Modern Eloquence Volume Ii Part 14

I thought that sublime setting of primeval forest and pouring canon was worthy of the lines; I am sure the dewless, crystalline air never vibrated to strains of more solemn music.

Certainly our poet can never be numbered among the great popular writers of all times. He has told no story; he has never unpacked his heart in public; he has never thrown the reins on the neck of the winged horse, and let his imagination carry him where it listed. "Ah! the crowd must have emphatic warrant." Its suffrages are not for the cool, collected observer, whose eye no glitter can ever dazzle, no mist suffuse. The many cannot but resent that air of lofty intelligence, that pale and subtle smile. But he will hold a place forever among that limited number who, like Lucretius and Epicurus--without rage or defiance, even without unbecoming mirth--look deep into the tangled mysteries of things; refuse credence to the absurd, and allegiance to the arrogant authority, sufficiently conscious of fallibility to be tolerant of all opinions; with a faith too wide for doctrine and a benevolence untrammelled by creed, too wise to be wholly poets, and yet too surely poets to be implacably wise. [Loud cheers.]

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES

NATIONAL SENTIMENTS

[Speech of Rutherford B. Hayes, President of the United States, at the first annual banquet of the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1880. The President of the Society, Benjamin D.

Silliman, in introducing him, said: "Gentlemen, we are honored this evening by the presence of an ill.u.s.trious descendant of New England, the Chief Magistrate of the Nation. [Cheers.] He is about retiring from his high position, with the respect, admiration and the grat.i.tude of the people for the great wisdom, the pure purpose, the steady will and the unwavering firmness with which he has administered the government, preserved its honor and secured its property. [Loud cheers.] I propose to you, as our first toast, 'The President of the United States.'"]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--We have often heard, we often hear, the phrase "New England ideas." It is said, and I think said truly, that these ideas have a large and growing influence in shaping the affairs of the people of the United States. It is not meant, I suppose, that the principles referred to in this phrase, are peculiar to New England, but merely that in New England they are generally accepted, and that perhaps there they had their first practical ill.u.s.tration.

These ideas, these principles generally termed New England ideas, and New England principles, it seems to me, have had much to do with that prosperity which we are now enjoying, and about which we are perhaps apt to be too boastful, but for which it is certain we cannot be too grateful. [Applause.]

The subject, New England ideas, is altogether too large a one for me, or anybody, to discuss this evening. If it were to be done at length, in protracted speaking, we have our friends here, able and with a reputation for capacity in that way. Our friend, Mr. Evarts, for example [applause], Mr. Beecher [applause], and I am confident that I shall be excused for naming in this connection, above all, our friend General Grant. [Loud applause.]

Leaving then to them the discussion of the larger topic, I must content myself with the humbler duty of merely naming the New England ideas to which I refer.

New England believes that every man and woman, under the law ought to have an equal chance and an equal hope with every other man and woman [applause], and believes that in a country where that is secured individuals and society will have their highest development and the largest allotment of human happiness. [Applause.] New England believes that equal rights can be best secured in a country where every child is provided freely with the means of education. [Applause.] New England believes that the road--the only road, the sure road--to unquestioned credit and a sound financial condition is the exact and punctual fulfilment of every pecuniary obligation, public and private [applause], according to its letter and spirit. [Applause.] New England believes in the home, and in the virtues that make home happy [cries of "Good!"], and New England will tolerate, so far as depends on her, no inst.i.tutions and no practices in any state or territory which are inconsistent with the sacredness of the family relation. [Cries of "Good!"] New England cherishes the sentiment of nationality and believes in a general government strong enough to maintain its authority, to enforce the laws and to preserve and to perpetuate the Union. [Applause.]

Now, with these New England ideas everywhere accepted and prevailing--to repeat, with just and equal laws, administered under the watchful eyes of educated voters; with honesty in all moneyed transactions; with the New England home and the New England family as the foundation of society; with national sentiments prevailing everywhere in the country; we shall not lack that remaining crowning merit of New England life which lends to every peopled landscape its chief interest and glory, the spires pointing heavenward that tell to every man who sees them that the descendants of the Pilgrims still hold to and cherish, and love that which brought their fathers to this continent, which they here sought and here found--freedom to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d. [Long-continued applause.]

