[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-seventh annual dinner of
the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1882.
Josiah M. Fiske, the President, occupied the chair and called upon
General Porter to respond to the toast: "The Embarkation of the
Pilgrims."]
GENTLEMEN:--Last summer two pilgrims might have been seen
embarking from the port of New York to visit the land from which the
Pilgrim Fathers once embarked. One was the speaker who just sat down
[Chauncey M. Depew], and the other the speaker who has just arisen. I do
not know why we chose that particular time. Perhaps Mr. Choate, with his
usual disregard of the more accurate bounds of veracity, would have you
believe that we selected that time because it was a season when there
was likely to be a general vacation from dinners here. [Laughter.] Our
hopes of pleasure abroad had not risen to any dizzy height. We did not
expect that the land which so discriminating a band as the Pilgrim
Fathers had deliberately abandoned, and preferred New England thereto,
could be a very engaging country. We expected to feel at home there upon
the general principle that the Yankees never appear so much at home as
when they are visiting other people. [Laughter.]
I have noticed that Americans have a desire to go to Europe, and I have
observed, especially, that those who have certain ambitions with regard
to public life think that they ought to cross the ocean; that crossing
the water will add to their public reputations, particularly when they
think how it added to the reputation of George Washington even crossing
the Delaware River. [Laughter and applause.] The process is very simple.
You get aboard a steamer, and when you get out of sight of land you
suddenly realize that the ship has taken up seriously its corkscrew
career through the sea. Certain gastronomic uncertainties follow. You
are sailing under the British flag. You always knew that "Britannia
ruled the waves;" but the only trouble with her now is that she don't
appear to rule them straight. [Laughter.] Then you lean up against the
rail; soon you begin to look about as much discouraged as a Brooklyn
Alderman in contempt of court. Your more experienced and sympathizing
friends tell you that it will soon pass over, and it does. You even try
to beguile your misery with pleasant recollections of Shakespeare. The
only line that seems to come to your memory is the advice of Lady
Macbeth--"To bed, to bed!"--and when you are tucked away in your berth
and the ship is rolling at its worst, your more advisory friends look in
upon you, and they give you plenty of that economical advice that was
given to Joseph's brother, not to "fall out by the way." [Laughter.]
For several days you find your stomach is about in the condition of the
tariff question in the present Congress--likely to come up any minute.
This is particularly hard upon those who had been brought up in the
army, whose previous experience in this direction had been confined
entirely to throwing up earthworks. [Laughter.] You begin to realize how
naval officers sometimes have even gone so far as to throw up their
commissions. If Mr. Choate had seen Mr. Depew and myself under these
circumstances he would not have made those disparaging remarks which he
uttered to-night about the engorgement of our stomachs. If he had
turned those stomachs wrong side out and gazed upon their inner walls
through that opera-glass with which he has been looking so intently
lately upon Mrs. Langtry, he would have found that there was not even
the undigested corner of a carbuncular potato to stop the pyloric
orifice; he would have found upon those inner walls not a morsel of
those things which perish with using. [Laughter.]
But Mr. Choate must have his joke. He is a professional lawyer, and I
have frequently observed that lawyers' jokes are like an undertaker's
griefs--strictly professional. You begin now to sympathize with
everybody that ever went to sea. You think of the Pilgrim Fathers during
the tempestuous voyage in the Mayflower. You reflect how fully their
throats must have been occupied, and you can see how they originated the
practice of speaking through their noses. [Great laughter and applause.]
Why, you will get so nauseated before the trip is over at the very sight
of the white caps that you can't look at the heads of the French nurses
in Paris without feeling seasick. There are the usual "characters"
about. There is the customary foreign spinster of uncertain age that has
been visiting here, who regales you with stories of how in New York she
had twelve men at her feet. Subsequent inquiry proves that they were
chiropodists. [Laughter.]
And then you approach Ireland. You have had enough of the ocean wave,
and you think you will stop there. I have no doubt everybody present,
after hearing from the lips of the distinguished chaplain on my right as
to the character of the men who come from that country, will hereafter
always want to stop there. And when you land at Queenstown you are taken
for an American suspect. They think you are going to join the Fenian
army. They look at you as if you intended to go forth from that ship as
the dove went forth from the ark, in search of some green thing. You
assure them that the only manner in which you can be compared with that
dove is in the general peacefulness of your intentions. Then you go
wandering around by the shores of the Lakes of Killarney and the Gap of
Dunloe, that spot where the Irishman worked all day for the agent of an
absentee landlord on the promise of getting a glass of grog. At night
the agent brought out the grog to him, and the Irishman tasted it, and
he said to the agent, "Which did you put in first, the whiskey or the
water?" "Oh," said he, "the whiskey." "Ah, ha! Well, maybe I'll come to
it by and by." [Laughter.] You look around upon the army, the
constabulary, the police, and you begin to think that Ireland is a good
deal like our own city of Troy, where there are two police forces on
duty--that it is governed a great deal. You can't help thinking of the
philosophical remark made by that learned Chinese statesman, Chin Lan
Pin, when he was here at the time Dennis Kearney was having an
unpleasantness with the Orientals. A man said to him, "Your people will
have to get out of here; the Irish carry too much religion around to
associate with Pagans." "Yes," said Chin Lan Pin, "we have determined to
go. Our own country is too overcrowded now, we can't go there, and I
think we'll go to Ireland." Said the man, "To Ireland? You will be
jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire." Said Chin Lan Pin, "I have
travelled in your country and all around a good deal, and I have come to
the conclusion that nowadays Ireland is about the only country that is
not governed by the Irish." [Applause and laughter.]
