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Mr. President, Ladies, and
Gentlemen: I feel that I am performing a patriotic duty to the Society of
which I am a member in appearing before you to-night in the role of a
speaker; for not until I entered the hall this evening was an intimation
given to me that I would be called upon to express any sentiments in the
presence of this audience, but now the task so difficult to accomplish is
given me to take the place of one who was expected to be here but has not
appeared.
Ladies and gentlemen,
though I am a stranger within the gates of Atlanta, there is an
association tender and sweet that binds me to your city. Out yonder in
that silent abode of the dead which is near your limits there rested for
twenty-one years the dust of one that was very near and very dear to me,
one who had given his life for the cause he loved, and who, far distant
from home, was buried beneath the sod of Georgia, where he lay until
loving hands carried him back and laid him to rest where the sun shines
bright on his old Kentucky home.
I am here to-night meeting
friends from all parts of the Union on an occasion when state lines have
been wiped out and political parties forgotten in the celebration and
glorification of the fact that we all sprang from a noble ancestry of whom
we are justly proud. A gentleman once said to me: "I am not Scotch-Irish
nor Huguenot, neither French nor English, Spanish nor German, but I am an
American citizen." There was, however, in the covert criticism of that
remark but little wisdom; and it showed that the speaker had not traced
back the streams of human action to the great wellsprings from which they
flow; that he knew but little of the motives that move men's souls,
whether at home or in public, whether in war or in peace. Once while
traveling in Texas I met a gentleman, older than myself, but still young,
who was then occupying an honorable position in the community in which he
lived. In the course of a conversation I learned that he was from
Kentucky. Then came some exchanges of confidence and of friendship which
were more intimate than might have been justified on ordinary occasions
from so short an acquaintance; and he told me something of his life and of
the temptations he had undergone. "But," said he, "my mother when I was
young used constantly to say, 'My boy, remember that you are a Baxter,'
and," he continued, "although I have often been where I would blush to
admit, although sometimes my deeds have been those that the light should
not fall upon, yet I have never forgotten that I was and am a Baxter." And
so the memory of noble ancestry, as our learned Vice President, Dr.
Macintosh, said last year in Louisville, the recollection of
responsibilities to an ancestry of whom we are proud, never debased, never
unfitted any man or woman that ever lived for the highest duties of home
or of public life. [Applause.] No one can contemplate the sublime, no man
or woman can feel through his heart and soul the thrill of a generous
emotion or a noble sentiment, I care not by what it may be awakened,
whether by the contemplation of the glorious present or a study of the
magnificent past, without being better for it; and no one can recollect
those who have gone before, and to whom he should be true, without being
truer to himself and truer to them.
In the cultivation of the
mind this principle is recognized, then why not in that of the soul? To
the lawyer who would become imbued with the love of his profession we say:
Go read the life of Marshall, of Story, and of Kent. To him who would give
life to canvas and make cold marble speak, we say: Go, cross the great
waters, pass through the British museum, walk through the salons of Paris,
and there, in the presence of the works of the great masters, study and
contemplate and drink into your souls the genius of Raphael, of Michael
Angelo, and! of Phidias. To him who would call forth the sweetest melodies
of sound, we say: Listen, whenever you can, to the swell of rapturous
music, to the grand resounding harmonies of Beethoven, of Mozart, and of
Mendlesshon. And so to-night I say to him who would learn the great
lessons of life, to him who would learn the price of civil and; religious
liberty: Go over to the moors and fens of Scotland, cross to the North of
Ireland, and stand beneath the walls of historic Derry, turn back the page
of time, read down its course for two hundred years, study the history of
the Scotch-Irish race, and learn how sublime a thing it is to suffer and
be strong. [Applause.]
My friends, for one, I
believe not only in the pleasure, but in the practical good that springs
from the commemoration of the deeds of noble dead; and I would not for all
I possess or ever expect to have wipe out from my memory impressions that
have been made by the contemplation of nobility, in whatever form it may
have appeared.
If Athens could have kept
before her the scenes of Salamis and of Marathon, if she could have
preserved before the eyes of her citizens the figure of Leonidas and his
immortal band, the words of Demosthenes would not have fallen on deaf
ears. Could her citizens have remembered the days of Xerxes when they
withstood the Persian hosts, they would never have bowed in submission
before the sword of Philip. Had the Roman people kept bright in memory the
lives of Cato and of Regulus, had Roman maids and matrons remembered the
story of Lucretia, the Vandals and the Goths had not found in the Eternal
City so easy a prey. It was not outside arms, but the internal weakness of
Rome that caused her fall. What the great Carthaginian, backed by the
grandest army of antiquity, failed to accomplish for the city by the Tiber
was worked out within her own walls, when her Prętorian Guard subjugated
the Roman Senate and filled the chair of the Cęsars. And so here, my
friends, to-night I would that I could call before us the forms of the
great dead whose histories we celebrate, that we might stand here in the
presence of that sublime past, and on the altar of their memories take an
oath that we will be true to them. [Applause.] |
