to be feted–when you have come here not to do honor to hereditary
privilege and ancient lineage, but to do reverence to mere moral
excellence and elemental veracity-and, dear me, how old it seems to make
me! I look around me and I see three or four persons I have known so
many, many years. I have known Mr. Secretary Hay–John Hay, as the
nation and the rest of his friends love to call him–I have known John
Hay and Tom Reed and the Reverend Twichell close upon thirty-six years.
Close upon thirty-six years I have known those venerable men. I have
known Mr. Howells nearly thirty-four years, and I knew Chauncey Depew
before he could walk straight, and before he learned to tell the truth.
Twenty-seven years ago, I heard him make the most noble and eloquent and
beautiful speech that has ever fallen from even his capable lips. Tom
Reed said that my principal defect was inaccuracy of statement. Well,
suppose that that is true. What’s the use of telling the truth all the
time? I never tell the truth about Tom Reed–but that is his defect,
truth; he speaks the truth always. Tom Reed has a good heart, and he has
a good intellect, but he hasn’t any judgment. Why, when Tom Reed was
invited to lecture to the Ladies’ Society for the Procreation or
Procrastination, or something, of morals, I don’t know what it was–
advancement, I suppose, of pure morals–he had the immortal indiscretion
to begin by saying that some of us can’t be optimists, but by judiciously
utilizing the opportunities that Providence puts in our way we can all be
bigamists. You perceive his limitations. Anything he has in his mind he
states, if he thinks it is true. Well, that was true, but that was no
place to say it–so they fired him out.
A lot of accounts have been settled here tonight for me; I have held
grudges against some of these people, but they have all been wiped out by
the very handsome compliments that have been paid me. Even Wayne
MacVeagh–I have had a grudge against him many years. The first time I
saw Wayne MacVeagh was at a private dinner-party at Charles A. Dana’s,
and when I got there he was clattering along, and I tried to get a word
in here and there; but you know what Wayne MacVeagh is when he is
started, and I could not get in five words to his one–or one word to his
five. I struggled along and struggled along, and–well, I wanted to tell
and I was trying to tell a dream I had had the night before, and it was a
remarkable dream, a dream worth people’s while to listen to, a dream
recounting Sam Jones the revivalist’s reception in heaven. I was on a
train, and was approaching the celestial way-station–I had a through
ticket–and I noticed a man sitting alongside of me asleep, and he had
his ticket in his hat. He was the remains of the Archbishop of
Canterbury; I recognized him by his photograph. I had nothing against
him, so I took his ticket and let him have mine. He didn’t object–he
wasn’t in a condition to object–and presently when the train stopped at
the heavenly station–well, I got off, and he went on by request–but
there they all were, the angels, you know, millions of them, every one
with a torch; they had arranged for a torch-light procession; they were
expecting the Archbishop, and when I got off they started to raise a
shout, but it didn’t materialize. I don’t know whether they were
disappointed. I suppose they had a lot of superstitious ideas about the
Archbishop and what he should look like, and I didn’t fill the bill, and
I was trying to explain to Saint Peter, and was doing it in the German
tongue, because I didn’t want to be too explicit. Well, I found it was
no use, I couldn’t get along, for Wayne MacVeagh was occupying the whole
place, and I said to Mr. Dana, “What is the matter with that man? Who is
that man with the long tongue? What’s the trouble with him, that long,