a god ! I feel the god rush to VESUVIUS AND THE EGYPTIAN. 145 my lips ! To the lion to the lion with Arbaccs ! " Sinking on the ground in strong convulsions the foam gathered to his mouth he was as a man, indeed, whom a supernatural power had entered ! The people saw and shuddered. " It is a god that inspires the holy man ! To the lion with the Egyptian /" With that cry up sprang on moved thousands upon thousands! They rushed from the heights they poured down in the direction of the Egyptian. The power of the praetor was as a reed beneath the whirlwind. The guards made but a feeble barrier the waves of the human sea halted for a moment, to enable Arbaces to count the exact moment of his doom ! In despair, and in a terror which beat down even pride, he glanced his eyes over the rolling and rushing crowd when, right above them, through the wide chasm which had been left in the velaria, he beheld a strange and awful apparition he beheld and his craft restored his courage ! " Behold ! " he shouted with a voice of thunder, which stilled the roar of the crowd ; " behold how the gods pro- tect the guiltless ! The fires of the avenging Orcus burst forth against the false witness of my accusers ! " The eyes of the crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld, with ineffable dismay, a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the form of a gigantic pine tree, the trunk, blackness ; the branches, fire. Then there arose on high the universal shrieks of women ; the men stared at each other, but were dumb. At that moment they felt the earth shake beneath their feet ; the walls of the theater trembled ; and beyond, in the distance, they heard the crash of falling roofs. An instant more and the mountain cloud seemed to roll towards them, dark and rapid, like a torrent. At the same time it cast forth from its bosom a shower of ashes mixed with vast fragments of 146 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. burning stone ! Over the crushing vines, over the desolate streets, over the amphitheater itself, far and wide, with many a mighty splash in the agitated sea, fell that awful shower ! No longer thought the crowd of justice or of Arbaces ; safety for themselves was their sole thought. Each turned to fly each dashing, pressing, crushing against the other. Trampling recklessly over the fallen, amidst groans and oaths and prayers and sudden shrieks, the enormous crowd vomited itself forth through the numerous passages. Whither should they fly for protection from the terrors of the open air ? And then darker and larger and mightier spread the cloud above them. It was a sudden and more ghastly Night rushing upon the realm of Noon ! THE VICTOR OF MARENGO. (Anonymous.) NAPOLEON was sitting in his tent. Before him lay the map of Italy. He took four pins, stuck them up, measured, moved the pins, and measured again. " Now," said he, " that is right. I will capture him there." " Who, sire ? " said an officer. " Melas, the old fox of Austria. He will return from Genoa, pass through Turin, and fall back on Alexandria. I will cross the Po, meet him on the plains of La Servia, and conquer him there." And the finger of the child of destiny pointed to Marengo. But God thwarted Napoleon's schemes, and the well-planned victory of Napo- leon became a terrible defeat. Just as the day was lost Desaix came sweeping across the field at the head of his cavalry, and halted near the THE VICTOR OF MARENGO. 147 eminence where stood Napoleon. In the corps was a drummer boy, a gamin, whom Desaix had picked up in the streets of Paris, and who had followed the victorious eagles of France in the campaigns of Egypt and Austria. As the column halted Napoleon shouted to him : " Beat a retreat." The boy did not stir. "Gamin, beat a retreat! " The boy grasped his drumsticks, stepped forward, and said : " O sire, I don't know how. Desaix never taught me that. But I can beat a charge. Oh ! I can beat a charge that would make the dead fall in line. I beat that charge at the Pyramids once, and I beat it at Mt. Tabor, and I beat it again at the Bridge of Lodi, and, oh ! may I beat it here ? " Napoleon turned to Desaix : " We are beaten ; what shall we do ? " " Do ? Beat them ! There is time to win a victory yet. Up ! gamin, the charge ! Beat the old charge of Mt. Tabor and Lodi ! " A moment later the corps, fol- lowing the sword gleam, of Desaix, and keeping step to the furious roll of the gamin's drum, swept down on the host of Austria. They drove the first line back on the second, the second back on the third, and there they died. Desaix fell at the first volley, but the line never faltered. As the smoke cleared away, the gamin was seen in front of the line, still beating the furious charge, as over the dead and wounded, over the breastworks and ditches, over the cannon and rear- guard, he led the way to victory. To-day men point to Marengo with wonderment. They laud the power and foresight that so skillfully planned the battle ; but they forget that Napoleon failed, and that a gamin of Paris put to shame the child of destiny. 148 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE VOYAGE OF THE "FRAM." ARTHUR P. HUNT. THE summer sun is beating down on a blue Norwegian fiord. Off the point yonder, where the tiny house nestles in the corner of the meadow land, a little vessel is just weighing anchor. It is the Fram starting on its bold ven- ture to wrest its secrets from the silent north. And what was the idea of Fridtjof Nansen, the great sea king of our age, as his good ship Fram went sailing into unknown seas ? It was that the ice, which comes grinding southward along the Greenland coast, is owing to a current across the Polar Sea. Previous expeditions, fighting against this current, had seen their ships ground to pieces, or else hurried southward by the irresistible force of the drifting ice. Why not change, asked Nansen, from the traditional course to one in which the current would carry the ship northward across the pole? Simple as was the idea, the scientific world would have none of it. " Arctic exploration," said one, " is sufficiently credited with rashness and danger in its legiti- mate and sanctioned methods without bearing the burden of Dr. Nansen's illogical scheme of self-destruction." And what were these " legitimate and sanctioned methods " ? They were : hug the shore ; avoid the ice ; leave open a line of retreat. But Nansen said: " Strike out into the open sea; freeze the ship into the ice ; leave open no line of retreat." Three weary years have passed. In the dim fantastic light of the aurora, a dull gray wilderness of ice with its pallid glitter fades away into the gloom of the horizon. There against the snow and sky rises a strange form in silhouette, a black hull which the ice seems slowly claim- ing. As if in exultation at the thought, the aurora flashes forth in startling splendor. Red and yellow, the streamers, THE VOYAGE OF THE FRAM. 149 serpent-like, glide into the sky. Then with lightning change of form and color, bright green and ruby red, they twist and writhe amid whole sheaves of golden flame. And now far away on the horizon's edge begins the dull boom of the packing ice. Again it rumbles, nearer now ; then double peals in quick succession, and across the waste great blocks of ice are tossed along a gathering ridge. Ten, twelve, fifteen feet thick, the massive floes are broken, and flung back grinding and crashing. Straight toward the ship, as if bent on destruction, it speeds along ; but when again the uproar dies away in the distance the little Fram looms there still, half buried, but unharmed. Dreary enough that black hull looks ; but within it, brave and hopeful hearts are beating. Not a man has been lost, not a man injured or even ill. And slowly, slowly, the Fram is drifting across the frozen sea. " Madness," do you say? Well, madness, if you will, but there was tremendous method in it. "Useless ? " No, surely not useless ; for science has gained by that painstaking series of observations, society has gained by that pluck which adds another name to her honor roll of heroes. But is there not something of a spiritual portent, too, in Nansen's venture ? The shores of every age are strewn with wreckage. Old faiths have crumbled, and the common doubt and hesitation make even the bravest hearts quail. But underneath the surface the eye of the seer beholds a current strong and free. To oppose it is destruction ; to utilize its forces with a firm hope in the final issue is to carry forward humanity's standard and plant it beyond the farthest boundary lines of former ages. And, though the pole be not reached, this is success. I5O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. WAR AND PEACE. F. W. ROBERTSON. DOUBTLESS the law of honor is only half Christian. Yet poetic imagination does this: it proclaims the invisible truth above the visible comfort. It does not say it will be better for you in the end if you do honorably. It says you must do honorably, though it be not better for you to do it, but worse and deathful. Honor says : Perhaps you will lose all life. Lose, then, like a man; for there is something higher than life, dearer than even your eternal gain. So it is that through poetic imagination war becomes chivalry. A truly great man, the American Channing, has said that if armies were dressed in a hangman's or a butcher's garb, the false glare of military enthusiasm would be seen in its true aspect as butchery. It is wonderful how the generous enthusiasm of Dr. Channing has led him into such a sophism. Take away honor and imagination and poetry from war, and it becomes carnage. Doubtless. And take away public spirit and invisible principles from resist- ance to a tax, and Hampden becomes a noisy demagogue. Take away the grandeur of his cause, and Washington is a rebel, instead of the purest of patriots. But the truth is here, as elsewhere; poetic imagination has reached the truth, while science and common sense have missed it. It has distinguished war from mere bloodshed. Carnage is terrible. The conversion of producers into destroyers is a calamity. Death, and insults to woman worse than death, human features obliterated beneath the hoof of the war horse, and reeking hospitals and ruined commerce and violated homes, they are all awful. But there is something worse than death. Cowardice is worse. And the decay of enthusiasm and manliness is worse. And it is worse WAR AND PEACE. 151 than death, ay, worse than a hundred thousand deaths, when a people has gravitated down into the creed that the "wealth of nations" consists, not in generous hearts, "fire in each breast, and freedom on each brow," - not in men, but in silk and cotton and something that they call " capital." Peace is blessed, peace arising out of charity. But peace springing out of the calculations of selfishness is not blessed. If the price to be paid for peace is this, that wealth accumu- late and men decay, better far that every street in every town of our noble country should run blood ! Let me illustrate my meaning by an anecdote from Sir Charles Napier's campaign against the robber tribes of upper Scinde. A detachment of troops was marching along a valley, the cliffs overhanging which were crested by the enemy. A sergeant, with twelve men, chanced to become separated from the rest by taking the wrong side of a ravine, which they expected soon to terminate, but which suddenly deepened into an impassable chasm. The officer in command signaled to the party an order to return. They mistook the signal for a command to charge; the brave fellows answered with a cheer, and charged. At the summit of the steep mountain was a triangular platform, defended by a breast- work, behind which were seventy of the foe. On they went, charging up one of those fearful paths, eleven against seventy. The contest could not long be doubtful with such odds. One after another they fell, six upon the spot, the remainder hurled backwards, but not until they had slain nearly twice their own number. There is a custom, we are told, amongst the hillsmen that when a great chieftain of theirs falls in battle his wrist is bound with a thread, either of red or green, the red denoting the highest rank. According to custom, they stripped the dead and threw their bodies over the precipice. When their comrades returned they found their bodies stark and gashed; 152 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. but around both wrists of every British hero was twined the red thread ! And so, if a foreign foot be planted on our sacred soil thanks to gentlemen who have taught us the sublime mys- teries of " capital " in lieu of the old English superstitions of honor and religion they may yet chance to learn that British chivalry did not breathe her last at Moodkee, or Sobraon, or Goojerat, or Hyderbad. They may yet discover that amongst the artisans and peasants and workingmen of England, there are a thousand thousand worthy to be brothers of those heroic eleven who sleep beneath the rocks of Trukkee with the red thread of honor round their wrists. WATERLOO. J. T. HEADLEY. THE whole continental struggle exhibits no sublimer spectacle than this last effort of Napoleon to save his sink- ing empire. The greatest military energy and skill the world possessed had been tasked to the utmost during the day. Thrones were tottering on the turbulent field, and the shadows of fugitive kings flitted through the smoke of battle. Bonaparte's star trembled in the zenith, now blazing out in its ancient splendor, now suddenly paling before his anxious eye. At last he staked his empire on one bold throw. Nothing could be more imposing than the movement of the Old Guard to the assault. It had never recoiled before a human foe, and the allied forces beheld with awe its firm and steady advance to the final charge. For a moment the batteries stopped playing and the firing ceased along the WATERLOO. 153 British lines, as, without the beating of a drum or a bugle note to cheer their steady courage, they moved in dead silence over the field. The next moment the artillery opened, and the head of that gallant column seemed to sink into the earth. Rank after rank went down; yet they neither stopped nor faltered. Dissolving squadrons and whole bat- talions disappearing one after another in the destructive fire affected not their steady courage. In vain did the artillery hurl its storm of fire and lead into that living mass. Up to the very muzzles they pressed, and, driving the artillerymen from their pieces, pushed on through the English lines. But just as the victory seemed won, a file of soldiers who had lain flat on the ground behind a low ridge of earth sud- denly rose and poured a volley in their very faces. Another and another followed, till one broad sheet of flame rolled on their bosoms, and in such a fierce and unexpected flow that they staggered back before it. Before the guard had time to rally again and advance, a heavy column of infantry fell on its left flank in close and deadly volleys, causing it in its unsettled state to swerve to the right. At that instant a whole brigade of cavalry thundered on the right flank, and penetrated where cavalry had never gone before. It was then that the army, seized with despair, shrieked out : " The Guard recoils ! the Guard recoils ! " and turned and fled in wild dismay. Still those veterans refused to fly ; rallying from their disorder, they formed into two immense squares of eight battalions and turned fiercely on the enemy, and nobly strove to stem the reversed tide of battle. Michel, at the head of those brave battalions, fought like a lion. To every command of the enemy to surrender he replied: "The Guard dies; it never surrenders," and, with his last breath bequeathing this glorious motto to the Guard, he fell a witness to its truth. 154 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Death traversed those eight battalions with such a rapid footstep that but a single battalion, the debris of the " column of granite " at Marengo, was left. Into this Napoleon flung himself. Cambronne, its brave commander, saw with terror the emperor in its frail keeping. Approach- ing the emperor, he cried out : " Retire ! do you not see that death has no need of you ? " and, closing mourn- fully yet sternly round their expiring eagles, those brave hearts bade Napoleon an eternal adieu, and, flinging them- selves on the enemy, were soon piled with the dead at their feet. WOLFE AT QUEBEC. FRANK D. BUDLONG. ON a bright June morning, 1759, Wolfe, sailing proudly up the St. Lawrence River, landed at Quebec. Continual victory had thus far rested on the banners of the English. Louisburg had been taken by storm, Ticonderoga and Crown Point evacuated, Fort Niagara surrendered, and now the eager eyes of the British were turned toward Wolfe and Quebec. But Wolfe had no sluggard with whom to deal. Quebec, almost impregnable from its position on the bluff, had been rendered doubly secure by the wary Montcalm. For a dozen miles above the city every landing-place was in- trenched and protected, while for a dozen miles below it the shore was guarded, to where the impetuous Montmorency, leaping and whirling down the steps of its rocky bed, rushes headlong over the ledge and pours its fiery cataract into the chasm. But the young and heroic Wolfe was not to be checked by an appearance of strength. Mortars were sta- tioned, hot shot and shell thrown into the city, and a rally WOLFE AT QUEBEC. 155 was made to force a landing ; but nowhere was a point left unguarded. Again and again the brave Grenadiers rush forward, only to be met with a withering fire which mows them down like grass. Flesh and blood cannot stand it, and reluctantly Wolfe orders a retreat. Day after day the general studied the position of the enemy ; seemingly every avenue of approach was recon- noitered. So the days crept into weeks, the weeks into months, and still the citadel of Quebec stood there on the cliff, bold, silent, impregnable, the Gibraltar of America; and above floated the banner of the Bourbons. Worn down by care and constant watching, fighting fire rafts by night and studying the shore by day, the feeble frame of Wolfe sunk under the energy of his resistless spirit. But his purpose was unchanged. He knew that far across the water Pitt was watching him with anxious eyes. To his comrades in arms, who loved their leader and were ready to follow him to death, he said : " While a man is able to do his duty and can stand and hold arms, it is infamous to retire." At length perseverance is crowned with success. A narrow bridle path is discovered winding from a little cove to the plateau above ; and up this path, under cover of the night, Wolfe determined to lead his army, offer battle to Montcalm, or carry the town by assault. On the evening of September 12 the final preparations were made. What a scene spread out before the English general on the clear, starlight evening, the spacious har- bor, so far from the sea, his own fleet and army gathering under way, and in the distance the gray walls and towering cliffs of Quebec ! Impressed by the sight as he passed along from ship to ship, the general spoke of the poet Gray and his " Elegy in a Country Churchyard." " Ah, yes," he said, " I would rather be the author of that poem than to take Quebec." Then the oars struck the river. As it rippled in 156 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. the silence of the night, with almost prophetic tenderness he repeated : The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave Await alike th' inevitable hour : The paths of glory lead but to the grave. At one o'clock the little band of five thousand men glide down the river, reach the landing-place, leap ashore, climb foot by foot up the precipitous height, and daylight finds Wolfe and his invincible battalions on the plains of Abraham -"the battlefield of empires." Montcalm was astounded. 1 'T is impossible ! " he exclaimed. But there in the dis- tance were the redcoats ; there the gleaming bayonets to assure him of the fact. The bugle sounds to arms, and soon the fast-falling death shot, the boom of guns, and the roar of battle tell of another " harvest of death," another day to be lost or won. Twice Montcalm leads his merry Frenchmen in the charge, and twice the bleeding line falls back shattered and broken. Again and again they rush forward reenforced and more determined than ever. The English line wavers, falters; will it break and the day be lost for England? No, no. Wolfe is here, and his rallying cry is heard high above the din of battle. With a cheer the soldiers rush forward, and, catching the inspiration of his cry, on they go, over the uneven ground, over the bogs and brushwood, over the dead and dying, pursuing the enemy to the very gates of the city. But their leader ? Ah ! The warrior had verified the words of the poet. For as the shouts of the victorious army came ringing over the plains of Abraham the spirit of their valorous leader, who had crowded into a few hours actions that would lend luster to length of days, went out in a blaze of glory. PART II. HENRY CABOT LODGE. '59 " OLD IRONSIDES." A TRIBUTE TO MASSACHUSETTS. CUBA AND ARMENIA. THE VENEZUELA QUESTION. THE TRADITIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS. THE BLUE AND THE GRAY. THE GREAT PERIL OF UNRESTRICTED IMMIGRATION. THE PURITAN OF ESSEX COUNTY. AMERICANISM. 160 "OLD IRONSIDES." l6l "OLD IRONSIDES." HENRY CABOT LODGE. THE United States frigate Constitution has come back to Boston and to Massachusetts. She floats again upon the waters into which she rushed as she left the builder's ways a hundred years ago. Curious inquirers have been at pains to tell us that of the ship launched in 1797 scarcely anything remains ; that in her long career she has been made over from truck to keel. Whether the statement is true or false matters not. It is not a given mass of wood and iron which touches our hearts and stirs our pride. It is the old ship herself, because she is the visible symbol of a great past charged with noble memories and representing sentiments, aspirations, and beliefs far more lasting than Brass eternal, slave to mortal rage. Every one is familiar with Turner's famous picture of "The Fighting Temeraire Towed to Her Last Berth." The splen- dor of the execution arrests the eye at once. The crowded river, the disturbed water, the smoky mist, the marvelous effects of clouds and color, of light and shade, all fill the gazer with wonder and delight. But there is much more than this. As we look at the old brown hulk dragged slowly up the murky stream, we see that the canvas before us is not only a picture, but a poem full of pathos and of mem- ories. The old ship's course is run. She will never face the seas nor front the foe again. The end of a great career, always pathetic to the finite mind, is here very present to us. But that is not all which genius has put upon the canvas. Turner was painting more than water, sky, and ship. He has touched the scene with the enchanter's wand, and we 1 62 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. behold, as in the magic mirror, the story of England's navy. The long roll of her sea fights stretches out before us. All the great figures are there, from Grenville sinking on the Revenge, ringed round by foes, and Blake burning the Span- ish ships at Cadiz and sweeping through the Mediterranean, to Nelson dying victorious at Trafalgar. Above all, the " Fighting Temeraire " speaks to us of that supreme period of England's naval history when she had crushed France and Spain and ruled the ocean unopposed, the great sea power of the world. Against that mighty power in the full flush of victory and dominion we took up arms, and England suddenly discovered that, ship for ship and man for man, she had more than met her match. It was by no fault of their own that the United States found themselves pitted in a terribly unequal struggle against this great antagonist. From the renewal of the Napoleonic wars after the rupture of the peace of Amiens, there was no insult, no humiliation, no outrage that the two great com- batants, England and France, failed to inflict on the United States. If we were to have peace or honor or national existence, we had to fight. Thus war began. We were utterly unpre- pared on land. At sea the case was very different. The career of the Constitution illustrates that of the American navy throughout the war. Commanded by Captain Isaac Hull, she left the Chesapeake on the i2th of July, 1812. On the i yth she almost ran into a British squadron, consisting of a ship of the line of sixty-four guns and four frigates. They gave chase. For three days, through perilous calms when he towed and warped his ship along, through light and baffling breezes, through squalls and darkness, Hull worked his way until the last enemy dropped below the horizon. He outmaneuvered and outsailed his foe, and escaped from an overwhelming force flying the flag of the mistress of the seas. "OLD IRONSIDES." 163 On July 26 the Constitution reached Boston, and on Aug- ust 2 set sail again and stood to the eastward. On the iQth she sighted the Guerriere, one of the ships that had pursued her, and bore down at once. There was an hour of long- range firing, and then the Constitution closed and they ex- changed broadsides within pistol shot. The sea was rough, but the American aim was deadly. The Constitution was but little damaged, while the Guerriere' s mizzenmast went by the board. Then Hull luffed under his enemy's bows and raked her, then wore and raked again. So near were the two ships now that they became entangled. Finally, the sea forced the ships apart after this brief hand-to-hand conflict, and as they separated the foremast and mainmast of 'the Guerriere went by the board, and she rolled, a helpless hulk, upon the waves. Hull drew off, repaired damages, and bore down again, when the Guerriere struck her flag. The next day Hull took off all the British crew, and the Guerriere, shot to pieces and a mere wreck, was set on fire and blown up. We had a better ship, more men, and threw a greater weight of metal. But we also fought our ship better and were better gunners ; for, while the Constitution lost fourteen, killed and wounded, the Guer- riere lost seventy-nine and was herself utterly destroyed. Hull returned in triumph to Boston, and the news of his victory filled the country with pride and England with alarm. At that period England naturally considered herself invin- cible. The results hitherto had justified their confidence, but now sprang up a people who had faster ships, sailed better, and shot straighter than they, and who were also quite as ready as they to come to close quarters by boarding. One frigate was nothing, but the facts flashed out in this first fight of the Constitution were impressive indeed. The men who fell upon the decks of the Constitution or who died at Gettysburg and Shiloh represent the highest 164 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. and noblest spirit of which a race is capable. Without that spirit of patriotism, courage, and self-sacrifice no nation can long exist, and the greatest material success in the hands of the cringing and timid will quickly turn to dust and ashes. The Constitution, as she lies in our harbor to-day, is an embodiment and memorial of that lofty patriotism. Built, launched, and saved here in Boston, is it any won- der that we have a peculiar attachment to the old frigate and should feel that this ought to be her home and resting- place ? And yet we know that she is not our ship. She did not win her victories for Massachusetts, but for the United States. She was the nation's ship, and fought the nation's battle beneath the nation's flag. A TRIBUTE TO MASSACHUSETTS. HENRY CABOT LODGE. To all who dwell within the confines of Massachusetts the old state is very dear. She has a right to our love and pride. " Behold her and judge for yourselves." Here she is, a queen among commonwealths, enthroned amidst her hills and streams, with the ocean at her feet. Trade is in her marts and prayer within her temples. Her cities stir with busy life. Her wealth grows beyond the dreams of avarice. Her rivers turn the wheels of industry, and the smoke of countless chimneys tells the story of the inventor's genius and the workman's skill. But the material side is the least of it. We rejoice mightily in her prosperity, but our love and pride are touched by nobler themes. We love the old state. The sand hills of the Cape, with gulls wheeling over the waste of A TRIBUTE TO MASSACHUSETTS. 165 waters, the gray ledges and green pastures of Essex, with the seas surging forever on her rocks, the broad and fruitful valleys of the Connecticut, the dark hills and murmuring streams of Berkshire have to us a tender charm no other land can give.' They breathe to us the soft message that tells of home and country. Still, it is something more than the look of hill and dale, something deeper than habit, which stirs our hearts when we think of Massachusetts. Behind the outward form of things lies that which passeth show. It is in the history of Massa- chusetts, in the lives of her great men, in the sacrifices, in the deeds, and in the character of her people that we find the true secret of our love and pride. We may not explain it even to ourselves, but it is there in the good old name, and flushes into life at the sight of the white flag. Massa- chusetts ! Utter but the word, and what memories throng upon her children ! Here came the stern, God-fearing men to find a home and found a state. Here, almost where we stand, on the edge of the wilderness, was placed the first public school. Yon- der, across the river, where the track of the savage still lingered and the howl of the wolf was still heard, was planted the first college. Here, through years of peril and privation, with much error and failure, but ever striving and marching onward, the Puritans built their state. It was this old town that first resisted England and bared its breast to receive the hostile spears. In the fields of Middlesex the first blood was shed in the American Revo- lution. On the slopes of Bunker Hill the British troops first recoiled under American fire. Massachusetts was the first great commonwealth to resist the advance of slavery, and in the mighty war for the Union she had again the sad honor to lay the first blood offering on the altar of the nation. 1 66 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. This is the state that Winthrop founded. Warren died for her liberties, and Webster defended her good name. Sumner bore stripes in behalf of her beliefs, and her sons gave their lives on every battlefield for the one flag she held more sacred than her own. She has fought for liberty. She has done justice between man and man. She has sought to protect the weak, to save the erring, to raise the unfortunate. She has been the fruitful mother of ideas as of men. Her thought has followed the sun and been felt throughout the length of the land. May we not say, as Charles Fox said of Switzerland : " Every man should desire once in his life to make a pil- grimage to Massachusetts, the land of liberty and peace " ? She has kept her shield unspotted and her honor pure. To us, her loving children, she is a great heritage and a great trust. CUBA AND ARMENIA. HENRY CABOT LODGE. AMONG the people who first settled in the United States, whose blood flows in American veins to-day, were to be found Hollanders who, weak in numbers but strong of heart, there among their dikes on the borders of the North Sea, first made head against the oppression of the Spanish Empire. Mr. President, in your own state of Delaware, the first settlers were the men who had followed the " Lion of the North," the Protestant champion, when he stayed the oncoming of Spain and Austria on the plains of Germany. In my own portion of the country are the people who draw their blood from those who followed Blake into the Mediterranean, from the Ironsides of Cromwell, of whom it CUBA AND ARMENIA. l6/ has been written that even the " banished cavaliers felt an emotion of pride when they beheld a brigade of their own countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by friends, drive before them in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage through a counterscarp which had been pronounced impregnable by the greatest of the marshals of France." Such are the men, such are the races which have done most to settle and build up the United States. It is from those people that we derive all that we hold dear and all in which we most believe, and they fought their way to liberty against the power and bigotry of Spain, which was then the great force of the European world. Now turn to the Cubans battling for their liberties. I think, Mr. President, that even the most bitter opponent of the Spanish- Americans would admit that free Cuba, under the constitution which now exists, would be an immense advance in civilization, in all that makes for the progress of humanity, over the government which Spain has given to that island. The Cubans offer a free press and a free speech. Both are suppressed there by Spain. The Cubans by their constitution guarantee a free church in a free state. They guarantee liberty of conscience. Those are things in which Americans believe ; and the Cubans, whatever their faults or deficiencies may be, stand also for those principles. Cuba is but a quarter smaller than the island of Java, and the island of Java sustains twenty-three million people. Cuba has a population of a million and a half, and she is one of the richest spots on the face of the earth. She has not grown or prospered, because the heavy hand of Spain has been upon her. Spain may ruin the island. She can never hold it or govern it again. Cuba now is not fighting merely for inde- pendence. Those men are fighting, every one of them, with 1 68 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. a price on their heads and a rope around their necks. They have shown that they could fight well. They are now fight- ing the battle of despair. That is the condition to-day in that island. And here we stand motionless, a great and powerful country, not six hours away from these scenes of useless bloodshed and destruction. We have had a good deal to say about Armenia. But do we not know very well that Armenia is far beyond our sphere of influence or of action ? Do we not know that, as a matter of traditional policy and as a physical matter of distance, we cannot interfere in the affairs of Turkey or stay the massacre of her subjects ? The words we utter on Armenia are mere words, words of sympathy, and that is all. We cannot support them by deeds. The slaughter in Armenia has been going on now for many months, and has involved massacres which cannot be equaled in extent unless you go back over three hundred years to the period of the religious wars in Europe. Those wars shook the whole of Europe from the center to the cir- cumference. To-day those massacres go on in Armenia, and the civilization of western Europe has stood by para- lyzed and helpless. It has not been able to do one single thing to check it. With millions of armed men, with hun- dreds of great ships, it has stood by and allowed the sultan to wreak his will on those helpless people. England, to whom Turkey owes her very existence as a nation among nations, has not stirred. In the last resort, the power which controls in Europe and in England is the great power of money and of the money lender. The money lenders do not care how many Arme- nians are butchered ; the Armenians are not nominated in the bond ; but they care very much that nothing shall be done to disturb or jar anything, that nothing shall be done to disturb values ; and they fear that if England moved to CUBA AND ARMENIA. 