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Mr. Chairman, Ladies and
Gentlemen, and Fellow Citizens:— I am happy to have the privilege of
meeting and greeting you on this auspicious occasion. It is said to be
well for a speaker who comes before an audience for the first time to, by
some means, get into their good graces at an early moment. I am going to
do that by announcing that I am too selfish toward myself and too generous
to you to detain you long from the good feast that awaits you from the
lips of one more eloquent than I could possibly be.
It is well for us to be
here to-day, not simply because Scotch-Irish blood flows in our veins, for
that of itself is a minor consideration. But why, my friends, are we here?
It is to commemorate the deeds of a glorious ancestry, not because they
were our ancestors, but because, by that commemoration, we may possibly
instill into the young men, upon whom the responsibilities of government
and the responsibilities of defending religious liberty are soon to rest,
ideas which will nerve them to come up to those responsibilities with more
of patriotic fervor and more of religious zeal than was possessed before
the meeting of this assembly. (Applause.)
It was not my pleasure to
be with you at the opening of this congress, as had been arranged, for the
reason that I was from home in New York when the invitation reached me
about the time of the opening of this assembly, and did not get back home
so as to be here at the inauguration of the exercises. This I say in
justification of myself. I am glad to come into your midst. I have heard
much of this glorious land in which you live, and its unstinted
hospitality; I had heard of the magnificent and fiery spirit of its sons;
I had heard of the beauty and feeling of its daughters; but I can truly
say, in the language of one of old, that the half had not been told.
(Applause.)
I take another pleasure in
coming here. It is the home of one of the purest patriots, one of the
greatest friends I ever bad, a man who Tennessee regrets and the nation
regrets is stricken with affliction to-day, and for whom the prayers of
all patriotic people ascend on this goodly morn; need I say that I speak
of your own distinguished fellow citizen, General Whitthorne? (Applause.)
My friends, it has been
said, in language more eloquent than I can command, that the history of
the Scotch-Irish race is the history of the combat against physical force
and the combat against oppression of the church by the state. I rejoice in
the little blood that flows in my veins from that stock. I rejoice in the
memories that cluster around the illustrious heroes that this country has
had, and I am glad that it is impossible for the historian to omit from
the pages of glorious deeds the actions of these thrice-glorious men.
Suppose that they could be obliterated, what would you have? The conquest
of Mexico by your own immortal Polk would be unknown, the defense of New
Orleans by Tennessee's glorious sons would be unrecorded, the great
intellectuality of Calhoun would be unknown to American youth as an
inspiration to exertions, and that fierce and fiery appeal of a Henry to
his countrymen to rush to arms would never have resounded down the ages to
awaken every man with the love to be free. It may be truly said of the
Scotch-Irish race what was said by Byron, the great poet, when he spoke of
Corinth and said:
"Many a vanquished year and
age And tempest's breath and battle's rage Have swept o'er Corinth, yet
she stands, A fortress, formed to freedom's hand."
So it is with the
Scotch-Irish race. They stand to-day as they have stood through the ages
and the centuries, defending freedom, proclaiming the freedom of the
press, freedom of religion, and freedom of the citizen. Those three
freedoms we come up to-day as Scotch-Irishmen to again proclaim the faith
of their sons as it was the faith of our fathers. (Applause.)
A peculiarity of the
Scotch-Irishman is that he is not the kind of a believer in freedom of
religion which is described so graphically, and I fear so truly, by
Artemus Ward, when in his book he praises his ancestry as follows: "The
Wards is a noble family. I believe they are descended from the Puritans,
that band of religious patriots who fled from the land of persecution to
the land of freedom, where they could not only enjoy their own religion,
but prevent every other man from enjoying his." That is the difference
between the Scotch-Irish love of freedom and the love of freedom which he
says characterized the Puritan. My friends, when I look around at the
great country that is our common blessing to-day, I feel that on its
account it is not-amiss for us to meet here and commemorate the noble
deeds by all races and in all ages. We have sixty odd million people in
these United States. We have more Jews than Jerusalem, more Irish than
Dublin, more Scotch than Edinburgh, more Germans than Berlin, and still
have more than 50,000,000 of native born, American citizens, noble sons of
noble sires from every clime and every country. Thus far we have got along
reasonably well, but the time will come when the vast public domain,
acquired by our ancestors, will not be here unoccupied as an inviting
field in times of calamity and distress that may occur in the east and the
south. My prediction is that it will then require all the patriotism of
the patriot, and all the wisdom of the sage to correctly steer this
government between all the breakers that will rise of anarchism on one
side and socialism and the disposition to control by other than patriotic
means on the other. It is characteristic of the Scotch-Irish race that in
its ranks, so far as I know, there has never been found a single anarchist
or socialist. On the contrary, there has never been found a single
Scotch-Irishman that was not able to defy power and potentate, be he king
or anybody else, who stood in the pathway of progress and of right. When I
look around in this beautiful country, I rejoice that there is a
considerable amount of Scotch-Irish blood in the southern states of the
Union ; and in what I shall say, it is not my purpose to deal with any
part of my country except as a patriot talking of a part of the whole
country, every foot of which is loved, and every foot of which every man
of the South stands ready to defend. (Applause.) I don't recur to the past
save for the lessons of wisdom and instruction and patriotism that it may
give us. Twenty odd years ago there was not in all this land, from
Kentucky to the gulf, hardly a single thoroughly fenced farm ; our homes
were desolated, our farms yielding nothing, our country depopulated. The
same spirit that had characterized our Scotch-Irish ancestry,
characterized the people of the South, and they have caused this country
to bloom as the rose, until to-day it is hardly possible for a stranger to
detect that the blighting hand of war ever fell upon it. I also speak the
truth of history when I say that at the close of the late war there was
eleven millions of people in the South, seven millions of whom could not
have bought their kettle, and yet the coal that lights the streets of
London is mined in Kentucky, and the iron that makes the screw to fasten
down the coffin lids of the dead Englishman comes from Tennessee and
Alabama, and is manufactured in Connecticut. Who is there that could have
done more than this, more than Aladdin with his lamp? You men of the South
deserve much; you were never discouraged in defeat. But a most potent
factor in the rehabilitation of the South was its glorious women. When
impartial history shall have been written, it may be truly recorded that
she who saw disaster with a smile, who encountered defeat and poverty
without any thing of encouragement; she who uprooted the thorn and planted
the rose; she, the woman of the South, deserves the praise for what has
been done; and she deserves the praise for keeping our young men in
firmness and uprightness which alone should characterize a man made in the
image of his almighty God. (Applause.) My friends, we have a glorious
country, and the reason I rejoice that there is Scotch-Irish in my veins,
is not simply because it is Scotch-Irish, but because it gives a little
more grit and a little more resolution to see the right and to have the
courage to do it, and be a better American citizen; for, after all, my
greatest ambition is to be one of the best of American citizens. But I
promised you in the beginning that I was not going to detain you.
Complying with that promise, and thanking you for your kind attention, I
give place to one who can more fittingly entertain you. (Applause.) |
