_Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow-citizens, men and women of Maine_:
I wish to say a word to you in recognition of great service rendered
not only to all our country but to the entire principle of democratic
government throughout the world, by one of your citizens. The best
institutions are of no good if they won’t work. I do not care how
beautiful a theory is, if it won’t fit in with the facts it is of no
good. If you built the handsomest engine that ever had been built and
it did not go, its usefulness would be limited. Well, that was just
about the condition that Congress had reached at the time when Thomas
B. Reed was elected Speaker. We had all the machinery, but it didn’t
work,—that was the trouble,—and you had to find some one powerful man
who would disregard the storm of obloquy sure to be raised by what
he did in order to get it to work. Such a man was found when Reed
was made Speaker. We may differ among ourselves as to policy. We may
differ among ourselves as to what course government should follow;
but if we possess any intelligence we must be a unit that it shall
be able to follow some course. If government can not go on it is not
government. If the legislative body can not enact laws, then there is
no use of misnaming it a legislative body; and if the majority is to
rule some method by which it can rule must be provided. Government by
the majority in Congress had practically come to a stop when Mr. Reed
became Speaker. Mr. Reed, at the cost of infinite labor, at the cost
of the fiercest attacks, succeeded in restoring that old principle;
and now through Congress we can do well or ill, accordingly as the
people demand, but at any rate, we can do something—and we owe it more
than to any other one man to your fellow-citizen, Mr. Reed. It is a
great thing for any man to be able to feel that in some one crisis he
left his mark deeply scored for good in the history of his country,
and Tom Reed has the right to that feeling.