two wars had settled it all. What else was so much good blood shed for on so many more than classical fields of revolutionary glory? For what was so much good blood more lately shed at Lundy's Lane, at Fort Erie, before and behind the lines at New Orleans, on the deck of the Constitution, on the deck of the Java, on the lakes, on the sea, but to settle exactly these "wrongs of past days"? And have we come back sulky and sullen from the very field of honor? For my country I deny it. We are born to happier feelings. We look on England as we look on France. We look on them, from our new world, not unrenowned, yet a new world still; and the blood mounts to our cheeks; our eyes swim; our voices are stifled with emulousness of so much glory; their trophies will not let us sleep; but there is no hatred at all; no hatred,—all for honor, nothing for hate! We have-we can have-no barbarian memory of wrongs, for which brave men have made the last expiation to the brave. EULOGY OF GARFIELD JAMES G. BLAINE Extract from a speech delivered in Congress, February 26, 1882. Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world's interests, from its EULOGY OF GARFIELD 155 hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death, and he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage, he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes whose lips may tell! What brilliant, broken plans! What baffled high ambitions! What sundering of strong, warm manhood's friendships! What bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him, a proud, expectant nation; a great host of sustaining friends; a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full, rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys, not yet emerged from childhood's days of frolic; the fair young daughter; the sturdy sons just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day and every day rewarding a father's love and care; and in his heart the eager rejoicing power to meet all demands. Before him, desolation and darkness, and his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled with instant, profound, and universal sympathy. Though masterful in his mortal weakness, enshrined in the prayers of a world, all the love and all the sympathy could not share with him in his suffering. He trod the winepress alone. With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the Divine decree. As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning. SCOTT'S FAME IN AMERICA JOHN HAY From Mr. Hay's speech at the unveiling of the bust of Sir Walter Scott in Westminster Abbey, May 21, 1897. Printed by permission. His lines have gone out through all the earth and his words to the end of the world. No face in modern history, if we may except the magisterial profile of Napoleon, is so well known as the winning, irregular features, dominated by the towering brow of the Squire of Abbotsford. It is the world-wide extent of his fame that has seemed hitherto to make it unnecessary that his visible image should be enshrined here among England's worthies. His spirit is every SCOTT'S FAME IN AMERICA 157 where; he is revered wherever the English speech has traveled; and translations have given some glimpses of his brightness through the veil of many alien tongues. It is most fitting that his bust should be placed to-day, among those of his mighty peers, in this great pantheon of immortal Englishmen. I doubt if anywhere his writings have had a more loving welcome than in America. The books a boy reads are those most ardently admired and longest remembered; and America reveled in Scott when the country was young. All over our straggling states and territories-in the East, where a civilization of slender resources but boundless hopes was building; in the West, where the stern conflict was going on, of the pioneer subduing the continent-the books most read were those poems of magic and of sentiment, those tales of bygone chivalry and romance, which Walter Scott was pouring forth upon the world with a rich facility, a sort of joyous fecundity, like that of Nature in her most genial moods. He had no clique of readers, no illuminated sect of admirers, to bewilder criticism by excess of its own subtlety. In a community engaged in the strenuous struggle for empire, whose dreams, careless of the past, were turned, in the clear, hard light of a nation's morning, to a future of unlimited grandeur and power, there was none too sophisticated to appreciate, none too lowly to enjoy those marvelous pictures of a time gone forever by, pleasing and stimulating to a starved fancy, though the times themselves were unlamented by a people and an age whose faces were set towards a far different future. Through all these important formative days of the Republic, Scott was the favorite author of the Americans; and the influence of his writings was enormous upon the tastes and the sentiments of a people peculiarly sensitive to such influences, from the very circumstances of their environment. The poems and novels of Scott, saturated with the glamour of legend and tradition, were greedily devoured by a people without perspective, conscious that they themselves were ancestors of a redoubtable line, whose battle was with the passing hour, whose glories were in all the days to come. His magic still has power to charm all wholesome and candid souls. His poems and his tales are read with undiminished and perennial pleasure. He loved, with a simple, straightforward affection, man and nature, his country and his kind; and he has his reward in a fame forever fresh and unhackneyed. His work is a clear, high voice from a simpler age than ours, breathing a song of lofty and unclouded purpose, of sincere and powerful passion, to which the world, however weary and preoccupied, must needs listen and attend. SPEECH AGAINST CENTRALIZATION OF GOVERNMENT HENRY W. GRADY Taken from an address delivered before the students of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va., June 25, 1889. The unmistakable danger that threatens free government in America is the increasing tendency to |