169 rescue the wretched Armenians values might be disturbed and Ottoman bonds decline. There is England with the greatest fleet of modern times, that great flying squadron which she mobilizes with such wonderful speed. It has remained in the English Channel and furnished pictures for the illustrated newspapers. It has not been seen or heard in the seas where Blake and Nelson fought their battles, and yet England is more respon- sible than any other country for the existence of Turkey. Now, we have right here an Armenia at our own doors. In Cuba there is useless bloodshed, brutality, cruelty, and destruction of life and property, all the horrors that can accompany a savage war which is not submitted to the rules of civilized warfare. Is our civilization in the United States to break down, as the civilization of western Europe has broken down before Armenia? I do not believe it to be possible. Of the sympathies of the American people, generous, liberty-loving, I have no question. They are with the Cubans in their struggle for freedom. I believe our people would welcome any action on the part of the United States to put an end to the terrible state of things existing there. We can stop it. We can stop it peacefully. We can stop it, in my judgment, by pursuing a proper diplomacy and offering our good offices. Let it at once be understood that we mean to stop the. horrible state of things in Cuba, and it will be stopped. The great power of the United States, if it is once invoked and uplifted, is capable of greater things than that. Stand- ing, as I believe the United States stands, for humanity and civilization, we should put a stop to that war which is now raging in Cuba, and give to that island once more peace, liberty, and independence. I/O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE VENEZUELA QUESTION. HENRY CABOT LODGE. Now, what was the Venezuela question ? A great many words have been written and spoken about it, and yet it can be stated in a sentence. There is a disputed territory down there which involves the mouth of the Orinoco, one of the great river systems of South America, and England said that territory belonged to her as heir of the Dutch. Venezuela said it belonged to her as the heir of Spain. For twenty years we have been seeking to settle that question by arbi- tration; for twenty years we have been put off. At last we met with a blunt refusal, and the President replied with the message of the iyth of December, asserting the Monroe doctrine and the rights of the United States. Our position is this: We do not care if, by the award of an impartial tribunal, England gets every inch of her claim. We are not struggling for South American territory. But it is vital to us how England gets it. If she takes it by the strong hand and says, " We will not arbitrate," and we yield, we can offer no opposition to any other European power that chooses to come in and they would come in, and they would parcel out South America as they parceled out Africa. The hunger for land is on the nations of the earth to-day, and we should find ourselves in a short time surrounded by formidable neighbors, whose presence would compel us to become a great military power, like the powers of Europe. That is what is at stake in Venezuela, not a few hundred miles of swamp, if you please, but a great principle; and the President made his declaration, and Congress stood firm, and has stood firm. When I say Congress has stood firm I mean that which is greater than Congress and without which con- THE VENEZUELA QUESTION. grasses and presidents can do nothing, the American people have stood firm. The cry of war was raised, but there never was any foundation in the cry. We have no desire to pick a quarrel with England, and England has no desire to fight us. The cry of war was simply to drive us from our position. For the same reason stocks were poured out from London into the New York market. A great firm of London bankers, the Rothschilds, published a letter in a newspaper of New York owned and controlled by a man who is an alien at heart, even if he does hold naturalization papers in which they said that if we did not yield on Venezuela they would not lend us money. Let me say to those gentlemen and their allies that the American people may have their faults, but they are not for sale. They cannot be bought, and they cannot be bullied, and they have stood firm. And what is the result ? Parliament has met. We said : now mark what we claimed ! " This concerns us, and we claim the right to intervene for our own safety." We said: " The Monroe doctrine applies to it." Parliament met, and the queen's speech said that it welcomed the coop- eration of the United States; in other words, admitted our right to intervene. After England has conceded the justice of our contentions, is it worth while for Americans to argue that we were wrong? We did not go into the business to humiliate anybody. We have no exultation to express. We have won our case. The rest of the settlement, which is sure to come, is but a detail. The principle has been vindicated. We are content. And let me say to you now that no such act for peace has been performed by this country since the rebellion fell at Appo- mattox as the position the firm, dignified position taken by the American people on this question. England under- stands us better. She has learned more about us in six months than she had learned before in half a century. THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. There will be a better understanding between the two great nations than ever before. She has listened too long to the voices that misrepresent America, and now she has . heard from the real America. And England respects the *men who love their country. You never find an Englishman who does not believe in England against all the world, and I wish that some people here would imitate that part of the English example. THE TRADITIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS. HENRY CABOT LODGE. THE first public man I ever saw when I was a more child in my father's house was Charles Sumner. The first voice I ever heard speak oh public affairs was his, and he was pleading the rights of humanity. Even a child could under- stand that. He bore stripes for what he believed, and you could not turn him from his great struggle for the black man by telling him that the negro could not make as good a government as the Anglo-Saxon. Go back a little farther. There is Daniel Webster, Secretary of State, declaring to the Austrian representative that every people struggling for freedom had the sympathy of the people of the United States. They sent for Kossuth and brought him out here in a man-of-war; and it was Daniel Webster who said in his letter to Hiilsemann: "The great Republic controls an area beside which the possessions of the house of Hapsburg are but a patch on the earth's surface." It was the same Daniel Webster who stood in the Congress thirty years before and pleaded the cause of the Greeks battling for their liberties, while he denounced Turkey in those rolling sentences of which he alone was master. THE TRADITIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS. Go back a little farther. A British ship had taken some of our seamen out of an American ship, and the President had asked for measures to resist the outrage. John Quincy Adams was one of the senators from Massachusetts. The President was not of his party; I am sure that the President's policy was not of his choosing. He did not like it, but he stood up in his place in the Senate and said that, in the presence of a controversy with a foreign government, when " the President has recommended this measure on his high responsibility, I would not deliberate I would act ! " That was the voice of Massachusetts then. Those are the lessons I read in the lives of three of my great prede- cessors. Go out again; walk up into Dock Square. What is the statue you see there ? It is that of Samuel Adams. Close by is the place where the first blood flowed in the Revolution. Hard by is the chamber where, in the gathering twilight, he faced the crown officers and said to them : " You must remove both regiments. If you can remove one you can remove both, both regiments or none." He looks forth over the harbor where the tea fell. Stop in front of that statue and put to it the question : " When the rights of your country are at stake, shall you resist or shall you yield ? " If you could touch those bronze lips with the fire of speech what do you think they would say? They never said " yield " in their life ! We are all agreed about Samuel Adams to-day. Do you think he did not have his critics ? Eleven hundred of them sailed out to Halifax with Lord Howe. As they sailed out of the harbor George Washington rode in at the other end of the town, and we have put up a statue to him, also. It is down there in the Public Garden, the statue of the man who broke the empire of England and laid the foundations of a mightier nation here. 174 TIIE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Close by is the statue of Charles Sumner, and the battle of his life was for human rights. A little farther away is the statue of William Lloyd Garrison. He was mobbed in the streets of Boston 1 Mobbed, and for what ? For pleading the rights of humanity, even if the skin that covered the humanity was black. There sits his statue in Commonwealth Avenue. I do not see the effigies of the men who mobbed him. Go up the hill ; take one more look. There is an unfinished monument in front of the State House, opposite the steps where John A. Andrew sent the soldiers off to the war. There is an unfinished monument ! Turn now to your Harvard biographies; read there the letters of the first colonel of the first Massachusetts black regiment. It was not because he was fighting for the Union ; it was because, in addition to fighting for the Union, he was trying to help a race to freedom by proving to all mankind that they deserved their freedom because they could fight for it. That is what he was meeting obloquy, reproach, and prejudice for, and he went off with his black troops, and he fell there at Fort Wagner; and slavery, in its ferociousness even on its deathbed, cried out: " Bury him with his niggers," one of the noblest epitaphs ever uttered over man. And now Boston is raising a statue to his memory, and there, carved by the chisel of the greatest of living sculptors, Robert Shaw and his black soldiers will ride together forever ride ! Those are the memories, those are the traditions, such is the inspiration, and such the lesson that I find in Massa- chusetts' history. THE BLUE AND THE GRAY. 1 75 THE BLUE AND THE GRAY. HENRY CABOT LODGE. I WAS a boy ten years old when the troops marched away to defend Washington. I saw the troops, month after month, pour through the streets of Boston. I saw Shaw go forth at the head of his black regiment, and Bartlett, shat- tered in body but dauntless in soul, ride by to carry what was left of him once more to the battlefields of the Republic. I saw Andrew, standing bareheaded on the steps of the State House, bid the men godspeed. I cannot remember the words he said, but I can never forget the fervid eloquence which brought tears to the eyes and fire to the hearts of all who listened. To my boyish mind one thing alone was clear, that the soldiers, as they marched past, were all, in that supreme hour, heroes and patriots. Other feelings have, in the progress of time, altered much, but amid many changes that simple belief of boyhood has never altered. And you, brave men who wore the gray, would be the first to hold me or any other son of the North in just contempt if I should say that now it was all over I thought the North was wrong and the result of the war a mistake. To the men who fought the battles of the Confederacy we hold out our hands freely, frankly, and gladly. We have no bitter memo- ries to revive, no reproaches to utter. Differ in politics and in a thousand other ways we must and shall in all good nature, but never let us differ with each other on sectional or state lines, by race or creed. We welcome you, soldiers of Virginia, as others more eloquent than I have said, to New England. We welcome you to old Massachusetts. We welcome you to Boston and to Faneuil Hall. In your presence here, and at the sound of your voices beneath this historic roof, the years roll back, and we see the figure and hear again the ringing tones of 1/6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. your great orator, Patrick Henry, declaring to the first Con- tinental Congress, " The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American." A distinguished Frenchman, as he stood among the graves at Arlington, said: "Only a great people is capable of a great civil war.' 7 Let us add with thankful hearts that only a great people is capable of a great reconciliation. Side by side, Virginia and Massachusetts led the colonies into the War for Independence. Side by side, they founded the govern- ment of the United States. Morgan and Greene, Lee and Knox, Moultrie and Prescott, men of the South and men of the North, fought shoulder to shoulder, and wore the same uniform of buff and blue, the uniform of Washington. Mere sentiment all this, some may say. But it is senti- ment, true sentiment, that has moved the world. Sentiment fought the war, and sentiment has reunited us. When the war was closed it was proposed to give Governor Andrew, who had sacrificed health and strength and property in his public duties, some immediately lucrative office. A friend asked him if he would take such a place. " No," said he; " I have stood as high priest between the horns of the altar, and I have poured out upon it the best blood of Massachu- setts, and I cannot take money for that." Mere sentiment truly, but the sentiment which ennobles and uplifts mankind. So I say that the sentiment manifested by your presence here, brethren of Virginia, sitting side by side with those who wore the blue, tells us that if war should break again upon the country the sons of Virginia and Massachusetts would, as in the olden days, stand once more shoulder to shoulder, with no distinction in the colors that they wear. It is fraught with tidings of peace on earth, and you may read its meaning in the words on yonder picture, " Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable ! " PERIL OF UNRESTRICTED IMMIGRATION. I 77 THE GREAT PERIL OF UNRESTRICTED IMMIGRATION, HENRY CABOT LODGE. THE injury of unrestricted immigration to American wages and American standards of living is sufficiently plain and is bad enough, but the danger which this immigration threatens to the quality of our citizenship is far worse. That which it concerns us to know, and that which is more vital to us as a people than all possible questions of tariff or currency, is whether the quality of our citizenship is endan- gered by the present course and character of immigration to the United States. That which identifies a race and sets it apart from others is not to be found merely or ultimately in its physical appearance, its institutions, its laws, its literature, or even its language. These are in the last analysis only the expression or the evidence of race. The achievements of the intellect pass easily from land to land and from people to people. The telephone, invented but yesterday, is used to-day in China, in Australia, or in South Africa as freely as in the United States. The book which the press to-day gives to the world- in English is scattered to-morrow through- out the earth in every tongue, and the thoughts of the writer become the property of mankind. V You can take a Hindoo and give him the highest educa- tion the world can afford. He has a keen intelligence. He will absorb the learning of Oxford, he will acquire the man- ners and habits of England, he will sit in the British Parlia- ment, but you cannot make him an Englishman. Yet he, like his conqueror, is of the great Indo-European family. But it has taken six thousand years and more to create the differences thus made, by education in a single life, because they do not rest upon the intellect. What, then, is this matter of race which separates the Englishman from the 1/8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Hindoo and the American from the Indian ? It is some- thing deeper and more fundamental than anything which concerns the intellect. On the moral qualities of the English-speaking race, there- fore, rest our history, our victories, and all our future. There is only one way in which you can lower those qualities or weaken those characteristics, and that is by breeding them out. If a lower race mixes with a higher in sufficient num- bers, history teaches us that the lower race will prevail. The lower race will absorb the higher, not the higher the lower, when the two strains approach equality in numbers. In other words, there is a limit to the capacity of any race for assimilating and elevating an inferior race, and when you begin to pour in in unlimited numbers people of alien or lower races of less social efficiency and less moral force, you are running the most frightful risk that a people can run. More precious, therefore, even than forms of government are the mental and moral qualities which make what we call our race. While those stand unimpaired all is safe. When those decline all is imperiled. They are exposed to but a single danger, and that is by changing the quality of our race and citizenship through the wholesale infusion of races whose traditions and inheritances, whose thoughts and whose beliefs are wholly alien to ours and with whom we have never assimilated or even been associated in the past. The danger has begun. It is small as yet, comparatively speaking, but it is large enough to warn us to act while there is yet time, and while it can be done easily and effi- ciently. There lies the peril at the portals of our land ; there is pressing the tide of unrestricted immigration. The time has certainly come, if not to stop, at least to check, to sift, and to restrict those immigrants. In careless strength, with generous hand, we have kept our gates wide open to all the world. If we do not close THE PURITAN OF ESSEX COUNTY. 1 79 them, we should at least place sentinels beside them to challenge those who would pass through. The gates which admit men to the United States and to citizenship in the great Republic should no longer be left unguarded. O Liberty, white goddess, is it well To leave the gates unguarded ? On thy breast Fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of fate, Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel Stay those who to the sacred portals come To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care, Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn And trampled in the dust. For so of old The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome, And where the temple of the Caesars stood The lean wolf unmolested made her lair. THE PURITAN OF ESSEX COUNTY. HENRY CABOT LODGE. IN Essex County the Puritan founded his first town and set up his first church. It was the stern old Essex Puritan, John Endicott, who cut St. George's cross from the English flag because it savored of idolatry. It was an Essex clergy- man who was cast out of his pulpit because he led his towns- men in a refusal to pay illegal impositions to Andros, as John Hampden had refused ship money to Charles I. It was in Essex that resistance was organized to the domina- tion of the capital ; and it was in Essex, too, that the dark and morbid side of Puritan faith found its last expression in the madness of the witchcraft trials. So, when we speak of Essex County, the name brings to us all that is most char- acteristic and most essential in Puritanism. i8O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. The time has come when we ought to judge the Puritan fairly, and see him as he really was. There is no lack of opportunity for fit judgment. The Puritan did not creep along the byways of his time. He stands out in history as distinctly as a Greek temple on a hilltop against the bright- ness of the clear twilight sky. It is a stern figure enough, but it is a manly figure withal, full of strength and force and purpose. He had grave faults, but they were the faults of a strong and not a weak nature, and his virtues were those of a robust man of lofty aims. It is true that he drove Roger Williams into exile and persecuted the Antinomians ; but he founded successful and God-fearing commonwealths. He hanged Quakers, and in a mad panic put old women to death as witches; but he planted a college in the wilderness and put a schoolhouse in every village. He made a narrow creed the test of citi- zenship ; but he founded the town meeting, where every man helped to govern, and where all men were equal before the law. He banished harmless pleasures, and cast a gloom over daily life ; but he formed the first union of states in the New England confederacy, and through the mouth of one of the witchcraft judges uttered an eloquent protest against human slavery a century before Garrison was born or Wilberforce began his agitation. He refused liberty of conscience to those who sought it beneath the shadow of his meeting-house ; but he kept the torch of learning burning brightly in the New World. In the fullness of time he broke the fetters which he had him- self forged for the human mind, as he had formerly broken the shackles of Laud and Charles. He was rigid in his prejudices, and filled with an intense pride of race and home ; but when the storm of war came upon the colonies he gave without measure and without stint to the common cause. AMERICANISM. l8l Call the roll of our poets, and you will find New England's answer in the names of Longfellow and Lowell, of Emerson and Holmes. Call the roll of our historians, and you will find her answer again in the names of Prescott and Motley, of Bancroft and Parkman. Turn to old Essex, the birth- place and the center of Puritanism, and she will respond with the greatest name of all, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and yet again with that beloved name to which we all bowed in reverence but the other day, the name of Whittier. To- day Essex holds as her noblest possession, and the Puritan states cherish above all men, the gracious poet who by pure and noble verse has been a voice and a guide to their people. Yet this poet whom New England so loves and cherishes is a member of that sect which two hundred years ago she per- secuted and exiled. Is not this in itself a commentary upon the growth of New England above all tributes of praise ? We honor the Puritan, despite all his errors, for his strong, bold nature, his devotion to civic freedom, and his stern, unconquerable will. We would not barter our descent from him for the pedigree of kings. May we not now say that we also honor him because his race has shown itself able to break through its own trammels, and " rise on stepping- stones of their dead selves to higher things" ? AMERICANISM. HENRY CABOT LODGE. "AMERICANISM" of the right sort we cannot have too much. By Americanism I do not mean that which had a brief political existence more than thirty years ago. That movement was based on race and sect, and was, therefore, thoroughly un-American, and failed, as all un-American move- 1 82 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. ments have failed in this country. True Americanism is opposed utterly to any political divisions resting on race and religion. To the race or to the sect which as such attempts to take possession of the politics or the public education of the country true Americanism says, " Hands off ! " The American idea is a free church in a free state, and a free and unsectarian public school in every ward and in every village, with its doors wide open to the children of all races and of every creed. It goes still further and frowns upon the constant attempt to divide our people according to origin or extraction. Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and honorable duty. But let us have done with British- Americans and Irish- Americans and German- Americans, and all be Americans, nothing more and nothing less. If a man is going to be an American at all, let him be so without any qualifying adjectives, and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description. Mere vaporing and boasting become a nation as little as a man. But honest, outspoken pride and faith in our country are infinitely better and more to be respected than the culti- vated reserve which sets it down as ill-bred and in bad taste ever to refer to our country except by way of depreciation, criticism, or general negation. We have a right to be proud of our vast material success, our national power and dignity, our advancing civilization, carrying freedom and education in its train. But to count our wealth and tell our numbers and rehearse our great deeds simply to boast of them is use- less enough. We have, a right to do it only when we listen to the solemn undertone which brings the message of great responsibilities, responsibilities far greater than the ordi- nary political and financial issues, which are sure to find, sooner or later, a right settlement. AMERICANISM. 183 Social questions are the questions of the present and the future of the American people. The race for wealth has opened a broad gap between rich and poor. There are thousands at your gates toiling from sunrise to sunset to keep body and soul together, and the struggle is a hard and bitter one. The idle, the worthless, and the criminal form but a small element of the community; but there is a vast body of honest, God-fearing workingmen and women, whose yoke is not easy and whose burden is far from light. We cannot push their troubles and cares into the background, and trust that all will come right in the end. Let us look to it that differences and inequalities of condition do not widen into ruin. It is most true that these differences cannot be rooted out; but they can be modified. Legislation cannot change humanity nor alter the decrees of nature; but it can help the solution of these grave problems. Practical measures are plentiful enough. They have to do with the hours of labor, with emigration from our over- crowded cities to the lands of the West, with wise regulation of the railroads and other great corporations. Here are matters of great pith and moment, more important, more essential, more pressing than others. They must be met; they cannot be shirked or evaded. The past is across the water; the future is here in our keeping. We can do all that can be done to solve the social problems -and fulfill the hopes of mankind. Failure would be a disaster unequaled in history. The first step to success is pride of country, simple, honest, frank, and ever present, and this is the Americanism that I would have. If we have this pride and faith, we shall appreciate our mighty respon- sibilities. Then, if we live up to them, we shall keep the words " an American citizen " what they now are, the noblest title any man can bear. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. THE CAPTURE OF ANDRE. ANDRE AND HALE. THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. THE LEGACY OF GRANT. THE PLACE OF ATHLETICS IN COLLEGE LIFE. THE LAWYER AND FREE INSTITUTIONS. HOME RULE FOR IRELAND. THE SCHOLAR IN PUBLIC LIFE, 186 THE CAPTURE OF ANDRE. l8/ THE CAPTURE OF ANDRE. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEVV. THE success or failure of the united colonies in forming an independent government depended, from the beginning to the end of the contest, on the state of New York. A British statesman and soldier said: "Fortify from Canada to the city of New York and we can hold the colonies together." The British Cabinet and generals said: " Capture and place a chain of posts along the route from New York City to Canada, and we can crush rebellious New England and awe all the rest into submission." The Battle of Saratoga and surrender of Burgoyne defeated the last and most formidable attempt to accomplish this result by arms. Upon its bloody field American independence was consummated. That grand victory, which gave us unity at home and recognition abroad, was largely due to the skill, the dash, the intrepid valor of Arnold. The issue decided in that conflict the control of the passes of the Hudson, 'and all which would follow was now to be reopened and reversed by treason and the traitor the same Arnold. For eighteen months a correspondence, opened by Arnold, had been carried on between him and Major Andre', acting for Sir Henry Clinton. These letters, moulded in the vocabulary of trade and treating of the barter and sale of cattle and goods, were really haggling about the price of the betrayal of the liberties of America and a human soul. Saturday morning, the 23d of September, one hundred years ago, was one of those clear, bright, exhilarating days when this region is in the fullness of its quiet beauty. Andre, having received from Benedict Arnold the papers giving the plans, fortifications, armament, and troops at West Point, is nearing the British line and the end of his perilous journey. 1 88 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Through Sparta, he strikes the river road, and gallops along that most picturesque highway, the scenery in harmony with the brilliant future spread before his imagination. He recognizes the old Sleepy Hollow church, and a half- mile in front sees the bridge over the little brook which was for him a fatal Rubicon. On the south side of that stream, in the bushes playing cards, were three young farmers of the neighborhood, John Paulding, David Williams, and Isaac Van Wart, watching to intercept the cowboys and their stolen cattle. At the approach of the horseman Paulding steps into the road, presents his musket, and calls a halt. Andre speaks first: " My lads, I hope you belong to our party." "Which party?" they said. "The lower party," he answered. " We do." " Then, thank God ! " said he, " I am once more among friends. I am a British officer, out on particular business, and must not be detained a minute." Then they said: "We are Americans, and you are our pris- oner and must dismount." " My God ! " he said, laughing, " a man must do anything to get along," and presented Arnold's pass. Had he presented it first, Paulding said afterward he would have let him go. They carefully scanned it, but per- sisted in detaining him. He threatened them with Arnold's vengeance for this disrespect to his order; but, in language more forcible than polite, they told him " they cared not for that," and led him to the great whitewood tree, under which he was searched. As the fatal papers fell from his feet, Paulding said: " My God, here it is ! " and, as he read them, shouted in high excitement to his companions, " My God, he is a spy ! " Now came the crucial and critical moment. Andre, fully alive to his danger and with every faculty alert, felt no harm. He had the day before bargained with and successfully bought an American major-general of the highest military THE CAPTURE OF ANDRE. 1 89 reputation. If a few thousand pounds and a commission in the British Army could seduce the commander of a district, surely escape was easy from these three young men, but one of whom could read, and who were buttressed by neither fame nor fortune. " If you will release me,' 7 said Andre, " I will give you a hundred guineas and any amount of dry goods. I will give you a thousand guineas," he cried, " and you can hold me hostage till one of your number returns with the money." Then Paulding swore: "We would not let you go for ten thousand guineas." That decision saved the liberties of America. It voiced the spirit which sustained and carried through the Revolu- tionary struggle for nationality, and crushed the rebellion waged eighty years afterward to destroy that nationality, the invincible courage and impregnable virtue of the common people. Arnold and Andre, Paulding, Williams, and Van Wart are characters in a drama which crystallizes an eternal prin- ciple, that these institutions rest upon the integrity and patriotism of the common people. As a hundred years have ripened the fame and enriched the merit of their deed, so will it be rehearsed with increasing gratitude by each suc- ceeding century. This modest shaft marks the memorable spot where they withstood temptation and saved the state ; but their monument is the Republic, its inscription upon the hearts of its teeming and happy millions. THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. ANDRE AND HALE. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. ANDRE'S story is the one overmastering romance of the Revolution. American and English literature is full of eloquence and poetry in tribute to his memory and sympathy for his fate. After the lapse of a hundred years, there is no abatement of absorbing interest. What had this young man done to merit immortality ? The mission whose tragic issue lifted him out of the oblivion of other minor British officers, in its inception was free from peril or daring, and its objects and purposes were utterly infamous. Had he succeeded by the desecration of the honorable uses of passes and flags of truce, his name would have been held in everlasting execration. In his failure the infant Republic escaped the dagger with which he was feeling for its heart, and the crime was drowned in tears for his untimely end. His youth and beauty, the brightness of his life, the calm courage in the gloom of his death, his early love and disappointment surrounded him with a halo of poetry and pity which have secured for him what he most sought and could never have won in battles and sieges, a fame and recognition which have outlived that of all the generals under whom he served. Are kings only grateful, and do not republics forget ? Is fame a travesty, and the judgment of mankind a farce ? America had a parallel case in Captain Nathan Hale. Of the same age as Andre', he, after graduation at Yale College with high honors, enlisted in the patriot cause at the begin- ning of the contest, and secured the love and confidence of all about him. When none else would go upon a most important and perilous mission, he volunteered, and was captured by the British. THE ARMY OF THK POTOMAC. IQI While Andre received every kindness, courtesy, and attention, and was fed from Washington's table, Hale was thrust into a noisome dungeon in the sugar house. While Andre was tried by a board of officers and had ample time and every facility for defense, Hale was summarily ordered to execution the next morning. While Andre's last wishes and bequests were sacredly followed, the infamous Cunning- ham tore from Hale his cherished Bible and destroyed before his eyes his last letters to his mother and sister, and asked him what he had to say. " All I have to say," was his reply, " is, I regret I have but one life to lose for my country." The dying declarations of Andre and Hale express the animating spirit of their several armies, and teach why, with all her power, England could not conquer America. " I call upon you to witness that "I die like a brave man," said Andre, and he spoke from British and Hessian surroundings, seek- ing only glory and pay. " I regret I have but one life to lose for my country," said Hale; and, with him and his comrades, self was forgotten in that absorbing, passionate patriotism which pledges fortune, honor, and life to the sacred cause. THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. " ON to Richmond ! " came the unthinking cry from every city, village, and cross roads in the North. " On to Rich- mond ! " shouted grave senators and impetuous congress- men. " On to Richmond ! " ordered the Cabinet, no longer able to resist the popular demand, and the raw and untrained recruits were hurled from their unformed organizations and I Q2 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. driven back to Washington. Then, with discipline and drill, out of the chaos came order. The self-asserting volunteer had become an obedient soldier. The mass had been moulded into a complex and magnificent machine, and it was the "Army of the Potomac." Overcoming untold difficulties, fighting with superb cour- age, it comes in sight of the spires of Richmond. Unable to succeed because McDowell and his corps of thirty-four thousand are held back, it renews each morning and carries on every night in retreat the seven days' battle for existence, and then, brought to bay at Malvern Hill, asserts its un- daunted spirit in hard-won victory. It follows Pope, and marches, and finds foes for which it is unprepared, and fights, and is beaten, under orders so contradictory and counsels so divided that an army of European veterans would have disbanded. Immediately it recognizes a general in whom it has con- fidence, the stragglers come from the bush, and the wounded from the hospitals. Regiments, brigades, divisions, and corps reform, and at Antietam it is invincible and irresistible. Every man in the ranks knows that the fortified heights of Fredericksburg are impregnable ; that the forlorn hope charges not into the imminent deadly breach, but into a death trap ; and yet, with unfaltering step, this grand army salutes its blind commander, and marches to the slaughter. Theirs not to reason why, Theirs not to make reply, Theirs but to do and die. Every private was aware of the follies of the Rappahan- nock campaign. He knew that the opportunity to inflict an irreparable blow upon the army of Lee had been trifled away, and that, after reckless delays to make the movement which at first would have been a surprise, conceived by the THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. 