JOSEPH C. HENDRIX

THE WAMPUM OF THE INDIANS

[Speech of Joseph C. Hendrix at the fifteenth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1894. The President, Robert D. Benedict, introducing the speaker, said: "I do not remember ever to have heard at any of the New England festivals which I have attended any discussion of the currency questions which plagued the Pilgrims. We cannot doubt that they had such questions for such questions must arise where there are different currencies. But the attention of our committee this year has naturally been drawn in that direction, and they have selected as the next subject one of the currencies with which the Pilgrims had to deal: 'The Wampum of the Indians.' Upon this subject they have invited the Hon. Joseph C.

Hendrix to speak. Doubtless he may draw from that subject lessons that will be of interest and of use for the present day."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--While your poetic souls are attuned to the sweet music of the last speech, I must chide the Fates which compel me to so suddenly precipitate upon you a discussion of a practical nature, especially when at the very outset I must begin to talk about clams. [Laughter.] For when we begin to consider wampum we have to begin to consider the familiar hard-sh.e.l.l clam of daily use, which was the basis of wampum. At this stage of the feast, after the confections contained in that eulogium pa.s.sed upon you by the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts [Frederick T. Greenhalge], and after that private parlor-car, canvas-back-duck, cold-champagne view of consolidation taken by the great trunk-line president [Chauncey M.

Depew] [laughter], can you endure anything savoring of the clam? Would you not prefer to go home and sleep upon what you already have? Yet every loyal son of Long Island ought to be partial to clams. The Mayor [Charles A. Schieren], who typifies what a German head can do in a contest with an Irish appet.i.te, should love them because they reside within the city limits, and have ceased to vote in Gravesend. You, Mr.

Chairman, as a lawyer, ought to tolerate the clam, for there are two sides to the case, and there's meat inside. Our friend the preacher [Rev. Samuel A. Eliot] knows that they are as good every day in the week as they are on Sunday. Dr. Johnson [Dr. J. G. Johnson] there favors them as part of his internal revenue system. The Mugwumps cannot object to them, because they change from side to side so easily. The Democrats ought to like anything that is always digging a hole for itself, and the Republicans cannot but be patient with what comes on top at the change of the tide. [Laughter.] So, gentlemen, I present to you the clam.

Professor Hooper [Franklin W. Hooper] tells me to call it the _Venus Mercenaria_, but we shall have to wait for our free public library before venturing so far.

You remember, when you were children, looking over the old story-book handed down to you by the Puritan fathers, that one of the conundrums with which the gayety of their times was ill.u.s.trated was, "Who was the shortest man in the Bible?" The answer was, "Bildad, the Shuhite;" but now, in the revised text it is Peter, because Peter said: "Silver and gold have I none," and no one could be shorter than that. The North American Indian was no better off than Peter in his gold reserve or silver supply; but he managed to get along with the quahog clam. That was the money substance out of which he made the wampum, and the sh.e.l.l-heaps scattered over the island are mute monuments to an industry which was blasted by the demonetization of the hard-sh.e.l.l clam. Wampum was a good money in the Indian civilization. It was the product of human labor as difficult and tedious as the labor of the gold-miner of to-day.

It had intrinsic value, for it was redeemable in anything the Indian had to give, from his skill in the chase to his squaw. It took time, patience, endurance and skill to make a thing of beauty out of a clam, even in the eyes of an Indian, but when the squaws and the old men had ground down the tough end of the sh.e.l.l to the size of a wheat straw, and had bored it with a sliver of flint, and strung it upon a thew of deerskin, and tested its smoothness on the noses, they had an article which had as much power over an Indian mind as a grain of gold to-day has over us. There were two kinds of wampum, the blue and the white. The Montauks to this day know that there is a difference between the two.

The blue came from our clam. The white, which was the product of the periwinkle, did not need so much labor to fit it for use as wampum, and it was cheaper. The blue was the gold; the white was the silver. One blue bead was worth two white ones. The Indians did not try to keep up any parity of the beads. They let each kind go for just what it was worth. The Puritans used to restring the beads and keep the blue ones.

Then the Indians strung their scalps.

Why was wampum good money in its time? The supply was limited. It took a day to make four or five beads. It was in itself a thing of value to the Indian for ornament. It was easily carried about from place to place. It was practically indestructible. It was always alike. It was divisible.

The value attached to it did not vary. It was not easily counterfeited.

So it was that it became the money of the colonists; a legal tender in Ma.s.sachusetts and the tool of the primitive commerce of this continent.

