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degrading a righteous cause, aimed a frightful blow at liberty, the liberty of intercourse between citizens and their chief magistrate, when he accepted hospitality and welcome to murder the most eminent and best loved of the people.

The Presidency did not change or elevate the Tribune. The dignity of the office was never better sustained, but its majesty was concealed. Familiar speech and caressing touch were there for all, and with them an indefinable reserve of power and of the respect due the office which kept the dullest and most audacious within rigid limits of propriety and decorum. The vast majority are lonesome in crowds; he could not bear to be alone. His pleasure in the long journeys across the continent was when the train stopped and the whole population surged around him. When the local committee, proud of the palaces of their wealth, their public buildings, art galleries and libraries, tried to show them, he cared not, and demanded to be taken to the wharfs where the fleets of commerce were loading and unloading the interchanges of the country and the world, to the mills, the factories, the furnaces and the mines. He did not like the pomp of glittering parades, but the farmer afield with plow or scythe or sower or mower or reaper, or a procession of artisans hurrying to or contentedly leaving their work, carried him to joyous heights of enthusiasm and happiness.

The prolonged and financial and industrial depression which preceded his election was the opportunity he at once saw and seized. The slogan he had sounded as a citizen, as an orator, and as a Congressman, now rang from the White House with a clarion clearness which aroused the country. It was to him the triumphal hour of faith and works. In his impatience for the trial of his favorite theories, he did his best to prevent the war with Spain. He detested war and he shrank with horror from its cruelties and with dread from the interruptions of industries it usually entails. When the country would not wait his efforts for peace he pushed preparations for war and forced the fighting with a wise and resistless energy which recalled the best efforts of Carnot and of Stanton. His favorite recollection of the civil war was not the many bloody and heroic struggles in which he bore an honorable part, not the promotions which came to him for gallantry in action, but that in the heat of battle at Antietam he had loaded his commissary wagon with food and coffee, and calmly driving amidst the storm of shot and shell, had brought succor and relief to the survivors of his comrades who had been fighting steadily for many hours. His supreme satisfaction in the result of the Spanish war, more than its wonderful conquests, was its bloodless victories.

The story of government is a pathetic recital of the neglected opportunities of statesmen. The crisis passes which wisely turned would have added to the glory and greatness of the country. The United States has been singularly rich in men for emergencies. Though lacking the heredity, experience and training of the Old World, they have been illustrious examples of wonderful achievement. Washington had no predecessor and left no successor. Hamilton provided the principles for a strong government with no precedents to guide him, and from them grew the Constitution and Union which John Marshall perfected by his matchless decisions, Webster made popular by his majestic eloquence, and Lincoln saved by rare native gifts and unequalled genius for guiding a nation through the perils of civil war and the destructive forces of evolution.

The triumphant issue of the war with Spain lifted our country in a hundred days from the isolation of the Western Hemisphere and the confines of a continent to the responsibilities of Colonial Empire and a foremost position in the family of nations among the great powers of Europe. The President had never been abroad, never given any attention to foreign affairs or the government of alien peoples, and for forty years had concentrated his mind upon purely domestic questions. Action must be taken, immediately, or we had to acknowledge that our institutions were wanting in elasticity for the situation and in the essential elements of sovereignty which constitue government, and we as a people. were unequal to the peaceful administration of the results of the victories of our Army and Navy. With the calmness of conscious powers, without effort which might excite the public and create financial distrust and industrial paralysis, the President so wisely formulated measures for the pacification of Cuba and preparations for its independence, and for the government of the Philippines, Hawaii and Guam that the wost delicate and difficult task of creating constitutions and institutions under untried conditions seemed to an astonished and satisfied country to be the ordinary processes of peaceful administration.

