[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-eighth annual dinner of the
New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1883. The
President, Marvelle W. Cooper, in introducing the speaker, arose,
mentioned the single word "Woman"--and said: "This toast will be
responded to by one whom you know well, General Horace Porter."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--When this toast was proposed to
me, I insisted that it ought to be responded to by a bachelor, by some
one who is known as a ladies' man; but in these days of female
proprietorship it is supposed that a married person is more essentially
a ladies' man than anybody else, and it was thought that only one who
had had the courage to address a lady could have the courage, under
these circumstances, to address the New England Society. [Laughter.]
The toast, I see, is not in its usual order to-night. At public dinners
this toast is habitually placed last on the list. It seems to be a
benevolent provision of the Committee on Toasts in order to give man in
replying to Woman one chance at least in life of having the last word.
[Laughter.] At the New England dinners, unfortunately the most fruitful
subject of remark regarding woman is not so much her appearance as her
disappearance. I know that this was remedied a few years ago, when this
grand annual gastronomic high carnival was held in the Metropolitan
Concert Hall. There ladies were introduced into the galleries to grace
the scene by their presence; and I am sure the experiment was
sufficiently encouraging to warrant repetition, for it was beautiful to
see the descendants of the Pilgrims sitting with eyes upturned in true
Puritanic sanctity; it was encouraging to see the sons of those pious
sires devoting themselves, at least for one night, to setting their
affections upon "things above." [Applause and laughter.]
Woman's first home was in the Garden of Eden. There man first married
woman. Strange that the incident should have suggested to Milton the
"Paradise Lost." [Laughter.] Man was placed in a profound sleep, a rib
was taken from his side, a woman was created from it, and she became his
wife. Evil-minded persons constantly tell us that thus man's first sleep
became his last repose. But if woman be given at times to that
contrariety of thought and perversity of mind which sometimes passeth
our understanding, it must be recollected in her favor that she was
created out of the crookedest part of man. [Laughter.]
The Rabbins have a different theory regarding creation. They go back to
the time when we were all monkeys. They insist that man was originally
created with a kind of Darwinian tail, and that in the process of
evolution this caudal appendage was removed and created into woman. This
might better account for those Caudle lectures which woman is in the
habit of delivering, and some color is given to this theory, from the
fact that husbands even down to the present day seem to inherit a
general disposition to leave their wives behind. [Laughter.]
The first woman, finding no other man in that garden except her own
husband, took to flirting even with the Devil. [Laughter.] The race
might have been saved much tribulation if Eden had been located in some
calm and tranquil land--like Ireland. There would at least have been no
snakes there to get into the garden. Now woman in her thirst after
knowledge, showed her true female inquisitiveness in her
cross-examination of the serpent, and, in commemoration of that
circumstance, the serpent seems to have been curled up and used in
nearly all languages as a sign of interrogation. Soon the domestic
troubles of our first parents began. The first woman's favorite son was
killed with a club, and married women even to this day seem to have an
instinctive horror of clubs. The first woman learned that it was Cain
that raised a club. The modern woman has learned it is a club that
raises cain. Yet, I think, I recognize faces here to-night that I see
behind the windows of Fifth Avenue clubs of an afternoon, with their
noses pressed flat against the broad plate glass, and as woman trips
along the sidewalk, I have observed that these gentlemen appear to be
more assiduously engaged than ever was a government scientific
commission in taking observations upon the transit of Venus. [Laughter.]
Before those windows passes many a face fairer than that of the
Ludovician Juno or the Venus of Medici. There is the Saxon blonde with
the deep blue eye, whose glances return love for love, whose silken
tresses rest upon her shoulders like a wealth of golden fleece, each
thread of which looks like a ray of the morning sunbeam. There is the
Latin brunette with the deep, black, piercing eye, whose jetty lashes
rest like silken fringe upon the pearly texture of her dainty cheek,
looking like raven's wings spread out upon new-fallen snow.
And yet the club man is not happy. As the ages roll on woman has
materially elevated herself in the scale of being. Now she stops at
nothing. She soars. She demands the coeducation of the sexes. She thinks
nothing of delving into the most abstruse problems of the higher
branches of analytical science. She can cipher out the exact hour of the
night when her husband ought to be home, either according to the old or
the recently adopted method of calculating time. I never knew of but one
married man who gained any decided domestic advantage by this change in
our time. He was an _habitué_ of a club situated next door to his house.
His wife was always upbraiding him for coming home too late at night.