The Puritan took it for firewater and gave it back for furs. Long Island was the great mint for this pastoral coinage. It was called the "Mine of the New Netherlands." The Indian walked the beach at Rockaway, dug his toes in the sand, turned up a clam, and after swallowing the contents carried the sh.e.l.ls to the mint. Gold and silver at the mouth of a mine obtain their chief value from the labor it takes to get the metals; wampum was the refinement by labor of a money substance free to all. The redemption of wampum was perfect. To the Indians it was a seal to treaties, an amulet in danger, an affidavit, small change, a savings'

bank, a wedding ring and a dress suit. To this day the belt of wampum is the storehouse of Indian treasure. In the Six Nations, when a big chief made an a.s.sertion in council, he laid down a belt of wampum, as though to say, "Money talks." The Iroquois sent a belt of it to the King of England when they asked his protection. William Penn got a strip when he made his treaty. The Indians braided rude pictures into it, which recorded great events. They talked their ideas into it, as we do into a phonograph. They sent messages in it. White beads between a row of dark ones represented a path of peace, as though to say: "Big chief no longer got Congress on his hands." A string of dark beads was a message of war or of the death of a chief, and a string of white beads rolled in mud was equivalent to saying that there was c.r.a.pe on the door of Tammany Hall. So you see that it was a combined post-office, telegraph, telephone, phonograph and newspaper.

The Iroquois had a keeper of wampum--a sort of secretary of the treasury without the task of keeping nine different kinds of money on a parity.

This old Indian financier had simple and correct principles. No one could persuade him to issue birch-bark promises to pay and delude himself with the belief that he could thus create money. He certainly would have called them a debt, and would have paid them off as fast as he could. Nor can we imagine him trying to sustain the value of the white wampum after the Puritans started in to make it out of oyster sh.e.l.ls by machinery. Nor would he have bought it, not needing it, and have issued against it his promises to pay in good wampum as fast and as often as they were presented.

It was said that wampum was so cunningly made that neither Jew nor Devil could counterfeit it. Nevertheless a Connecticut Yankee rigged up a machine that so disturbed the market value of the beads that in a short time the Long Island mints were closed to the free coinage of clams.

Wampum was demonetized through counterfeit, overproduction and imitation; but when this occurred the gentle Puritan didn't have enough of it left to supply the museums. The Indian had parted with his lands and his furs, had redeemed all the outstanding wampum with his labor, and when he went to market to get firewater, he was taught that he must have gold and silver to get it. Then he wanted to ride in blood up to his horse's bridles. Commerce had found a better tool than wampum had become. The buccaneers and the pirates had brought in silver and that defied the Connecticut man's machinery or the Dutchman's imitations. The years pa.s.s by and commerce finds that silver, because of overproduction, becomes uncertain and erratic in value, and with the same instinct it chooses gold as a standard of value. A coin of unsteady value is like a knife of uncertain sharpness. It is thrown aside for one that can do all that is expected of it. Gold is such a tool. It is the standard of all first-cla.s.s nations. It is to-day, and it will remain, the standard of this Republic.

The value of the gold dollar is not in the pictures on it. It is in the grains of gold in it. Smash it and melt it, and it buys one hundred cents' worth the world over. Deface a silver dollar and fifty cents of its value goes off yonder among the silent stars. Free coinage means that the silver miner may make fifty cents' worth of silver cancel a dollar's worth of debts. This is a greenback doctrine in a silver capsule. Bimetallism is a diplomatic term for international use.

Monometallism with silver as the metal is the dream of the Populist and of the poor deluded Democratic gra.s.shoppers who dance by the moons.h.i.+ne until they get frost-bitten.

The free-silver heresy is about dead. It has cost this country, at to-day's price for silver, $170,000,000. The few saddened priests of this unhappy fetich who remain active find their disciples all rallying round the standard of currency reform. The report of the Secretary of the Treasury is a confession of national financial sins, and a profession of faith in sound money doctrines. Every business man will watch with keen interest the progress of a plan for the reform in our currency. You all know that the straight road is the retirement of the greenback and the Treasury note, and the withdrawal of the Government from the banking business, and you will naturally distrust any makes.h.i.+ft measures. The greenback is a war debt, and a debt that is now troublesome. We are funding and refunding it in gold daily, and are still paying it out as currency to come back after gold. Any scheme to sequestrate, to hide it under a bushel, or to put it under lock and key, is a shallow device. The way to retire it is to retire it. It has served its full purpose, and there never was a better time than now to call it in.

