husband, took to flirting even with the Devil. 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 that 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.
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 a 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 co-education of 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 a _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. Every time he stept 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 the 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 can not 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.
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 a garment she wore. 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 marvelous tour through New England,
just after the war. The train stopt 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. 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'."
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.
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.
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 defense; 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 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, 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
can not guess her, we will never give her up.
TRIBUTE TO HERBERT SPENCER
BY WILLIAM M. EVARTS
Gentlemen:--We are here to-night, to show the feeling of Americans
toward our distinguished guest. As no room and no city can hold all his
friends and admirers, it was necessary that a company should be made up
by some method out of the mass, and what so good a method as that of
natural selection and the inclusion, within these walls, of the ladies?
It is a little hard upon the rational instincts and experiences of man
that we should take up the abstruse subjects of philosophy and of
evolution, of all the great topics that make up Mr. Spencer's
contribution to the learning and the wisdom of his time, at this end of
the dinner.
The most ancient nations, even in their primitive condition, saw the
folly of this, and when one wished either to be inspired with the
thoughts of others or to be himself a diviner of the thoughts of others,
fasting was necessary, and a people from whom I think a great many
things might be learned for the good of the people of the present time,
have a maxim that will commend itself to your common-sense. They say the
continually stuffed body can not see secret things. Now, from my
personal knowledge of the men I see at these tables, they are owners of
continually stuffed bodies. I have addrest them at public dinners, on
all topics and for all purposes, and whatever sympathy they may have
shown with the divers occasions which brought them together, they come
up to this notion of continually stuffed bodies. In primitive times
they had a custom which we only under the system of differentiation
practise now at this dinner. When men wished to possess themselves of
the learning, the wisdom, the philosophy, the courage, the great traits
of any person, they immediately proceeded to eat him up as soon as he
was dead, having only this diversity in that early time that he should
be either roasted or boiled according as he was fat or thin. Now out of
that narrow compass, see how by the process of differentiation and of
multiplication of effects we have come to a dinner of a dozen courses
and wines of as many varieties; and that simple process of appropriating
the virtue and the wisdom of the great man that was brought before the
feast is now diversified into an analysis of all the men here under the
cunning management of many speakers. No doubt, preserving as we do the
identity of all these institutions it is often considered a great art,
or at least a great delight, to roast our friends and put in hot water
those against whom we have a grudge.
Now, Mr. Spencer, we are glad to meet you here. We are glad to see you
and we are glad to have you see us. We are glad to see you, for we
recognize in the breadth of your knowledge, such knowledge as is useful
to your race, a greater comprehension than any living man has presented
to our generation. We are glad to see you, because in our judgment you
have brought to the analysis and distribution of this vast knowledge a
more penetrating intelligence and a more thorough insight than any
living man has brought even to the minor topics of his special
knowledge. In theology, in psychology, in natural science, in the
knowledge of individual man and his exposition and in the knowledge of
the world in the proper sense of society, which makes up the world, the
world worth knowing, the world worth speaking of, the world worth
planning for, the world worth working for, we acknowledge your labors as
surpassing those of any of our kind. You seem to us to carry away and
maintain in the future the same measure of fame among others that we are
told was given in the Middle Ages to Albertus Magnus, the most learned
man of those times, whose comprehension of theology, of psychology, of
natural history, of politics, of history, and of learning, comprehended
more than any man since the classic time certainly; and yet it was found
of him that his knowledge was rather an accumulation, and that he had
added no new processes and no new wealth to the learning which he had
achieved.
Now, I have said that we are glad to have you see us. You have already
treated us to a very unique piece of work in this reception, and we are
expecting perhaps that the world may be instructed after you are safely
on the other side of the Atlantic in a more intimate and thorough manner
concerning our merits and our few faults. This faculty of laying on a
dissecting board an entire nation or an entire age and finding out all
the arteries and veins and pulsations of their life is an extension
beyond any that our own medical schools afford. You give us that
knowledge of man which is practical and useful, and whatever the claims
or the debates may be about your system or the system of those who agree
with you, and however it may be compared with other competing systems
that have preceded it, we must all agree that it is practical, that it
is benevolent, that it is serious and that it is reverent; that it aims
at the highest results in virtue; that it treats evil, not as eternal,
but as evanescent, and that it expects to arrive at what is sought
through the aid of the millennium--that condition of affairs in which
there is the highest morality and the greatest happiness. And if we can
come to that by these processes and these instructions, it matters
little to the race whether it be called scientific morality and
mathematical freedom or by another less pretentious name. You will
please fill your glasses while we propose the health of our guest,
Herbert Spencer.