1 93 very genius of war, was then mere midsummer madness. And yet this incomparable army, floundering through swamps, lost in almost impenetrable forests, outflanked, outmaneuvered, outgeneraled, decimated, no sooner felt the firm hand of Meade than they destroyed the offensive and aggressive power of the Confederacy in the three days' fighting at Gettysburg. At last this immortal army of Cromwellian descent, of Viking ancestry, had at its head a great captain who had never lost a battle, and whom President Lincoln had freed from political meddling and the interference of the civil authorities. Every morning for thirty days came the orders to storm the works in front, and every evening for thirty nights the survivors moved to the command : " By the left flank, march ! " and at the end of that fateful month, with sixty thousand dead or wounded in the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac once more, after four years, saw the spires of Richmond. Inflexible of purpose, insensible to suffering, inured to fatigue, and reckless of danger, it rained blow on blow upon its heroic but staggering foe, and the world gained a new and better and freer and more enduring Republic than it had ever known, in the surrender at Appomattox. When Lincoln and Grant and Sherman, firmly holding behind them the vengeful passions of the Civil War, put out their victorious arms to the South, and said : " We < are brethren," this generous and patriotic army joined in the glad acclaim and welcome with their fervent " Amen." Twenty-two years have come and gone since you marched down Pennsylvania Avenue past the people's representatives, to whom you and your Western comrades there committed the government you had saved and the liberties you had redeemed ; past Americans from whose citizenship you had wiped with your blood the only st-iin and made it the proud- IQ4 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. est of earthly titles. Call the roll. The names reverberate from arth to heaven. " All present or accounted for." Here the living answer for the dead ; there the spirits of the dead answer for the living. As God musters them out on earth, he enrolls them above; and as the Republic marches down the ages, accumulating power and splendor with each succeeding century, the van will be led by the Army of the Potomac. THE LEGACY OF GRANT. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. AT West Point Grant was graduated without honor. In the Mexican War he won no great glory. As a wood- seller he was beaten by all the wood-choppers of Missouri. He did not earn his salary in commerce. But the moment supreme command devolved upon him, and there was a country to be saved, his great intellect grasped the situation, and the god of war was in the field ! Battles had theretofore been fought with gloves ; victories had ended in nothing. But here was a genius that said : " Unconditional surrender are my terms. I propose immediately to move upon your works ! " Then the end came. Grant believed that fighting was to kill, that victory was to annihilate the hope of resistance. At Vicksburg he moved his army up the ramparts, and, though rivers of blood flowed, he saved oceans of blood that must otherwise have flowed in the future. With victory after victory, he reached his zenith at Appomatox; and the sun whiph rose at Vicksburg blazed in the glory of noonday. But while he was winning these victories and saving the nation a thrill of horror went through the country at the thousands that were slain, and the cry of butcher was raised against him. THE LEGACY OF GRANT. 1 95 But Grant differed from all the conquerors of history in this: the moment that Grant had the trembling Confederacy at his feet he was no longer the soldier. He became trans- formed into the patriot and the statesman. He knew that those men who had there surrendered had to be citizens, and this was to be our common country. He knew that no Republic could govern conquered provinces. He said : " Go back to your homes, cultivate crops, create manufactures, develop commerce, help us to make this the greatest nation on the globe." Grant was the greatest of all generals in that he lacked the faculty of jealousy. The fondest and pleasantest moments to him were when some other general won a vic- tory. When Sheridan rode down the valley, when he made Lee fall back into the arms of Grant, Grant proclaimed his glory to the world with ungrudging generosity. " Here is one of the greatest generals of all time," said Grant of Sheridan. When his companion in arms and in friendship performed that act which cast into the shade the march of Xenophon and his Greeks, when he destroyed the source of the rebellion's supplies and swept from Atlanta to the sea, the man who led then in applause of Sherman's great achievement was Ulysses S. Grant. But the war was over. There was a President of the United States whose qualities are the paradox of patriots, Andrew Johnson. He had a greatness and a meanness combined, a broadness and a narrowness, a patriotism and a sympathy with rebellion which were in him united and mingled in his composition as in the composition of no other man. A poor white, he had the pride of a rich man, but he had no less the mingled passions of revenge and hatred for the rich whites of the South. " Treason is odious," he said, and he demanded that by summary processes all the leaders of the rebellion should be immediately executed. 196 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Before the passions of this paradox arose General Grant. Said he : " Halt ! The parole of Grant is the honor of the United States." As the pendulum swung to the other side, as Johnson, though he would serve the country on his own ideas, was willing to see the country destroyed if his ideas could not be carried out, Grant rose and said : " The bayo- nets which have protected the country will save it from destruction now." Grant stands in history the one grand figure of the cen- tury. Hundreds of years hence his name will be as memor- able as Alexander the Great's, long after the other men of his time are forgotten. Caesar was greater than Grant, and also infinitely beneath him, for his ambition was greater than his virtue. But Grant, sitting beside the emperor of Germany at the great review of the army, said : " I hate war," and electrified the emperor and Bismarck and Moltke by his grand remark. What is the lesson of Grant's life ? At Appomattox and as he stood up against the passions of Andrew Johnson, he said : " Let us have peace ! " And when upon his^eath- bed a vision came before him of the tents of bothXgreat armies, he said : " Let us have peace." He left as a last legacy to his countrymen : "Let us have peace." And we will have peace, most of all because of him. THE PLACE OF ATHLETICS IN COLLEGE LIFE. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. DYSPEPSIA is no longer the test of scholarship, and honors are not won by shadows. The theology of to-day believes that there are no antagonisms between spirituality and mus- cularity. The minister who hits sin so hard from the pulpit THE PLACE OF ATHLETICS IN COLLEGE LIFE. 1 97 can whip any sinner in the pews. The modern student knows that a well-developed body and a well-informed mind are necessary partners for intellectual and material triumphs. Exercise in solitude and without the stimulus of friendly contest is always a failure. The dumb-bell becomes a nui- sance, and the Indian club a fraud. Venerable axioms are exploded ; mechanical movements of muscles make neither athletes nor healthy students. The excited mind must guide the procession of the limbs. To force water by a hand pump in the cellar to a tank on the roof is work ; to master the glorious sweep and artistic dip of the oar is exercise and fame. Athletics have encouraged manliness and stamped out ruffianism. Every healthy youth generates steam faster than under ordinary conditions he can work it off. In the old days it impelled him to throw bricks through the tutors' windows, to crack the college bell, to steal signs, and wrench off door knobs. These diversions taught him contempt for law, and kept him in fear of the constable and dangerously near the police court. It dulled his sense of honor, and left a stain upon his character to be exhibited under other con- ditions in after years. He was rusticated for rioting and dropped because he had neither a disciplined mind nor could submit to discipline. But with the bat, the ball, the oar, with the training of the gymnasium, and in the splendid vigor of competitive sports, came the fire and the enthusiasm of the Olympian games. The hard lesson that the best training and the most faithful work alone win the prizes is learned under joyous conditions. The page again welcomes every hard- ship that he may bear the armor of the knight, and the spirit of chivalry pervades the university. The pent-up forces and the resistless energies of the students become the 198 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. potent agents for physical development and mental disci- pline, and for the growth of moral and intellectual health. , Such men hail difficulties with ardor and overcome them with ease. They love work because of the pleasure in the mastery and the movement of the perfect machinery which wins the game or elucidates the problemT The school of unruly boys becomes a university of active, thoughtful, and self-reliant gentlemen. The requirements for admission are constantly increasing, and the standard for graduation is perpetually rising. Already practical men are becoming alarmed for fear the advancing demands of the college courses may keep a man an undergraduate so long, and launch him into his life work so late that he can neither catch up nor compete with those who came younger into the field. Except for the disciplined and obedient mind which comes from the training of the athlete, it would be hard to meet the conditions of the cur- riculum within proper years. THE LAWYER AND FREE INSTITUTIONS. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. OURS is and always has been a government controlled by lawyers. In this De Tocqueville recognized its greatest claim to stability and expansion. The profession has con- tributed seventeen of the twenty-one presidents of the United States and filled cabinets and councils. Its radicalism has always tended to the preservation of liberty, the main- tenance of order, and the protection of property. Lawyers can be agitators without being demagogues. They have codified the laws, brushed away the subtleties of practice, abolished those fictions of law and equity which THE LAWYER AND FREE INSTITUTIONS. defeated justice; and yet liberties are always so enlarged as to preserve essential rights. No other profession or pursuit has behind it exemplars and a history like the law. Its teachers have been the foes of anarchy, misrule, and tyranny, and its principles form the foundation of governments and the palladium of rights. Call the roll, and you summon God's chosen ministers of civilization and reform. It was not Pericles, but Solon and his statutes, who made possible Grecian power and progress. It was not her legions, but her twelve tables, which made Rome the mistress of the world. It was not the defeat of the Moslem hordes, but the discovery of the Pandects, which preserved Europe. It was not the Norman conqueror, but the common law, which evolved constitutional freedom out of chaos, revolution, and despotism. In the sack of the Italian city of Amalfi, a copy of the Pandects was discovered ; the study of the civil law sprang up all over Europe, and its administration passed from the hands of the ecclesiastics to its trained professors. In revenge, the council of the Church held at Amalfi decreed that no lawyer could enter the kingdom of heaven; but the lawyers have requited this anathema by largely converting the nations from the hell of arms to the heaven of arbitration. Few of the barons at Runnymede could read, and their sword hilts were .their marks; but the lawyers improved upon their demands by grafting upon the Great Charter those Saxon liberties for the individual embodied in that noble sentiment of the last will of King Alfred, that " it was just the English should forever remain as free as their own thoughts." It was the courts and not the commons which convinced the great and arbitrary Queen Elizabeth that there were limits to the royal prerogative, and warned Charles the First that taxation without representation might cost him his head. 2OO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. When submission and servility were threatening the integrity of English institutions, it was Chief Justice Coke who steadied wavering patriotism with the grand sentiment: " That power, which is above law, is not fit for the king to ask or the people to yield." King James the First, pedantic, pig-headed, and a tyrant, said: " I will dispense justice in person and reverse decrees at will." The judges firmly replied: " That, by the Constitution, can only be done by men learned in the law." " Then I will show what com- mon sense and common honesty can do," said the king, "by sitting with you." But on the third day he abandoned the judgment seat, cured, saying: "When one side speaks, the case is clear, but when the other closes, upon my soul, I cannot tell which is right." English statesmen had guaranteed the protection of slavery in the West Indies, and the property and prosperity of thousands were dependent upon that pledge. The policy of the government, the interests of trade were all enlisted in its support; but when Lord Mansfield said: " I know the promises of the Cabinet and the immense sums of money involved. Since, however, the question is before me, a slave cannot breathe the air of England," then was human slavery doomed all over the world. It was as a law student that Cromwell learned those prin- ciples which caused him to pledge fortune and life to the motto, " that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God "; and when the gay Cavalier went down before the resistless charge of his Ironsides, the freedom and development of the English-speaking world were assured. He established peace, and enlarged the power of his country abroad, and, though Charles the Second, by violating the law, might squander this glorious inheritance and disinter the remains of the great Protector and hang them at Tyburn, his spirit crossed the seas in the Mayflower and founded this Republic. HOME RULE FOR IRELAND. 2OI HOME RULE FOR IRELAND. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. IN England a Tory member of Parliament said to me : "Does anybody in America take any interest in the question which Mr. Gladstone has precipitated upon us, except the Irish? " I said to him: " There are no cross roads in the United States where the question is not watched with the same eagerness with which in a presidential canvass candidates and questions are talked about. The only differ- ence between an ordinary presidential election with us and this election is that our voices and our votes are unanimously on one side." " Well," he said, " that is because you are not informed." I said to him: " It is because we are educated on that question, and England proper is not." The principle of Home Rule starts from the town meeting, starts from the village caucus, starts from the ward gather- ing, reaches the county board of supervisors, stops at the state legislature, and delegates imperial power only to Con- gress. The whole genius and spirit of American liberty is Home Rule in the locality where it best understands what it needs, and that only in general matters shall the central government control. With all our English-speaking race, whatever may be its origin or its commingling with other races, there is at bottom a savage spirit a brutal spirit by which we seek to gain what is necessary to our power or to our interests by might, and to hold it, no matter what may be the right. Under the impetus of that spirit, the English-speaking race have trodden upon rights and sacred privileges until they virtually circle and control the globe. I know the common, middle-class Englishman. Whatever may be the prejudice aroused against him in Ireland or in 2O2 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. this country, he is a hard-headed, a conscientious, a moral, and family-loving man. All he needs is to be enlightened as to what is right and what is wrong, and he rises to the emergency. When Gladstone and those who are behind him have educated him, he will turn around and say to the Tory Government, to Union-Liberal Government, to Liberal Gov- ernment, to Radical Government: "Justice to Ireland, or you cannot stay in power." Now, I thought I would talk with these people; so I said to a Tory of some note : " Why do you oppose Mr. Glad- stone's bill ? " " Why," said he, " because it would confiscate, through an Irish Parliament, all the land there is in Ireland, and the Protestant minority would be crushed out and driven from the Island." I said to a Union-Liberal: "Why do you oppose Home Rule in Ireland? " " Why," said he, "because it would lead to the disruption of the British Empire ; and that is precisely the question presented in your rebellion and Civil War." I said to the English manufacturer: "Why don't you help Ireland by taking over your capital and developing her industries and great national capacities?" He said: "Be- cause the beggars won't work." I said to an English squire, who is alive to-day, but who is simply the mummied repre- sentative of his ancestors of the fourteenth century: " Why are you opposed to Gladstone and Home Rule ? " " Why," said he, " because the Irish are children, and must have a strong hand to govern them." Well, gentlemen, all these questions are answered success- fully either in America or Ireland to-day. The fact that among the noblest, the most brilliant, the most magnificent contributions to the forces, of human liberty, not only in Ireland but in the world, which have been given in the last century, no small number have come from the Protestant minority in Ireland answers the question of Irish bigotry. THE SCHOLAR IN PUBLIC LIFE. 2O3 What have the Irishmen in this country done ? Whenever they are freed from the distressing and oppressing influences which have borne them down for centuries in their country, they do work. They have built our great public works ; they have constructed our vast system of railways; they have done more than that: they have risen to places of power and emi- nence in every walk of industry and in every avenue which is open to brains and to pluck. I doubt, however, if the justice and strength of Home Rule would have been so thoroughly understood and so unani- mously approved by the American people, except for the conversion and resistless advocacy of an English statesman who has for years held the first place in our admiration and respect. Americans recognize genius everywhere, and neither race nor nationality is a barrier to their appreciation and applause. Beyond all other men in the Old World, one Englishman of supreme ability, of marvelous eloquence and varied acquirements, has fired their imaginations and enthusiasm, William E. Gladstone. THE SCHOLAR IN PUBLIC LIFE. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. PUBLIC life has been in all free states the highest and noblest of ambitions. To guide the Republic, command lis- tening senates, and promote the national welfare fill the full measure of duty and fame. But the same causes which threaten solid learning have changed the representative opportunities. The energy of business, its absorption of all classes, its demand for uninterrupted time and attention, and the increase of the cost of living have nowhere pro- 2O4 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. duced such marked effects as upon our statesmanship. Hence, the halls of Congress are gradually filling up with wealthy men and professional placemen. The glorious school in which preceding generations were trained for grand careers is almost disbanded. Convictions yield to expediency, and the ability to guide and the courage to resist are leaving their accustomed seats. By combinations and cunning, mediocrity occupies positions it cannot fill, and the " machine " runs for the suppression of dangerous ability and the division of all dividends of honor and power among its directors. The leaders are dependent upon followers who have no livelihood but office, and who desert the setting, and worship the rising, sun with a facility which surpasses the Middle Age courtier, who cried : " The king is dead ; long live the king ! " There is not at this hour in public life a single recognized and undisputed leader of a great party, or the progenitor of accepted ideas. The Congressional Record is a morass of crudity and words whose boundless area and fathomless depths none have the courage to explore. The Washingtons, Adamses, and Jays of the first period, the Hamiltons, Jef- fersons, and Madisons of the second, the Websters, Clays, and Calhouns of the third, and the Sewards, Sumners, Chases, and Lincolns of the fourth have no successors of equal power and influence. The debates of to-day are unread, but the utterances of these statesmen were the ora- cles of millions. Has the talent which made these men eminent died out ? Oh, no. It is practising law, editing newspapers, managing manufactories, mines, and commerce, building railroads, and directing transportation. If, then, those who fill the leaders' place cannot lead, so much greater the responsibility and duty which rest upon the liberally educated. Never fear but that, if they are true to their mission, whenever one of those mighty crises comes THE SCHOLAR IN PUBLIC LIFE. 2O5 which threaten the stability of our institutions and demand the services of the loftiest patriotism and genius, from the ranks will spring other Websters and Clays to the council, other Sewards, Chases, and Stantons to the cabinet, other Lincoln s to the presidency, and other Grants, Shermans, Sheridans, and Thomases to the field. We need have no regrets for the past, or anxiety for its return. No time is so good as the present, no period, no country so rich in liberty and opportunity as ours. The ^most radical, we are also the most conservative of states. We can canonize William Lloyd Garrison as a reformer, and dismiss Dennis Kearney as a demagogue. Genius, which was misunderstood or ignored or persecuted or put to death in its own time, receives the recognition and applause of ours. Plato was sold into slavery, and Socrates compelled to drink the hemlock. Cicero pleaded to bought juries; Sidney and Russell, though heroes with us, were martyrs in their own age. While even the earlier part of this century doubled and opposed the railroad, tried to prevent the introduction of gas, and sneered at and fought the telegraph, this decade welcomes and encourages all invention and discovery, art and letters. Twenty years ago Emerson, the transcendental- ist, and Darwin, the evolutionist, were alike the objects of almost universal sneers and scoffs ; and now the world, assigning to each the highest place in his sphere, stands by reverently with bared head while the one is buried beneath the Concord elms, and the other is laid away in Westminster Abbey among England's mighty dead. A recent tragedy, which shocked and stilled the world, brought before his countrymen a glorious example of the scholar in public life. While performing with rigid exact- ness all the duties of his calling, he never neglected the claims the community had upon his citizenship and culture. 2O6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. He found time every day for his allotted lines from the classics and pages in some book of solid worth. When he enlisted in the army, he mastered the curriculum of West Point in three months, and won Kentucky by cross- ing a swollen river, when the engineers could suggest no remedy, upon a bridge constructed from recollections of Caesar's Commentaries. He learned the French language to get readier access to the great works upon finance, when his Congressional duties demanded a solution of that vital question ; and reasoning from original principles, founded in his college life, impressed upon the Supreme Court of the United States a new bulwark of liberty. The broad founda- tion he laid at college, his loyalty ever after to learning, and the uses and duties of knowledge, developed the backwoods boy into the learned scholar, the good teacher, the success- ful soldier, the accomplished lawyer, the eloquent orator, the equipped statesman, and the lamented President James A. Garfield. CHARLES H. PARKHURST. 207 THE CORRUPTION OF MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT. A MORAL CRISIS. CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP. PIETY AND Civic VIRTUE. THE PULPIT AND POLITICS. 208 THE CORRUPTION OF MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT. 2OQ THE CORRUPTION OF MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT. CHARLES H. PARKHURST, D.D. EVERY solid statement of fact is argument. Every time you deal with things as they are, and name them in honest, ringing Saxon, you have done something. It has always been a trump card in the devil's game to keep things mixed. He mixed them in Paradise, and he has been trying to keep them mixed ever since. If the powers that manage this town are supremely and concertedly bent on encouraging iniquity in order to the strengthening of their own position and the enlargement of their own capital, what, in heaven's name, is the use of disguising the fact and wrapping it up in ambiguous euphemisms ? Something like a year ago, in company with a number of gentlemen, I conferred in his office with the highest munici- pal dignitary of this city in regard to the slovenly and wicked way in which he was pretending to clean our streets. In what I had to say to him at the time I addressed him as though he were a man, and as though he had the supreme interests of this city at heart ; and I have been ashamed of myself from the crown of my head to the sole of my foot ever since. Our city in its municipal life is thoroughly rotten. Gam- bling houses flourish on all these streets almost as thick as roses in Sharon. They are open to the initiated at any hour of day or night. They are eating into the character of some of what we are accustomed to think of as our best and most promising young men. They are a constant menace to all that is choicest and most vigorous in a moral way in the generation that is now moving on to the field of action. If we try to close up a gambling house, we, in the guile- lessness of our innocent imaginations, might have supposed 2IO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. that the arm of the city government that takes cognizance of such matters would find no service so congenial as that of combining with well-intentioned citizens in turning up the light on these nefarious dens and giving to the public certi- fied lists of the names of their frequenters. But if you con- vict a man of keeping a gambling hell in this town, you must do it in spite of the authorities and not by their aid. But you ask me, perhaps, what is the use of all this assev- eration and vituperation ? What is the good of protesting ? What is the good of protesting ? Do you know that a Protestant is nothing but a protestant ? A man who pro- tests ? And did not the men who protested in the sixteenth century do a good deal ? Did they not start a volcano beneath the crust of the whole European civilization ? Wherever you have a Luther, a grand stick of human tim- ber, all afire with holy indignation, a man of God, who is not too lymphatic to get off his knees or too cowardly to come out of his closet, confront iniquity, look it in the eye, plaster it with its baptismal name such a man can start a reformation and revolution every day in the year, if there are enough of them to go around. Why, it makes no dif- ference how thick the darkness is, a ray of light will cut it. What Christianity has done, Christianity can do. And when it is done, it is going to be done by the men and women who stand up and make a business of the thing and quit playing with it. If your Christianity is not vigor- ous enough to help save this country and this city, it is not vigorous enough to do anything toward saving you. Reality is not worn put. The truth is not knock-kneed. The incisive edge of bare-bladed righteousness will still cut. Only it has got to be righteousness that is not afraid to stand up, move into the midst of iniquity, and shake itself. The humanly incarcerated principles of this Gospe/ were able in three centuries to change the complexion of the A MORAL CRISIS. 211 whole Roman Empire; and there is nothing the matter with the Christianity here, except that the incarnations of it are lazy and cowardly, and think more of their personal comfort than they do of municipal decency, and more of their dollars than they do of a city that is governed by men who are not tricky and beastly. I have meant to be unprejudiced in my position, and con- servative in my demands, but we have got to have a better world, and we have got to have a better city than this is ; and men who feel iniquity keenly and who are not afraid to stand up and hammer it unflinchingly and remorselessly, and never get tired of ha'mmering it, are the instruments God has always used to the defeat of Satan and the bringing in of a better day. A MORAL CRISIS. CHARLES H. PARKHURST, D.D. THE history of this city has reached a point of moral crisis. I admit that there is nothing truer than the state- ment that has been reiteratedly made by parties that are themselves involved in these iniquities, that matters are in no worse shape now than they have been for a good many years. More than two years ago people well versed in the municipal situation were saying : " These things are all true, but what are you going to do about it ? " The stagger- ing point in the situation was its moral lifelessness pricking the conscience produced no pain. We were suffer- ing from ethical bankruptcy. We were being ruled by beasts, and yet it did not hurt our feelings. Our moral cuticle had become seared down to the situation. 2Ij| THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. I am not speaking now of the conscience of our rulers ; take them as they run, they have n't any. All that crime means to them is the liability of being sent to Sing Sing for it. With them remorse is a lost art. I am not saying that there are not exceptions to this. I am simply saying that, taken as a whole, the herd that is preying on us is composed of a lot of moral incapables that have breathed iniquity, eaten iniquity, drunk iniquity, and bartered in iniquity so long that to them iniquity is actually the normal condition of things, as propriety and decency are normal to the esti- mate of people that live righteously. But it is the parents who should reflect upon what all this municipal condition means. The influences with which the air is saturated are boring into and honeycombing the tissue of young integrity. There is nothing more insidiously fatal to a boy's prospective manhood than to gain an early im- pression that the difference between a straight line and a line that is not quite straight, is more an affair of imagination than it is of fact. A man who is in very close alliance with the liquor interest in this town, but who, for all that, believes in law and its enforcement, and who appreciates distinctly the fact that there is nothing that will abstract from a young person moral virility like letting him imagine that law is not a fact but a fiction, recently told me this anecdote of his own boy : " Father," said he, " that liquor saloon is open and it is Sunday, and the law says it shall not be open Sunday. Father, what is law, anyway? " And because in this community law is not handled as though it had its grounds in the eternal, nor truth dealt with other than as ninepins set up to be bowled down, character is despoiled of its virility. And one thing that we have to remember is that there is no power, even in the might of God, to recover a people and set it again upon a high track CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP. 213 of destiny when it has once reached a certain point of moral decay. History declares that with a directness and with an emphasis of reiteration that is overwhelming and appalling. National sin means national poison, and the unstemmed progress of national disease means eventual national death. It always has and always will, and God will make no excep- tion in behalf of the Western Continent. If there is no way of staying the tide of pollution that is setting with so full and oozy a current as has been so repul- sively demonstrated in our own town, if, I say, there is no way of stopping it, there is not much remaining for us to do but wait for destiny and pray for the Lord to take us before the year of destiny comes. CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP. CHARLES H. PARKHURST, D.D. THE fundamental service which the church has to render in the line of municipal or national betterment is to develop in Christians as such a civic consciousness. To an Ameri- can the stars and stripes ought to be as actually a part of his religion as the Sermon on the Mount. Other things being equal, it is as urgently the obligation of a Christian to go to the polls on election day as it is for him to go to the Lord's table on communion day. That sense of the holy obligation which citizenship involves must be made part of our Christian religion. It must be taught from the pulpit, rehearsed in the home, reit- erated in the Sunday school, and practiced in the life. I wish the time might come when we could have our national colors displayed in the sanctuary; not simply hung from the 214 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. belfry in a shy kind of way on Fourth of July and the twenty- second of February, but made a permanent part of sanctuary decoration. The old Hebrew never thought of patriotism as anything but a constituent part of religion. To him it was religion in its political aspects. I wish there were some way in which we could make civic virtue part of our creed. It would be a tremendous gain if we could all of us come to conceive of and to handle civic duties, such as attending the primaries and going to the polls, as lying on religious ground and contained within Christian jurisdiction. The instant effect of such civic consciousness would be to bring the citizen into direct practical relations to his city or country, and to make him feel in regard to his city, for example, " This is my city." No matter how many mayors or aldermen or police captains you have, it is your city all the same, and no city is safe unless its citizens tread steadily on the heels of those who have been hired to do the town's business. The mayor is bound to look after the citizens, but the citizens are just as much bound to look after the mayor. The police must watch the people, but the people must watch the police. The evil will have to be overcome with the good, and per- sonality is the thing that will have to do it. It will have to be done by men with convictions and with the courage of their convictions. It will have to be done by men who remember always that the security and the honor of the com- munity lies not so much in its great statesmen, in its power- ful leaders, or even in its educational advantages as it does in the number of its men with whom righteousness is a chronic passion, civic duty a part of Christianity. PIETY AND CIVIC VIRTUE. 