In twelve years all our Government debt matures. The national banking system based upon it must expire with it, unless existing laws are changed. This system has served the nation well. No one has ever lost a dollar by a national bank note. The system is worth preserving, and with a little more liberal treatment it can be made to serve until a currency based upon commercial credits and linked to a safety fund, a system which works so admirably in Canada, can be engrafted upon it.

There is a great hurry to create such a system now on a basis of the partial sequestration of the greenback and the Treasury note, but the bottom principle is wrong. The Government should discourage a commercial credit currency based upon a public credit currency, which, in turn, rests upon a slender gold deposit, exposed to every holder of a Government demand note. A credit currency is a double-edged tool, and needs to be handled with great care. We have had so much crazy-quilt finance that I am sure that we want no more of it. We have been sorely punished for our financial sins in the past, and now that we are repentant, we want to get everything right before we go ahead with our full native energy. We have suffered from the distrust of the world, and then from our own distrust. In retracing our steps let us be sure that we are on solid ground, and make our "wampum" as good as the best there is in the world. [Applause.]

LORD HERSCh.e.l.l

GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES

[Speech of Lord Farrer Hersch.e.l.l at the 130th annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, November 15, 1898. Lord Hersch.e.l.l was present in this country as President of the Joint High Commission appointed to arbitrate the dispute between Canada and the United States relative to the Bering Sea seal fisheries. Alexander E.

Orr, President of the Chamber, proposed the toast to which Lord Hersch.e.l.l spoke: "The Future Relations between Great Britain and the United States--a determined union of heart and purpose will carry the forces of justice and humanity the world over."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE:--I a.s.sure you that I am most deeply sensible of the warm welcome that you have extended to me, and grateful for the manner in which you have received the words which were uttered introducing me to you. But I can a.s.sure you that I rejoiced to hear the cheers with which this toast was greeted, not merely because they were a compliment to myself, but because I was satisfied that you were regarding me rather in the character of a representative of my country, and that there rang in those cheers sentiments of good will to the country that I have the honor to represent to-night. [Applause.] And I heard in them something more than that--they indicated to me a conviction that in the continuance of good relations between your country and mine, there were involved blessings, priceless blessings, to the countries we love so well. [Applause.]

I can a.s.sure you that all my countrymen reciprocate the feeling which has been expressed; that they desire, as you do, that the cordial relations.h.i.+p should continue, and that they have toward the United States of America nothing but feelings of good will and a desire for its welfare and progress. [Applause.] I have said--all my countrymen. I ought, perhaps, not to have been so bold. There are some fools in all lands. [Laughter.] They are the product of every soil. No nation has a monopoly of them. [Laughter.] But with these exceptions, I can speak, I think, for all my countrymen. The echoes of those now distant events of a century and a quarter ago, which left much soreness behind them, have died away in England. [Applause.] We can rejoice as much as you rejoice to-day, in the fact that you are one of the leading nations of the world. [Applause.] And there is to me a peculiar interest in the fact that I, who have had the honor to fill the office of Lord Chancellor, should be here as the representative of my country engaged in negotiations between Great Britain and the United States. A century and a quarter ago or more, a predecessor of mine in that high office made a most unfortunately foolish prediction. He said, with reference to these (at that time) colonies: "If they withdraw their allegiance, we shall withdraw our protection; and then they will soon be overrun by the little States of Genoa and San Marino." [Laughter.] I am happy to say--I must say it for the credit of the office--that there was even then a distinguished lawyer who was to succeed the Lord Chancellor to whom I have referred, who made a speech at which to-day neither I nor any one else need blush. But I could not help thinking of those words when I reflected that I was here negotiating with the representatives of a mighty nation of seventy millions of people, who have not been overrun by the little Republics of Genoa and San Marino [laughter], although undoubtedly, in a sense very different from that which the speaker intended, you may have been overrun by the natives of some of the Italian towns. [Laughter.]

Gentlemen, there is to-day in my country, as in yours, a pride in the United States. We cannot forget that if you won your independence, if you achieved your liberties, if you laid the foundations of your const.i.tution, if you prepared for such a nation as exists here to-day, you were at that time colonists of Great Britain. The men who laid the foundation stones of the United States, in which you to-day glory, were those who had gone out from amongst us, who had in the country of my birth imbibed for the most part their traditions of liberty, and their desire and determination to achieve it; and, therefore, with no misgiving, with nothing but a feeling of pride, we may rejoice in your success and in your progress. We long ago admitted the follies and the wrong-doings of those times, as freely as you could insist upon them yourselves. [Applause.]

