Part 39

There are other fields to conquer. The past has gone, and the future opens the door to greater responsibilities, and I trust to greater progress and prosperity. We are ascending to a clearer atmosphere, up to a higher level, where we should take a stronger position than ever before occupied by our government and people. We can no longer confine ourselves to the narrow limits that governed us as a people in the past. Much has been said of what has been the ruling policy of the past. This much, I think, is apparent to all, that the grave responsibilities of the nation are too great to be contaminated by personal, partisan, or sectional interests. Our interests are national in the highest degree. They embrace two hemispheres. They involve the welfare of a hundred millions of the human race. We are getting to that time when we shall require not only the ablest men but many of them, in every department, to protect and administer the affairs of the Nation. In those impressive lines of Holland we might exclaim:--

"God give us men; a time like this demands Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands, Men whom the lust of office does not kill, Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy, Men who possess opinions and a will, Men who have honor; men who will not lie."

The important and great questions that had to be met and that have been decided during the last few months have had a broadening influence upon the great mass of our people. It has been uplifting to every community and every phase of society. It has turned the attention of our people to the great power and responsibility of our Republic, and institutions, and true interests as a people and a nation, not only at home, but through every part of the globe. We have been enabled to give freedom to millions of the oppressed, and I believe that we shall be able to extend to them the hand of support and secure for them a full measure of justice and enlightened government. In behalf of the army and for myself, I wish to return my most heartfelt thanks for this most cordial greeting. [Applause.]

SAMUEL FREEMAN MILLER

FEDERAL JUDGES

[Speech of Samuel F. Miller, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, at the annual dinner of the State Bar Association, Albany, November 20, 1878. Justice Miller spoke in response to the toast: "The Supreme Court of the United States." With the toast was associated the following sentiment from De Tocqueville: "The peace, the prosperity, and the very existence of the Union are vested in Federal Judges."]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ASSOCIATION:--I perceive that in the meeting of this State Bar Association it has devolved upon me to inaugurate the talking on all occasions. [Laughter.] When I had supposed last evening that I should hear the eloquent voice of your then President, Judge Porter, to get up the enthusiasm which was necessary, I was surprised to find that he was absent, and that the distinguished gentleman who presided did not feel called upon to fill his place in that regard, though he did the honors and discharged the duties of the office very gracefully; and now when your own Governor, and when the President of the United States are toasted in advance of the body of which I have the honor to be a member, there is nobody with the respectful and cordial approval of the Association here to respond to the sentiments in their honor. But I have had the honor of sitting for a couple of hours in this body, and to find that although a moderate speaker myself, I had opened the way for a good deal of disposition to talk [applause]; and I trust it will be found that there will be a similar experience this evening, as I find here the Judges of the Court of Appeals and of the Supreme Court of this State, and others, who know how to speak, and who, no doubt, will speak in response to toasts.

The sentiment of De Tocqueville, to which I am in some sense called upon to respond, is one which those of you who have read his work on "Democracy in America," written forty-five years ago, must know has reference to a much smaller body of judges than now existing. Perhaps I shall entertain you a little by telling you about what are the Federal judges, and how many of them there are. We have fifty-seven or fifty-eight district judges who are Federal judges. We have nine judges of the Circuit Court of the United States; we have five judges of the District of Columbia; we have five judges of the Court of Claims; and we have nine judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, and these are all considered and treated as constitutional Federal judges. That is to say, they enter their offices as officers of the United States, and hold their offices during life or good behavior. We have, in addition to these, eight Territories, each of which has three judges, who are Federal judges, although in a different sense. They are not called constitutional judges--I do not know that that is a very correct distinction--and they are only appointed for four years. These are the Federal judges, the name which De Tocqueville applies to them.