21$ PIETY AND CIVIC VIRTUE. CHARLES H. PARKHURST, D.D. THE fault with the mass of civic virtue is that there is not enough Christian live coal in it to make it safe to be counted on for solid effects. What a wicked man will do on election day you can tell. What a good man will do you cannot tell. Most likely he will not do anything. It is a singular fact that goodness cannot be so confidently trusted as depravity can to do what is expected of it. It is not so reliable. It takes a larger consideration to prevent a bad man from cast- ing his ballot for rum than it does to prevent a good man from going and voting against it. Average decency is not so much in earnest as average profligacy. Elections in city and state are very likely to turn on the weather. Singularly enough, a watery day is apt to mean a rum government. Respectability looks at the barom- eter before it steps out of doors. Decency is afraid of taking cold. Piety does not like to get its feet wet. Wickedness is amphibious and thrives in any element or in no element. There are a good many lessons which the powers of darkness are competent to teach the children of light, and that is one of them. Vice is a good deal spryer than virtue, has more staying power, can work longer without getting out of breath, and has less need of half-holidays. I know because of this people say, You can't do anything. You can. One man can chase a thousand ; we have the Almighty's word for it. I have done it. I am not bragging of it ; but I have done it. And any man can do it, be he Catholic, Republican, or Democrat, if he have the truth on his side, dares to stand up and tell it, is distinguished by consecrated hang-to-itiveness, and when he has been knocked down once preserves his serenity, gets up, and goes at it 2l6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. again. One man can chase a thousand. Let our earnest, fiery citizens once get but an inkling of what citizenship means, in its truest and innermost sense, and there is no wall of misrule too solidly constructed for it to overthrow ; no "machine" of demagogism too elaborately wrought for it to smash. There is nothing that can stand in the way of virtue on fire. A fact you can misstate, a principle you can put under a false guise, but a man you cannot down ; that is to say, if he is a man who has grit, grace, and sleeps well o' nights. There is no play about this work; there is no fun in it. It means annoyances; it means enmities. It is no more possible to stand up in the presence of the community and speak the truth in cold monosyllables now than it was in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. Human nature has not altered any in that time. There is not so much wickedness now, perhaps, as there was then, but what there is is just as wicked and just as malignant. If a man butts his head against a wall, he may be able to do a little something towards weakening the wall, but it will be certain to give him the headache. Action and reaction are bound to be equal. Nothing less than the steady pull of a long and devout purpose will be sufficient under those circumstances to keep the man a-going. Men now are precisely what they were when they thrust Jeremiah into a hole and took off the head of John the Baptist. But that makes not a whit of difference. Every blow tells. Wickedness is cowardly and Pentecostal virtue is not. That makes a huge difference. The matter of numbers does not come into the account. History is not administered on the basis of arithmetic. The declaration of Solomon that the battle is not to the strong has been justified by every age of moral, political, and military history. No cause can be called a weak cause that has vitality enough about it to make devotees out of its advocates. THE PULPIT AND POLITICS. Philip Second could do nothing with poor little Holland because the Protestant's idea put recruits on their feet faster than Philip's mercenaries could shoot or roast the veterans. If any one anywhere is anxious to accomplish something in the way of ameliorating the condition of his town or city, and asks me what he shall do, I answer in ten words : Get the facts ; state them ; stand up to them. THE PULPIT AND POLITICS. CHARLES H. PARKHURST, D.D. THE particular political stripe of a municipal administra- tion is no matter of our interest and none of our business ; but to strike at iniquity is the business of the church. It is primarily what the church is for, no matter in what connec- tion that sin may find itself associated and intermixed. If it is proper for us to go around cleaning up after the devil, it is proper for us to fight the devil. If it is right to cure, it is right to prevent, and a thousand times more economical and sagacious. Republicans and Democrats we have nothing to do with, but sin is our particular province to ferret out, to publish, and, in unadorned Saxon, to stigmatize. And sin, be it remembered, never gets tired ; never is low- spirited ; has the courage of its convictions ; never fritters away its power and its genius pettifogging over side issues. And so piety, when it fronts sin, has got to become grit. Salt is a concrete commodity, and requires to be rubbed into the very pores of decay. I scarcely ever move into the busy parts of this town without feeling in a pained way how little of actual touch there is between the life of the church and the life of the times. 2l8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. I have no criticism to pass on the effort to improve the quality of civilization in Central Africa, but it would count more in the moral life of the world to have this city, where the heart of the country beats, dominated in its government by the ethical principles insisted on by the Gospel than to have evangelical light a hundred miles broad thrown clear across the Dark Continent. And the men and women that live here are the ones to do it. It is achievable. What Christianity has done Christianity can do. In the pulpit to-day there is not a great deal of statesman- ship, and outside of it there is not any that I know of. There is politics, but there is not statesmanship. Do you know what the difference is between statesmanship and poli- tics ? Well, politics is statesmanship with the moral gristle left out. But how long has it been since anybody at Wash- ington has stood up in the strength of a Wilson, a Sumner, a Webster, or an Elijah, and spoken the word that has drawn to a snug attention the moral sense of this great people ? We used to have speeches made there that would ring clear across the continent and clear the air for a decade. But there is no longer the Samson at Washington that will fling his arms about the two pillars and bow himself mightily. So that at present if you are going to have statesmen you will have to look to the pulpit for them. And is there a place where one would have any better right to expect them to abound ? If there is any Moses who can climb to the top of Sinai and commune with God and behold with an unabashed eye the realities that compose the tissue of all history, why should he not lead the waiting host when he gets back to the foot of the mountain ? Why leave it to dirty Aaron, who, meantime, has been stripping the people and building golden calves ? The idea of a rabble of cut-throats, thieves, thugs, and libertines presuming to stand up and tell God's prophets to keep their hands off the ark of the cove- THE PULPIT AND POLITICS. 2IQ narit, when the sole regard they have for the ark is their sacrilegious appetite for the golden pot of manna that is preserved in the interior of the ark ! There is moral material enough in community, but it lacks leadership. The prophets of God are here to meet that exigency. That is what they are for ; to foster and train moral sentiment, to compact arid marshal it, and hold it along lines of earnest and intelligent devotement to the common weal. HENRY W. GRADY. THE UNIVERSITY THE TRAINING CAMP OF THE FUTURE. THE SOUTHERN NEGRO. PROHIBITION IN ATLANTA. THE SOUTH AND HER PROBLEMS. CENTRALIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES. THE NEW SOUTH. THE TRAINING CAMP OF THE FUTURE. 223 THE UNIVERSITY THE TRAINING CAMP OF THE FUTURE. HENRY W. GRADY. WE are standing in the daybreak of the second century of this Republic. The fixed stars are fading from the sky, and we grope in uncertain light. The unrest of dawn impels us to and fro, but Doubt stalks amid the confusion, and even on the beaten paths the shifting crowds are halted, and from the shadows the sentries cry : " Who comes there ? " Nothing is steadfast or approved. The church is besieged from without and betrayed from within. Behind the courts smoulders the rioter's torch and looms the gibbet of the anarchists. Trade is restless in the grasp of monopoly, and commerce shackled with limitation. The cities are swollen, and the fields are stripped. Splendor streams from the castle, and squalor crouches in the home. The universal brotherhood is dissolving, and the people are huddling into classes. The hiss of the Nihilist disturbs the covert, and the roar of the mob murmurs along the highway. Amid it all beats the great American heart, undismayed ; and, standing fast by the challenge of his conscience, the citizen of the Republic, tranquil and resolute, notes the drifting of the spectral currents and calmly awaits the full disclosures of the day. Who shall be the heralds of this coming day ? Who shall thread the way of honor and safety through these besetting problems ? You, my countrymen, you ! The university is the training camp of the future. The scholar, the champion of the coming years. Napoleon overran Europe with drum- tap and bivouac ; the next Napoleon shall form his battalions at the tap of the schoolhouse bell, and his captains shall come with cap and gown. Waterloo was won at Oxford ; Sedan at Berlin. So Germany plants her colleges in the 224 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. shadow of the French forts, and the professor smiles amid his students as he notes the sentinel stalking against the sky. The farmer has learned that brains mix better with his soil than the waste of seabirds. A button is pressed by a child's finger and the work of a million men is done. The hand is nothing ; the brain everything. Physical prowess has had its day, and the age of reason has come. The lion-hearted Richard challenging Saladin to single combat is absurd. Science is everything ! She draws Boston within three hours of New York, renews the famished soil, routs her viewless bondsmen from the electric center of the earth, and then turns to watch the new Icarus as, mount- ing in his flight to the sun, he darkens the burnished ceiling of the sky with the shadow of his wing. Learning is supreme, and you are its prophets. Here the Olympic games of the Republic and you are its chosen athletes. It is yours, then, to grapple with these problems, to confront and master these dangers. Yours to decide whether the tremendous forces of this Republic shall be kept in balance, or whether, unbalanced, they shall bring chaos; whether sixty million men are capable of self-government, or whether liberty shall be lost to them who would give their live % s to maintain it. Your responsibility is appalling. You stand in the pass behind which the world's liberties are guarded. This government carries the hopes of the human race. Blot out the beacon that lights the portals of this Republic, and the world is adrift again. But save the Republic, establish the light of its beacon over the troubled waters, and one by one the nations of the earth shall drop anchor and be at rest in the harbor of universal liberty. THE SOUTHERN NEGRO. 225 THE SOUTHERN NEGRO. HENRY W. GRADY. FAR to the south lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. There by night the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treas- ures, forests, vast and primeval, and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. But why is it, though the sectional line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of the North have crossed it over to the South than when it was crimson with the best blood of the Repub- lic, or even when the slaveholder stood guard every inch of its way ? There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to consider. My people, your brothers in the South brothers in blood, in destiny, in all that is best in our past and future are so beset with this problem that their very existence depends upon its right solution. I thank God as heartily as you do that human slavery is gone forever from the American soil. But the freedman remains. With him a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil with equal civil and political rights almost equal in numbers, but terribly unequal in intelligence and responsibility each pledged against fusion one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last by a desolating war the experiment sought by neither, but approached by both with doubt, these are the conditions. The President of the United States, discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem, asks : " Are they at work upon it ? What solution do they offer ? When will the black man cast a free ballot ? " When will the black cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is 226 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. not dominated by the will of the intelligent; when the laborer anywhere casts a vote unhindered by his boss, then and not till then will the ballot of the negro be free. Meantime we treat the negro fairly, measuring to him justice in the fullness the strong should give to the weak, and leading him in the steadfast ways of citizenship, that he may no longer be the prey of the unscrupulous and the sport of the thoughtless. The love we feel for that race you cannot measure nor comprehend. As I attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy from her home up there looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals the sweet music of her crooning, as thirty years ago she held me in her black arms and led me smiling into sleep. This scene vanishes as I speak, and I catch a vision of an old Southern home, with its lofty pillars and its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air. I see women with strained and anxious faces and children alert yet help- less. I see night come down with its dangers and its appre- hensions, and in a big homely room I feel on my tired head the touch of loving hands now worn and wrinkled, but fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal woman, and stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man as they lay a mother's blessing there, while at her knees the truest altar I yet have found I thank God that she is safe in her sanctuary, because her slaves, sentinel in the silent cabin or guard at her chamber door, put a black man's loyalty between her and danger. I catch another vision. The crisis of battle a soldier struck, staggering, fallen. I see a slave scuffling through the smoke, winding his black arms about the fallen form, reckless of the hurtling death, bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the stricken lips, so wrestling mean- time with agony that he would lay down his life in his master'-s stead. I see him by the weary bedside, ministering PROHIBITION IN ATLANTA. with uncomplaining patience, praying with all his humble heart that God will lift his master up, until death comes in mercy and in honor to still the soldier's agony and seal the soldier's life. I see him by the open grave, mute, motion- less, uncovered, suffering for the death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him when the mound is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave comes a voice, saying : " Follow him ! Put your arms about him in his need, even as he once put his about me. Be his friend, as he was mine." And out into this new world strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering both - I follow. And may God forget my people when they forget these ! PROHIBITION IN ATLANTA. HENRY W. GRADY. MR. GEORGE ADAIR rents houses to thirteen hundred tenants. He states that he has issued, in the last year, one distress warrant where he issued twenty, two years ago. I claim to be an intelligent man with some courage of convic- tion; and I pledge you my word, if that one fact were estab- lished to my satisfaction, I would vote for prohibition in Atlanta, although I never heard another word on this subject. Have you thought what that means, a distress warrant? It means eviction; it means the very thing that is to-day kindling the heart of the world for poor Ireland. It means 228 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. eviction ! It means turning woman and her little children out of the house which has sheltered them, and to which they are entitled. I was astonished at Colonel Adair's statement. Mr. Tally, who rents six hundred or eight hundred houses, says: " I used to issue two or three distress warrants four or five a month. I have not issued a single one in eighteen months." Now, both of them are Prohibitionists. Have you ever thought about a woman being turned out of her house, the little cottage which covers her and her children? Can you picture you who live in comfortable homes filled with light and warmth and books and joy can you think of these people, human beings, our brothers and sisters; the poor mother, brave, though her heart is breaking, huddling her little children about her; and the father, weak, but loving, and loving all the deeper because he knows his weakness has brought them to this want and degradation; and the little children of whom our Savior said : " Suffer them to come unto me, and forbid them not," as they ask, " Mamma, where shall we sleep to-night? " can you picture that, and then their taking themselves up, and the woman putting her hand with undying love and faith in the hand of the man she swore to follow through good and evil report, and march- ing up and down the street this pitiable procession through the unthinking streets, by laughing children and shining windows, looking for a hole where, like the foxes, they may hide their poor heads ? My friends, they talk to you about personal liberty, that a man should have the right to go into a grogshop and see this pitiable procession now stopped parading up and down our streets again. They talk to you about the shades of Washington, Monroe, and Jefferson. I would not give one happy, rosy little woman, uplifted from that degradation happy again in her home, with the cricket chirping on her PROHIBITION IN ATLANTA. 22Q hearthstone, and her children about her knee, her husband, redeemed from drink, at her side I would not give one of them for all the shades of all the men that ever contended since Cataline conspired and Caesar fought. I assume to keep no man's conscience: I assume to judge for no man. I do not assume that I am better than any man, but that I am weaker. But I say this to you : I have a boy as dear to me as the ruddy drops that gather about this heart. I find my hopes already centering in his little body, and I look to him to-night to take to himself the work that, strive as I may, must fall unfinished at last from my hands. Now, I know they say it is proper to educate a boy at home; that if he is taught right at home he will not go wrong. But I have seen sons of as good people as ever lived turn out badly. I accept my responsibility as a father. The boy may fall from the right path, as things now exist. If he does, then I shall bear that sorrow with such resignation as I may; but I tell you, if I were to vote to recall the bar rooms to this city, when I know it has prospered in their absence, and that -boy should fall through their agency, I tell you and this conviction has come to me in the still watches of the night I could not, wearing the crowning sorrow of his disgrace and looking into the eyes of her whose heart he had broken I could not, if I had voted to recall these bar rooms, find answer for my conscience or support for my remorse. The best reforms of this earth come through waste and storm and doubt and suspicion. The sun itself when it rises on each day wastes the radiance of the moon and blots the starlight from the skies, but only to unlock the earth from the clasp of night and to plant the stars anew in the opening flowers. Behind that sun, as behind this movement, we may be sure there stands the Lord God Almighty, master and maker of the universe. 23O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE SOUTH AND HER PROBLEMS. HENRY W. GRADY. As I speak to you to-day, I wish to tell you of a soldier who lay wounded on a hard-fought field. The roar of battle had died away, and he rested in the deadly stillness of its aftermath. Not a sound was heard as he lay there, sorely smitten and speechless, but the shriek of men, and the sigh of the dying soul as it escaped from the tumult of earth into the unspeakable peace of the stars. Off over the field flickered the lanterns of the surgeons with the litter bearers, searching that they might take away those whose lives could be saved, and leave in sorrow those who were doomed to die with pleading eyes through the darkness. This poor soldier watched, unable to move or speak, as the lanterns grew near. At last the light flashed in his face, and the surgeon, with kindly face, bent over him, hesitated a moment, shook his head, and was gone, leaving the poor fellow alone with death. He watched in patient agony as they went on from one part of the field to another. As they came back the surgeon bent over him again. " I believe if this poor fellow lives until sundown to-morrow," said the surgeon, " he will get well." All night long these words fell into the soldier's heart as the dews fell from the stars upon his lips, " if he but lives till sundown he will get well." He turned his weary head to the east, and watched for the coming sun. At last the stars went out, the east trembled with radiance, and the sun, slowly lifting above the horizon, tinged his pallid face with flame. He watched it inch by inch as it climbed slowly up the heavens. He thought of life, its hopes and ambitions, its sweetness and its raptures, and he fortified his soul against THE SOUTH AND HER PROBLEMS. 23! despair until the sun had reached high noon. He thought of his far-off home, the blessed house resting in tranquil peace, with the roses climbing to its door and the trees whispering to its windows, and, dozing in the sunshine, the orchard, and the little brook running like a silver thread through the forest. " If I live till sundown, I will see it again. I will walk down the shady lane. I will open the battered gate, and the mocking bird shall call to me from the orchard, and I will drink once more at the old mossy spring." And the Son of God, who had died for men, bending from the stars, put the hand that had been nailed to the cross on the ebbing life, and held it tenderly until the sun went down and the stars came out, and shone down in the brave man's heart and blurred in his glistening eyes, and the lanterns of the surgeons came, and he was taken from death to life. The world is a battlefield strewn with the wreck of government and institutions, of theories and of faiths that have gone down in the ravage of years. On this field lies the South, sown with her problems. Upon the field swing the lanterns of God. Amid the carnage walks the Great Physician. Over the South he bends. " If ye but live until to-morrow's sundown, ye shall endure, my countrymen." Let us for her sake turn and watch as the soldier did for the coming sun. Let us staunch her wounds and hold steadfast. And when the sun has gone down and the day of her proba- tion has ended, and the stars shall have rallied her heart, the lanterns shall be swung over the field, and the Great Physician shall lead her up from trouble into content, from suffering into peace, from death to life. Let every man here pledge himself in that high and ardent hour, as I pledge myself, that in death and earnest loyalty, in patient painstaking and care, every man will watch her interests, advance her fortune, defend her fame, and guard 232 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. her honor as long as life shall last. Every man in the sound of my voice, under the deeper consecration he offers to the Union, will consecrate himself to the South. Have no ambition but to be first at her feet and last at her service. No hope but, after a long life of devotion, to sink to sleep in her bosom, as a little child sleeps at his mother's breast and rests untroubled in the light of her smile. ' CENTRALIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES. HENRY W. GRADY. --' / THE unmistakable danger that threatens free government in America is the increasing tendency to concentrate in the federal government powers and privileges that should be left with the states, and to create powers that neither the state nor federal government should have. Concurrent with this political drift is another movement, less formal, perhaps, but not less dangerous, the consolida- tion of capital. The world has not seen nor has the mind of man conceived of such miraculous wealth gathering as are everyday tales to us. Aladdin's lamp is dimmed, and Monte Cristo becomes commonplace when compared to our magicians of finance and trade. I do not denounce the newly rich. Our great wealth has brought us profit and splendor. But the status itself is a menace. A home that costs three million dollars and a break- fast that costs five thousand dollars are disquieting facts to the millions who live in a hut and dine on a crust. The fact that a man ten years from poverty has an income of twenty million dollars falls strangely on the ears of those who hear it, as they sit empty-handed while children cry for bread. CENTRALIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES. 233 But the abuse of this amazing power of consolidated wealth is its bitterest result and its pressing danger. We have read of the robber barons of the Rhine, who from their castles sent a shot across the bow of every passing craft, and, descending as hawks from the crags, tore and robbed and plundered the voyagers until their greed was glutted or the strength of their victims spent. Shall this shame of Europe against which the world revolted, shall it be repeated in this free country ? And yet, when a syndicate or a trust can arbitrarily add twenty-five per cent to the cost of a single article of common use, and safely gather forced trib- ute from the people, until from its surplus it could buy every castle on the Rhine, or requite every baron's debauchery from its kitchen account, where is the difference save that the castle is changed to a broker's office, and the picturesque river to the teeming streets and the broad fields of this government " of the people, by the people, and for the people " ? I do not overstate the case. Economists have held that wheat, grown everywhere, could never be cornered by capi- tal. And yet one man in Chicago tied the wheat crop in his handkerchief, and held it until a sewing woman in my city, working for ninety cents a week, had to pay him twenty cents tax on the sack of flour she bore home in her famished hands. Three men held the cotton until the English spin- dles stopped and the lights went out in three million Eng- lish homes. Last summer one man cornered pork until he had levied a tax of three dollars per barrel on every con- sumer, and pocketed a profit of millions. The Czar of Russia would not have dared to do these things. And yet they are no secrets in this free government of ours ! They are known of all men, and, my countrymen, no argument can follow them, and no plea excuse them, when they fall on the men who, toiling, yet suffer, who hunger at their work, 234 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. and who cannot find food for their wives with which to feed the infants that hang famishing at their breasts. What is the remedy? To exalt the hearthstone, to strengthen the home, to build up the individual, to magnify and defend the principle of local self-government. Not in deprecation of the federal government, but to its glory not to weaken the Republic, but to strengthen it. Let it be understood in my parting words to you that I am no pessimist as to this Republic. I always bet on sunshine in America. I know that my country has reached the point of perilous greatness ; but I know that beyond the utter- most glory is enthroned the Lord God Almighty, and that when the hour of her trial has come he will lift up his ever- lasting gates and bend down above her in mercy and in love. And, bending down humbly as Elisha did, and praying that my eyes shall be made to see, I catch the vision of this Republic plenty streaming from its borders, and light from its mountain tops working out its mission under God's approving eye, until the dark continents are opened, and under one language, one liberty, and one God all the nations of the-world, hearkening to the American drumbeat, and girding up their loins, shall march amid the breaking of the millennium dawn into the paths of righteousness and of peace ! THE NEW SOUTH. HENRY W. GRADY. A MASTER hand has drawn for you the picture of your returning armies. You have been told how, in the pomp and circumstance of war, they came back to you, marching with proud and victorious tread, reading their glory in a THE NEW SOUTH. 235 nation's eyes ! Will you bear with me while I tell you of another army that sought its home at the close of the late war, an army that marched home in defeat and not in victory, in pathos and not in splendor, but in glory that equaled yours, and to hearts as loving as ever welcomed heroes home ! Let me picture to you the footsore Confederate soldier, as, buttoning up in his faded gray jacket the parole which was to bear testimony to his children of his fidelity and faith, he turned his face southward from Appomattox in April, 1865. Think of him as, ragged, half-starved, heavy- hearted, enfeebled by want and wounds, having fought to exhaustion, he surrenders his gun, wrings the hands of his comrades in silence, and, lifting his tear-stained and pallid face for the last time to the graves that dot old Virginia hills, pulls his gray cap over his brow and begins the slow and painful journey. What does he find let me ask you what does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful ? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless, his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away, his people without law or legal status, his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone. Without money, credit, employment, material, or training, and, beside all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence, the establishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves. What does he do, this hero in gray with a heart of gold ? Does he sit down in sullenness and despair ? Not for a day. Surely God, who had stripped him of his prosperity, 236 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. inspired him in his adversity. As ruin was never before so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow ; horses that had charged Federal guns marched before the plow ; and fields that ran red with human blood in April were green with the harvest in June. But what is the sum of our work ? We have found out that the free negro counts more than he did as a slave. We have planted the schoolhouse on the hilltop, and made it free to white and black. We have sowed towns and cities in the place of theories, and put business above politics. The new South is enamored of her new work. Her soul is stirred with the breath of a new life. The light of a grander day is falling fair on her face. She is thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity. As she stands upright, full statured and equal, among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because, through the inscrutable wisdom of God, her honest purpose was crossed and her brave armies were beaten. The South has nothing for which to apologize. I should be unjust to the dauntless spirit of the South and to my own convictions if I did not make this plain in this presence. The South has nothing to take back. In my native town of Athens is a monument that crowns its central hill a plain white shaft. Deep cut into its shining side is a name dear to me above the names of men that of a brave and simple man who died in brave and simple faith. Not for all the glories of New England, from Plymouth Rock all the way, would I exchange the heritage he left me in his soldier's death. To the foot of that I shall send my children's children to reverence him who ennobled their name with his heroic blood. THE NEW SOUTH. 237 But, sir, speaking from the shadow of that memory which I honor as I do nothing else on earth, I say that the cause in which he suffered and for which he gave his life was adjudged by higher and fuller wisdom than his or mine, and I am glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in his almighty hand and that human slavery was swept forever from American soil, the American Union was saved from the wreck of war. x^^Now, what answer has New England to this message ? Will she withhold, save in strained courtesy, the hand which, straight from his soldier's heart, Grant offered to Lee at Appomattox ? Will she make the vision of a restored and happy people which gathered above the couch of your dying captain, filling his heart with grace, touching his lips with praise, and glorifying his path to the grave will she make this vision, on which the last sigh of his expiring soul breathed a benediction, a cheat and delusion ? If she does, the South, never abject in asking for comradeship, must accept with dignity its refusal ; but if she does not refuse to accept in frankness and sincerity this message of good will and friendship, then will the prophecy of Webster, delivered in this very society forty years ago amid tremendous ap- plause, be verified in its fullest sense when he said : " Stand- ing hand to hand and clasping hands, we should remain united as we have been for sixty years, citizens of the same country, members of the same government, united, all united now and united forever." JAMES G. ELAINE. THE DEATH OF GARFIELD. CHINESE IMMIGRATION. THE PERMANENCE OF GRANT'S FAME. AMERICAN SHIPBUILDING. THE ELEMENTS OF NATIONAL WEALTH. THE AMNESTY OF JEFFERSON DAVIS. THE DEATH OF GARFIELD. 24! THE DEATH OF GARFIELD. JAMES G. ELAINE. ON the morning of Saturday, July 2, President Garfield was a contented and happy man not in an ordinary degree, but joyfully, almost boyishly happy. And surely, if happiness can ever come from the honors or triumphs of this world, on that quiet July morning Garfield may well have been a happy man. No foreboding of evil haunted him ; no premonition of danger clouded his sky. One moment he stood erect, strong, confident in the years stretching peacefully out before him. The next he lay wounded, bleeding, helpless, doomed to weary weeks of torture, to silence, and the grave. Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world's interest, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victo- ries, into the visible presence of death and he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of its relin- quishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony, that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage, he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes whose lips may tell what brilliant, broken plans, what baffled, high ambition, what sundering of household ties ! Behind him a proud, expectant nation, a great host of sustaining friends, a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full, rich honors of her early toil and tears ; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his ; the little boys not yet emerged from child- hood's day of frolic ; the fair young daughter ; the sturdy sons, just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding a father's love and care ; and 242 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. in his heart the eager, rejoicing power to meet all demand. Before him desolation and great darkness ! And his soul was not shaken. As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changing wonders; on its fair sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning. CHINESE IMMIGRATION. JAMES G. BLAINE. OUGHT we to exclude the Chinese ? The question lies in my mind thus : Either the Caucasian race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolian race will possess it. Give Mongolians the start to-day, with the keen thrust of neces- sity behind them, and it is entirely probable, if not demon- CHINESE IMMIGRATION. 