THE EMPIRE STATE[3]
MR. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW
Mr. President and Gentlemen:--It has been my lot from a time whence I
can not remember to respond each year to this toast. When I received the
invitation from the committee, its originality and ingenuity astonished
and overwhelmed me. But there is one thing the committee took into
consideration when they invited me to this platform. This is a
Presidential year, and it becomes men not to trust themselves talking on
dangerous topics. The State of New York is eminently safe. Ever since
the present able and distinguished Governor has held his place I have
been called upon by the New England Society to respond for him. It is
probably due to that element in the New Englander that he delights in
provoking controversy. The Governor is a Democrat, and I am a
Republican. Whatever he believes in I detest; whatever he admires I
hate. The manner in which this toast is received leads me to believe
that in the New England Society his administration is unanimously
approved. Governor Robinson, if I understand correctly his views, would
rather that any other man should have been elected as Chief Magistrate
than Mr. John Kelly. Mr. Kelly, if I interpret aright his public
utterances, would prefer any other man for the Governor of New York than
Lucius Robinson, and therefore, in one of the most heated controversies
we have ever had, we elected a Governor by unanimous consent or assent
in Alonzo B. Cornell. Horace Greeley once said to me, as we were
returning from a State convention where he had been a candidate, but the
delegates had failed to nominate the fittest man for the place: "I don't
see why any man wants to be Governor of the State of New York, for there
is no one living who can name the last ten Governors on a moment's
notice." But tho there have been Governors and Governors, there is, when
the gubernatorial office is mentioned, one figure that strides down the
centuries before all the rest; that is the old Dutch Governor of New
York, with his wooden leg--Peter Stuyvesant. There have been heroines,
too, who have aroused the poetry and eloquence of all times, but none
who have about them the substantial aroma of the Dutch heroine, Anneke
Jans.
It is within the memory of men now living when the whole of American
literature was dismissed with the sneer of the _Edinburgh Review_, "Who
reads an American book?" But out of the American wilderness a broad
avenue to the highway which has been trod by the genius of all times in
its march to fame was opened by Washington Irving, and in his footsteps
have followed the men who are read of all the world, and who will
receive the highest tributes in all times--Longfellow, and Whittier, and
Hawthorne and Prescott.
New York is not only imperial in all those material results which
constitute and form the greatest commonwealth in this constellation of
commonwealths, but in our political system she has become the arbiter of
our national destiny. As goes New York so goes the Union, and her voice
indicates that the next President will be a man with New England blood
in his veins or a representative of New England ideas.
And for the gentleman who will not be elected I have a Yankee story. In
the Berkshire hills there was a funeral, and as they gathered in the
little parlor there came the typical New England female, who mingles
curiosity with her sympathy, and as she glanced around the darkened room
she said to the bereaved widow, "When did you get that new eight-day
clock?" "We ain't got no new eight-day clock," was the reply. "You
ain't? What's that in the corner there?" "Why no, that's not an
eight-day clock, that's the deceased; we stood him on end, to make room
for the mourners."
Up to within fifty years ago all roads in New England led to Boston; but
within the last fifty years every byway and highway in New England leads
to New York. New York has become the capital of New England, and within
her limits are more Yankees than in any three New England States
combined. The boy who is to-day ploughing the stony hillside in New
England, who is boarding around and teaching school, and who is to be
the future merchant-prince or great lawyer, or wise statesman, looks not
now to Boston, but to New York, as the El Dorado of his hopes. And how
generously, sons of New England, have we treated you? We have put you in
the best offices; we have made you our merchant-princes. Where is the
city or village in our State where you do not own the best houses, run
the largest manufactories, and control the principal industries? We have
several times made one of your number Governor of the State, and we have
placed you in positions where you honor us while we honor you. New
York's choice in the National Cabinet is the distinguished Secretary of
State, whose pure Yankee blood renders him none the less a most fit and
most eminent representative of the Empire State.