William McKinley entered upon the Presidency at a period of greater distress in every branch of industry and employment than had ever before been experienced. He died when prosperity had assumed proportions in productions, in domestic trade and foreign commerce, in the accumulation of National and individual wealth and in the happy condition of wage-earners, beyond the dreams of the most enthusiastic optimist in the development of our country. He assumed the administration of the government when it was not reckoned diplomatically or industrially by the Cabinets of the Old World and left it to his successor when for

the same Cabinets the leading discussion is how to avert what they are pleased to call "the American peril." Happily for him before the dread summons came, the realization of his life work, his aspirations and his hopes were complete. The assassin struck him down at the moment when the splendors of the fruition of his labors were crystallized by his death into a halo of immortality.

ADDRESS OF

Hon. TIMOTHY L. WOODRUFF.

The President: Ladies and Gentlemen: The two great political centres of the country, Washington and Albany, are represented here this evening. We have already listened to a distinguished member of the Federal Senate; we will now be addressed by the President of the Senate of the State of New York, Lieut. Governor Woodruff (Great Applause). He is a Republican of the aggressive and untiring sort and he speaks as well as he presides. Lieut. Governor Woodruff (Cheers and Applause).

TOAST-REPUBLICAN PARTY.

Mr. Chairman-Ladies who have shown your patriotism for our party and our country by gracing this occasion by your presence, fellow Republicans and fellow-members of the Republican Club:

To me has been assigned to-night the toast, "The Republican Party." If there has been drafted into the post-prandial exercises of this Lincoln birthday dinner of the Republican Club of the city of New York, the greatest forensic power in all the land, it would have been inadequate to respond to a sentiment which for half a century has held the attention of the American people; to the support of whose candidates and principles for forty years have rallied a vast majority of the citizens of the Republic, a name dear to the heart of every member of this Republican Club.

It has occurred to me that I may have been invited to attend this banquet and respond to the toast "The Republican Party," because as President of the Senate I am only permitted to talk a little, while had a senator or a member of Assembly been invited he would probably have talked on forever. You know New York State was once thus described by an enthusiastic resident of the commonwealth: "Here we have the finest air to breathe in all the universe, and if our birds and trees could speak and our legislators be silent we would have the finest conversation

also." But really is not the legislator to be commended for his conservative conversational attention to legislation? How else can he defeat the mortgage tax bill, the charities bill, the divorce bill or the excise bill? He can only oppose them by talking against them. He cannot apply Jeromism to the chief executive and put a stop to further talk about a bill which emanates from the executive chamber by throwing the Governor out of the third story window of the capitol.

These public banquets have become so frequent of late as to lead me to suggest to Senator Depew that he change his statement that a man's life is divided into two parts, the first to getting his name in the newspapers and the last to keeping it out (oh, no, it wasn't Senator Depew who said that); but I want that definition changed to this: A man's life is divided into two parts, the first part devoted to an effort to get an invitation to one of these dinners and the last part to dodging them. Why, do you know, I have had so many of these dinners since election that I feel like the Long Island girl (from away down the island, not from Brooklyn) who ate so many clams that her bosom rose and fell with the tide.

I have had another kind of indigestion lately which has quite unfitted me for proper preparation for this splendid occasion. It is said that a watched pot does not boil. Nevertheless, the pot of gossip and slander in the borough of Brooklyn has boiled and boiled until it has boiled over, while we were watching it most carefully to see that it did not boil at all-this to the everlasting shame of certain would-be Republicans whose energies should be bent to safeguarding and not destroying the character of "The Republican Party." Oh, that we had in our party to-day more of the wisdom that actuated the acts of Abraham Lincoln, who did not tell everything to everybody and yet offended no one, as was the case when being asked by a statesman who thought he had a right to know what was the destination of a certain fleet that had sailed under sealed orders, replied, "The ships have gone to sea."

I fear I have subordinated the patriotic spirit which should animate this occasion to this reference to the conditions which surround us at present, but as it was impossible for the men of the literary and martial ages to cope with the practical affairs of life, so do we find it difficult in this commercial and political era to bring ourselves in harmony with the memories of an age that is past. It is difficult for me, even despite the fact that as a child it was my proud privilege to be much in the presence of him whose birthday we are here to-night to celebrate.

It is of the greatest benefit to the American people to observe these anniversaries, full of the inspiration that flows from the lives

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