You will excuse me if I talk for a few minutes about the court of which I have the honor to be a member--the Supreme Court of the United States. That court, if it is nothing else, certainly is a hard-working court. It is a court of which a great deal is required; and it is some solace for the hard work that we have to do, that we are supposed to be a court of a good deal of dignity and of a very high character. I hope you all concur. [Laughter and applause.] Just consider what the jurisdiction of that court is. There have come before that court often, States--States which in the old ante-bellum times, we called "Sovereign States"--and some of them did not come voluntarily. They were brought by the process of that court. And when one State of the Union has a question of juridical cognizance against another State of the Union, it must come to that court. A subpoena is sent, and it is brought into that court just like an individual, and it must, by the constitution of this country, submit its rights and territorial jurisdiction, and the right which accompanies that territorial jurisdiction, to the decision of that Supreme Court. Except the great court which sat on Mount Olympus, I know of no other which has ever had the right to decide, and compel States to submit to its decision. [Applause.] It is within our province to declare a law of one of these sovereign States, void, absolutely null, because it may be in conflict with the Constitution and laws of the United States; and that is a function of daily occurrence. What other court in the world has that power? To what other court has ever been submitted such a function as that--to declare the legislation of a State like New York, with five millions of population, and other States verging upon the same amount of population and wealth, to declare that the laws which you have passed in the ordinary discharge of your powers as legislators, are null and void?

It is a great power. We not only do that, but we decide that the laws which the Congress of the United States shall pass are void, if they conflict with that instrument under which we all live and move and have our being. Though we approach these subjects with regretful hesitation, it is a duty from which the court has never shrunk, and from which I presume it never will shrink as long as that court has its existence. [Applause.]

Gentlemen, I have told you about our high prerogatives; but just look at what we have done! see what it is that we are compelled to know or supposed to know--but I am very sorry to say we don't know at all. [Laughter.] We are supposed to take judicial cognizance of all questions of international law, of treaties, of prize laws, and of the law of nations generally. We take notice of it without its being specially pleaded. We take notice of the laws and statutes of every State of these thirty-eight States of the Union. They are not to be proved in our courts; they are not brought in issue, but the judge of the Federal courts, from the lowest one to the highest, is supposed to take judicial cognizance of all the statute laws, and to know them, of the whole thirty-eight States of the Union, and of the eight Territories besides. In addition to that, we are supposed to take notice of the common law of the country. We take notice of the equity principles, and we apply them now in separate courts, notwithstanding you have combined them in your processes in the State courts. We are supposed to understand the civil law on which Texas and Louisiana have framed their system of laws; and we are supposed to understand all the other laws, as I said, of the States, divergent and varied as they are. We do the best we can to understand them; but, gentlemen, permit me to say that, but for the bar which practices before us; but for the lawyers who come up from New York and Pennsylvania, and from the States of the West and of the South, to tell us what the law is; but for the instruction and aid which they afford to us, our duties would be but poorly fulfilled.

I take pleasure in saying, gentlemen, and it is the last thing that I shall trouble you with, that a bar or set of men superior in information, in the desire to impart that information to the court, a set of gentlemen in the legal profession more instructive in their arguments, could hardly be found in any country in the world. [Applause.] I doubt whether their equals are found, when you consider the variety of the knowledge which they must present to us, the topics which they discuss, the sources from which they derive the matter which they lay before us. I say that it is with pleasure that the court relies upon the lawyers of the country to enable it to perform its high functions.

JOHN MORLEY

LITERATURE AND POLITICS

[Speech of John Morley at the banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 3, 1890. Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Academy, said in introducing Mr. Morley: "With Literature I associate, not for the first time, the name of a master of strong and sober English, a man in whose writings the clear vision of a seeker after truth controls the generous fervor of an idealist, and of whom every appreciator of a fine literary temper must earnestly hope that the paths upon which he has so long trod with growing honor may never become wholly strangers to his feet--I mean Mr. John Morley."]

MR. PRESIDENT, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--I feel that I am more unworthy now than I was eight years ago to figure as the representative of literature before this brilliant gathering of all the most important intellectual and social interests of our time. I have not yet been able like the Prime Minister, to go round this exhibition and see the works of art that glorify your walls; but I am led by him to expect that I shall see the pictures of Liberal leaders, including M. Rochefort. [Laughter.] I am not sure whether M. Rochefort will figure as a man of letters or as a Liberal leader, but I can understand that his portrait would attract the Prime Minister because M. Rochefort is a politician who was once a Liberal leader, and who has now seen occasion to lose his faith in Parliamentary government. [Laughter and cheers.] Nor have I seen the picture of "The Flowing Tide," but I shall expect to find in that picture when I do see it a number of bathing-machines in which, not the younger generation, but the elder generation are incarcerated. [Laughter.] The younger generation, as I understand, are waiting confidently--for the arrival of the "Flowing Tide," and when it arrives, the elderly gentlemen who are incarcerated in those machines [laughter] will be only too anxious for a man and a horse to come and deliver them from their imminent peril. [Laughter and cheers.]