Fortunately, when they made this change of time, they placed one of
those meridians from which our time is calculated right between the club
and his house. [Laughter.] Every time he stepped across that imaginary
line it set him back a whole hour in time. He found that he could then
leave his club at one o'clock and get home to his wife at twelve; and
for the first time in twenty years peace reigned around that
hearthstone.
Woman now revels even in the more complicated problems of mathematical
astronomy. Give a woman ten minutes and she will describe a heliocentric
parallax of the heavens. Give her twenty minutes and she will find
astronomically the longitude of a place by means of lunar culminations.
Give that same woman an hour and a half, with the present fashions, and
she cannot find the pocket in her dress.
And yet man's admiration for woman never flags. He will give her half
his fortune; he will give her his whole heart; he seems always willing
to give her everything that he possesses, except his seat in a
horse-car. [Laughter.]
Every nation has had its heroines as well as its heroes. England, in her
wars, had a Florence Nightingale; and the soldiers in the expression of
their adoration, used to stoop and kiss the hem of her garment as she
passed. America, in her war, had a Dr. Mary Walker. Nobody ever stooped
to kiss the hem of her garment--because that was not exactly the kind of
garment she wore. [Laughter.] But why should man stand here and attempt
to speak for woman, when she is so abundantly equipped to speak for
herself. I know that is the case in New England; and I am reminded, by
seeing General Grant here to-night, of an incident in proof of it which
occurred when he was making that marvellous tour through New England,
just after the war. The train stopped at a station in the State of
Maine. The General was standing on the rear platform of the last car. At
that time, as you know, he had a great reputation for silence--for it
was before he had made his series of brilliant speeches before the New
England Society. They spoke of his reticence--a quality which New
Englanders admire so much--in others. [Laughter.] Suddenly there was a
commotion in the crowd, and as it opened a large, tall, gaunt-looking
woman came rushing toward the car, out of breath. Taking her spectacles
off from the top of her head and putting them on her nose, she put her
arms akimbo, and looking up, said: "Well, I've just come down here a
runnin' nigh onto two mile, right on the clean jump, just to get a look
at the man that lets the women do all the talkin'." [Laughter.]
The first regular speaker of the evening [William M. Evarts] touched
upon woman, but only incidentally, only in reference to Mormonism and
that sad land of Utah, where a single death may make a dozen widows.
[Laughter.]
A speaker at the New England dinner in Brooklyn last night [Henry Ward
Beecher] tried to prove that the Mormons came originally from New
Hampshire and Vermont. I know that a New Englander sometimes in the
course of his life marries several times; but he takes the precaution to
take his wives in their proper order of legal succession. The difference
is that he drives his team of wives tandem, while the Mormon insists
upon driving his abreast. [Laughter.]
But even the least serious of us, Mr. President, have some serious
moments in which to contemplate the true nobility of woman's character.
If she were created from a rib, she was made from that part which lies
nearest a man's heart.
It has been beautifully said that man was fashioned out of the dust of
the earth while woman was created from God's own image. It is our pride
in this land that woman's honor is her own best defence; that here
female virtue is not measured by the vigilance of detective nurses; that
here woman may walk throughout the length and the breadth of this land,
through its highways and its byways, uninsulted, unmolested, clothed in
the invulnerable panoply of her own woman's virtue; that even in places
where crime lurks and vice prevails in the haunts of our great cities,
and in the rude mining gulches of the West, owing to the noble efforts
of our women, and the influence of their example, there are raised up,
even there, girls who are good daughters, loyal wives, and faithful
mothers. They seem to rise in those rude surroundings as grows the pond
lily, which is entangled by every species of rank growth, environed by
poison, miasma and corruption, and yet which rises in the beauty of its
purity and lifts its fair face unblushing to the sun.
No one who has witnessed the heroism of America's daughters in the field
should fail to pay a passing tribute to their worth. I do not speak
alone of those trained Sisters of Charity, who in scenes of misery and
woe seem Heaven's chosen messengers on earth; but I would speak also of
those fair daughters who come forth from the comfortable firesides of
New England and other States, little trained to scenes of suffering,
little used to the rudeness of a life in camp, who gave their all, their
time, their health, and even life itself, as a willing sacrifice in that
cause which then moved the nation's soul. As one of these, with her
graceful form, was seen moving silently through the darkened aisles of
an army hospital, as the motion of her passing dress wafted a breeze
across the face of the wounded, they felt that their parched brows had
been fanned by the wings of the angel of mercy.
Ah! Mr. President, woman is after all a mystery. It has been well said,
that woman is the great conundrum of the nineteenth century; but if we
cannot guess her, we will never give her up. [Applause.]
* * * * *