HORACE PORTER

[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-second annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1877. The President, William Borden, said: "Gentlemen, in giving you the next toast, I will call upon one whom we are always glad to listen to. I suppose you have been waiting to hear him, and are surprised that he comes so late in the evening; but I will tell you in confidence, he is put there at his own request. [Applause.] I give you the eleventh regular toast: 'Internal Improvements.'â€”The triumph of American invention. The modern palace runs on wheels.'When thy car is loaden with [dead] heads,Good Porter, turn the key.'General Horace Porter will respond."]

'When thy car is loaden with [dead] heads,Good Porter, turn the key.'

General Horace Porter will respond."]

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the New England Society:â€”I suppose it was a matter of necessity, calling on some of us from other States to speak for you to-night, for we have learned from the history of Priscilla and John Alden, that a New Englander may be too modest to speak for himself. [Laughter.] But this modesty, like some of the greater blessings of the war, has been more or less disguised to-night.

We have heard from the eloquent gentleman [Noah Porter, D.D.] on my left all about the good-fellowship and the still better fellowships in the rival universities of Harvard and Yale. We have heard from my sculptor friend [W. W. Story] upon the extreme right all about Hawthorne's tales, and all the great Storys that have emanated from Salem; but I am not a little surprised that in this age, when speeches are made principally by those running for office, you should call upon one engaged only in running cars, and more particularly upon one brought up in the military service, where the practice of running is not regarded as strictly professional. [Laughter.] It occurred to me some years ago that the occupation of moving cars would be fully as congenial as that of stopping bulletsâ€”as a steady business, so when I left Washington I changed my profession. I know how hard it is to believe that persons from Washington ever change their professions. [Laughter.] In this regal age, when every man is his own sovereign, somebody had to provide palaces, and, as royalty is not supposed to have any permanent abiding place in a country like this, it was thought best to put these palaces on wheels; and, since we have been told by reliable authority that "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," we thought it necessary to introduce every device to enable those crowned heads to rest as easily as possible. Of course we cannot be expected to do as much for the travelling public as the railway companies. They at times put their passengers to death. We only put them to sleep. We don't pretend that all the devices, patents, and inventions upon these cars are due to the genius of the management. Many of the best suggestions have come from the travellers themselves, especially New England travellers. [Laughter.]

Some years ago, when the bedding was not supposed to be as fat as it ought to be, and the pillows were accused of being constructed upon the hom[oe]opathic principle, a New Englander got on a car one night. Now, it is a remarkable fact that a New Englander never goes to sleep in one of these cars. He lies awake all night, thinking how he can improve upon every device and patent in sight. [Laughter.] He poked his head out of the upper berth at midnight, hailed the porter and said, "Say, have you got such a thing as a corkscrew about you?" "We don't 'low no drinkin' sperits aboa'd these yer cars, sah," was the reply. "'Tain't that," said the Yankee, "but I want to get hold onto one of your pillows that has kind of worked its way into my ear." [Loud laughter.] The pillows have since been enlarged.

I notice that, in the general comprehensiveness of the sentiment which follows this toast, you allude to that large and liberal class of patrons, active though defunct, knownas "deadheads." It is said to be a quotation from Shakespeare. That is a revelation. It proves conclusively that Shakespeare must at one time have resided in the State of Missouri. It is well-known that the term was derived from a practice upon a Missouri railroad, where, by a decision of the courts, the railroad company had been held liable in heavy damages in case of accidents where a passenger lost an arm or a leg, but when he was killed outright his friends seldom sued, and he never did; and the company never lost any money in such cases. In fact, a grateful mother-in-law would occasionally pay the company a bonus. The conductors on that railroad were all armed with hatchets, and in case of an accident they were instructed to go around and knock every wounded passenger in the head, thus saving the company large amounts of money; and these were reported to the general office as "deadheads," and in railway circles the term has ever since been applied to passengers where no money consideration is involved. [Laughter.]

One might suppose, from the manifestations around these tables for the first three hours to-night, that the toast "Internal Improvements" referred more especially to the benefiting of the true inwardness of the New England men; but I see that the sentiment which follows contains much more than human stomachs, and covers much more ground than cars. It soars into the realms of invention. Unfortunately the genius of invention is always accompanied by the demon of unrest. A New England Yankee can never let well enough alone. I have always supposed him to be the person specially alluded to in Scripture as the man who has found out many inventions. If he were a Chinese Pagan, he would invent a new kind of Joss to worship every week. You get married and settle down in your home. You are delighted with everything about you. You rest in blissful ignorance of the terrible discomforts that surround you, until a Yankee friend comes to visit you. He at once tells you you mustn't build a fire in that chimney-place; that he knows the chimney will smoke; that if he had been there when it was built he could have shown you how to give a different sort of flare to the flue. You go to read a chapter in the family Bible. He tells you to drop that; that he has just written an enlarged and improved version, thatcan just put that old book to bed. [Laughter.] You think you are at least raising your children in general uprightness; but he tells you if you don't go out at once and buy the latest patented article in the way of steel leg-braces and put on the baby, the baby will grow up bow-legged. [Laughter.] He intimates, before he leaves, that if he had been around to advise you before you were married, he could have got you a much better wife. These are some of the things that reconcile a man to sudden death. [Continued laughter and applause.]

Such occurrences as these, and the fact of so many New Englanders being residents of this city and elsewhere, show that New England must be a good placeâ€”to come from.

At the beginning of the war we thought we could shoot people rapidly enough to satisfy our consciences, with single-loading rifles; but along came the inventive Yankee and produced revolvers and repeaters, and Gatling guns, and magazine gunsâ€”guns that carried a dozen shots at a time. I didn't wonder at the curiosity exhibited in this direction by a backwoods Virginian we captured one night. The first remark he made was, "I would like to see one of them thar new-fangled weepons of yourn. They tell me, sah, it's a most remarkable eenstrument. They say, sah, it's a kind o' repeatable, which you can load it up enough on Sunday to fiah it off all the rest of the week." [Laughter.] Then there was every sort of new invention in the way of bayonets. Our distinguished Secretary of State has expressed an opinion to-night that bayonets are bad things to sit down on. Well, they are equally bad things to be tossed up on. If he continues to hold up such terrors to the army, there will have to be important modifications in the uniform. A soldier won't know where to wear his breastplate. [Laughter.] But there have not only been inventions in the way of guns, but important inventions in the way of firing them. In these days a man drops on his back, coils himself up, sticks up one foot, and fires off his gun over the top of his great toe. It changes the whole stage business of battle. It used to be the man who was shot, but now it is the man who shoots that falls on his back and turns up his toes. [Laughter and applause.] The consequence is, that the whole world wants American arms, andas soon as they get them they go to war to test them. Russia and Turkey had no sooner bought a supply than they went to fighting. Greece got a schooner-load, and, although she has not yet taken a part in the struggle, yet ever since the digging up of the lost limbs of the Venus of Milo, it has been feared that this may indicate a disposition on the part of Greece generally to take up arms. [Laughter and applause.]

But there was one inveterate old inventor that you had to get rid of, and you put him on to us Pennsylvaniansâ€”Benjamin Franklin. [Laughter.] Instead of stopping in New York, in Wall Street, as such men usually do, he continued on into Pennsylvania to pursue his kiting operations. He never could let well enough alone. Instead of allowing the lightning to occupy the heavens as the sole theatre for its pyrotechnic displays, he showed it how to get down on to the earth, and then he invented the lightning-rod to catch it. Houses that had got along perfectly well for years without any lightning at all, now thought they must have a rod to catch a portion of it every time it came around. Nearly every house in the country was equipped with a lightning-rod through Franklin's direct agency. You, with your superior New England intelligence, succeeded in ridding yourselves of him; but in Pennsylvania, though we have made a great many laudable efforts in a similar direction, somehow or other we have never once succeeded in getting rid of a lightning-rod agent. [Laughter.] Then the lightning was introduced on the telegraph wires, and now we have the duplex and quadruplex instruments, by which any number of messages can be sent from opposite ends of the same wire at the same time, and they all appear to arrive at the front in good order. Electricians have not yet told us which messages lies down and which one steps over it, but they all seem to bring up in the right camp without confusion. I shouldn't wonder if this principle were introduced before long in the operating of railroads. We may then see trains running in opposite directions pass each other on a single-track road. [Laughter.]

There was a New England quartermaster in charge of railroads in Tennessee, who tried to introduce this principle during the war. The result was discouraging. He succeeded in telescoping two or three trains every day. He seemed to think that the easiest way to shorten up a long train and get it on a short siding was to telescope it. I have always thought that if that man's attention had been turned in an astronomical direction, he would have been the first man to telescope the satellites of Mars. [Laughter.]

The latest invention in the application of electricity is the telephone. By means of it we may be able soon to sit in our houses, and hear all the speeches, without going to the New England dinner. The telephone enables an orchestra to keep at a distance of miles away when it plays. If the instrument can be made to keep hand-organs at a distance, its popularity will be indescribable. The worst form I have ever known an invention to take was one that was introduced in a country town, when I was a boy, by a Yankee of musical turn of mind, who came along and taught every branch of education by singing. He taught geography by singing, and to combine accuracy of memory with patriotism, he taught the multiplication-table to the tune of Yankee Doodle. [Laughter.] This worked very well as an aid to the memory in school, but when the boys went into business it often led to inconvenience. When a boy got a situation in a grocery-store and customers were waiting for their change, he never could tell the product of two numbers without commencing at the beginning of the table and singing up till he had reached those numbers. In case the customer's ears had not received a proper musical training, this practice often injured the business of the store. [Laughter.]

It is said that the Yankee has always manifested a disposition for making money, but he never struck a proper field for the display of his genius until we got to making paper money. [Laughter.] Then every man who owned a printing-press wanted to try his hand at it. I remember that in Washington ten cents' worth of rags picked up in the street would be converted the next day into thousands of dollars.

An old mule and cart used to haul up the currency from the Printing Bureau to the door of the Treasury Department. Every morning, as regularly as the morning came, that old mule would back up and dump a cart-load of thesinews of war at the Treasury. [Laughter.] A patriotic son of Columbia, who lived opposite, was sitting on the doorstep of his house one morning, looking mournfully in the direction of the mule. A friend came along, and seeing that the man did not look as pleasant as usual, said to him, "What is the matter? It seems to me you look kind of disconsolate this morning." "I was just thinking," he replied, "what would become of this government if that old mule was to break down." [Laughter and applause.] Now they propose to give us a currency which is brighter and heavier, but not worth quite as much as the rags. Our financial horizon has been dimmed by it for some time, but there is a lining of silver to every cloud. We are supposed to take it with 412Â½ grains of silverâ€”a great many more grains of allowance. [Laughter.] Congress seems disposed to pay us in the "dollar of our daddies"â€”in the currency which we were familiar with in our childhood. Congress seems determined to pay us off in something that is "child-like and Bland." [Laughter and applause.] But I have detained you too long already. [Cries of "No, no; go on!"]

Why, the excellent President of your Society has for the last five minutes been looking at me like a man who might be expected, at any moment, to break out in the disconsolate language of Bildad the Shuhite to the patriarch Job, "How long will it be ere ye make an end of words?" Let me say then, in conclusion, that, coming as I do from the unassuming State of Pennsylvania, and standing in the presence of the dazzling genius of New England, I wish to express the same degree of humility that was expressed by a Dutch Pennsylvania farmer in a railroad car, at the breaking out of the war. A New Englander came in who had just heard of the fall of Fort Sumter, and he was describing it to the farmer and his fellow-passengers. He said that in the fort they had an engineer from New England, who had constructed the traverses, and the embrasures, and the parapets in such a manner as to make everybody within the fort as safe as if he had been at home; and on the other side, the Southerners had an engineer who had been educated in New England, and he had, with his scientific attainments, succeeded in making the batteries of the bombarders as safe as any harvest field, and the bombardment had raged for twowhole days, and the fort had been captured, and the garrison had surrendered, and not a man was hurt on either side. A great triumph for science, and a proud day for New England education. Said the farmer, "I suppose dat ish all right, but it vouldn't do to send any of us Pennsylvany fellers down dare to fight mit does pattles. Like as not ve vould shoost pe fools enough to kill somepody." [Loud applause and laughter, and cries of "Go on; go on."]

[Speech of Horace Porter at the seventy-fifth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1880. "We have been told here to-night," said the President, James C. Carter, "that New York has been peopled by pilgrims of various races, and I propose, as our next toast, 'The Pilgrims of Every Race.' And I call upon our ever welcome friend, General Horace Porter, for a response."]

Mr. President:â€”I am here, like the rest of your guests, to-night, in consequence of these notes of invitation that we have received. I know it is always more gratifying to an audience for speakers to be able to assure them, in the outset of their remarks, that they are here without notes; but such is not my case. I received the following:

"The Committee of Arrangements of the New England Society respectfully invite you to be present at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society, and the two hundred and sixtieth of the landing of the Pilgrims at Metropolitan Concert Hall." [Laughter.]

Such is the ignorance of those of us upon whom Providence did not sufficiently smile to permit us to be born in New England, that I never knew, until I received that note, anything about the landing of the Pilgrims at Metropolitan Concert Hall. This certainly will be sad news to communicate to those pious people who assembled in Brooklyn last night, and who still rest happy in the belief that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Church. [Laughter.] From the day they have chosen for the anniversary,it seems very evident that the Pilgrims must have landed somewhere one day before they struck Plymouth Rock. [Laughter.]

The poet Longfellow tells us, in one of his short poems, "learn to labor and to wait." I have labored through about twenty-five courses at this table, and then I have waited until this hour, in the hope that I might be spared the inevitable ordeal. But when the last plate had been removed, and your president, who is a stern man of duty, rapped upon the table, I saw there was no escape, and the time had come when he was going to present to you one of the most popular of all dishes at a New England banquet, tongue garnished with brains. He seems, following the late teachings of Harvard and Yale, to have invited the guests to enter for a sort of skull-race. [Laughter.] Now, I suppose that, in calling first upon those on his right and left, it is a matter of convenience for himself, and he has acted from the same motives that actuated a newly fledged dentist who, when his first patient applied, determined to exercise all that genius and understanding which Boston men generally exercise in the practice of their profession. The patient, coming from the country, told him he wanted two back teeth, which he pointed out to him, pulled. The dentist placed him in a chair, and in a few moments he had pulled out his two front teeth. The patient left the chair, and it occurred to him that the circumstance might be deemed of sufficient importance to call the dentist's attention to it. He said, "I told you to pull out these two back teeth." "Yes," said the dentist, "so you did; but I found that the front ones were kind of handier to get at." [Laughter and applause.] I suppose the reason your president called upon those of us nearest the platform to-night was because he found us a little handier to get at. But there is no use in speakers coming here and pleading want of preparation, because, doubtless, the New Englanders who expected to take part to-night might have been found at any time within the last six months sitting under blue glass to enlarge their ideas. [Laughter.] I ventured to say to the committee that, this being such a large room, some of your speakers might not have a high enough tone of voice to be heard at the other end. They looked unutterable things at me, as much as tosay that at New England dinners I would find the speakers could not be otherwise than high-toned. [Laughter.]

The first New Englander I ever had the pleasure to listen to was a Pilgrim from Boston, who came out to the town in Pennsylvania, where I lived, to deliver a lecture. We all went to the lecture. We were told it was worth twice the price of admission to see that man wipe the corners of his mouth with his handkerchief before he commenced to speak. Well, he spoke for about two hours on the subject of the indestructibility of the absolute in connection with the mutability of mundane affairs. The pitch and variety of the nasal tones was wonderful, and he had an amazing command of the longest nouns and adjectives. It was a beautiful lecture. The town council tried to borrow it and have it set to music. It was one of those lectures that would pay a man to walk ten miles in wet feetâ€”to avoid. After he got through, a gentleman in the audience, thinking it the part of good nature, stepped up and congratulated him upon his "great effort." The lecturer took it as a matter of course, and replied, "Oh, yes, you will find the whole atmosphere of Boston exhilarant with intellectual vitality." [Laughter.]

Now, if there is one thing which modern Pilgrims pride themselves upon more than another, it is in being the lineal descendants of those who came over by the Mayflower. To prove this, when you visit their homes, they bring forth family records in the shape of knives, forks, and spoons that were taken from the Mayflower. From the number of those articles I have seen, I have come to the conclusion that the captain of the Mayflower did not get back to England with a single article belonging to the ship that was not nailed fast to the deck. Such a dread have the people of that island of this wide-spread Puritanical kleptomania attaching to people coming here, that even as late as 1812 the commander of one of the British frigates took the wise precaution to nail his flag fast to the mast. [Laughter.]

We have heard that the Pilgrim fathers made amends for their shortcomings, from the fact of their having determined, after landing, to fill the meeting-houses and have worship there, and that brave men were detailed from the congregation to stand sentinels against a surprise by the Indians. It is even said that during those long and solemn sermons someof the members vied with each other in taking their chances with the Indians outside. Some of these acts of heroism re-appear in the race. I have been told that some of the lineal descendants of these hardy men that paced up and down in front of the meeting-house have recently been seen pacing up and down all night in front of the Globe Theatre, in Boston, ready in the morning to take their chance of the nearest seat for Sara Bernhardt's performance. [Laughter.]

Now, sir, the New Englanders are eminently reformers. I have never seen anything they did not attempt to reform. They even introduced the Children of the Sun to the shoe-shops of Lynn, with the alleged purpose of instructing the Chinese in letters, yet recently in Massachusetts they themselves showed such lamentable ignorance as not to know a Chinese letter when they saw it. [Laughter.] But the poor Chinese have been driven away. They have been driven away from many places by that formidable weaponâ€”the only weapon which Dennis Kearney has ever been able to use against themâ€”the Chinese must-get. [Laughter.]

I have never seen but one thing the Yankee could not reform, and that was the line of battle at Bull Run, and I call upon Pilgrim Sherman as a witness to this. He was there, and knows. Bulls have given as much trouble to Yankees as to Irishmen. Bulls always seem to be associated with Yankee defeat, from the time of Bull Run down to Sitting Bull, and I will call upon Pilgrim Miles as a witness to that.

Now, gentlemen, let me say that the presence of General Grant to-night will enable you to settle forever that question which has vexed the New England mind all the period during which he was making his triumphal journey round the globeâ€”the question as to whether, in his intercourse with kings and potentates, he was always sure to keep in sufficient prominence the merits of the Pilgrim fathers, and more especially of their descendants. I have no doubt he did. I have no doubt that to those crowned heads, with numerous recalcitrant subjects constantly raising Cain in their dominions, the recital of how the Pilgrims went voluntarily to a distant country to live, where their scalps were in danger, must have been a pleasant picture. [Laughter.]

If I am to have any reputation for brevity I must now close these remarks. I remember a lesson in brevity I once received in a barber's shop. An Irishman came in, and the unsteady gait with which he approached the chair showed that he had been imbibing of the produce of the still run by North Carolina Moonshiners. He wanted his hair cut, and while the barber was getting him ready, went off into a drunken sleep. His head got bobbing from one side to the other, and at length the barber, in making a snip, cut off the lower part of his ear. The barber jumped about and howled, and a crowd of neighbors rushed in. Finally the demonstration became so great that it began to attract the attention of the man in the chair, and he opened one eye and said, "Wh-wh-at's the matther wid yez?" "Good Lord!" said the barber, "I've cut off the whole lower part of your ear." "Have yez? Ah, thin, go on wid yer biznessâ€”it was too long, anyhow!" [Laughter.] If I don't close this speech, some one of the company will be inclined to remark that it has been too long, anyhow. [Cheers and laughter.]

[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:â€”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 deliberatelyabandoned, 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 Macbethâ€”"To bed, to bed!"â€”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 Congressâ€”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 griefsâ€”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 dutyâ€”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 dayâ€”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 ginâ€”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 privilegewhich you cannot expect to enjoy in a New England Society even when Mr. Choate addresses youâ€”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 breastâ€”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.]

[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"â€”and said: "This toast will be responded to by one whom you know well, General Horace Porter."]

Mr. President and Gentlemen:â€”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 whichwoman 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 landâ€”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 delvinginto 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 anhabituÃ©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 garmentâ€”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. Thetrain 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 silenceâ€”for it was before he had made his series of brilliant speeches before the New England Society. They spoke of his reticenceâ€”a quality which New Englanders admire so muchâ€”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 effortsof 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.]

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