I thought that I detected in the last words of your speech, in proposing this toast, Mr. President, an accent of gentle reproach that any one should desert the high and pleasant ways of literature for the turmoil and the everlasting contention of public life. I do not suppose that there has ever been a time in which there was less of divorce between literature and public life than the present time. ["Hear! Hear!"] There have been in the reign of the Queen two eminent statesmen who have thrice had the distinction of being Prime Minister, and oddly enough, one of those statesmen [Lord Derby] has left behind him a most spirited version of Homer, while the other eminent statesman [William E. Gladstone]--happily still among us, still examines the legends and the significance of Homer. [Cheers.] Then when we come to a period nearer to ourselves, and look at those gentlemen who have in the last six years filled the office of Minister for Ireland, we find that no fewer than three [George Otto Trevelyan, John Morley, and Arthur Balfour] were authors of books before they engaged in the very ticklish business of the government of men. ["Hear! Hear!"] And one of these three Ministers for Ireland embarked upon his literary career--which promised ample distinction--under the editorial auspices of another of the three. We possess in one branch of the Legislature the author of the most fascinating literary biography in our language. We possess also another writer whose range of knowledge and of intellectual interest is so great that he has written the most important book upon the Holy Roman Empire and the most important book upon the American Commonwealth [James Bryce]. [Cheers.]

The first canon in literature was announced one hundred years ago by an eminent Frenchman who said that in literature it is your business to have preferences but no exclusions. In politics it appears to be our business to have very stiff and unchangeable preferences, and exclusion is one of the systematic objects of our life. [Laughter and cheers.] In literature, according to another canon, you must have a free and open mind and it has been said: "Never be the prisoner of your own opinions." In politics you are very lucky if you do not have the still harder fate--(and I think that the gentlemen on the President's right hand will assent to that as readily as the gentlemen who sit on his left) of being the prisoner of other people's opinions. [Laughter.] Of course no one can doubt for a moment that the great achievements of literature--those permanent and vital works which we will never let die--require a devotion as unceasing, as patient, as inexhaustible, as the devotion that is required for the works that adorn your walls; and we have luckily in our age--though it may not be a literary age--masters of prose and masters of verse. No prose more winning has ever been written than that of Cardinal Newman; no verse finer, more polished, more melodious has ever been written than that of Lord Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne. [Cheers.]

It seems to me that one of the greatest functions of literature at this moment is not merely to produce great works, but also to protect the English language--that noble, that most glorious instrument--against those hosts of invaders which I observe have in these days sprung up. I suppose that every one here has noticed the extraordinary list of names suggested lately in order to designate motion by electricity [laughter]; that list of names only revealed what many of us had been observing for a long time--namely, the appalling forces that are ready at a moment's notice to deface and deform our English tongue. [Laughter.] These strange, fantastic, grotesque, and weird titles open up to my prophetic vision a most unwelcome prospect. I tremble to see the day approach--and I am not sure that it is not approaching--when the humorists of the headlines of American journalism shall pass current as models of conciseness, energy, and color of style. [Cheers and laughter.]

Even in our social speech this invasion seems to be taking place in an alarming degree and I wonder what the Pilgrim Fathers of the seventeenth century would say if they could hear their pilgrim children of the nineteenth century who come over here, on various missions, and among others, "On the make." [Laughter.] This is only one of the thousand such like expressions which are invading the Puritan simplicity of our tongue. I will only say that I should like, for my own part, to see in every library and in every newspaper office that admirable passage in which Milton, who knew so well how to handle both the great instrument of prose and the nobler instrument of verse--declared that next to the man who furnished courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy he placed the man who should enlist small bands of good authors to resist that barbarism which invades the minds and the speech of men in methods and habits of speaking and writing.

I thank you for having allowed me the honor of saying a word as to the happiest of all callings and the most imperishable of all arts. [Loud cheers.]

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY

THE POETS' CORNER

[Speech of John Lothrop Motley, United States Minister to England at the eighty-fourth annual banquet of the Royal Literary Fund, London, May 28, 1873. The Right-Hon. William E. Gladstone, First Minister of the Crown, was chairman. The Bishop of Derry proposed the toast, "The Literature of the United States, and Mr. Motley," which was loudly cheered.]