But while we have done our best to satisfy the Yankee, there is one
thing we have never been able to do. We can meet his ambition and fill
his purse, but we never can satisfy his stomach. When the President
stated to-night that Plymouth Rock celebrated this anniversary on the
21st, whilst we here did so on the 22d, he did not state the true
reason. It is not as he said, a dispute about dates. The pork and beans
of Plymouth are insufficient for the cravings of the Yankee appetite,
and they chose the 21st, in order that, by the night train, they may get
to New York on the 22d, to have once a year a square meal. From 1620
down to the opening of New York to their settlement, a constantly
increasing void was growing inside the Yankee diaphragm, and even now
the native and imported Yankee finds the best-appointed restaurant in
the world sufficient for his wants; and he has migrated to this house,
that he may annually have the sensation of sufficiency in the largest
hotel in the United States.
My friend, Mr. Curtis, has eloquently stated, in the beginning of his
address, the Dutchman's idea of the old Puritan. He has stated, at the
close of his address, the modern opinion of the old Puritan. He was an
uncomfortable man to live with, but two hundred years off a grand
historic figure. If any one of you, gentlemen, was compelled to leave
this festive board, and go back two hundred years and live with your
ancestor of that day, eat his fare, drink his drink, and listen to his
talk, what a time would be there, my countrymen! Before the Puritan was
fitted to accomplish the work he did, with all the great opportunities
that were in him, it was necessary that he should spend two years in
Leyden and learn from the Dutch the important lesson of religious
toleration, and the other fundamental lesson, that a common school
education lies at the foundation of all civil and religious liberty. If
the Dutchman had conquered Boston, it would have been a misfortune to
this land, and to the world. It would have been like Diedrich
Knickerbocker wrestling with an electric battery.
But when the Yankee conquered New York, his union with the Dutch formed
those sterling elements which have made the Republic what it is. Yankee
ideas prevailed in this land in the grandest contest in the Senate of
the United States which has ever taken place, or ever will, in the
victory of Nationalism over Sectionalism by the ponderous eloquence of
that great defender of the Constitution, Daniel Webster. And when
failing in the forum, Sectionalism took the field, Yankee ideas
conquered again in that historic meeting when Lee gave up his sword to
Grant. And when, in the disturbance of credit and industry which
followed, the twin heresies Expansion and Repudiation stalked abroad,
Yankee ideas conquered again in the policy of our distinguished guest,
the Secretary of the Treasury. So great a triumph has never been won by
any financial officer of the government before, as in the funding of our
national debt at four per cent., and the restoration of the national
credit, giving an impulse to our prosperity and industry that can
neither be stayed nor stopt.
When Henry Hudson sailed up the great harbor of New York, and saw with
prophetic vision its magnificent opportunities, he could only emphasize
his thought, with true Dutch significance, in one sentence--"See here!"
When the Yankee came and settled in New York, he emphasized his coming
with another sentence--"Sit here!"--and he sat down upon the Dutchman
with such force that he squeezed him out of his cabbage-patch, and upon
it he built his warehouse and his residence. He found this city laid out
in a beautiful labyrinth of cow-patches, with the inhabitants and the
houses all standing with their gable-ends to the street, and he turned
them all to the avenue, and made New York a parallelogram of palaces;
and he has multiplied to such an extent that now he fills every nook of
our great State, and we recognize here to-night that, with no tariff,
and free trade between New England and New York, the native specimen is
an improvement upon the imported article. Gentlemen, I beg leave to say,
as a native New Yorker of many generations, that by the influence, the
hospitality, the liberal spirit, and the cosmopolitan influences of this
great State, from the unlovable Puritan of two hundred years ago you
have become the most agreeable and companionable of men.
New York to-day, the Empire State of all the great States of the
Commonwealth, brings in through her grand avenue to the sea eighty per
cent. of all the imports, and sends forth a majority of all the exports,
of the Republic. She collects and pays four-fifths of the taxes which
carry on the government of the country. In the close competition to
secure the great Western commerce which is to-day feeding the world and
seeking an outlet along three thousand miles of coast, she holds by her
commercial prestige and enterprise more than all the ports from New
Orleans to Portland combined. Let us, whether native or adopted New
Yorkers, be true to the past, to the present, to the future, of this
commercial and financial metropolis. Let us enlarge our terminal
facilities and bring the rail and the steamship close together. Let us
do away with the burdens that make New York the dearest, and make her
the cheapest, port on the continent; and let us impress our commercial
ideas upon the national legislature, so that the navigation laws, which
have driven the merchant marine of the Republic from the seas, shall be
repealed, and the breezes of every clime shall unfurl, and the waves of
every sea reflect, the flag of the Republic.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Speech of Chauncey M. Depew at the seventy-fourth anniversary
banquet of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22,
1879.
MEN OF LETTERS
BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE