Model Speeches for Practise by Grenville Kleiser (english books to improve english txt) 📕

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.

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.

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