we must fight, let us fight for ourselves; if we must slaughter, let us slaughter our oppressors; if we must die, let us die under the open sky, by the bright waters, in noble, honorable battle." NEW ENGLAND CHARACTER By JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE, Journalist, Statesman, Author; Member of Congress from Maine, 1863-76; Senator, 1876-81; Secretary of State, 1881, 1889-1892. Born in West Brownsville, Penn., 1830; died in Washington, D. C., 1893. Taken from a speech made at a banquet of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 23, 1878. Mr. President, I am not ashamed to say in any presence that in the settlement of this continent and the shaping and moulding of its institutions the leading place, the chief merit, belongs to New England. Why, every chapter of its history is weighty with momentous events. A small number came in 1620; there was no immigration to speak of till 1630; there was none after 1640. And the twenty-one thousand men that came in those brief years are the progenitors of a race that includes one-third of the people of the United States of America. They are the progenitors of a race of people twice as numerous as all who spoke the English language in the world when they came to these shores. The tyrannical father of Frederick the Great said to his tutor: "Instruct this young boy in history; do not dwell much on the ancients, but let him know everything that has happened in the last one hundred and fifty years. And I submit to you, Mr. President, that the great event which has happened in the last one hundred and fifty years—not to go back to 1620, the cause of which was planted then-has been the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race in the world. As I have said, not seven millions of people spoke the tongue when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth; not seventeen millions spoke it when the American Revolution was born. In this one hundred years-mark it well-great has been the progress with other nations. The German Empire has been reformed, and is stronger and firmer than it ever existed before; Russia, springing from semi-barbarism, has come to be a great and first-class power; Italy has been born again, and promises something of its ancient grandeur; France has fallen and risen again, and fallen and again risen under the aid and inspiration of republican energy and patriotism. And yet, with all this progress of all these countries, the one great fact of the last hundred years is that when the Revolution of the American colonies was fought, not seventeen million spoke the English tongue, and to-day one hundred million speak it. But We are in the habit of deploring the hardships of the men who settled New England, and in deploring their hardships we are in the habit of alluding to them as a poor and friendless and downcast race of men. They were anything else. They had the nerve and courage to endure hardship. they were a class of men the like of which never before and never since emigrated from any land. They were men of intelligence and learning; they were men of property. They were men of education and large experience in affairs; they were men who had in the literature of that day Milton and Locke and Lightfoot; they were men who had in the ministry John Robinson and Brewster and Davenport; they were men who had in statesmanship Cromwell and Hampden and Pym; they were men who, in all the great departments of civil polity and in all the great features of personal and individual character at that day, led the van in the English race. And when we wonder at what has been done in New England we wonder without knowledge, for those men brought with them all the elements of success that has since crowned their efforts. And they brought with them one thing which has stuck pretty well to the end with them and their descendants, and that was the belief that if you set a principle that is founded on truth in motion it will go through. They believed, in the language of one of their most eloquent men, of that an army of principles will penetrate where an army men cannot enter. The Rhine cannot stop it nor the ocean arrest its progress. It will march to the horizon of the world, and it will conquer. MEAGHER'S DEFENSE BY THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER (Mäʼher), Irish Orator, Brigadier-General in the United States Army. Born in Waterford, Ireland, 1823; died near Fort Benton, Montana, 1867. In October, 1848, after the passage of the treason-felony act in Ireland, Meagher was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. "The sentence was afterward commuted to banishment for life, and on July 9, 1849, he was transported to Van Diemen's Land, but he escaped in 1852 and took refuge in the United States." A jury of my countrymen have found me guilty of the crime for which I stood indicted. For this I entertain not the slightest feeling of resentment towards them. Influenced, as they must have been, by the charge of the Lord Chief Justice, they could have found no other verdict. What of that charge? Any strong observations on it I feel sincerely would ill befit the solemnity of this scene; but I would earnestly beseech of you, my Lord,-you who preside on that bench,—when the passions and prejudices of this hour have passed away, to appeal to your own conscience, and to ask of it, was your charge as it ought to have been, impartial and indifferent between the subject and the crown? I My Lords, you may deem this language unbecoming in me, and perhaps it will seal my fate. But I am here to speak the truth, whatever it may cost; I am here to regret nothing I have ever done,—to retract nothing I have ever said. am here to crave, with no lying lip, the life I consecrate to the liberty of my country. Far from it, even here-here, where the thief, the libertine, the murderer, have left their footprints in the dust; here on this spot, where the shadows of death surround me, and from which I see my early grave in an unanointed soil opened to receive me,-even here, encircled by these terrors, the hope which has beckoned me to the perilous sea upon which I have been wrecked still consoles, animates, enraptures me. No; I do not despair of my poor old country,—her peace, her liberty, her glory. For that country, I can do no more than bid her hope. To lift this island up; to make her a benefactor to humanity, instead of being the meanest beggar in the world; to restore her to her native powers and her ancient constitution,—this has been my ambition, and this ambition has been my crime. Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains this crime, and justifies it. Judged by that history, I am no criminal,-I deserve no punishment. Judged by that history, the treason of which I stand convicted loses all its guilt, is sanctioned as a duty, will be ennobled as a sacrifice. With these sentiments, my Lord, I await the sentence of the court. Having done what I felt to be my duty, having spoken what I felt to be the truth,- -as I have done on every other occasion of my short career, -I now bid farewell to the country of my birth, my passion, and my death; the country whose misfortunes have invoked my sympathies; whose factions I have sought to still; whose intellect I have prompted to a lofty aim; whose freedom has been my fatal dream. I offer to that country, as a proof of the love I bear her, and the sincerity with which I thought and spoke and struggled for her freedom, the life of a young heart, and with that life all the hopes, the honors, the endearments, of a happy and an honored home. Pronounce, then, my Lords, the sentence which the laws direct, and I will be prepared to hear it. I trust I shall be prepared to meet its execution. I hope to be able, with a pure heart and perfect composure, to appear before a higher tribunal, a tribunal where a Judge of infinite goodness as well as of justice will preside, and where, my Lords, many, many of the judgments of this world will be reversed. A CITIZEN'S RESPONSIBILITY By WILLIAM MCKINLEY, Lawyer, Statesman; Member of Congress, 1876-90; Governor of Ohio, 1891-95; President of the United States, 1897. Born in Niles, Ohio, 1843. From a speech delivered at Canton, Ohio, May 30, 1894. Reprinted, by permission of the publishers, from "McKinley's Masterpieces," published by L. C. Page & Co., Boston. Sumter and Appomattox! What a flood of memories these names excite! How they come unbidden to every soldier as he contemplates the great events of the war! The one marked the beginning, the other the close, of the great struggle. At one the shot was fired which threatened this Union and the downfall of liberty. The other proclaimed peace and wrote in history that the machinations which inaugurated war to establish a government with slavery as its corner-stone had failed. The one was the commencement of a struggle which drenched the nation in blood for four years; the other was its end and the beginning of a reunited country which has lasted now for twenty-nine years, and which, God grant, may last forever and forever more, blazing the pathway of freedom to the races of man everywhere, and loved by all the peoples of the world! The one marked the wild rush of mad passion; the other was the restoration of the cool judgment, disciplined by the terrible ordeal of four years of bloody war. Patriotism, justice, and righteousness triumphed. The Republic which God had ordained withstood the shock of battle, and you and your comrades were the willing instruments in the hands of that divine Power that guides nations which love and serve Him. Howells, thirty-two years ago, expressed the simple and sublime faith of the soldier, and the prophecy of the outcome of the war, in words which burn in my soul whenever I pass in review the events of that struggle. He said: "Where are you going, soldiers, |