243 strable that, while we are filling up the other portions of the continent, they will occupy the great space of country between the Sierras and the Pacific coast. When gentlemen say that we admit from all other coun- tries, where do they find the slightest parallel ? The Asiatic cannot live with our population and make a homogeneous element. The idea of comparing European immigration with an immigration that has no regard to family, that does not feel in the slightest degree the humanizing and the ennobling influences of the hearthstone and the fireside ! There is not a peasant's cottage inhabited by a Chinaman. There is not a hearthstone, as it is found and cherished in an American home, or an English home, or a German home, or a French home; and yet you say that it is entirely safe to sit down and quietly permit that mode of life to be fastened upon our country. I have heard much of late about the cheap labor of the Chinese. I do not myself believe in cheap labor. The wealthy classes, in a Republic where suffrage is universal, must not legislate in favor of cheap labor. Labor should not be cheap, and it should not be dear ; it should have its share, and it will have its share. Then the answer is, " But are not American laborers equal to Chinese laborers ? " I answer that question by asking another. Were not free white American laborers equal to African slaves in the South ? When you tell me that the Chinaman driving out the free American laborer only proves the superiority of the Chinaman, I ask you if the African slave driving out the free white labor from the South proved the superiority of slave labor ? The conditions are not unlike ; the parallel is not complete, and yet it is a parallel. Chinese labor is servile labor. It is labor that comes here under a mortgage. It is labor that comes here to subsist on what the American laborer cannot subsist on. You cannot 244 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. work a man who must have beef and bread in competition with a man who can live on rice. In all such conflicts and in all such struggles the result is not to bring up the man who lives on rice to the beef and bread standard, but it is to bring down the man living on beef and bread to the rice standard. Slave labor degraded free labor. It took its respectability ; it put an odious caste upon it. It throttled the prosperity of one of the fairest portions of the Union ; and a worse than slave labor will throttle and impair the prosperity of a still finer and fairer section of the Union. We can choose here to-day whether our legislation shall be in the interest of the American free laborer or in favor of the servile laborer from China. THE PERMANENCE OF GRANT'S FAME. JAMES G. ELAINE. THE monopoly of fame by the few in this world comes from an instinct of human nature. Heroes cannot be multi- plied. The millions pass into oblivion; only the units survive. Who aided the great leader of Israel to conduct the chosen people over the sands of the desert and through the waters of the sea unto the Promised Land ? Who marched with Alexander from the Bosphorus to India ? Who commanded the legions under Caesar in the conquest of Gaul ? Who crossed the Alps with the Conqueror of Italy ? Who fought with Wellington at Waterloo ? Alas ! how soon it may be asked, Who marched with Sherman from the mountain to the sea ? Who stood with Meade on the victorious field of Gettysburg ? Who went with Sheridan through the trials and triumphs of the blood-stained valley ? THE PERMANENCE OF GRANT S FAME. 245 Napoleon said: "The rarest attribute among generals is two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage." " I mean," he added, " unprepared courage, that which is necessary on an unex- pected occasion and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judgment and promptness of decision." No better description could be given of the type of courage which distinguished General Grant. His constant readiness to fight was another quality which, according to the same high authority, established his rank as a commander. " Generals," said the exile at St. Helena, " are rarely found eager to give battle; they choose their positions, consider their combinations, and then indecision begins." " Nothing," added this greatest warrior of modern times, " nothing is so difficult as to decide." General Grant, in his services in the field, never once exhibited indecision. This was the quality which gave him his crowning characteristic as a military leader ; he inspired his men with a sense of their invincibility, and they were thenceforth invincible ! General Grant's name will survive because it is indissolubly connected with the greatest military and moral triumph in the history of his country. If the armies of the Union had ultimately failed, the vast and beneficent designs of Mr. Lincoln would have been frustrated. General Grant would then have taken his place with that long and always increas- ing array of able men who are found wanting in the supreme hour of trial. But a higher power controlled the result. In the reverent expression of Mr. Lincoln, " no human counsel devised, nor did any mortal hand work out these great things." In their accomplishment these human agents were sustained by more than human power, and through them great salvation was wrought for the land. As long, therefore, as the American Union shall abide, with its blessings of law and liberty, Grant's name shall be remem- bered with honor ; as long as the slavery of human beings 246 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. shall be abhorred and the freedom of man cherished, Grant's name shall be recalled with gratitude ; and in the cycles of the future the story of Lincoln's life can never be told without associating Grant in the enduring splendor of his own fame. AMERICAN SHIPBUILDING. JAMES G. ELAINE. IT is a remarkable fact that for the past twenty-five years the Congress of the United States has not done one solitary thing to uphold the navigation interests of the United States. Decay has been observed going steadily on from year to year. During these years, in which Congress has not stepped forward to do one thing for the carrying trade of the country, the same Congress has passed ninety-two acts in aid of international transportation by rail. It has given two hundred million acres of the public lands, worth to-day a thousand million dollars in money, and has added seventy million dollars in cash, and yet it has scarcely extended the aid of a single dollar to build up our foreign commerce. An energetic and able man who found a great ocean high- way unoccupied, and had the enterprise to put American vessels of the best construction and great power upon it, has been held up to scorn and to reproach because he came to the American Congress and said : " If you will do for this enterprise what the emperor of Brazil will do, pay a hun- dred thousand dollars a year, I will give you a great line of steamships from New York to Rio Janeiro." But New England senators, I regret to say, remarked with quiet complacency : " If Brazil is willing to pay for the line, we need not." Just as soon as it was found that we would AMERICAN SHIPBUILDING. 247 not pay a combination of English shipbuilders said : "We will put on our ships and run that American line off ; we will carry the coffee of Brazil to the United States for noth- ing ; we will break down this attempt of the United States to begin a race upon the ocean ; " and have they not pretty nearly succeeded ? Great Britain has been our great commercial rival. How has she succeeded ? Since the first Cunard steamship sailed into Boston Harbor, now about forty years ago, Great Britain has paid from her treasury to aid her steamship lines a sum exceeding forty million pounds sterling, more than two hundred millions of American dollars. Last year France paid twenty-three million francs more than four and a half million dollars, to aid her steamship lines. Italy, hemmed in upon the Mediterranean, with a territory that does not touch either of the great oceans, paid last year one million six hundred thousand dollars to her lines. Even Austria, that enjoys but a single seaport on the upper end of the Adriatic, pays five hundred thousand dollars toward stimulating commercial ventures from Trieste. The United States cannot succeed in this great inter- national struggle without adopting exactly the same mode that has achieved victory for other countries. Let the American merchants, then, feel that the government of the United States is behind them. Let the United States take from her treasury per annum the four millions of dollars that Great Britain is paying as a postscript to her two hundred million dollars of investment and that is not a great sum for this opulent country let that be used as a fund to stimulate steamship companies from any port of the United States to any foreign port on the globe, and I venture to predict that you will see that long-deferred, much-desired event, the revival of the American merchant marine. 248 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE ELEMENTS OF NATIONAL WEALTH. JAMES G. ELAINE. THE territory which we occupy is at least three million square miles in extent, within a fraction as large as the whole of Europe. The state of Texas alone is equal in area to the empire of France and the kingdom of Portugal united; and yet these two monarchies support a population of forty millions, while Texas has but six hundred thousand inhabi- tants. The land that is still in the hands of government, not sold or even preempted, amounts to a thousand million of acres, an extent of territory thirteen times as large as Great Britain, and equal in area to all the kingdoms of Europe, Russia and Turkey alone excepted. Combined with this great expanse of territory, we have facilities for the acquisition and consolidation of wealth varied, magnificent, immeasurable. The single state of Illinois, cultivated to its capacity, can produce as large a crop of cereals as has ever been grown within the limits of the United States, while Texas, if peopled but half as densely as Maryland even, could give an annual return of cotton larger than the largest that has ever been grown in all the Southern states combined. Our facilities for commerce and exchange, both domestic and foreign who shall measure them ? Our oceans, our vast inland seas, our marvelous flow of navigable streams, our canals, our network of railroads more than thirty thou- sand miles in extent these give us avenues of trade and channels of communication both natural and artificial such as no other nation has ever enjoyed. Our mines of gold and silver and iron and copper and lead and coal, with their untold and unimaginable wealth, spread over millions of acres of territory, in the valley, on the mountain side, along THE AMNESTY OF JEFFERSON DAVIS. 249 rivers, yielding already a rich harvest, are destined yet to increase a thousandfold, until their everyday treasures, . . . familiar grown, Shall realize Orient's fabled dream. These are the great elements of material progress, and they comprehend the entire circle of human enterprise, agriculture, commerce, manufactures, mining. They give into our hands, under the blessing of Almighty God, the power to command our fate as a nation. They hold out to us the grandest future reserved for any people ; and with this promise they teach us the lesson of patience, and render confidence and fortitude a duty. With such amplitude and affluence of resources, and with such a vast stake at issue, we should be unworthy of our lineage and our inheritance if we for one moment distrusted our ability to maintain ourselves a united people, with " one country, one constitution, one destiny." THE AMNESTY OF JEFFERSON DAVIS. JAMES G. ELAINE. EVERY time the question of amnesty has been introduced, it has been done with a certain flourish of magnanimity which seemed to convey an imputation on this side of the House. It seemed to charge the Republican party, which has been in control of the government for the last fifteen years, with being bigoted, narrow, and illiberal. I entered Congress while the hot flame of war was yet raging, when the Union was rocking to its foundations, and when no man knew whether we were to have a country or 2SO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. not. I should have been surprised indeed had I been told that I should see sixty-one gentlemen who were then in arms against us admitted to the privileges of membership in this body, and all by the grace and magnanimity of the Republican party. When the war ended, according to the universal usage of nations, the government, then under the exclusive control of the Republican party, had the right to determine what should be the political status of the people who had suffered defeat. Did the Republicans, with full power in their hands, inaugurate any measure of persecution ? Did they set forth on a career of bloodshed and vengeance ? Did they take the property of the Southern people who had rebelled ? Did they deprive any man of his civil rights ? Not at all. The disability did not apply to the hundreds of thousands or millions, if you please who had been engaged in the attempt to destroy this government. It held under dis- ability only those who, in joining the rebellion, had violated a special and personal oath to support the Constitution of the United States. In my amendment, Mr. Speaker, I have excepted Jeffer- son Davis from amnesty. I do not place his exclusion on the ground that he was, as he has been commonly called, the head and front of the rebellion. But I except him on this ground : that he was the responsible author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, of the great crime of Andersonville. Since this bill was introduced last month, I have taken occasion to re-read some of the historic cruelties of the world. I have read once more the details of those atrocious murders by the Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, which are always mentioned with a thrill of horror throughout Christendom. I have refreshed my memory with the details of the massa- cre of Saint Bartholomew, that stands out in history as another of those atrocities beyond imagination. I have THE AMNESTY OF JEFFERSON DAVIS. 2$ I read anew the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. But neither the deeds of the Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, nor the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, rior the thumb- screws of the Spanish Inquisition, surpass the hideous crime of Andersonville. " Into its narrow walls were crowded thirty-five thousand enlisted men, many of them the bravest and best, the most devoted and heroic of those grand armies which carried the flag of their country to final vrctory. For long and weary months here they suffered, maddened, died. Here they lin- gered, unsheltered from the burning rays of a tropical sun by day, and drenching and deadly dews by night, hungered, emaciated, starving, festering with unhealed wounds, gnawed by the ravages of scurvy and gangrene. These men, these heroes, born in the image of God, thus crouching and writh- ing in their terrible torture and calculating barbarity, stand forth in history as a monument of the surpassing horrors of Andersonville, realizing in the studied torments of their prison house the ideal of Dante's ' Inferno ' and Milton's ' Hell.' " Mr. Speaker, I do not desire to go into such horrible details as these for any purpose of arousing bad feeling. I wish only to say that the man who administered the affairs of that prison went there by order of Mr. Davis, and was sustained by him. I only see before me, when his name is presented, a man who by a wave of his hand, by a nod of his head, could have put an end to the atrocious cruelties at Andersonville ! Some of us had kinsmen there, many of us had friends there, all of us had countrymen there. In the name of those kinsmen, friends, and countrymen, I here protest, and shall with my vote protest, against calling back and crowning with the honors of full American citizenship the man who stands responsible for that organized murder. JAMES A. GARFIELD. 253 GENERAL THOMAS AT CHICKAMAUGA. AN APPEAL TO YOUNG MEN. IMMORTALITY OF TRUE PATRIOTISM. MACAULAY'S PROPHECY. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. THE GRAVES OF UNION SOLDIERS AT ARLINGTON. 254 GENERAL THOMAS AT CHICKAMAUGA. 255 GENERAL THOMAS AT CHICKAMAUGA. JAMES A. GARFIELD. To General Thomas a battle was neither an earthquake, nor a volcano, nor a chaos of brave men and frantic horses involved in vast explosions of gunpowder. It was rather a calm, rational concentration of force against force. It was a question of lines and positions of weight of metal and strength of battalions. His remark to a captain of artillery while inspecting a battery exhibits his theory of success : " Keep everything in order, for the fate of a battle may turn on a buckle or a linchpin." It was most natural that such a man should be placed in the center of movements. From the autumn of 1862 till the autumn of 1864 from Bowling Green to Atlanta whether commanding a division, a corps, or an army, his position on the march and his post in battle was the center. And he was placed there because it was found that, when his com- mand occupied the center, that center could not be broken. It never was broken. At Stone River, as the eye of Rose- crans swept over that bloody field, it always rested on Thomas as the center of his hope. For five days Thomas' command stood fighting in their bloody tracks, until twenty per cent of their members were killed or wounded, and the enemy had retreated. But it was reserved for the last day at Chickamauga to exhibit, in one supreme example, the vast resources of his prodigious strength. After a day of heavy fighting and a night of anxious preparation, General Rosecrans had estab- lished his lines for the purpose of holding the road to Chat- tanooga. This road was to be the prize of that day's battle. The substance of his order to Thomas was this : " Your line lies across the road to Chattanooga. That is the pivot of 256 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. the battle. Hold it at all hazards, and I will reenforce you, if necessary, with the whole army." During the whole night, the reinforcements of the enemy were coming in. Early next morning we were attacked along the whole line. Thomas commanded the left and center of our army. From early morning he withstood the furious and repeated attacks of the enemy, who constantly reenforced his assaults on our left. About noon our whole right wing was broken, and driven in hopeless confusion from the field. Rosecrans was himself swept away in the tide of retreat. The forces of Longstreet, which had broken our right, desisted from the pursuit, and, forming in heavy columns, assaulted Thomas' right flank with unexampled fury. Seeing the approaching danger, he threw back his exposed flank toward the base of the mountain and met the new peril. While men shall read the history of battles, they will never fail to study and admire the work of Thomas during that afternoon. With but twenty-five thousand men, formed in a semicircle of which he himself was the center and soul, he successfully resisted for more than five hours the repeated assaults of an army of sixty-five thousand men, flushed with victory and bent on his annihilation. Toward the close of the day his ammunition began to fail. One by one his division commanders reported but ten rounds, five rounds, or two rounds left. The calm, quiet answer was returned : " Save your fire for close quarters, and when your last shot is fired give them the bayonet." When night had closed over the combatants, the last sound of battle was the boom- ing of Thomas' shells bursting among his baffled and retreated assailants. He was, indeed, the " Rock of Chickamauga," against which the wild waves of battle dashed in vain. It will stand written forever in the annals of his country that there he ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN. 2 57 saved from destruction the Army of the Cumberland. He held the road to Chattanooga. The campaign was success- ful. The gate of the mountains was ours. AN APPEAL TO YOUNG MEN. JAMES A. GARFIELD. I HEARD a very brilliant thing said the other day by a boy up in one of our northwestern counties. He said to me : " General, I have a great mind to vote the Democratic ticket." Well ! that was not the brilliant thing. I said to him : " Why ? " " W 7 hy," said he, " my father is a Repub- lican, and my brothers are Republicans, and I am a Republi- can all over ; but I don't want anybody to say: ' That fellow votes the Republican ticket just because his dad does/ and so I have a mind to vote the Democratic ticket just to prove my independence." I did not like the thing the boy sug- gested, but I do admire the spirit of a boy who wants some independence. Now, I tell you, young man, do not vote the Republican ticket just because your father votes it. Do not vote the Democratic ticket even if he does vote it. But let me give you this one word of advice as you are about to pitch your tent in one of the great political camps. Your young life is full and buoyant with hope now, and I beg you, when you pitch your tent, pitch it among the living, and not among the dead. If you are at all inclined to pitch it among the Democratic people, let me go with you for a moment while we survey the ground where I hope you will not shortly lie. It is a sad place, young man, for you to put your young life. It is 258 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. to me far more like a graveyard than a camp for the living. Look at it ! It is billowed all over with the graves of dead issues, buried opinions, exploded theories, and disgraced doc- trines. You cannot live in comfort in such a place. Why ! Look here ! Here is a little double mound, and I look down on it and I read : " Sacred to the memory of Squatter Sovereignty and the Dred Scot Decision." A mil- lion and a half of Democrats voted for that ; but it has been dead fifteen years dead by the hand of Abraham Lincoln and here it lies. But look a little farther ! Here is another monument, a black tomb, and beside it there towers to the sky a monu- ment of four million pairs of human fetters, taken from the arms of slaves; and I read on its little headpiece this: " Sacred to the memory of human slavery." For forty years of its infamous life the Democratic party taught that it was divine, God's institution. They defended it, they stood around it, they followed it to its grave as a mourner. But here it lies, dead by the power of the Republican party, dead by the justice of Almighty God. But here is another, a little brimstone tomb, and I read across its yellow face in lurid, bloody lines these words : "Sacred to the memory of State Sovereignty and Secession." Twelve millions of Democrats mustered around it in arms to keep it alive. But here it lies, shot to death by the million guns of the Republic. Its shrine burnt to ashes under the blazing rafters of the defeated Confederacy. Oh, young man, come out of that camp ! That is no place in which to put your young life. Come out, and come over into this camp of liberty, of order, of law, of justice, of freedom, of all that is glorious under these night stars. But is there no death here in our camp ? Yes ! Yes ! Three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, the noblest band that ever trod the earth, died to make this camp a camp of ' IMMORTALITY OF TRUE PATRIOTISM. 259 glory and of liberty forever. But there are no dead issues here. There are no dead ideas here. Hang out our banner under the blue sky, until it shall sweep the turf under your feet ! Read away up under the stars this inscription which we have written on it, lo ! these twenty-five years. What is it ? Human slavery shall never extend another foot over the territories of the great West. Is that dead or alive ? Alive ! thank^God, forevermore. Truer now than it was the hour it was written. Then it was a hope, a promise, a pur- pose. Now it is equal with the stars immortal history and immortal truth. Follow the glorious steps of our banner. Every record that we have made we have vindicated with our blood and with our truth. It sweeps the ground, and it touches the stars. Come here, young man, and put in your young life where all is living, and where nothing is dead but the heroes that defended it. IMMORTALITY OF TRUE PATRIOTISM. JAMES A. GARFIELD. FOR nearly fifty years no spot in any of these states had been the scene of battle. But as a flash of lightning in a midnight tempest reveals the abysmal horrors of the sea, so did the flash of the first gun disclose the awful abyss into which rebellion was ready to plunge us. In a moment the fire was lighted in twenty million hearts. In a moment we were the most warlike nation on the earth. In a moment we were not merely a people with an army we were a people in arms. The nation was in column not all at the front, but all in the array. 26O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost ; that treasured up in American souls are all the unconscious influ- ences of the great deeds of the Anglo-Saxon race, from Agincourt to Bunker Hill. It was such an influence that led a young Greek, two thousand years ago, when musing on the Battle of Marathon, to exclaim : " The trophies of Miltiades will not let me sleep ! " Could these men be silent in 1861, these whose ancestors had felt the inspira- tion of battle on every field where civilization had fought in the last thousand years ? Read their answer in this green turf. Each for himself gathered up the cherished purposes of life, its aims and ambitions, its dearest affections, and flung all, with life itself, into the scale of battle. \AVe began the war for the Union alone ; but we had not gone far into its darkness before a new element was added to the conflict, which filled the army and the nation with cheerful but intense religious enthusiasm. In lessons that could not be misunderstood the nation was taught that God had linked to our own the destiny of an enslaved race that their liberty and our Union were indeed " one and insepara- ble." It was this that made the soul of John Brown the marching companion of our soldiers, and made them sing as they went down to battle : In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born, across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me ; As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on. The struggle consecrated, in some degree, every man who bore a worthy part. I can never forget an incident illustra- tive of this thought which it was my fortune to witness, near sunset of the second day at Chickamauga, when the belea- guered but unbroken left wing of our army had again and again repelled the assaults of more than double their num- MACAULAY'S PROPHECY. 261 bers, and when each soldier felt that to his individual hands were committed the life of the army and the honor of his country. It was just after a division had fired its last cartridge and had repelled a charge at the point of the bayonet that the great-hearted commander took the hand of an humble sol- dier and thanked him for his steadfast courage. The soldier stood silent for a moment, and then said with deep emotion : " George H. Thomas has taken this hand in his. I '11 knock down any mean man that offers to take it here- after." This rough sentence was full of meaning. He felt that something had touched that hand which consecrated it. Could a hand bear our banner in battle and not be forever consecrated to honor and virtue ? But doubly consecrated were these who received into their own hearts the fatal shafts aimed at the life of their country. Fortunate men ! your country lives because you died ! Your fame is placed where the breath of calumny can never reach it, where the mistakes of a weary life can never dim its brightness ! Coming generations will rise up to call you blessed ! MACAULAY'S PROPHECY. JAMES A. GARFIELD. ONE of the ablest writers that England ever produced, one whose name is honored in America, has given his reasons for believing that our Republic must fall. "The day will come," he says, " when, in the state of New York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt 262 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. what sort of a legislature will be chosen ? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith ; on the other is a dema- gogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink cham- pagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candi- dates is likely to be preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more bread ? # # * # # * " Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire in the fifth with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your country by your own institutions." This is Macaulay's indictment and prophecy. I ask you to carry it home and reflect upon it. How shall we answer it ? For myself, with all my soul I repel the prophecy as false. But why ? Because here there is no need for the Old World war between capital and labor. Here is no need of the explosion of social order predicted by Macaulay. All we need is the protection of just and equal laws just alike to labor and to capital. Every poor man hopes to lay by something for a rainy day, hopes to become a capitalist, for capital is only accumulated labor. Here also are no classes with barriers fixed and impassa- ble. Here, in our society, permeated with the light of American freedom, there is no American boy, however poor, however humble, orphan though he may be, who, if he have a clear head, a true heart, a strong arm, may not rise through all the grades of society, and become the crown, the glory, ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 263 the pillar of the state. There is another answer to Macaulay. He could not understand no man can understand it until he has seen it the almost omnipotent power of our system of education, which teaches our people how to be free by teaching them to be intelligent. But who has read Macaulay's letter that did not remem- ber it a year ago last July, when in ten great states of the Union millions of American citizens and millions of Ameri- can property were in peril of destruction, when the mob spirit ran riot, when Pittsburg flamed in ruin and smoked in blood, and many of our great cities were in peril of destruc- tion who did not remember the prediction of Macaulay then, and did not anew resolve that the bloody track of the Commune should have no pathway on our shore ? I have introduced all this for the purpose of saying that behind the element that now attacks the public faith behind it and preparing the movement is Communism, coming from its dens in Europe and this country. We believe the hearts of true Americans everywhere will respond to the right, when they know the right. But to the disturbers of law, to those who would break the peace of this Republic, to those who would convert it into a huge anarchy, we say the true men of this Union who put down rebellion in one place will put rebellion down in every place. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. JAMES A. GARFIELD. IN the great drama of the rebellion there were two acts. The first was the war, with its battles and sieges, its victories and defeats, its sufferings and tears. Just as the curtain was lifting on the second and final act, the restoration of peace 264 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. and liberty, the evil spirit of the rebellion, in the fury of despair, nerved and directed the hand of an assassin to strike down the chief character in both. It was no one man who killed Abraham Lincoln ; it was the embodied spirit of treason and slavery, inspired with fearful and despairing hate, that struck him down in the moment of the nation's supremest joy. Sir, there are times in the history of men and nations when they stand so near the veil that separates mortals from the. immortals, time from eternity, and men from God that they can almost hear the beatings and pulsations of the heart of the Infinite. Through such a time has this nation passed. When two hundred and fifty thousand brave spirits passed from Jthe field of honor, through that thin veil, to the presence of Ggd, and when at last its parting folds admitted the martyr president to the company of those dead heroes of the Republic, the nation stood so near the veil that the whispers of God were heard by the children of men. Awe-stricken by his voice, the American people knelt in tearful reverence and made a solemn covenant with him and with each other that this nation should be saved from its enemies, that all its glories ^hould be restored, and, on the ruins of slavery and treason, the temples of freedom and justice should be built, and shauld survive forever. It reniains for us, consecrated by that great event and under a covenant with God, to keep that faith, to go forward in the great work until it shall be completed. Following the lead of that great man, and obeying the high behests of God, let us remember that: He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat ; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat ; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer him ! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. GRAVES "OF UNION SOLDIERS AT ARLINGTON. 26 THE GRAVES OF UNION SOLDIERS AT ARLINGTON. JAMES A. GARFIELD. THE view from this spot bears some resemblance to that which greets the eye at Rome. In sight of the Capitoline Hill, up and across the Tiber, and overlooking the city, is a hill, not rugged nor lofty, but known as the Vatican Mount. At the beginning of the Christian era an imperial circus stood on its summit. There gladiator slaves died for the sport of Rome, and wild beasts fought with wilder men. There a Galilean fisherman gave up his life a sacrifice for his faith. No human life was ever so nobly avenged. On that spot was reared the proudest Christian temple ever built by human hands. As the traveler descends the Apennines, he sees the dome of St. Peter's rising above the desolate Cam- pagna and the dead city, long before the seven hills and the ruined palaces appear to his view. The fame of the dead fisherman has outlived the glory of the Eternal City. A noble life, crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth. Seen from the western slope of our Capitol, in direction, distance, and appearance this spot is not unlike the Vatican Mount, though the river that flows at our feet is larger than a hundred Tibers. The soil beneath our feet was once watered by the tears of slaves, in whose hearts the sight of yonder proud Capitol awakened no pride and inspired no hope. But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence no longer ! This will be forever the sacred mountain of our capital. Here is our temple ; its pavement is the sepulcher of heroic hearts ; its dome, the bending heaven ; its altar candles, the watching stars. And now consider this silent assembly of the dead. If 2'66 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. each grave had a voice to tell us what its silent tenant last saw and heard on earth, we might stand with uncovered heads and hear the whole story of the war. We should hear that one perished when the first great drops of the crimson shower began to fall, when the darkness of that first disaster at Manassas fell like an eclipse on the nation. We should hear that another died of disease while wearily waiting for winter to end ; that this one fell on the field, in sight of the spires of Richmond ; and that one fell when the tide of war had swept us back till the roar of rebel guns shook the dome of yonder Capitol and reechoed in the chambers of the Executive Mansion. We should hear mingled voices from the Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the Chickahominy, and the James, solemn voices from the Wilderness, and triumphant shouts from the Shenandoah, from Petersburg, and the Five Forks, mingled with the wild acclaim of victory and the sweet chorus of returning peace. The voices of these dead will forever fill the land like holy benedictions. What other spot so fitting for their last resting-place as this, under the shadow of the Capitol saved by their valor ? Here, where the grim edge of battle joined, here, where all the hope and fear and agony of their country centered, here let them rest, asleep on the nation's heart, entombed in the nation's love ! HENRY WARD BEECHER. 267 COMPROMISE OF PRINCIPLE. SUPPRESSED REPUDIATION. WENDELL PHILLIPS. OUR NATIONAL FLAG. Loss OF THE ARCTIC. THE NORTH AND THE AFRICAN. 268 COMPROMISE OF PRINCIPLE. 269 COMPROMISE OF PRINCIPLE. HENRY WARD BEECHER. IN the march of nations our country has kept step. We know it by the victory of ideas, by the recognition of prin- ciples instead of mere policies. The tree of life, whose leaves were for the healing of the nations, has been evilly dealt with. Its boughs have been lopped, and its roots starved till its fruit is knurly. But now again it blooms. The air is fragrant in its opening buds; the young fruit is setting. God has returned and looked upon it, and, behold, summer is in all its branches ! I do not wish you to think that the background is not dark ; for it is. There is excitement. There is brewing mischief. The clouds lie lurid along the Southern horizon. The Caribbean Sea, that breeds tornadoes and whirlwinds, has heaped up treasures of storms portentous that seem about to break. Let them break ! God has appointed their bounds. Not till the sea drives back the shore, and the Atlantic submerges the continent, will this tumult of an angry people move the firm decrees of God. Selfish interests, if they are our pilots, will betray us. Vainglory will destroy us. Pride will wreck us. Expedients are for an hour, but principles are for the ages. Nothing can be permanent and nothing safe in this exigency that does not sink deeper than politics or money. We must touch the rock or we shall never have firm foundations. It is rank infidelity, stupendous infatuation, to suppose that the greatness of this nation ever sprung from the wisdom of expediency, instead of the power of settled principles. Your harbor did not make you rich ; you made the harbor rich. Your ships did not create your commerce ; your com- merce created your ships, and you created your commerce. 2/O THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Your stores did not make traffic. Your factories did not create enterprise. Your firms, your committees, your treaties, and your legislation did not create national prosperity. Our past greatness sprung from our obedience to God's natural and moral law. We had men trained to courage, to virtue, to wisdom. And manhood manhood MANHOOD exer- cised in the fear of God has made this nation. When night is on the deep, when the headlands are obscured by the darkness, and when storm is in the air, that man who undertakes to steer by looking over the side of the ship, over the bow or over the stern, or by looking at the clouds or his own fears, is a fool. There is a silent needle in the binnacle which points like the finger of God, telling the manner which way to steer, and enabling him to outride the storm and reach the harbor in safety. And what the compass is to navigation, that is moral principle in political affairs. SUPPRESSED REPUDIATION. HENRY WARD BEECHER. THERE is a danger from suppressed repudiation. When children have the measles, and when after an appropriate* time saffron and all the other drinks fail to bring them out, the doctors shake their heads and call them suppressed measles ; and the measles suppressed are more dangerous than when brought out. And suppressed repudiation is all the more dangerous than any open and avowed repudiation. Whenever, in any nation, the moral sense of men is bewildered, and liberty is given to unprincipled men at large to cheat, to be unfaithful to obligations, to refuse the pay- ment of honest debts wherever that takes place, it is all SUPPRESSED REPUDIATION. 