Then you go to Scotland. You want to learn from personal observation
whether the allegation is true that the Scotch are a people who are
given to keeping the Sabbath day--and everything else they can lay their
hands on. [Laughter.] You have heard that it is a musical country, and
you immediately find that it is. You hardly land there before you hear
the bag-pipes. You hear that disheartening music, and you sit down and
weep. You know that there is only one other instrument in the world that
will produce such strains, and that is a steam piano on a Mississippi
steamboat when the engineer is drunk. And in this musical country they
tell you in song about the "Lassies Comin' Through the Rye;" but they
never tell you about the rye that goes through the "laddies." And they
will tell you in song about "bodies meeting bodies coming through the
rye," and you tell them that the practice is entirely un-American; that
in America bodies usually are impressed with the solemnity of the
occasion and the general propriety of the thing, and lie quiet until the
arrival of the coroner, but that the coroners are disputing so much in
regard to their jurisdiction, and so many delays occur in issuing burial
permits, that, altogether, they are making the process so tedious and
disagreeable that nowadays in America hardly anybody cares to die. You
tell them this in all seriousness, and you will see from their
expression that they receive it in the same spirit. [Laughter.]
Then you go to England. You have seen her colonies forming a belt around
the circle of the earth, on which the sun never sets. And now you have
laid eyes on the mother-country, on which it appears the sun never
rises. Then you begin to compare legislative bodies, Parliament and
Congress. You find that in Parliament the members sit with their hats on
and cough, while in Congress the members sit with their hats off and
spit. I believe that no international tribunal of competent jurisdiction
has yet determined which nation has the advantage over the other in
these little legislative amenities. And, as you cross the English
Channel, the last thing you see is the English soldier with his blue
trousers and red coat, and the first you see on landing in France is the
French soldier with his red trousers and blue coat, and you come to the
conclusion that if you turn an English soldier upside down he is,
uniformly speaking, a Frenchman. [Laughter.]
We could not tarry long in France; it was the ambition of my travelling
companion to go to Holland, and upon his arrival there the boyish antics
that were performed by my travelling companion in disporting himself
upon the ancestral ground were one of the most touching and playful
sights ever witnessed in the open air. [Laughter.] Nobody knows Mr.
Depew who has not seen him among the Dutch. He wanted especially to go
to Holland, because he knew the Pilgrims had gone from there. They did
not start immediately from England to come here. Before taking their
leap across the ocean they stepped back on to Holland to get a good
ready. [Laughter.] It is a country where water mingles with everything
except gin--a country that has been so effectually diked by the natives
and damned by tourists. [Laughter.] There is one peculiar and especial
advantage that you can enjoy in that country in going out to a banquet
like this. It is that rare and peculiar privilege which you cannot
expect to enjoy in a New England Society even when Mr. Choate addresses
you--the privilege of never being able to understand a word that is said
by the speakers after dinner. But we had to hurry home. We were
Republicans, and there was going to be an election in November. We
didn't suppose that our votes would be necessary at all; still it would
look well, you know, to come home and swell the Republican majority.
[Laughter.] Now when you get on that ship to come back, you begin for
the first time to appreciate the advantage of the steam lanes that are
laid down by the steamship company, by which a vessel goes to Europe one
season over one route and comes back another season over another route,
so that a man who goes to Europe one season and comes back another is
treated to another change of scenery along the entire route. [Laughter.]
As I said, we thought it was the thing for Republicans to come home to
vote. At the polls we found it was rather the thing for them to stay
away. But we acted upon that impulse which often seizes upon the human
breast--the desire to come home to die. I never for one moment realized
the overwhelming defeat that we were going to suffer until one day Mr.
Choate confided to me his determination to speak for the Citizens'
candidate. [Loud laughter.] And this left us the day after that election
and left the other members of our party standing around the highways and
byways with that one supplication upon each one's lips: "Lord, be
merciful unto me a Republican and a sinner." [Loud applause and
laughter.]
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