I am not going to dwell upon that aspect of the case to-night, because I am quite aware that sometimes the ready admission of wrong-doing is rather irritating than soothing. [Laughter.] I remember once hearing a learned counsel, who was conducting the trial of a case before a judge of great ability but not of the best of tempers, put a question of a character such as to shock any one accustomed to be guided by the rigid rules of evidence. Strictly in confidence, I don't think he had the least idea that it was a wrong question, but the learned judge interposed and said: "That was an improper question, Mr. so and so."

"Yes, my Lord, it was very improper." "Yes," said the judge, "you ought not to have put the question,--a most improper question." "Yes, sir; I ought not to have put it, a more improper question never was." And the more the judge reproached him the more submissive he became, until he drove the judge nearly mad. [Laughter.]

Gentlemen, there has been a great deal of discussion lately as to the exact nature of the bond which united Great Britain and the United States. Some one says blood is thicker than water, whereupon another with perverse ingenuity begins at once to a.n.a.lyze the blood and discovers that the elements are not, when resolved, precisely the same.

That, it is said, is the bond of the Anglo-Saxon race; whereupon a Scotchman insists, or a Welshman insists, that it is not all Anglo-Saxon, that there is something Celtic in its const.i.tution, and that to speak of it as the Anglo-Saxon race, either in my country or in yours, is not in strictness historically accurate. Another finds that they are the great English-speaking peoples, whereupon an ingenious man points out that there are people in Great Britain and its dependencies to whom the English language is not the most natural means of communication, and that not every inhabitant of the United States is a perfect master of the English tongue. [Laughter.]

Well, then, I saw an ingenious argument the other day to prove that it is a gross impropriety to speak of England as the mother country; that the two countries were really in the relation of sisters, and that we ought to call them sister countries, and not speak of them as mother and daughter. I am not going to enter into any of this controversy to-night.

The probability is that none of these suggested explanations is a completely adequate explanation of the bond that binds the two nations together, but that in each of them is to be found some element of truth.

I am not going to dwell on them to-night; I prefer a practical rather than a theoretical view of any subject, and they all agree in this: a tacit a.s.sertion of the fact that there is a bond which unites Great Britain and the United States such as unites no two other nations [applause and cheers]; and they express a realization of the fact that there is a very close relations.h.i.+p between the two countries. Now, undoubtedly we have at times said nasty things of one another [laughter]; but then that is not proof that we are not near relations.

[Laughter.] Indeed, it might, perhaps, be cited by some as evidence the other way. We have sometimes seemed to be very near serious--what shall I say?--attacks upon one another. But, again, that is no proof that a close relations.h.i.+p does not exist between us. It is not impossible that at some future time, when we are either of us menaced by the intervention of some third party which seriously threatens our existence or our prosperity, we may find that, whatever differences arise amongst ourselves from time to time, we shall be ready to unite in defence of each other against a stranger. [Applause and cheers.] A friend of mine who is a great champion of woman's rights, and a man of the most chivalrous disposition, when walking home one night, found a man and a woman, husband and wife, in serious controversy, and the man was just about to strike his wife. With his usual chivalry he intervened between them. In a moment they were both upon him [laughter], and he had much ado to withdraw himself from their clutches. May not that, perhaps, be an indication of the kind of action which relations may show who are not always perfectly peaceably disposed toward one another?

Gentlemen, I rejoice to think that I am here to take part in an endeavor to compose such differences as exist at present between the two nations. There is another bond of union beyond the natural one to which I have alluded, and that is the commercial interests of the two countries. I know there are some who think that no country can gain in commercial prosperity or make real progress in commerce except at the expense of some other. I believe that to be a profound mistake. I do not, of course, deny that a particular interest here or there--perhaps many interests--may suffer from the stress of international compet.i.tion, but I think we take too narrow a view when in gazing on the industrial world we fix our eyes upon this local spot or that, and consider how this or that particular place may be affected. Our interests are more widespread, strike deeper roots, roots in more different directions than we are at all times ready to admit or to conceive. And of this I am perfectly certain, that where two nations are so closely bound up in commercial intercourse as we are, neither of those nations can possibly progress in commercial prosperity, without a reflection of that commercial prosperity upon the other nation with which it deals.