2/1 the worse if done with the permission of law ! I hate the devil riding on a law worse than I do the devil riding without a law under him. What would become of this land if all standards were tampered with ? What if the legislature this year should ordain that a foot should consist of only ten inches ? W T hat if next year, the power being taken out of their hands by the other party, it should be ordained that a foot should measure fourteen inches; and so every three or five years the standard should be changed on which immense and innumerable con- tracts were based ? What if the pound weight should be tampered with, and it should be ordained now that a pound is ten ounces, now that it is twelve, and now that it is fifteen ? What if all the standards on which business is conducted should be subject to fluctuations and caprice ? What chance would there be for honesty, for integrity, or for solid prosperity ? The danger into which we are running is hidden under the mystery of finance and the currency. All money is but a representative of property. Gold is the world's standard. Gold is the universal measure of value. Gold is king in commerce. All other money must represent gold. No vote of legislature can change the nature of commerce, the nature of property, the nature of its representative in money, or the relative superiority or inferiority of different currencies. Gold came to its supremacy as a representative of property by the long-established consent of mankind. Congress can- not change it for the world, nor even for this nation except upon past transactions. The crime of paying a debt in a currency inferior in value to that in which it was contracted, base at all times and anywhere, has a deeper guilt and a baser infamy in our case. When, in our mortal struggle, capitalists were solicited to lend their money to us on the faith of the nation, we were 2/2 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. too glad, most grateful for their aid. Then they were not grasping and swollen usurers. Oh, no ; they were bene- factors ! We rejoiced in their bounty, and gave thanks for their confiding faith in our national honesty. Now, our dangers past, we revile them, finding no epithets too violent, and strive to pay them, not gold for the gold they lent our misery, but in a dishonest measure of an inferior metal. In all great crises our nation has gone right ; and the nation will go right. Like a ship against which storms are leagued, it rolled heavily, it was dashed upon by overwhelm- ing waves, only to rear up its unharmed hull, and, in darkness or in light, against the elements to hold on its way, taking no counsel of storm or of darkness, but of the compass that lay silent before it, an unerring guide. Let us not, therefore, have any such war cries as " liberty, equality, fraternity"; but let our war-cry be" INTEGRITY, INTELLIGENCE, LIBERTY." With that legend we will fight the world and time, and win all right things. WENDELL PHILLIPS. HENRY WARD BEECHER. IT was at the beginning of the Egyptian era in America that the young aristocrat of Boston appeared. His blood came through the best colonial families. All his life long Wendell Phillips resented every attack on his person and on his honor as a noble aristocrat could. When they poured the filth of their imaginations upon him, he cared no more for it than the eagle cares what the fly is thinking about him away down under the cloud. All the miserable traffickers and all the scribblers and all the aristocratic foibles of Boston were no more to him than mosquitoes are to the behemoth or to the lion. WENDELL PHILLIPS. 2/3 You remember when Lovejoy was infamously slaughtered by a mob in Alton ; blood that has been the seed of liberty all over the land. You remember how Faneuil Hall was granted to call a public meeting to express itself on the murder. The meeting was made up largely of rowdies. They meant to overawe and put down all other expressions of opinion except those that then rioted with the rioters. Wendell Phillips, fired with their infamy and feeling called of God in his soul, went upon the platform. Practically unknown when the sun went down one day, when it rose next morning all Boston was saying, " Who is this fellow ? Who is this Phillips ? "- a question that has never been asked since. The power to discern right amid all the trappings of interest and all the seductions of ambition was his genius and his glory. In literature and history widely read, in person magnificent, in manners most accomplished, in voice clear and silvery, yet he was not a man of tempests he was not an orchestra of a hundred instruments he was not an organ mighty and complex. The nation slept, and God wanted a trumpet, sharp, wide- sounding, narrow, and intense and that was Wendell Phillips. His eloquence was penetrating and alarming. He did not flow as a mighty gulf stream. He did not dash upon this continent as the ocean does. He was not a mighty rushing river. His eloquence was a flight of arrows, sentence after sentence polished, and most of them burning. He slung these one after the other, and when they struck they slew, always elegant, always awful. He belongs to the race of giants, not simply because he was in and of himself a great soul, but because he bathed in the providence of God, and came forth scarcely less than a god. When pygmies are all dead, the noble countenance of Wendell Phillips will still look forth, radiant as a rising sun a sun that will never set. 2/4 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE NATIONAL FLAG. HENRY WARD BEECHER. A THOUGHTFUL mind, when it sees a nation's flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself. When the French tricolor rolls out to the wind, we see France. When the new-found Italian flag is unfurled, we see unified Italy. When the united crosses of St. Andrew and St. George, on a fiery ground, set forth the banner of old England, we see not the cloth merely; there rises up before the mind the idea of that great monarchy. This nation/has a banner, too ; and wherever this flag comes, and men behold it, they see h/its sacred emblazonry no ramping lion and no fierce eagle, no embattled castles or insignia of imperial authority ; they see the symbols of light. It is the banner of dawn. It means liberty ; and the galley slave, the poor, oppressed conscript, the trodden- down creature of foreign despotism, sees in the American flag the very promise of God. If one, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him : It means just what Concord and Lexington meant, what Bunker, Hill meant. It means the whole glorious Revolutionary War. It means all that the Declaration of Independence meant. It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happi- ness, meant. Our flag carries American ideas, American history, and American feelings. /Beginning with /the colonies, and coming down jfo our tinie, in its sacred heraldry, in its glorious insignia, it has gathered and stor/d chiefly this supreme idea: divine right of liberty in man. Every color means liberty; every thread means liberty; every form of star and beam or stripe of light means liberty not lawlessness, not license, THE NATIONAL FLAG. 275 but organized, institutional liberty liberty through law, and laws for liberty ! This American flag was the safeguard of liberty. Not an atom of crown was allowed to go into its insignia. Not a symbol of authority in the ruler was permitted to go into it. It was an ordinance of liberty by the people for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time ! Under this banner rode Washington and his armies. Before it Burgoyne laid down his arms. It waved on the highlands at West Point. When Arnold would have sur- rendered these valuable fortresses and precious legacies, his night was turned into day and his treachery was driven away by the beams of light from this starry banner. It cheered our army, driven out from around New York, and in their painful pilgrimages through New Jersey. In New Jersey, more than in almost every other state, grows the trailing arbutus. May I not think it is sacred drops of Pilgrim blood that come forth in beauteous flowers on this sandiest of soils ? For this sweet blossom that lays its cheek on the very snow is the true Pilgrim's Mayflower ! This banner streamed in light over the soldiers' heads at Valley Forge and at Morristown. It crossed the waters rolling with ice at Trenton, and when its stars gleamed in the cold morning with victory, a new day of hope dawned on the ^despondency of this nation. Our states grew up under it. And when our ships began ;to swarm upon the ocean to carry forth our commerce, and Great Britain arrogantly demanded the right to intrude her search warrants upon American decks, then up went the lightning flag, and every star meant liberty and every stripe streamed defiance. The gallant fleet of Lake Erie have you forgotten it ? The thunders that echoed to either shore were overshadowed by this broad ensign of our American 276 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. liberty. Those glorious men that went forth in the old ship Constitution carried this banner to battle and to victory. The old ship is alive yet. Bless the name, bless the ship, bless her historic memory, and bless the old flag that waves over her yet ! How glorious, then, has been its origin ! How glorious has been its history ! How divine is its meaning ! LOSS OF THE "ARCTIC." HENRY WARD BEECHER. IT was autumn. Hundreds had wended their way from pilgrimages ; from Rome, and its treasures of dead art and its glory of living nature ; from the side of the Switzer's Mountains; from the capitals of various nations. And so the throng streamed along from Berlin, from Paris, from the Orient, converging upon London, still hastening towards the welcome ship. Never had the Arctic borne such a host of passengers. The hour was come. The bell strikes; the wheel revolves; the signal gun beats its echoes along the shore, and the Arctic glides joyfully forth from the Mersey and begins her homeward run. The pilot stood at the wheel, and none saw him. Death sat upon the prow, and no eye beheld him. Whoever stood at the wheel in all that voyage, Death was the pilot, and none knew it. He never revealed his presence nor whispered his errand. And so hope was effulgent, and lithe gayety disported itself, and joy was with every guest. Eight days had passed. They beheld the fog bank of Newfoundland. Boldly they plunged in, and its pliant wreaths wrapped about them. LOSS OF THE ARCTIC. 2/7 They shall never emerge. The last sunlight has flashed from that deck. The last voyage is done to ship and passengers. At a league's distance, unconscious, and at nearer approach unwarned, within line, and bearing right towards each other, unseen, emerging from the gray mist, the ill-omened Vesta dealt her deadly stroke to the Arctic. The deathblow was scarcely felt along the mighty hull. She neither reeled nor shivered. Neither commander nor officer deemed that they had suffered harm. Prompt upon humanity, the brave Luce ordered away his boat with the first officer to inquire if the stranger had suffered harm. They departed, and with them the hope of the ship ; for now the waters, gaming upon the hold and rising up upon the fires, revealed the mortal blow. Then each subordinate officer lost all presence of mind, his courage, his honor. In a wild scramble, that ignoble mob of firemen, engineers, waiters, and crew rushed for the boats, and abandoned the helpless passengers to the mercy of the deep. Four hours there were from the catastrophe of collision to the catastrophe of sinking. Oh, what a burial was there ! Not as when one is borne from his home, among weeping friends, and gently carried to the green fields, and laid peacefully beneath the turf and the flowers. No priest stood to pronounce a burial service. It was an ocean grave. The mists alone shrouded the burial place. No spade prepared the grave, nor sexton filled up the hallowed earth. Down, down they sank, and the quick returning waters smoothed out every ripple and left the sea as if it had not been. 2/8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. THE NORTH AND THE AFRICAN. HENRY WARD BEECHER. IF we would benefit the African at the South, we must begin at the North. The lever with which to lift the load of Georgia is in New York. I do not believe that the North can tolerate grinding injustice toward the poor and inhu- manity toward the laboring classes, without exerting an influence unfavorable to justice and humanity in the South. No one can fail to see the inconsistency between our treatment of those amongst us who are in the lower walks of life and our professions of sympathy with the Southern negroes. How are the free colored people treated at the North ? Can the black man be a mason in New York ? Let him be employed as a journeyman, and every Irish lover of liberty that carries the hod or trowel would leave at once, or compel him to leave ! Can the black man be a carpenter? There is scarcely a carpenter's shop in New York in which a journeyman would continue to work if a black man was employed in it. Can the black man engage in the common industries of life ? There is scarcely one from which he is not excluded. He is crowded down, down, down through the most menial callings to the bottom of society. We heap upon him moral obloquy more atrocious than that which the master heaps upon the slave. And, notwithstanding all this, we lift ourselves up to talk to the Southern people about the rights and liberties of the human soul, and especially the African soul ! It is true that slavery is cruel. But it is not at all certain that there is not more love to the race in the South than in the North. We do not own them ; so we do not love them at all. The prejudice of the whites against color is so THE NORTH AND THE AFRICAN. strong that they cannot endure to ride or sit with a black man, so long as they do not own him. As neighbors, they are not to be tolerated ; but as property they are most tol- erable in the house, the church, the carriage, the couch ! The African owned may dwell in America ; but unowned, he must be expatriated. Emancipation must be jackal to colonization. The choice given to the African is plantation or colonization. Our Christian public sentiment is a pen- dulum swinging between owning or exporting the colored poor in our midst. The air must be vital with the love of liberty. We must love it for ourselves and demand it for others. The glory of intelligence, refinement, genius has nothing to do with men's rights. The rice slave, the Hottentot, are as much God's children as Humboldt or Chalmers. That they are in degradation only makes it more imperative upon us to secure to them the birthright which in their ignorance they sell for a mess of pottage. But the end of these things is at hand. A nobler spirit is arising. New men, new hearts, new zeals are coming for- ward, led on by all those signs and auspices that God fore- sends when he prepares his people to advance. This work, well begun, must not go back. It must grow, like spring, into summer. God will then give it an autumn without a winter. And when such a public sentiment fills the North, founded upon religion and filled with fearless love to both the bond and the free, it will work all over the continent, and nothing can be hid from the shining thereof. or THE UNIVERSITY OF WILLIAM H. SEWARD. 281 A PLEA FOR WILLIAM FREEMAN. THE AMERICAN AND THE CORSICAN. DANIEL O'CONNELL'S EPITAPH. WELCOME TO Louis KOSSUTH. DEFENSE OF ALLEGED CONSPIRATORS AGAINST THE MICHIGAN CENTRAL RAILROAD COMPANY. 282 A PLEA FOR WILLIAM FREEMAN. 283 A PLEA FOR WILLIAM FREEMAN. WILLIAM H. SEWARD. FOR William Freeman as a murderer I have no commis- sion to speak. If he had silver and gold accumulated with the frugality of a Croesus, and should pour it all at my feet, I would not stand one hour between him and the avenger. But for the innocent it is my right, my duty, to speak. If this sea of blood was innocently shed, then it is my duty to stand beside the prisoner till his steps lose their hold on the scaffold. I plead not for a murderer. I have no inducement, no motive, to do so. I have been cheered on other occasions by manifestations of popular approbation and sympathy; but I speak now in the hearing of a people who have pre- judged the prisoner and condemned me for pleading in his behalf. He is a convict, a pauper, a negro, without intellect, sense, or emotion. My child, with an affectionate smile, disarms my care- worn face of its frown whenever I cross my threshold. The beggar in the street compels me to give because he says " God bless you ! " as I pass. My dog caresses me with fondness if I but smile on him. My horse recognizes me when I fill his manger. But what reward, what gratitude, what sympathy and affection can I expect here ? There sits the prisoner. Look at him. Look at the assemblage around. Listen to their ill-suppressed censures and their excited fears, and tell me where among my neighbors or my fellow-men, where even in his heart, I can expect to find the sentiment, the thought, not to say of reward or acknowledg- ment, but even of recognition? I sat here two weeks during the preliminary trial. I stood between the jury and the prisoner nine hours, and pleaded for the wretch that he was insane, and that he did not even 284 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. know that he was on trial. And when all was done, the jury, or at least eleven of them, thought that I had been deceiving them or was self-deceived. They read signs of intelligence in his idiotic smile, and of cunning and malice in his stolid insensibility. They rendered a verdict that he was sane enough to be tried a contemptible compromise verdict in a capital case and they looked on, with what emotion God and they only know, upon his arraignment. The district attorney bade him rise, and, reading to him one indictment, asked him whether he wanted trial, and the poor fool answered : "No." " Have you counsel ? " " No." And they went through the same mockery, the prisoner giving the same answer, until a third indictment was thun- dered in his ears, and he stood before the court silent, motionless, and bewildered. Gentlemen, you may think of this action what you will, bring in any verdict you can ; but I assert before heaven that to the best of my knowledge and belief the prisoner at the bar does not at this moment know why it is that my shadow falls upon you instead of his own. I speak with all sincerity and earnestness. But I am* not the prisoner's lawyer. I am the lawyer for society, for mankind shocked beyond the power of expression by the scenes I have witnessed here of trying a maniac as a malefactor. The circumstances under which this trial closes are pecu- liar. The prisoner, though in -the greenness of youth, is withered,^ decayed, senseless, almost lifeless. He has no father here. The descendant of slaves, that father fell a victim to the vices of a superior race. There is no mother here, for her child is polluted with the blood of a mother and an infant, and he looks and laughs so that she cannot bear to look upon him. There is no brother, no sister, no friend here. Popular rage against the accused has driven them hence and scattered his kindred and his people. THE AMERICAN AND THE CORSICAN. 28$ On the other hand : I notice the aged and venerable par- ents of Van Nest and his surviving children, and all around are mourning and sympathizing friends. I know not at whose instance they have come. I dare not say they ought not to be here. But this I must say, that, though we may send this maniac to the scaffold, it will not restore to life the manly form of Van Nest, nor reanimate the exhausted frame of that aged matron, nor restore to life and grace and beauty the murdered mother, nor call back the infant boy from the arms of his Savior. Such a verdict can do no good to the living and carry no joy to the dead. THE AMERICAN AND THE CORSICAN. WILLIAM H. SEWARD. STRICKEN in the midst of public service, in the very act of rising to debate, John Quincy Adams fell into the arms of conscript fathers of the Republic. A long lethargy super- vened and oppressed his senses. Nature rallied the wasting powers, on the verge of the grave, for a brief period. But it was long enough for him. He surveyed the scene, and knew at once its fatal import. He had left no duty unper- formed; he had no wish unsatisfied, no regret, no sorrow, no fear, no remorse. Eloquence, even in that hour, inspired him with his ancient sublimity of utterance. " This," said the dying man, "this is the last of earth." He paused for a moment, and then added : " I am content." Only two years after the birth of John Quincy Adams there appeared on an island in the Mediterranean Sea a human spirit newly born, endowed with equal genius, with- out, however, the regulating qualities of justice and benevo- lence which Adams possessed in an eminent degree. 286 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. A like career opened to both. Born, like Adams, a sub- ject of a king, the child of more genial skies, like him, became in early life a patriot and a citizen of a new and great Republic. Like Adams, he lent his service to the state in precocious youth, and in its hour of need he won its confidence. But, unlike Adams, he could not wait the dull delays of slow and laborious but sure advancement. He sought power by the hasty road that leads through fields of carnage, and he became, like Adams, a supreme magistrate, a consul. But there were other consuls. He was not con- tent. He thrust them aside, and was consul alone. Consu- lar power was too short. He fought new battles, and was consul for life. He was not content. He desolated Europe afresh, subverted the Republic, imprisoned the patriarch who presided over Rome's comprehensive see, and obliged him to pour on his head the sacred oil that made the persons of kings divine and their right to reign indefeasible. He was an emperor. He scourged the earth again. But he saw around him a mother, brothers, and sisters not ennobled. He bestowed kingdoms and principalities upon his kindred, put away the devoted wife of his youthful days, and another, a daughter of Hapsburgh's imperial house, joyfully accepted his proud alliance. Now he was indeed a monarch, a legitimate monarch, a monarch by divine appointment. He was not content. He would reign with his kindred alone. He gathered new and greater armies from his own land, from subjugated lands. He called forth the young and brave one from every household from the Pyrenees to the Zuyder Zee from Jura to the ocean. He marshaled them into long and majestic columns, and went forth to seize that universal dominion which seemed almost within his grasp. But ambition had tempted fortune too far. The pageant was ended. The crown fell from his presumptuous head. DANIEL O'CONNELL'S EPITAPH. 287 He was no longer emperor, nor consul, nor general, nor even a citizen, but an exile and a prisoner on a lonely island in the midst of the wild Atlantic. Discontent attended him there. His heart corroded. Death came, not unlocked for, though it came even then unwelcome. As his strength wasted away, delirium stirred up the brain from its long and inglorious inactivity. The pageant of ambition returned. He was again a lieutenant, a general, a consul, an emperor of France. He filled again the throne of Charlemagne. The legions of the Old Guard were in the field, their scarred faces rejuvenated, and their ranks, thinned in many battles, replenished. Russia, Prussia, Austria, Denmark, and Eng- land gathered their mighty hosts to give him battle. Once more he mounted his impatient charger and rushed forth to conquest. He waved his sword aloft and cried : " Tete d'arme'e ! " The feverish vision broke the mockery was ended. The silver cord was loosed, and the warrior fell back upon his bed a lifeless corpse. This was the last of earth. The Corsican was not content. DANIEL O'CONNELL'S EPITAPH. WILLIAM H. SEWARD. ON the lofty brow of Monticello, under a green old oak, is a block of granite, and underneath are the ashes of Jef- ferson." Read the epitaph; it is the sage's claim to immor- tality : " Author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Statute for Religious Liberty." Stop now and write an epitaph for Daniel O'Connell : " He gave Liberty of Conscience to Europe, and renewed 288 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. the Revolutions of the Kingdoms toward Universal Free- dom, which had begun in America and had been arrested by the anarchy of France." Let the statesmen of the age read that epitaph and be humble. Let the kings and aris- tocracies of the earth read it and tremble. Who but O'Con- nell has ever given liberty to a people by the mere utterance of his voice, without an army, navy, or revenues without a sword, a spear, or even a shield ? Who but he ever detached from a venerable constitution a column of aristoc- racy, dashed it to the earth, and yet left the ancient fabric stronger and more beautiful than before ? The agency employed by O'Connell was as simple and sublime as were his own position and character. " Electors of Clare," said he, on the eve of a special election, " you want a representative in Parliament ; I solicit your suffrages. True, I am a Catholic. I cannot, and of course I never will, take the oaths prescribed. But the power which cre- ated those oaths can abrogate them. If you elect me, I will try the question." O'Connell could only expect to be elected by the forty-shilling freeholders, as they were called, tenants of the landlords in Clare. Their votes, by tacit understanding and unbroken usage, belonged to their lords. But there was now a power higher than the landlord. You see a mass of the peasantry of Clare issuing from the little parish church on the hillside. They have rever- ently received the mass ; but their steps indicate perturba- tion. They gather around the priest, and ask his paternal counsel concerning the hazardous requirement of O'Connell. The priest lays down his missal, raises his hand toward heaven, breaks forth in their own wild native language, and concludes his impassioned harangue with the injunction : " Vote, vote for O'Connell and freedom ! " It is now the election day. There is O'Connell, depicting the atrocities of British persecution with a noble ardor of DANIEL O'CONNELL'S EPITAPH. 289 religious zeal. A band of tenants are marching by under the conduct of their landlord, to vote for the ministerial can- didate. They pause, they mingle in the crowd, they listen ; and now, at every cadence of the liberator's voice, redoubled shouts arise : " O'Connell and freedom ! " An elector is released from jail by his creditor on condi- tion that he vote against O'.Connell. He is already at the polls ; a shrill cry is heard it is the debtor's wife who speaks : " Remember your soul and liberty ! " The debtor rises to the majesty of. a freeman and declares his vote for O'Connell. Instantly all rents in arrear are paid by the Catholic Association. The elector's debt is discharged by the same omnipresent power, and that noble Celtic woman's exclamation becomes the watchword of all Ireland : " Remember your soul and liberty ! " But there is sad news from Genoa. An aged and weary pilgrim who can travel no further, passes beneath the gate of one of her ancient palaces, saying with pious resignation as he enters its silent chambers : "Well, it is God's will that I shall never see Rome. I am disappointed. But I am ready to die. It is all right." The superb though fading queen of the Mediterranean holds anxious watch through ten long days over that majestic stranger's wasting frame. And now death is there the liberator of Ireland has sunk to rest in the cradle of Columbus. O'Connell left his mighty enterprise unfinished. So did the founder of the Hebrew state ; so did Cato ; so did Hampden ; so did Emmett and Fitzgerald. Will their epi- taphs be less sublime by reason of the long delay which intervenes before they can be written ? It is God that sets the limits to human life and the bounds to human achieve- ment. 2QO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. WELCOME TO LOUIS KOSSUTH. WILLIAM H. SEWARD. I WILL suppose now that the opposition made to this resolution to welcome Louis Kossuth is effective. I will suppose that the measure is defeated. Where, then, sir, shall he find welcome and repose ? In his own beautiful native land, at the base or on the slopes of the Carpathian hills ? No ! the Austrian despot reigns absolutely there. Shall he find it in Germany, east or west, north or south? No, sir; the despot of Austria and the despot of Prussia reign abso- lutely there. Shall he find it under the sunny skies of Italy ? No, sir ; for the Austrian monarch has crushed Italy to the earth. Shall he find it in Siberia, or in the frozen regions of the North ? No, sir ; for the Russian czar, who drove him from his native land and forced him into exile in Turkey, will be ready to seize the fugitive. The scaffold awaits him there. Where, then, shall he go ? Where else on the face of broad Europe can he find refuge but in the land of your forefathers, in Britain ? There, God be thanked, there would be a welcome and a home for him. Are you prepared to give to the world evidence that you cannot receive the representative of liberty and republican- ism, whom England can honor, shelter, and protect ? But will this transaction end there ? No, sir. Beyond us, above us, there is a tribunal higher and greater than the Congress of the United States. It is the tribunal of the public opinion of the world the public opinion of man- kind. And before that tribunal does the Unites States hold up the right hand and answer "Not guilty"? You say that you were willing to give Kossuth a welcome, but that he demanded more. How did you know that he "demanded more"? But, you reply, he was overheard to DEFENSE OF ALLEGED CONSPIRATORS. 2QI say that he expected arms, men, money, " material aid, and intervention." Overheard? What! did you deliver Kos- suth from Russian surveillance in Turkey to establish an espionage over him of your own ? Shame ! shame to the country that so lightly regards the sanctity of the character of a stranger and an exile ! But, you say, you stand upon precedent. And what precedent ? The precedent of the reception given to La- fayette ? Wherein does the parallel between Kossuth and Lafayette fail ? Lafayette began his career as a soldier of liberty in the cause of your country ; but he pursued it through life in an effort to establish a Republic in his own beloved land. Kossuth found the duty which first devolved upon him was to wage a struggle for freedom in his own country. When overborne there, he became, like Lafayette, a champion of liberty throughout the world. You say that the Russian might have taken offense. Is America, then, brought so low that she fears to give offense when commanded by the laws of nature and of nations ? What right had Russia to prescribe whom you should receive and whom reject from your hospitalities ? Let no such humiliation be confessed. DEFENSE OF ALLEGED CONSPIRATORS AGAINST THE MICHIGAN CENTRAL RAILROAD COMPANY. WILLIAM H. SEWARD. FIFTEEN years ago Michigan attempted to stretch a rail- road across the peninsula from shore to shore. The regions through which it passed were newly opened. Their inhabit- ants were settlers, and settlers were generally poor. Their THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. farms were not fenced. Public roads, as well as public lands, were habitually used as ranges for pasturage. Cattle, often the settler's only convertible property, were frequently destroyed. The corporation refused to pay damages ; the settler insisted on them. Litigation ensued, and failed to settle the contested claim. The corporation offered half price as a compromise. The settler regarded this as a concession of the right, and insisted on the whole. Jealousy of wealth and power inflamed the controversy. The con- troversy became embittered. On the night of the iQth of November last the freight depot at Detroit took fire and was reduced to ashes. No one dreamed, or ever would have dreamed, of an incendiary, had not a public outcast, lured by the tempting rewards of the corporation, conceived the thought of enriching himself by charging the crime com- mitted here upon persons in Jackson County, obnoxious for trespasses committed there. As I now look upon the men who occupy the place on my right hand, and recognize among them pioneers of the state, its farmers, its mechanics, and its citizens, and then on this legion of spies, and find there on the witness stand convicts yet wearing the look and the gait contracted in the state prison, and see others come reeking from the stews of the city, I ask myself, can it be real ? No ! I am not in Michi- gan. I am in Venice, where an aristocratic senate keeps always open the lion's mouth, as well by day as by night, gaping for accusations against the plebeian and the patriot. I am in Syracuse, and see before me the dungeon which the tyrant has erected, with cells in which he has imprisoned those he fears, and with walls constructed on the model of the human ear, so that its curious channels convey to him even suppressed groans and sighs and whispered complaints. But I mistake. This is not the act of citizens of Detroit, for they are a humane people. It is not the act of Michi- DEFENSE OF ALLEGED CONSPIRATORS. 2Q3 gan, for it is a just and benignant commonwealth. It is not the act even of the Michigan Central Railroad Company. It is the act of agents of that corporation who have dared misuse their powers and to assume the police authority of the state. Gentlemen, in the middle of the fourth month we draw near to the end of what has seemed to be an endless labor. The rugged forms -of the unfortunate men whom I have defended have drooped, their sunburnt brows have blanched, and their hands have become as soft to the pressure of friendship as yours or mine. One of them, a vagrant boy, whom I found imprisoned here for a few extravagant words that perhaps he never uttered, has. pined away and died. Another, he who was feared, hated, and loved most of all, has fallen in the vigor of life, hacked down, His thick summer leaves all faded. When such a one falls amid the din and smoke of the battle- field, our emotions are overpowered, suppressed, lost in the excitement of public passion. But when he perishes a victim of domestic or social strife when we see the iron enter his soul, and see it day by day sink deeper and deeper, until nature gives way, and he lies lifeless at our feet then there is nothing to check the flow of forgiveness, compassion, and sympathy. If he whom God has called hence was guilty of the crime charged in this indictment, every man here may neverthe- less be innocent ; but if he was innocent, then there is not one of these, his associates in life, who can be guilty. Try him, then, since you must, condemn him if you must, and with him condemn them. But remember that you are mortal and he is now immortal, and that before the tribunal where he stands you must stand and confront him and vindicate your judgment. WENDELL PHILLIPS. 295 THE SCHOLAR'S DISTRUST. THE MURDER OF LOVEJOY. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE AND TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE. TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE'S PLACE AMONG GREAT MEN. DANIEL O'CONNELL THE ORATOR. DANIEL O'CONNELL'S POWER OVER THE IRISH PEOPLE. IDOLS. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. PUBLIC OPINION. WHAT WE OWE THE PILGRIMS. THE SCHOLAR'S DISTRUST. 