REPRODUCTIONS OF MURAL DECORATIONS
FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON
"JUSTICE"
Photo-engraving in colors after the original painting by George W. Maynard
This picture is one of a series of eight panels representing "The Virtues"—Fortitude, Justice, Patriotism, Courage, Temperance, Prudence, Industry, and Concord. The number of virtues to be represented was limited to the number of panels, so the selection was necessarily somewhat arbitrary. Each figure is about five and a half feet high, clad in floating classic drapery, and represented to the spectator as appearing before him in the air, without a support or background other than the deep red of the wall. "Justice" holds the globe in one hand, signifying the extent of her sway. In the other hand she holds a naked sword upright, in token of the terribleness of her punishment.]
MODERN
ELOQUENCE
EDITOR
THOMAS B REED
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
JUSTIN McCARTHY · ROSSITER JOHNSON
ALBERT ELLERY BERGH
VOLUME II
After-Dinner Speeches
E-O
GEO. L. SHUMAN & CO.
CHICAGO
Copyright, 1903
JOHN R SHUMAN
COMMITTEE OF SELECTION
Edward Everett Hale, Author of "The Man Without a
Country."
John B. Gordon, Former United States Senator.
Nathan Haskell Dole, Associate Editor "International
Library of Famous Literature."
James B. Pond, Manager Lecture Bureau; Author of "Eccentricities
of Genius."
George McLean Harper, Professor of English Literature,
Princeton University.
Lorenzo Sears, Professor of English Literature, Brown University.
Edwin M. Bacon, Former Editor "Boston Advertiser" and
"Boston Post."
J. Walker McSpadden, Managing Editor "Édition Royale"
of Balzac's Works.
F. Cunliffe Owen, Member Editorial Staff "New York
Tribune."
Truman A. DeWeese, Member Editorial Staff "Chicago
Times-Herald."
Champ Clark, Member of Congress from Missouri.
Marcus Benjamin, Editor, National Museum, Washington,
D. C.
Clark Howell, Editor "Atlanta Constitution."
INTRODUCTIONS AND SPECIAL ARTICLES BY
NOTE—A large number of the most distinguished speakers of this country and Great Britain have selected their own best speeches for this Library. These speakers include Whitelaw Reid, William Jennings Bryan, Henry van Dyke, Henry M Stanley, Newell Dwight Hillis, Joseph Jefferson, Sir Henry Irving, Arthur T. Hadley, John D. Long, David Starr Jordan, and many others of equal note.
CONTENTS
VOLUME II
PAGE Eggleston, George Cary Southern Literature 423 Eliot, Charles William Harvard and Yale 427 Eliot, Samuel A. The Source of Song and Story 431 Emerson, Ralph Waldo England, Mother of Nations 437 The Memory of Burns 439 War 442 The Wisdom of China 445 Evarts, William Maxwell International Arbitration 448 The Republic and Its Outlook 452 The French Alliance 457
ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME II
"Justice" Frontispiece Photo-engraving in colors after an original painting by George W. Maynard Henry Woodfin Grady 534 Photogravure after a photograph from life Oliver Wendell Holmes 625 Photogravure after a photograph from life Robert Green Ingersoll
GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
SOUTHERN LITERATURE
[Speech of George Cary Eggleston at the first annual banquet of the New York Southern Society, February 22, 1887. Algernon Sidney Sullivan, President of the Society, was in the chair. In introducing the speaker Mr. Sullivan said: "We want to hear a word about 'Southern Literature,' and we will now call upon Mr. George Cary Eggleston to respond to that sentiment."]
Mr. President:—I have cheered myself so hoarse that I do not think I can make a speech at all. I will say a word or two if my voice holds out. It is patriotically hoarse.
If I manage to make a speech it will be the one speech of the evening which was most carefully prepared. The preparations were all made, arrangements were completed and it was perfectly understood that I should not make it. The name set down under this toast is that of Hon. John Randolph Tucker, and the wild absurdity of asking a writer who does not make speeches, to take the place of such an orator as John Randolph Tucker would seem to be like asking a seasick land-lubber to take the captain's place upon the bridge of the ocean steamer in a storm, and there is another reason by which I am peculiarly unfit to speak in response to the toast—"Southern Literature," and that is, that I am firmly convinced that there is no Southern Literature; that there never was a Southern Literature; that there never will be a Southern Literature, and that there never ought to be a Southern Literature. Some very great and noble work in literature has been produced by men of Southern lineage and birth and residence. John Marshall, if he had not been the greatest of American jurists, would have been counted, because of his "Life of Washington," the greatest of biographers. I might name an extended list of workers in this field, all of Southern birth. Sims; my dead friend, John Esten Cooke; his brother, Philip Cooke; Cable, who is married to New England; the gifted woman who calls herself Charles Egbert Craddock; and a host of others including that noble woman now going blind in Lexington, who has done some of the sweetest work in American poetry, Margaret J. Preston. [Applause.] I might go further and claim Howells, every drop of whose blood is Virginian. If it were not getting personal and becoming a family affair, I might mention the fact that the author of the "Hoosier Schoolmaster," with whom I used to play on the hills of Ohio River, was of direct Southern descent; that he was born as I was, exactly on Mason and Dixon's line, and one of us fell over on one side and the other on the other when the trouble came.
Notwithstanding all this, I hold that there can be no such thing as a Southern Literature, because literature is never provincial, and to say of any literature that it is Southern or Western or Northern or Eastern is to say that it is a provincial utterance and not a literature. The work to which I have referred is American literature. It is work of which American literature is proud and will ever be proud, whatever is worthy in literature or in achievement of any kind in any part of the country goes ultimately in the common fund of American literature or of American achievement; and that is the joy I have had in being here to-night, when I ought to have been at home. The joy I have had to-night has been that this sentiment of Americanism has seemed to be all around me, and to run through and through everything that has been said here to-night—a sentiment which was taken out of my mouth, as it were, by the President this evening, that our first devotion above all is to what I call the American idea. It seems to me that we are sometimes forgetting what idea it is that has made this country great; what it is that has made of it a nation of free men and educated men—a nation in which the commonest laborer has the school open to him, as well as the workshop; in which the commonest laborer can sit down three times every day to a bountiful table. We sometimes forget the idea on which our country was founded; the idea which prompted Jefferson, as a young man, to stand up in the legislature of Virginia and fight through three bills directly affecting mere questions of law, but determining the future of this country more largely than any other acts,—even the acts of Washington himself. Those three bills, one providing for the separation of Church and State, one for the abolition of primogeniture, and the third for the abolition of entail. The idea that ran through that time was the idea of equal individual manhood—of the supremacy of the man to all else, to the State itself, to Government and Society; that the individual man was the one thing to be taken care of; that it is the sole business of the Government to give him rights of manhood, to protect him in his personal freedom, and then to let him alone.
We have imported of late subtly sophistical advocates of socialism who would set up in opposition to these American ideas the system of State paternalism, and assert the doctrine that the State should not let a man alone to make the best use he can of his abilities and opportunities, but should guide him and support him and direct him and provide for him and, in short, make a moral and intellectual cripple of him. That is the new and un-American idea which has recently been promulgated and which has found expression in New York in 60,000 votes; it is the idea which has been seized upon by those persons who have leagued themselves together to secure to themselves larger profits upon their industry or investments by taxing the whole people for the benefit of the few, making the State the pap-giver, taking from the people the taxes that should be rigidly limited to the needs of the government and turning them into the pockets of the individual; supporting, helping and making, as I have said, a cripple of him. That is the idea which has prompted in large degree disturbances through which we have passed, and to which reference has been made here to-night. It is the idea that somehow or in some particular way a man should have some support other than his own individual exertion, and absolute freedom can provide for him.
It seems to me that one lesson we here to-night should take most to heart is that lesson taught by the whole history of our country, that the American idea—the idea of the individuality and manhood of man, the idea