297 THE SCHOLAR'S DISTRUST. WENDELL PHILLIPS. ANACHARSIS went into the Archons' court at Athens, heard a case argued by the great men of that city, and saw the vote by five hundred men. Walking in the streets, some one asked him, "What do you think of Athenian liberty? " " I think," said he, " wise men argue cases and fools decide them." Just what that timid scholar, two thousand years ago, said in the streets of Athens that which calls itself scholarship here says to-day of popular agitation, that it lets wise men argue questions and fools decide them. Yet to that Athens, where fools decided the gravest questions of policy and right and wrong, God lent the largest intellects; and that very Athens flashes to-day the torch that gilds still the mountain peaks of the Old World. A chronic distrust of the people pervades the book- educated class of the North. They shrink from that free speech which is God's normal school for educating men, throwing upon them the grave responsibility of deciding great questions, and so lifting them to a higher level of intellectual and moral life. I knew a signal instance of this disease of scholar's dis- trust, and the cure was as remarkable. I remember sitting with Lothrop Motley once in the State House when he was a member of our legislature. " What can become of a country," said he scornfully, " with such fellows as these making its laws ? No safe investments ; your good name lied away any hour, and little worth keeping if it were not." In. vain I combated the folly. He went to Europe; spent four or five years. I met him the day he landed on his return. As if our laughing talk in the State House had that moment ended, he took my hand with the sudden exclamation, 2Q8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. " You were all right; I was all wrong. It is a country worth dying for, to make it all it can be." Europe had made him one of the most American of all Americans. This distrust shows itself in the growing dislike of univer- sal suffrage. Timid scholars tell their dread of it. But sup- pose that universal suffrage endangered peace and threatened property. There is something more valuable than wealth; there is something more sacred than peace. As Humboldt says, " The finest fruit earth holds up to its Maker is a man." To ripen, lift, and educate a man is the first duty. Despotism looks down into the poor man's cradle, and knows it can crush resistance and curb ill-will. Democracy sees the ballot in that baby hand ; and selfishness bids her put integrity on one side of those baby footsteps and intelligence on the other, lest her own hearth be in peril. In this sense John Brown's pulpit at Harper's Ferry was equal to any ten thousand ordinary chairs in our colleges. God lifted a million of hearts to his gibbet, as the Roman cross lifted a world to itself in that divine sacrifice of two thousand years ago. Europe thrilled to John Brown as proof that our institutions had not lost all their native and distinc- tive life. You spoke to vacant eyes when you named Pres- cott, fifty years ago, to average Europeans ; while Vienna asked with careless indifference, " Seward who is he ? " But long before our ranks marched up State Street to the John Brown song, the banks of the Seine and of the Danube hailed the new life, which had given us another and nobler Wash- ington. Lowell foresaw him when, forty years ago, he sang. Truth, forever on the scaffold ; Wrong, forever on the throne ; Yet that scaffold sways the future. And behind the dim unknown Standeth God, within the shadow, Keeping watch above his own. THE MURDER OF LOVEJOY. THE MURDER OF LOVEJOY. WENDELL PHILLIPS. A COMPARISON has been drawn between the events of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. We have heard it asserted here, in Faneuil Hall, that Great Britain had a right to tax the colonies; and we have heard the mob at Alton, the drunken murderers of Lovejoy, compared to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard ! Fellow citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine ? The mob at Alton were met to wrest from a citizen his just rights met to resist the laws. We have been told that our fathers did the same ; and the glorious mantle of Revolutionary precedent has been thrown over the mobs of our day. To make out their title to such defense, the gentleman says that the British Parlia- ment had a right to tax these colonies. Shame on the American who calls the tea tax and Stamp Act lawsfl&hr fathers resisted, not the king's prerogative, but the King's usurpation. To find any other account you must read our Revolutionary history upside down. //feir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by .side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams/fTtTiought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. The gentle- man said that he should sink into insignificance if he dared to gainsay the principles of these resolutions. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up. // ^jp^The gentleman says Lovejoy was riresumptuous and imprudent: " He died as the fool diethjf Antf""^ reverend clergyman of the city tells us that no citizen has a right to 3OO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. publish opinions disagreeable to the community ! If any mob follows such publication, on him rests its guilt! He must wait, forsooth, till the people come up to it and agree with him ! This libel on liberty goes on to say that the want of right to speak as we think is an evil inseparable from republican institutions ! If this be so, what are they worth ? ^Velcome the despotism of the sultan, where one knows what .e may publish and what he may not, rather than the tyranny of this many-headed monster, the mob, where we know not what we may do or say, till some fellow citizen has tried it and paid for the lesson with his life. Shades of Hugh Peters and John Cotton save us from such pulpits* Imprudent to defend the liberty of the press ! Why ? Because the defense was unsuccessful ? Does success gild crime into patriotism, and the want of it change heroic self- devotion to imprudence i^-lpWas Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard ? Yet he, judged by that single hour, was unsuccessful. After a short exile, the race he hated sat again upon the throne. Imagine yourself present when the first news of Bunker Hill Battle reached a New England town. The tale would have run thus : " The patriots are routed the redcoats victorious Warren lies dead upon the field." With what scorn would that Tory have been received who should have charged Warren with imprudence, who should have said that, bred a physician, he was "out of place" in that battle, and " died as the fool dieth " / How would the intimation have been received that Warren and his associates should have waited a better time"!^^ One word, gentlemen. As much as thought is better than money, so much is the cause in which Lovejoy died nobler than a mere question of taxes. James Otis thundered in this hall when the king did but touch his pocket. Imagine, if you can, his indignant eloquence had England offered to BONAPARTE AND TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE. 30 1 put a gag upon his lips. The question that stirred the Revolution touched our civil interests. This concerns us not only as citizens, but as immortal beings. Wrapped up in its fate, saved or lost with it, are not only the voice of the statesman, but the instructions of the pulpit and the progress of our faith. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE AND TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE. WENDELL PHILLIPS. IT was 1801. At this time Europe concluded the Peace of Amiens, and Napoleon took his seat on the throne of France. He glanced across the Atlantic, and, with a single stroke of his pen, reduced Cayenne and Martinique back into chains. He then said to his council : " What shall I do with St. Domingo? " The slaveholders said: "Give it to us." But Colonel Vincent, who had been private secretary to Toussaint L'Ouverture, wrote to Napoleon, saying, " Sire, leave it alone; it is the happiest spot in your dominions. God raised Toussaint to govern ; races melt under his hand. He has saved you this island." Napoleon is said to have remarked : " I have sixty thousand idle troops ; I must find them something to do." What he meant to say was : " I am about to seize the crown; I dare not do it in the faces of sixty thousand republican soldiers. I must give them work at a distance to do." It was against this man, Toussaint L'Ouverture, who was above the lust of gold, pure in private life, generous in the use of his power, that Napoleon sent his army. Mounting his horse and riding to the eastern end of the island, Toussaint looked out on a sight such as no native had ever seen before. Sixty ships of the line, crowded by 3O2 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. the best soldiers of Europe, rounded the point. They were soldiers who had never yet met an equal, whose tread, like that of Caesar's, had shaken Europe, soldiers who had scaled the pyramids and planted the French banners on the walls of Rome. Toussaint looked a moment, counted the flotilla, let the reins fall on the neck of his horse, and exclaimed: "All France is come to Haiti; they can only come to make us slaves, and we are lost ! " He then recognized the only mistake of his life, his confidence in Bonaparte, which had led him to disband his army. Returning to the hills, he issued the only proclamation which bears his name and breathes vengeance : " My chil- dren, France comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the v/hite man the hell he comes to make" and he was obeyed. When the great William of Orange saw Louis XIV. cover Holland with troops, he said: "Break down the dikes, give Holland back to ocean "; and Europe said : " Sublime ! " When Alexander saw the armies of France descend upon Russia, he said: " Burn Moscow, starve back the invaders"; and Europe said: " Sublime ! " This black saw all Europe come to crush him, and gave to his people- the same\ heroic example of defiance. Truthful as a knight of old, the negro was cheated by his lying foe. Arrived in Paris, Toussaint was flung into jail. A little later, he was sent to the castle of St. Joux, to a dungeon twelve feet by twenty, built wholly of stone, with a narrow window, high up on the side, looking out on the snows of Switzerland. This dungeon was a tomb. !ln Josephine's time, a young French marquis was placed there, and the girl to whom he was betrothed went to the empress and prayed for his release. Said Josephine to her: " Have a model of it made, L OUVERTURE S PLACE AMONG GREAT MEN. 303 and bring it to me." Josephine placed it near Napoleon. He said : " Take it away ; it is horrible." She put it on his footstool, and he kicked it from him. She held it to him the third time, and said : " Sire, in this horrible dungeon you have put a man to die." "Take him out," said Napoleon, and the girl saved her lover. In this tomb Toussaint was buried ; but he did not die fast enough. The commandant was told to go into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him, and to stay four days ; when he returned Toussaint was found starved to death. That imperial assassin was taken twelve years after to his prison at St. Helena, planned for a tomb, as he had planned that of Toussaint ; and there he whined away his dying hours in pitiful complaints of curtains and titles, of dishes and rides. God grant that, when some future Plutarch shall weigh the great men of our epoch, the whites against the blacks, he shall not be permitted to put that whining child at St. Helena into one scale, and into the other the negro meeting death like a Roman, without a murmur in the soli- tude of his icy dungeon. TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE'S PLACE AMONG GREAT MEN. WENDELL PHILLIPS. THERE are three tests by which races love to be tried. The first, the basis of all, is courage, the element that says, here and to-day, " This continent is mine, from the lakes to the gulf; let him beware who seeks to divide it." And the second is the recognition that force is doubled by purpose. And the third element is persistency, endurance; first a purpose, then death or success. In the time you lend me, I attempt the Quixotic effort to convince you that the 304 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. negro blood, instead of standing at the bottom of the list, is entitled, if judged either by its courage, its purpose, or its endurance, to a place as near ours as any other blood known in history. If I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his Country. But I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards, men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in battle. You remember Macaulay says, comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell showed the greater military genius. And why? Because Cromwell never saw an army until he was forty, while Napoleon was educated from a boy in the best military schools in Europe. This man never saw a soldier until he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his army out of what ? Englishmen, the best blood in Europe. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen, their equals. Toussaint manufactured his army out of what ? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery. Yet out of this, as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at what ? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet ; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier. Further, Cromwell was only a soldier; his fame stops L OUVERTURE S PLACE AMONG GREAT MEN. 305 there. Not one line in the statute book of Britain can be traced to Cromwell. The state he founded went down with him to his grave. But this man no sooner put his hand on the helm of state than the ship steadied with an upright keel, and he began to evince a statesmanship as marvelous as his military genius. In 1800 this negro made a proclama- tion. It runs thus: " Sons of St. Domingo, come home. We never meant to take your houses or your lands. The negro only asked that liberty which God gave him. Your houses wait for you; your lands are ready; come and cultivate them." And from Madrid and Paris, Baltimore and New Orleans, the emigrant planters crowded home to enjoy their estates, under the pledged word that was never broken of a victorious slave. Carlyle has said : " The natural king is one who melts all wills into his own." At this moment Toussaint turned to his armies, poor, ill-clad, and half-starved, and said to them : " Go back and work on these estates you have conquered, for an empire can be founded only on order and industry, and you can learn these virtues only there." And they went. I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. " No retaliation " was his great motto and the rule of his life. His last words, uttered to his son in France, were these : " My boy, you will one day go back to St. Domingo ; forget that France murdered your father." I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. You think me a fanatic ; for you read history not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But when Truth gets a hearing, the muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for 3O6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown, the ripe fruit of our noonday ; then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L? Oliver ture. DANIEL O'CONNELL THE ORATOR. WENDELL PHILLIPS. BROADLY considered, the eloquence of Daniel O'Connell has never been equaled in modern times. Do you think I am partial ? I will vouch John Randolph, of Roanoke, the Virginia slaveholder, who hated an Irishman almost as much as he hated a Yankee, himself an orator of no mean level. Hearing O'Connell, he exclaimed : " This is the man, these are the lips, the most eloquent that speak English in my day." I think he was right. I remember the solemnity of Webster, the grace of Everett, the rhetoric of Choate. I know the eloquence that lay hid in the iron logic of Calhoun. I have melted beneath the magnetism of Sergeant S. Pren- tiss, of Mississippi, who wielded a power few men ever had. But I think all of them together never surpassed, and no one of them ever equaled, O'Connell. To show you that he never took a leaf from our American gospel of compromise, that he never filed his tongue to silence on one truth, fancying so to help another, that he never sacrificed any race to save even Ireland, let me compare him with Kossuth, whose only merits were his elo- quence and his patriotism. When Kossuth was in Faneuil Hall he exclaimed : " Here is a flag without a stain, a nation without a crime." We Abolitionists appealed to him : " O DANIEL O CONNELL THE ORATOR. 307 eloquent son of the Magyar, come to break chains ! Have you no word, no pulse beat, for four millions of negroes bending under a yoke ten times heavier than that of Hun- gary ? " He answered : " I would forget anybody, I would praise anything to help Hungary." O'Connell never said anything like that. When I was in Naples I asked Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, a Tory : " Is O'Connell an honest man ? " " As honest a man as ever breathed," said he; and then he told me this story : "When, in 1830, O'Connell entered Parliament, the anti-slavery cause was so weak that it had only Lushington and myself to speak for it. And we agreed that when he spoke I should cheer him, and when I spoke he should cheer me ; and these were the only cheers we ever got. O'Connell came, with one Irish member to support him. A large number of members, whom we called the West India interest, the slave party, went to him, saying : ' O'Connell, at last you are in the House, with one helper. If you will never go down to Freemason's Hall with Buxton and Brougham, here are twenty-seven votes for you on every Irish question. If you work with these Abolitionists, count us always against you.' " It was a terrible temptation. How many a so-called statesman would have yielded ! O'Connell said : ' Gentle- men, God knows I speak for the saddest people the sun sees ; but may my right hand forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if to save Ireland, even Ireland, I forget the negro one single, hour !' From that day," said Buxton, " Lushington and I never went into the lobby that O'Connell did not follow us." Some years afterward I went to Conciliation Hall, where O'Connell was arguing for repeal. He lifted from the table a thousand-pound note sent from New Orleans, and said to be from the slaveholders of that city. Coming to the front 308 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. of the platform, he said : " This is a draft of one thousand pounds from the slaveholders of New Orleans, the unpaid wages of the negro. Mr. Treasurer, I suppose the treasury is empty." The treasurer nodded to show him that it was, and he went on : " Old Ireland is very poor ; but, thank God, she is not poor enough to take the unpaid wages of anybody. Send it back." That was the man. The ocean of his philanthropy knew no shore. As an orator, nature intended him for our Demosthenes. Never since the great Greek has she sent forth any one so lavishly gifted for his work as a tribune of the people. He had a magnificent presence, impressive in bearing, massive like that of Jupiter. A small O'Connell would hardly have been an O'Connell at all. I remember Russell Lowell tell- ing us that Mr. Webster came home from Washington at the time the Whig party thought of dissolution, and went down to Faneuil Hall to protest. Drawing himself to his loftiest proportions, his brow clothed with thunder, he said to the listening thousands : " Gentlemen, I am a Whig, a Massa- chusetts Whig, a revolutionary Whig, a constitutional Whig, a Faneuil Hall Whig. If you break the Whig party, where am 7 to go ? " And, says Lowell : " We held our breath, thinking where he could go. If he had been five feet three we should have said : ' Who cares where you go ? ' ' So it was with O'Connell. There was something majestic in his presence before he spoke ; and he added to it what Webster had not, what Clay might have lent, that magnetism that melts all hearts into one. Then he had a voice that covered the gamut. I heard him once say : " I send my voice across the Atlantic, career- ing like the thunderstorm against the breeze, to tell the slaveholder of the Carolinas that God's thunderbolts are hot, and to remind the bondsman that the dawn of his redemption is near." And you seemed to hear his voice O'CONNELL'S POWER OVER THE IRISH PEOPLE. 309 come echoing back from the Rocky Mountains. Then, with the slightest possible Irish brogue, he would tell a story at which all Exeter Hall shook with laughter; and the next moment, as he spoke with the tears in his voice, five thou- sand men wept. And all the while no effort. He seemed only breathing. DANIEL O'CONNELL'S POWER OVER THE IRISH PEOPLE. WENDELL PHILLIPS. WEBSTER could awe a senate, Everett could charm a col- lege, and Choate could cheat a jury, Clay could magnetize the million, and Corwin lead them captive. But O'Connell was Clay, Corwin, Choate, Everett, and Webster in one. Before the courts, logic ; at the bar of the senate, unanswer- able ; on the platform, grace, wit, and pathos ; before the masses, a whole man. Carlyle says : " He is God's own anointed king whose single word melts all wills into his." This describes O'Connell. He held the masses free but willing subjects in his hand. Behind them were ages of bloodshed ; every rising had ended at the scaffold. O'Connell said : " Follow me ; put your feet where mine have trod, and a sheriff shall never lay hand on your shoulder." And the great lawyer kept his pledge. This unmatched, long-continued power almost passes belief. You can only appreciate it by comparison. Let me carry you back to the mob year of 1835, m tn i g country, when the Abolitionists were hunted; when the streets roared with riot ; when from Boston to Baltimore, from St. Louis to Philadelphia, a mob took possession of every city ; when private houses were invaded and public halls were burned, 3IO THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. press after press was thrown into the river, and Lovejoy baptized freedom with his blood. You remember it. Re- spectable journals warned the mob that they were playing into the hands of the Abolitionists. Webster and Clay and the staff of Whig statesmen told the people that the truth floated farther on the shouts of the mob than the most eloquent lips could carry it. But law-abiding, Protestant, educated America could not be held back. Neither Whig chiefs nor respectable journals could keep these people quiet. Go to England. When the Reform Bill of 1831 was thrown out from the House of Lords, the people were tu- multuous ; and Melbourne and Grey, Russell and Brougham, Lansdowne, Holland, and Macaulay, the Whig chiefs, cried out : " Don't violate the law ; you help the Tories ! Riots put back the bill." But quiet, sober John Bull, law-abiding, could ndt do without it. Birmingham was three days in the hands of a mob; castles were burned; Wellington ordered the Scotch Greys to rough-grind their swords, as at Waterloo. This was the Whig aristocracy of England. O'Connell had neither office nor title. Behind him were three million people steeped in utter wretchedness, sore with the oppression of centuries, ignored by statute. For thirty restless and turbulent years he stood in front of them and said : " Remember, he that commits a crime helps the enemy." And during that long and fearful struggle I do not remember one of his followers ever being convicted of a political offense. There is no such record in our history. Neither in classic nor in modern times can the man be produced who held a million of people in his right hand so passive. I do not forget your soldiers, orators, or poets any of your leaders. But when I consider O'Connell's personal disinterestedness ; his eloquence, almost equally effective in the courts, in the IDOLS. 311 senate, and before the masses ; that sagacity which set at naught the malignant vigilance of the whole imperial bar, watching thirty years for a misstep ; when I see the sobriety and moderation with which he used his measureless power, and the lofty, generous purpose of his whole life I am ready to affirm that he was, all things considered, the greatest man the Irish race ever produced. IDOLS. WENDELL PHILLIPS. THE honors we grant mark how high we stand, and they educate the future. The men we honor, and the maxims we lay down in measuring our favorites show the level and morals of the time. A name has been in every one's mouth of late, and men have exhausted language in trying to ex- press their admiration and their respect. The courts have covered the grave of Mr. Choate with eulogy. Let us see what is their idea of a great lawyer. We are told that he " worked hard " ; " he never neglected his client " ; " he flung over the discussions of trie forum the grace of a rare scholarship " ; " no pressure or emergency ever stirred him to an unkind word." A ripe scholar, a profound lawyer, a faithful servant of his client, a gentleman. This is a good record surely. What he earned God grant he may have ! But the bar that seeks to claim for such a one a place among great jurists must itself be weak indeed. Not one moral trait specified, not one patriotic act men- tioned, not one patriotic service even claimed. Look at Mr. Webster's idea of what a lawyer should be in order to be called great, in the sketch he drew of Jere- miah Mason, and notice what stress he lays on the religious 312 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. and moral elevation and the glorious and high purposes which crowned his life ! Nothing of this now ! When Cordus, the Roman senator whom Tiberius murdered, was addressing his fellows, he began : " Fathers, they accuse me of illegal words, plain proof that there are no illegal deeds with which to charge me." So with these eulogies, words, nothing but words, plain proof that there were no deeds to praise. Yet this is the model which Massachusetts offers to the pantheon of the great jurists of the world ! Suppose we stood in that lofty temple of jurisprudence on either side of us the statues of the great lawyers of every age and clime and let us see what part New England, Puritan, educated, free New England, would bear in the pageant. Rome points to a colossal figure, and says : " That is Papinian, who, when the Emperor Caracalla mur- dered his own brother and ordered the lawyer to defend the deed, went cheerfully to death rather than sully his lips with the atrocious plea ; and that is Ulpian, who, aiding his prince to put the army below the law, was massacred at the foot of a weak but virtuous throne." And France stretches forth her grateful hands, crying : "That is D'Aguesseau, worthy, when he went to face an enraged king, of the farewell his wife addressed him : ' Go ! forget that you have a wife and children to ruin, and remember only that you have France to save!" England says : " That is Coke, who flung the laurels of eighty years in the face of the first Stuart, in defense of the people. This is Selden, on every book of whose library you saw written the motto of which he lived worthy : * Before everything, Liberty!' That is Mansfield, silver tongued, who proclaimed : ' Slaves cannot breathe in England ; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free.' WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 313 This is Romilly, who spent life trying to make law synony- mous with justice, and succeeded in making life and prop- erty safer in every city of the empire." Then New England shouts : " This is Choate, who made it safe to murder, and of whose health thieves asked before they began to steal." WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. WENDELL PHILLIPS. WHEN I think of William Lloyd Garrison, " day by day grows the wonder fresh " as Melancthon said of Luther at the ripeness of the moral and intellectual life that God gave him at the very opening. Think of the mere dates. Think that at some twenty-four years old, while Christianity and statesmanship were wandering in the desert, aghast, amazed, and confounded over a frightful evil, a great sin, this boy sounded, found, invented the talisman : " Immedi- ate, unconditional emancipation on the soil." A year afterwards, in words that have been so often quoted, with those dungeon doors behind him, he enters on his career. In January, 1831, he starts the publication of the Liberator, advocating the immediate abolition of slavery; and with the sublime pledge : " I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to speak or write with moderation. I will not equivocate ; I will not excuse ; I will not retreat a single inch ; and I will be heard" Then began an agitation which for the marvel of its origin, the majesty of its purpose, is without a parallel in history since Luther. Here were the brain and the heart ; here was the statesman-like intellect, brave as Luther, which 314 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. confronted the logic of South Carolina with an assertion direct and broad enough to make an issue and necessitate a conflict of two civilizations. Calhoun said : " Slavery is right" Webster and Clay shrunk from him and evaded his assertion. Garrison, alone at that time, met him face to face, proclaiming slavery a sin. More than this, Garrison was the first man to begin a movement designed to annihilate slavery. He announced the principle, arranged the method, gathered the forces, enkindled the zeal, started the argument, and finally mar- shaled the nation for and against the system in a conflict that came near rending the Union. " Give me a spot," said Archimedes, " and I will move the world." O'Connell leaned back on three millions of Irish- men, all on fire with sympathy. Cobden's hands were held up by the whole manufacturing interest of Great Britain. But this boy stood alone, utterly alone, at first. There was no sympathy anywhere ; his hands were empty. One single penniless comrade was his only helper. Starving on bread and water, he could command the use of types, that was all. Trade endeavored to crush him ; the intellectual life of America disowned him. To a friend who remonstrated with him on the heat and severity of his language, he said : " Brother, I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt." And yet Garrison lived to see these mountains of ice melting about him. In 1842 Lindley had finished the rail- way at Hamburg, and was to open it, when the great fire broke out. The self-satisfied citizens called the English- man to see how well their six-penny squirts and old pails could put out the fire. But it raged on, till one-quarter of the city was in ruins. " Mynheer Lindley, what shall we do ? " cried the frightened senators of Hamburg. " Let me blow up a couple of streets," he answered. " Never, never, PUBLIC OPINION. 315 never." Another day of flames. " Mynheer Lindley, blow up the streets and welcome; only save us." "Too late," replied the engineer. " To do that I must blow up the Senate House itself." They debated an hour, and then said : " Mynheer Lindley, save us in your own way." In one hour the Senate House was in ruins and the fire ceased. " Be quiet, Mr. Garrison," said 1830. " Don't you see our six-penny colonization society, and our old-fashioned pails of church resolves, nicely copied and laid away in ves- tries ? See how we '11 put out this fire of slavery." But it burned on fiercer, fiercer. " What shall we do now ? " asked startled Whiggery. " Keep the new states free, abolish slavery in the District, shut the door against Texas." tf Too much," said Whiggery. " We are busy now making Web- ster president and proving that Mr. Everett never had an anti-slavery idea." But the flames roll on. Republicanism proposes to blow up a street or two. No, no ; nothing but to blow up the Senate House will do ; and soon frightened Hamburg cries : " Mynheer Garrison, Mynheer Garrison, save us on your own terms." This boy confronting church, commerce, and college, this boy with neither training nor experience, seems to have understood by instinct that righteousness is the only thing which will finally compel submission, that one with God is always a majority. PUBLIC OPINION. WENDELL PHILLIPS. REVOLUTIONS are not made ; they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back. The child feels ; he grows into a man, and thinks ; another, perhaps, speaks, and the 3l6 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. world acts out the thought. And this is the history of modern society. The beginning of great changes is like the rise of the Mississippi. A child must stoop and gather away the pebbles to find it. But soon it swells broader and broader, bears on its ample bosom the navies of a mighty Republic, fills the gulf, and divides a continent. I remember a story of Napoleon which illustrates my meaning. We are apt to trace his control of France to some noted victory, to the time when he camped in the Tuileries, or when* he dissolved the Assembly by the stamp of his foot. He reigned on the day when five hundred irresolute men were met in that Assembly, which called itself, and pretended to be, the government of France. They heard that the mob of Paris was coming the next morning, thirty thousand strong, to turn them, as was usual in those days, out of doors. And where did this seemingly great power go for its support and refuge ? They sent Tal- lien to seek out a boy lieutenant, the shadow of an officer, so thin and pallid that, when he was placed on the stand before them, the president of the Assembly, fearful, if the fate of France rested on the shrunken form, the ashy cheek before him, that all hope was gone, asked : "Young 'man, can you protect the Assembly ? " And the stern lips of the Corsican boy parted only to reply, " I always do what I undertake." Then and there Napoleon ascended his throne; and the next day, from the steps of St. jloche, thundered forth the cannon which taught the mob of Paris, for the first time, that it had a master. That was the commencement of the Empire. In working these great changes, in such an age as ours, the so-called statesman has far less influence than the many little men who, at various points, are silently maturing a regeneration of public opinion. This is a reading and think- ing age, and great interests at stake quicken the general intellect. Stagnant times have been when a great mind, WHAT WE OWE THE PILGRIMS. anchored in error, might snag the slow-moving current of society. Such is not our era. Nothing but freedom, justice, and truth is of any permanent advantage to the mass of mankind. " Establish justice and secure liberty." WHAT WE OWE THE PILGRIMS. WENDELL PHILLIPS. THEY say that Michael Angelo once entered a palace at Rome where Raphael was ornamenting the ceiling, and as Angelo walked around he saw that all the figures were too small for the room. Stopping a moment, he sketched on one side an immense head, proportioned to the chamber ; and when his friends asked him why, his reply was : " I criticise by creation, not by finding fault." Carver and Bradford and the other Pilgrim fathers did so. They came across the water, created a great model state, and bade England take warning. __The Edinburgh Reviewer may be seen running up and down the sides of the Pilgrims, and taking their measure where does he get his yardstick ? He gets it from the very institutions they made for him. He could never have known how to criticise if their crea- tions had not taught him. The Puritans believed that institutions were made for man. Europe established a civilization which, like that of Greece, made the state everything, the man nothing. The man was made for the institutions ; the man was made for the clothes. The Puritans said: " No, let us go out and make clothes for the man ; let us make institutions for men ! " What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but ACTION. Europe had ideas, but she was letting " I dare not wait upon I would" The Puritans, with native pluck, launched out into the deep sea. Men who called themselves thinkers v 3l8 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. had been creeping along the Mediterranean, from headland to headland, in their timidity; the Pilgrims launched boldly out into the Atlantic, and trusted God. That is the claim they have upon posterity. It was ACTION that made them what they were. We should bear in mind development when we criticise the Pilgrims, where they would be to-day. Indeed, to be as good as our fathers, we must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. When some one sent a cracked plate to China to have a set made, every piece in the new set had a crack in it. The copies of 1620 and 1787 you commonly see have the crack, and very large, too. Thee and thou, a stationary hat, bad grammar and worse manners, with an ugly coat, are not George Fox in 1855. You will recognize him in any one who rises from the lap of artificial life, flings away its softness, and startles you with the sight of a MAN. Neither do I acknowledge, sir, the right of Plymouth to the whole rock. No, the rock underlies all America ; it only crops out here. It has cropped out a great many times in our history. You may recognize it always. Old Putnam stood upon it at Bunker Hill when he said to the Yankee boys: " Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes." Ingraham had it for ballast when he put his little sloop between two Austrian frigates, and threatened to blow them out of the water if they did not respect the broad eagle of the United States, in the case of Koszta. Jefferson had it for a writing-desk when he drafted the Declaration of Inde- pendence and the " Statute of Religious Liberty" for Virginia. Lovejoy rested his musket upon it when they would not let him print at Alton, and he said: " Death, or free speech ! " Ay, sir, the rock cropped out again. Garrison had it for an imposing stone when he looked in the faces of seventeen millions of angry men and printed his sublime pledge, " I will not retreat a. single inch, and I will be heard." GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 3*9 A RUB-A-DUB AGITATION. BURGOYNE'S SURRENDER. PAUL REVERE'S RIDE. THE SPIRIT OF PURITANISM. THE CAUSE OF BUNKER HILL. SAMUEL ADAMS AND THE NEW ENGLAND TOWN MEETING. 320 A RUB-A-DUB AGITATION. 321 A RUB-A-DUB AGITATION. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. THE passionate chapter in our history known as the Abolition Agitation is the story of the vindication of free speech in the United States. So long as people said : "Oh, yes, slavery is a very bad thing, but there is nothing to be done about it, you know/' the Southern Policy smiled politely and worked diligently at its web in which the country was entangled. But when a few other people said: "Yes, slavery is a very bad thing, and will destroy the nation if the nation does not destroy it," Mr. Calhoun knew that the open battle was at hand. He sprang to his feet. " What does it mean?" asked he, the representa- tive man of the South, of Mr. Webster, the representative of the North. "Nothing, nothing; a rub-a-dub agitation," replied Mr. Webster. A rub-a-dub agitation ! Oh, yes, so it was. It was the beating of the roll call at midnight. The camp slept no more ; and morning breaks at last in the storm of a war that shakes the world. Not in November, 1837, when Elijah Lovejoy was shot dead in Illinois for exercising his plainest right, as I am doing now ; not in October, 1835, when Garrison was mobbed in Boston for saying that slavery was wrong ; but in October, 1833, when, in the city of New York, a body of men met in Tammany Hall in response to an invitation signed "Many Southrons," and, marching to the Chatham Street chapel to rout a peaceful meeting for discussion, marched against the rights of every American citizen, against the Union and the government, from that moment the cause of the Abolitionist was the cause of America. The fight was desperate, and the Southern Policy, already firmly intrenched,, seemed to conquer. In the summer of 322 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. 1859, Alexander H.. Stephens, of Georgia, comes home from Congress to his friends and neighbors and tells them why he is going to retire from public life. " There is not now a spot of the public territory of the United States," he said, " over which the national flag floats where slavery is excluded by the law of Congress, and the highest tribunal of the land has decided that Congress has no power to make such a law. At this time there is not a ripple upon the surface. The country was never in a profounder quiet." He stops ; he sits down. The summer sun sets over the fields of Georgia, the land of peace. Good night, Mr. Stephens a long good night. Look from your window how calm it is ! Upon Missionary Ridge, upon Lookout Mountain, upon the heights of Dalton, upon the spires of Atlanta, silence and solitude, the peace of the Southern Policy of Slavery and Death. But look ! hark ! Through the great five years before you a light is shining a sound is ringing. It is the gleam of Sherman's bayonets ; it is the roar of Grant's guns ; it is the red daybreak and wild morning music of peace indeed, the peace of National Life and Liberty. Yes, it was a rub-a-dub agitation. It was a drumbeat that echoed over every mountain and penetrated every valley and roused the heart of the land to throb in unison. To that rub-a-dub a million men appeared at Lincoln's call, and millions of women supported them. To that rub-a-dub the brave and beautiful and beloved went smiling to their graves. To that rub-a-dub Grant forced his fiery way through the Wilderness ; following its roll, Sherman marched to the sea, and Sheridan scoured the Shenandoah. The rattling shots of the Kearsarge sinking the Alabama were only the far-off echoes of that terrible drumbeat. To that rub-a-dub the walls of the rebellion and of slavery crumbled at last and forever, as the walls of Jericho before the horns of Israel. BURGOYNE S SURRENDER. 323 That tremendous rub-a-dub, played by the hearts and hands of a great people, fills the land to-day with the celestial music of liberty, and to that people, still thrilling with that music, we appeal ! (From Orations and Addresses by GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers.) BURGOYNE'S SURRENDER. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. ON the morning of October 7, at ten o'clock, fifteen hundred of the best troops in the world, led by four of the most experienced and accomplished generals, moved in three columns toward the left of the American position into a field of wheat. They began to cut forage. Startled by the rattling picket fire, the American drums beat to arms, and the British approach was announced at headquarters. The Americans dashed forward, opened to the right and left, flanked the enemy, struck him with a blasting fire, then closed, and, grappling hand to hand, the mad mass of com- batants swayed and staggered for half an hour, five times taking and retaking a single gun. At the first fire upon the left, the Virginia sharpshooters, shouting and blazing with deadly aim, rushed forward with such fury that the appalled British right wavered and recoiled. While it yet staggered under the blow of Virginia, New England swept up, and with its flaming muskets broke the English line, which wildly fled. It reformed and again advanced, while the whole American force dashed against the British center, held by the Germans, whose right and left had been uncovered. The British Gen- eral Fraser hurried to their aid. With fatal aim an American sharpshooter fired and Fraser fell. With him sank the British heart. The whole American line, jubilant with certain 324 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. victory, advancing, Burgoyne abandoned his guns and ordered a retreat to his camp. The British, dismayed, bewildered, overwhelmed, were scarcely within their redoubts when Benedict Arnold came spurring up, Benedict Arnold, whose name America does not love, who, volunteering to relieve Fort Stanwix, had, by the mere terror of his coming, blown St. Leger away, and who, on September 19, had saved the American left, Bene- dict Arnold, whom battle stung to fury, now whirled from end to end of the American line, hurled it against the Great Redoubt, driving the enemy at the point of the bayonet. He then, flinging himself to the extreme right, and finding there the Massachusetts brigade, swept it with him to the assault, and, streaming over the breastworks, scattered the Bruns- wickers who defended them, killed their colonel, and gained and held the point which commanded the entire British posi- tion. At the same moment his horse was shot under him, and he sank to the ground, wounded in the leg that had been wounded at Quebec. Here, upon the Hudson, where he tried to betray his country, here, upon the spot where, in the crucial hour of the Revolution, he illustrated and led the American valor that made us free and great, let us recall, for one brief instant of infinite pity, the name that has been justly execrated for a century. Night fell, and the weary fighters slept. Before day dawned Burgoyne, exhausted and overwhelmed, drew off the remainder of his army, and the Americans occupied his camp. At evening, in a desolate autumn rain, Burgoyne, who, in the splendid hour of his first advance had so proudly proclaimed, " This army must not retreat," turned to fly. But everywhere he was too late. The American sharp- shooters hovered around him, cutting off supplies, and preventing him from laying roads. Deserted by his allies, PAUL REVERE'S RIDE. 3 2 S his army half gone, with less than five days' food, with no chance of escape, Burgoyne prepared honorably to surrender. At nine o'clock on the morning of this day, a hundred years ago, he signed the convention. At eleven o'clock his troops marched to this meadow, the site of old Fort Hardy, and, with tears coursing down bearded cheeks, with passion- ate sobs, and oaths of rage and defiance, the soldiers kissing their guns with the tenderness of lovers, or with sudden frenzy knocking off the butts of their muskets, and the drummers stamping on their drums, the king's army laid down their arms. (From Orations and Addresses by GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers.) PAUL REVERE'S RIDE. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. ON Tuesday, April 18, 1775, Gage, the royal governor, who had decided to send a force to Concord to destroy the stores, picketed the roads from Boston into Middlesex, to prevent any report of the intended march from spreading into the country. But the very air was electric. In the tension of the popular mind, every sound and sight was significant. In the afternoon, one of the governor's grooms strolled into a stable where John Ballard was cleaning a horse. John Ballard was a son of liberty ; and when the groom idly remarked in nervous English " about what would occur to-morrow," John's heart leaped and his hand shook, and, asking the groom to finish cleaning the horse, he ran to a friend, who carried the news straight to Paul Revere. Gage thought that his secret had been kept, but Lord Percy, who had heard the people say on the Common that the troops would miss their aim, undeceived him. Gage 326 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. instantly ordered that no one should leave the town. But Dr. Warren was before him, and, as the troops crossed the river, Paul Revere was rowing over the river farther down to Charlestown, having agreed with his friend, Robert New- man, to show lanterns from the belfry of the Old North Church: One, if by land, and two, if by sea, as a signal of the march of the British. It was a brilliant April night. The winter had been unusually mild and the spring very forward. The hills were already green ; the early grain waved in the fields, and the air was sweet with blossoming orchards. Under the cloud- less moon the soldiers silently marched, and Paul Revere swiftly rode, galloping through Medford and West Cambridge, rousing every house as he went, spurring for Lexington and Hancock and Adams, and evading the British patrols, who had been sent out to stop the news. Stop the news ! Already the village church bells were beginning to ring the alarm, as the pulpits beneath them had been ringing for many a year. In the awakening houses lights flashed from window to window. Drums beat faintly far away and on every side. Signal guns flashed and echoed. The watchdogs barked ; the cocks crew. Stop the news ! Stop the sunrise ! The murmuring night trembled with the summons so earnestly expected, so dreaded, so desired. And as, long ago, the voice rang out at midnight along the Syrian shore, wailing that great Pan was dead, but in the same moment the choiring angels whispered, " Glory to God in the highest, for Christ is born," so, if the stern alarm of that April night seemed to many a wistful and loyal heart to portend the passing glory of British dominion and the tragical chance of war, it whispered to them with prophetic inspiration, "Good will to men; America is born !" There is a tradition that long before the troops reached THE SPIRIT OF PURITANISM. 327 Lexington an unknown horseman thundered at the door of Captain Joseph Robbins in Acton, waking every man and woman and the babe in the cradle, shouting that the regulars were marching to Concord and that the rendezvous was the old North Bridge. Captain Robbins' son, a boy of ten years, heard the summons in the garret where he lay, and in a few minutes was on his father's old mare, a young Paul Revere, galloping along the road to rouse Captain Isaac Davis, who commanded the minute-men of Acton. The company assembled at his shop, formed, and marched a little way, when he halted them and returned for a moment to his house. He said to his wife: "Take good care of the children," kissed her, turned to his men, gave the order to march, and saw his home no more. Such was the history of that night in how many homes ! The hearts of those men and women of Middlesex might break, but they could not waver. They had counted the cost. They knew what and whom they served; and, as the midnight summons came, they started up and answered, " Here am' I ! " (From Orations and Addresses by GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers.) THE SPIRIT OF PURITANISM. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. IN Europe, three centuries ago, the cause of the people took form as the Protestant Reformation, and transferred to the battlefield was the thirty years' war. In England drawn to a finer point in the sermons of stern preachers it was known as Puritanism. But at length it was preaching and debating no longer. At Edgehill, John Pym's speeches had become pikes, and Charles' falsehoods, swords. The Cavalier fought for privilege ; the Puritan for the people. 328 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. The larger and generous Puritanism of America inspired the Revolution. They were Puritan guns whose echo is endless upon Bunker Hill. It was the Puritan spirit that spoke in the Declaration of Independence. It was to the Puritan idea that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown ; and eighty-three years later it was the Cavalier who again sur- rendered to the Puritan under the Appomattox apple tree. Our good friends, the Knickerbockers, are never weary of telling us that our fathers were sanctimonious sniffers, who rolled up their eyes and snarled psalms through their noses, canting hypocrites, who persecuted Quakers and hung forlorn old women for witches. Well, Cromwell and his men did sing hymns to some purpose. The proudest music of the Scotch Highlands was the psalmody of the old Covenanters, whose lingering echoes still haunt those misty mountains. Massachusetts certainly persecuted the Quakers, and so did New York ; and the negro hangings in New York a hundred and forty years ago are as atrocious as the witch hangings in Salem. But when we have called the Puritan a sour-faced fanatic, have we done with him ? Is that all ? Old John Adams was a small, choleric, and dogmatic man. But the little, dogmatic, and testy man took the Continental Congress, took the Ameri- can colonies in his arms and lifted them to independence. I was one day talking with Charles Sumner upon some public question, and, as our conversation warmed, I said to him: " Yes, but you forget the other side." He brought his clinched hand down upon the table till it rang again, and his voice shook the room as he thundered in reply : " There is no other side !" There spoke the Puritan. There flamed the unconquerable spirit which swept the Stuarts out of England, liberalized the British Constitution, planted the Republic in America, freed the slaves, and made the Union a national bond of equal liberty. THE CAUSE OF BUNKER HILL. 329 If the Puritans snuffled in prayer, they smote in fight. If they sang through their noses, the hymn they chanted was liberty. If they aimed at a divine monarchy, they have founded the freest, most enlightened, most powerful Republic in history. So, whether it was John Pym moving the Grand Remonstrance in Parliament, or John Milton touching the loftiest stop of epic song, or Oliver Cromwell and his Iron- sides raising the mighty battle cry at Worcester and Dunbar, " Arise, O Lord, and scatter thine enemies ! " then, putting spur and sweeping forward like a whirlwind to scatter them, all this long line of light in history is the splendid story of Puritan principle and Puritan pluck. By their fruits, not by their roots, ye shall know them. Under the matted damp leaves in the April woods of New England, straggling and burrowing and stretching far in darkness and in cold, you shall find tough, hard, fibrous roots. But the flower they bear is the loveliest and sweetest of all flowers in the year. The root is black and rough and unsightly. But the flower is the mayflower. The root of Puritanism may have been gloomy bigotry, but the flower was Liberty and its fruit. (From Orations and Addresses by GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers.) THE CAUSE OF BUNKER HILL. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. EUROPEAN Toryism has long regarded us as a vulgar young giant sprawling over a continent, whose limbs were, indeed, too loose and ungainly to be effective, but who might yet one day make trouble and require to be thrashed into decency and order. When Horace Greeley was in Paris, he was one morning looking with an American friend at the pictures in the 330 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. gallery of the Louvre and talking of this country. " The fact is," said Mr. Greeley, "that what we need is a darned good licking." An Englishman, who stood by and heard the con- versation, smiled eagerly, as if he knew a nation that would like to administer the castigation. "Yes, sir," said he com- placently, rubbing his hands with appetite and joining in the conversation, "that is just what you do want." "But the difficulty is," continued Mr. Greeley to his friend, as if he had heard nothing, " the difficulty is that there 's no nation in the world that can lick us." It was true so we turned to and licked ourselves. And it seems to me that a young giant who for the sake of order and humanity scourges himself at home is not very likely wantonly to insult and outrage his neighbors. " If you put a million of men under arms," said Europe, " you will inevitably end in a military despotism." And within six months of the surrender of Lee an English gentle- man found himself in a huge warehouse in Chicago, surrounded by scores of clerks, quietly engaged with merchandise and ledgers. " But did you go on so through the war ? " asked the gentleman. " Oh, no, sir. That young man was a corporal, that was a lieutenant, that was a major, that was a colonel. Twenty-seven of us were officers in the army." " I-n-d-e-e-d ! " said the Englishman. And all Europe, looking across the sea at the same spectacle, magnified by hundreds of thousands of citizens quietly reengaged in their various pursuits, echoed the astonished exclamation: "I-n-d-e-e-d ! " For it saw that a million of men were in arms for the very purpose of returning to their offices and warehouses, to sell their merchandise and post their ledgers in tranquillity. Yes, the great army that for four years shook this continent with its march and countermarch was only the Yankee constable going his rounds. The British Tory mind did not believe that any popular THE NEW ENGLAND TOWN MEETING. 331 government could subdue so formidable a rebellion. Mr. Gladstone is not a Tory, but even he said : " Great Britain could not do it, sir," and what Great Britain could not do he did not believe could be done. Perhaps he would have thought differently could he have heard what a friend of mine did when the Massachusetts Sixth Regiment passed through New York on its way to Washington. It was the first sign of war that New York had seen, and, as Broadway stared gloomily at the soldiers steadily march- ing, my friend stepped into the street and, walking by the side of one of the ranks, asked the soldier nearest him from what part of the state he came. The soldier, solely intent upon stepping in time, made his reply in measure with the drumbeat, " From Bunk-er Hill ; from Bunk-er Hill ; from Bunk-er Hill." Mr. Gladstone is an Englishman and a scholar. Had he walked by the side of that soldier, remembering Cromwell's Ironsides, who trusted in God and kept their powder dry, I think he would not have declared, as he did, that " Jefferson Davis had created a nation," but he would rather have said: " If Bunker Hill sends the first soldiers to this war, it is already decided. My lords and gentlemen, John Bull had better touch no American bonds which Bunker Hill does not indorse." (From Orations and Addresses by GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers.) SAMUEL ADAMS AND THE NEW ENGLAND TOWN MEETING. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. UNTIL 1768 Samuel Adams did not despair of a peaceful issue of the quarrel with Great Britain. But when, in May of that year, the British frigate Romney sailed into Boston 332 THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER. Harbor, and her shotted guns were trained upon the town, he saw that the question was changed. From that moment he knw that America must be free or slave. On that gray December evening, two years later, when he rose in the Old South and in a clear, calm voice said: " This meeting can do nothing more to save the country," and so gave the word for the march to the tea ships, he compre- hended more clearly, perhaps, than any other man in the colonies the immense and far-reaching consequences of his words. He was ready to throw the tea overboard, because he was ready to throw overboard the king and Parliament of England. During the ten years from the passage of the Stamp Act to the day of Lexington and Concord, this poor man, in an obscure provincial town beyond the sea, was engaged with the British ministry in one of the mightiest contests that history affords. Not a word in Parliament that he did not hear; not an act in the Cabinet that he did not see. With brain and heart and conscience all alive, he opposed every hostile order in council with a British precedent. Against the government of Great Britain he arrayed the battery of principles impregnable with the accumulated strength of centuries of British conviction. He was not eloquent, like Otis, nor scholarly, like Quincy, nor all-fascinating, like Warren; yet, bound heart to heart with these great men, his friends, the plainest, simplest, austerest among them, he gathered all their separate gifts, and, adding to them his own, fused the whole in the glow of that untiring energy, that unerring perception, that sublime will which moved before the chosen people of the colonies a pillar of cloud by day, of fire by night. Intrenched in his own honesty, the king's gold could not buy him. Enshrined in the love of his fellow citizens, the king's writ could not take him. And when, on the morning, THE NEW ENGLAND TOWN MEETING. 333 the king's troops marched to seize him, his sublime faith saw beyond the clouds of the moment the rising sun of the America that we behold ; and, careless of himself, mindful only of his country, he exultingly exclaimed : " Oh, what a glorious morning ! " Yet this man held no office but that of clerk of the Assembly, to which he was yearly elected, and that of con- stant moderator of the town meeting. That was his mighty weapon. The town meeting was the alarm bell with which he aroused the continent. It was the rapier with which he fenced with the ministry. It was the claymoLe.with which he smote their counsels. It was the harp of a thousand strings that he swept into a burst of passionate defiance, or an electric call to arms, or a proud paean of exulting triumph, defiance, challenge, and exultation, all lifting the continent to independence. His indomitable will and command of the popular con- fidence played Boston against London, the provincial town meeting against the royal Parliament. So long as Faneuil Hall stands Samuel Adams will not want his most fitting monument ; and when Faneuil Hall falls its name with his will be found written as with a sunbeam upon every faithful American heart. (From Orations and Addresses by GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, copyright, 1894, by Harper and Brothers.) EXERCISES IN PRONUNCIATION. THE following words, which, with a few exceptions are from the extracts in THE NEW CENTURY SPEAKER, have been selected for exercises in pronuncia- tion. It is expected that the student, in preparation for these exercises, will con- sult the dictionary or dictionaries designated by the instructor. The words have been chosen so as to direct attention especially to the proper sound of vowels, the full presentation of consonants that are not silent, and the right division and accentuation of syllables. Accurate Achilles Adriatic ^Eolian Agincourt Alar ic Alcibiades A I debar an Alias Aliens Ally Alternate Amalfi Ameliorating Amen America Amiens Amphibious Amphitheater Anarchasis Anarchy Anatomist Andre Annihilate Antarcs Antinomians Antithetical Apennines Apostle Appomattox Appreciation Arab Arbaces Arbutus Archangel Archon Arctic Aristocrat Armada Armenia Asiatic Asmodean Asm ode us Asseveration Association Attitude August Aureole Aurora A usterlitz Badajos Balaklava Balzac Baptismal Bartholdi Basilisk Bastile Beaconsfield Beelzebtib Behemoth Behring (strait) Beloved (adj.) Beneath Bengal Berlin Bestial Bestiality Bethlehem Biding Biographer Bivouac Blatant Blessed (adj.) Boisterous Bombardment 336 EXERCISES IN PRONUNCIATION. Bombastic Coffin Denunciation Borysthenes Cognizance Deploy Bosphorus Coligny, de Deprecation Bourbon Columns Depreciation Bravo Combatants Deranged Brazil Commentary Desaix Brethren Com modus Desisted Brougham Commune Despicable Bulgaria Compensate Detail Buoy Comrades De Tocqueville Buoyant Concentrate Detonation Burgoyne Concord Detour Butcher Confident Devastated Byzantine Confines Dignitary Confiscate Diplomatist Cadiz Congressional Disabled Cajoled Consul Disarms Cambronne Consummate Disaster Campagna Contemplate Disgraced Capitoline Continuity Disguise Caracalla Corps Disheveled Caribbean Counterscarp Dishonored Casualties Courteous Dismount Catching Courtesy Dissolve Caucasian Coxswain Dissonance Cauldron Croesus Drama Cawnpore Cromwell Dyspepsia Cayenne Crucial Cayuga Crusades Ecclesiastics Ceremony Crystallization Economic Charlemagne Curriculum Edinburgh Chattanooga Cuticle Education Chesapeake Cycles Egotism Chickamauga Czar Either Chinese Elba Chivalry D'Aguesseau Elbe Christian Daubs Electric Christianity Daunted Elysian Civilization Decades Emaciate Cceur de Lion Demonstrate Emaciated EXERCISES IN PRONUNCIATION. 337 Emendation Food Guerriere Empyrean Forensic Guillotine Enervate Formidable Guiteau Enfranchised Fortnight Guizot Enginery Fountain Gymnasium Enigma Fragmentary Enigmatic Fraternize Haiti Enthusiasm Fratricide Halcyon Enunciate Fraught Harass Environed Frequenters Hasten Epicurean Friends Haunt Epoch From Havelock Equable Fulmined Hawaii Eros Futile Hearth Euphemisms Hegira Evangelical Gaelic Height Evening Galileo Heinous Evident Gallows Hellenic Exasperate Gamut Henghist Executive Garibaldi Heraldic Executor Gaunt Herbage Exhausted Generally Herculean Exhilarating Genial Heroic Exist Genoa Heronry Expatriated Geyser History Exquisite Ghibelline Holidays Extirpate Giaour Homage Eyrie Gibbet Homeopathic Gibraltar Homogeneity Familiarity Gigantic Honest Faneuil Gist Horizon Faust Glacier Horologe February Glaucus Hospitable Federalist Gladiators Hostage Fidelity Gladstone Hovel Finance Glamor Hover Financial Gloucester Huguenot Fiord God Humble Floes Golgotha Humboldt Fonta ineblea u Grimy Humorous 338 EXERCISES TX PRONUNCIATION. lago Jerusalem Lineament Ibrahim Pasha Jesuit Lisle Idea Jew Literature Idyl Joan of Arc Lithe Ignominy Jocund Livelong Illinois Joust Loathe Illusive Jovial Lodi Imbecile (adj.) Jubilate Louisburg Incisive Judaic Loiiisiana Incoherent Jura Louvre Incomparable Juvenile Luc know Indecorous Luxembourg Indissolubly Kaleidoscope Luxuriance Industry Kansas Luxurious Ineffably Katahdin Lyceum Inevitable Kearney Lycidas Infamous Kearsarge Inherent Kept Madeleine Inimitable Khartoum Magnanimity Inquiry Khedive Magyar Insatiate Khiva Maintenance Instead Knout Malevolent Interesting Kohinopr Manassas Interminable Koran Maniacally Intrepidly Kossuth Marauder Intrigue Koszta Marengo Iowa Martinique Irreparable Lacerate Measure Irrepressible Lachesis Medicis, de Irresistible Lafayette Melodrama Isolation Languor Memorable Italian Laocoon Mercenaries Latent Micawber Jacobean Launched Michael Jamaica Learned (adj.) Military Japanese Legend Militiamen Jaunt Legendary Miltiades Javelin Lenient Misolonghi Jean Valjean Leyden Missiles Jena Libertines Mississippi EXERCISES IN PRONUNCIATION. 339 Missouri Obelisk Pleasure Moccasin Objurgate Plebeian Mockery Obligatory Plutarch Moliere Oblique Pompeii Momentous Obloquy Portentous Monk Oceanic Praetor Monolith Octavo Precedent Mont Blanc Odious Predecessors Montcalm Officer Primate Montenegro Often Proscenium Montezuma Ominously Prussia Montmorency Opponent Psalm Morass Oppugner Pygmalion Moscow Orchestra Pyramidal Moslem Ordeal Pyrenees Municipal Organization Museum Orgies Quaff Orinoco Qualm Naiad Orion Quarantine (n.) Napier Orison Quay Napoleonic Orpheus Quebec Nascent Osawatomie Querulous Naseby Ottoman Quincy Nationality Outmaneuvered Quirinal Naturalization Quixotic Navarre Pageant Quote Nearest Pandects Necropolis Parliament Recess Negotiate Patriotism Recreant Nemean Pauline Redolent Nemesis Pedestal Redoubtable Neva Pendulum Refluent Newfoundland Perfume Requiem New Orleans Perpetuity Resignation Niagara Perturbation Retributive Nihilism Phidippides Revolted Nomad Philharmonic Ribaldry None Philip pi Rio Janeiro Philistine Rizzio Oaths Plateau Roanoke 340 EXERCISES IN PRONUNCIATION. Romance Sovereign Unfrequented Root Squire Uninteresting Rosecrans Stalwart Unprecedenetd Rothschilds Status Usage Route Staunch Usurpation Routed Stilicho Utah Ruffianism Stolid Russia Suakim Vagary Subtile Vanquish Sacrifice Suffice Varuna Saint Germain aux Sultan Vaunt Auxerrois Summarily Vehement Saladin Surcease Velaria Savonarola Surveillance Venezuela Sccsvola Venial Scinde Te Deum Vera Cruz Sciot Tenerife Versatile Seamstress Territory Vicar Sevastopol Testimony Vienna Sedan Thames Vindicative Seine Thermopylae Virile Sepoys Thyme Visor Sergeant Ticonderoga Vituperation Servile Tiny Vive L'Empereur Sharon Titanic Voluntarily Shenandoah Toussaint ISOuverture Vosges Shikar poor Trafalgar Vulpine Shiloh Traversed Shone Treasure Waft Shriek Tremendous Wallenstein, von Shrill Tripoli Warrior Sierras Triumvir Warwick Silhouette Tuileries Way Simultaneous Tumbril Westminster Sinai Turin Wherefore Slavic Which Somber Ulpian Windsor Sorceress Umbrageous Winkelried, von Soudan Uncourteous Wolseley Souvenir Underneath Wolsey EXERCISES IN PRONUNCIATION. 341 Wounded Yarmouth Zodiacal Wreathe Yea Zoological Wrestler Yesterday Zoroaster Yosemite Zouave Xantippe Youths Zurich Xenophon Zutphen Ximenes Zealot Zuyder Zee Zeus Zwingle ALPHABETICAL LIST OF CONTENTS. Abraham Lincoln James A. Garfield . . . 263 American and the Corsican, The . . William H. Seward . . 285 American Shipbuilding James G. Elaine .... 246 Americanism Henry Cabot Lodge . . . 181 Amnesty of Jefferson Davis, The . . James G. Elaine .... 249 Andre and Hale Chauncey M. Depew . . 190 Appeal to Young Men, An .... James A. Garfield . . . 257 Army of the Potomac, The .... Chauncey M. Depew . . 191 Blue and the Gray, The Henry Cabot Lodge . . . 175 Boat Race, The Thomas Hughes .... i Burgoyne's Surrender George William Curtis . 323 Capture of Andre, The . . . . . Chauncey M. Depew . , 187 Capture of Lookout Mountain, The . Benjamin F. Taylor . . 4 Career of Gordon, The Frederick /. Swift ... 6 Catherine de Medicis William M. Punshon . . 8 Cause of Bunker Hill, The .... George William Curtis . 329 Centralization in the United States . Henry W. Grady . . . 232 Chinese Immigration James G. Elaine .... 242 Christian Citizenship Charles H. Parkhurst . . 213 Compromise of Principle Henry Ward Beecher . . 269 Confederate Sergeant, The . . . . Adapted 10 Convict's Death, The Charles Dickens .... 12 Corruption of Municipal Government, The Charles H. Parkhurst . . 209 Cuba and Armenia Henry Cabot Lodge . . . 166 Culture in Emergencies Adapted 14 Daniel O'Connell the Orator . . . Wendell Phillips . ... 306 Daniel O'ConnelPs Epitaph .... William H. Seward . . . 287 Daniel O'ConnelPs Power over the Irish People Wendell Phillips .... 309 344 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF CONTENTS. I'AGE Death of Garfield, The James G. Blaine . . . . 241 Defense of Alleged Conspirators against the Michigan Central Railroad Company .... William H. Seward . . 291 Destruction of Jerusalem, The . . Frank D, Bud long ... 16 Doom of Claudius and Cynthia, The (Abridged) Maurice Thompson ... 19 Elements of National Wealth, The . James G. Blaine .... 248 Eulogy on Henry Ward Beecher . . Joseph Parker, D.D. . . 21 Fort Wagner Anna E. Dickinson . . 24 General Thomas at Chickamauga . . James A. Garfield . . . 255 General's Client, The Adapted 27 Graves of Union Soldiers at Arling- ton, The James A. Garfield . . . 265 Great Peril of Unrestricted Immigra- tion, The Henry Cabot Lodge . . . 177 Greatness of Obedience, The . . . Frederic W. Farrar . . 29 Guiteau the Assassin John K. Porter .... 31 Heroism of Horatio Nelson, The . . Frank V. Mills .... 33 Historic Codfish, The Richard W. Irwin ... 35 Home Rule for Ireland . . . . . Chauncey M. Depew . . 201 Homes of the People Parke Godwin .... 39 Idols Wendell Phillips . ... 311 Immortality of True Patriotism . . James A. Garfield . . . 259 Jean Valjean's Sacrifice Victor Hugo 41 John A. Logan George R. Peck .... 47 John Brown of Osawatomie .... Anonymous 45 Knights of Labor T. V. Powderly .... 49 Last Night of Misolonghi, The . . Edwin A. Grosvenor . . 52 Law and Humanity Raymond N. Kellogg . . 56 Lawyer and Free Institutions, The . Chauncey M. Depew . . 198 Legacy of Grant, The Chauncey M. Depew . . 194 " Little David " of Nations, The . . William C. Duncan . . 58 Loss of the " Arctic " Henry Ward Beecher . . 276 Macaulay William M. Punshon . . 61 Macaulay's Prophecy James A. Garfield . . . 261 Man for the Crisis, The Adapted 63 Mission of Thomas Hood, The . . Adapted 67 Moral Courage Frederic W. Farrar . . 69 Moral Crisis, A Charles //. Parkhurst . . 211 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF CONTENTS. 345 PAGE Murder of Lovejoy, The Wendell Phillips .... 299 Napoleon Bonaparte and Toussaint L'Ouverture Wendell Phillips . . . . 301 Napoleon's Ambition and Shelley's Doubt William De Shon ... 71 National Flag, The Henry Ward Beecher . . 274 Negro in American History, The . . Frank F. Laird .... 74 New Englander in History, The . . //. L. Wayland .... 76 New South, The Henry W. Grady ... 234 North and the African, The . . . Henry Ward Beecher . . 278 "Old Ironsides" Henry Cabot Lodge . . . 161 Opening of the Mississippi in 1862, The William E. Lewis ... 78 Orator's Cause, The John D. Wright .... 80 Pathos of Thackeray and Dickens, The Julien M. Elliott ... 82 Paul Revere's Ride George William Curtis . 325 Permanence of Grant's Fame, The . James G. Blaine .... 244 Piety and Civic Virtue Charles H. Parkhtirst . . 215 Place of Athletics in College Life, The Chauncey M. Depew . . 196 Plea for Enthusiasm, A Anonymous 87 Plea for William Freeman, A ... William H. Seward . . 283 Poetry the Language of Symbolism . Frederick W. Robertson . 85 Prohibition in Atlanta Henry W. Grady . . . 227 Public Opinion Wendell Phillips . . . . 315 Pulpit and Politics, The Charles H. Parkhurst . . 217 Puritan of Essex County, The . . . Henry Cabot Lodge . . . 179 Race, The Lew Wallace 89 Realism of Dickens, The William A. Lathrop . . 92 Relief of Luck now, The Adapted 94 Rescue, The Benjamin F. Taylor . . 97 Review of the Grand Army, The . . Adapted 98 Rights and Duties Frederick W. Robertson . 100 Rub-a-dub Agitation, A George William Curtis . 321 Russia the Enigma of Europe . . . Gilbert H. Grosvenor . . 102 Samuel Adams and the New Eng- land Town Meeting .... George William Curtis . 331 Savonarola William M. Punshon . . 104 Scholar in Public Life, The .... Chauncey M. Depew . . 203 Scholar's Distrust, The Wendell Phillips ... 297 346 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF CONTENTS. Shakespeare's Mark Antony . . . Walter B. Winchell . . 106 Signal Man, The Charles Dickens . . . . 109 Signing of the Declaration, The . . George Lippard . . . . 1 1 1 Sir Walter Scott in Westminster . . John Hay 114 Slave of Boston, The Theodore Parker . . . 115 South and Her Problems, The . . . Henry W. Grady . . . 230 Southern Negro, The Henry W. Grady . . . 225 Spirit of Conquest, The Thomas Corwin . . . . 117 Spirit of Puritanism, The .... George William Curtis . 327 Storming of Mission Ridge, The . . Benjamin F. Taylor . . 119 Sun of Liberty, The Victor Hugo 124 Sunday Newspaper, The Herrick Johnson, D.D. . 122 Suppressed Repudiation Henry Ward Beecher . . 270 Sydney Carton's Death Charles Dickens .... 126 Toussaint L'Ouverture's Place among Great Men Wendell Phillips .... 303 Traditions of Massachusetts, The . Henry Cabot Lodge . . . 172 Traitor's Deathbed, The George Lippard .... 128 Tribute to Massachusetts, A ... Henry Cabot Lodge . . . 164 Two of Dickens' Villains .... Julien M. Elliott . , . 131 Two Queens Franklin Addington . . 133 Unconscious Greatness of Stonewall Jackson, The Moses D. Hoge, D.D. . . 135 University the Training Camp of the Future, The Henry W. Grady . . . 223 Unknown Rider, The George Lippard . . . . 138 Venezuela Question, The .... Henry. Cabot Lodge . . . 170 Vengeance of the Flag, The . . . Henry D. Esterbrooke . . 140 Vesuvius and the Egyptian .... Edward Bt4hver Lytton . 143 Victor of Marengo, The Anonymous 146 Voyage of the " Fram," The . . . Arthur P. Phint . . . . 148 War and Peace Frederick W. Robertson . 1 50 Waterloo /. T. Headley 152 Welcome to Louis Kossuth .... William H. Seward . . . 290 Wendell Phillips Henry Ward Beecher . . 272 What We Owe the Pilgrims . . . Wendell Phillips . . . . 317 William Lloyd Garrison Wendell Phillips . . . . 313 Wolfe at Quebec Frank D. Budlong . . . 154 ADVERTISEMENTS English Composition and Rhetoric Text-books and works of reference for high schools, academies, and colleges. Lessons in English. Adapted to the study of American Classics. A text-book for high schools and academies. By SARA E. H. LOCK- WOOD, formerly Teacher of English in the High School, New Haven Conn. Cloth. 403 pages. For introduction, $1.12. A Practical Course in English Composition. By ALPHONSO G. NEW- COMER, Assistant Professor of English in Leland Stanford Junior University. Cloth. 249 pages. Eor introduction, 80 cents. A Method of English Composition. By T. 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