MR. CHAIRMAN, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I can scarcely find fitting words to express my gratitude for the warm and genial manner in which the toast of "American Literature" has been received by this distinguished assembly. I wish that the honor of responding to it had been placed in worthier hands. Two at least of our most eminent men of letters I thought were in England, or near it--one, that most original, subtle, poetical and graceful of thinkers and essayists, Mr. Emerson [cheers]; the other, one of our most distinguished poets and prose-writers, second to none in the highest spheres of imagination and humor: Mr. Lowell. [Cheers.] I had hoped to meet them both, but I look in vain for their friendly and familiar faces. In their absence, I venture to return thanks most sincerely, but briefly, for the eloquent and sympathetic words with which the distinguished prelate has spoken of our literature. I do so in behalf of the eminent poets and prose-writers in every department of literature and science, many of whose names tremble on my lips, but the long roll-call of which I will not enumerate, who are the living illustrators of our literature, and who it is a gratification to know are almost as familiar and highly appreciated in the old land of our forefathers as they are at home [cheers]; but I for one like to consider them all as fellow-citizens in the great English-speaking Republic of letters--where all are brothers, not strangers to each other. And as an illustration of this, I believe that it is not long since one of our famous poets whose exquisite works are familiar in every palace and every cottage all over the world where the English language is spoken--Mr. Longfellow--was recently requested to preside at one of your meetings. [Cheers.]

I can produce nothing new on that great subject, which seems the inevitable one for an American on such an occasion as this, the international bond of a common language, a common literature, and centuries of common history and tradition, which connects those two great nations, the United Empire and the United Republic. May the shadows of both never grow less and may that international bond strengthen its links every year! [Cheers.] What is the first hallowed spot in the Transatlantic pilgrimage of every true American? What is the true Mecca of his heart? Not the hoary tombs of the Pharaohs, and the one hundred gated cities of the Nile. Not the Acropolis and the Parthenon, the plains of Marathon, the Pass of Thermopylæ, thrilling as they are with heroic and patriotic emotion; not the Forum and the Coliseum and the triumphal arches of Rome. No; the pious pilgrim from the Far West seeks a sequestered, old-fashioned little town, in the heart of the most delicious rural scenery that even old England can boast; he walks up a quiet, drowsy, almost noiseless street, with quaint old houses, half brick, half timber, hardly changed of aspect since they looked out on the Wars of the Roses. He comes to an ancient, ivy-mantled tower hard by a placid, silvery stream on which a swan is ever sailing; he passes through a pleached alley under a Gothic gateway of the little church, and bends in reverence before a solitary tomb, for in that tomb repose the ashes of Shakespeare. [Cheers.] We claim our share in every atom of that consecrated dust. Our forefathers, who first planted the seeds of a noble civilization in New England and Virginia, were contemporaries and countrymen of the Swan of Avon. So long as we all have an undivided birthright in that sublimest of human intellects, and can enjoy, as none others can, those unrivalled masterpieces, Americans and Englishmen can never be quite foreigners to each other though seas between as broad have rolled since the day when that precious dust wore human clothing. [Cheers.]

And what is the next resting-place in our pilgrim's progress--the pilgrim of Outre-Mer? Surely that stately and beautiful pile which we have all seen in our dreams long before we looked upon it with the eyes of flesh, time-honored Westminster Abbey. I can imagine no purer intellectual pleasure for an American than when he first wanders through those storied aisles, especially if he have the privilege which many of our countrymen have enjoyed, of being guided there by the hand of one whose exquisite urbanity and kindliness are fit companions to his learning and his intellect, the successor of the ancient Abbot, the historian of the Abbey, the present distinguished Dean of Westminster [Dean Stanley], to whom we have listened with such pleasure to-night. [Cheers.] And it will be in the Poets' Corner that we shall ever linger the longest. Those statues, busts and mural inscriptions are prouder trophies than all the banners from the most ensanguined battle-fields that the valor of England has ever won, and with what a wealth of intellect is that nation endowed which after the centuries of immortal names already enshrined there has had the proud although most melancholy honor of adding in one decade--scarcely more than ten years--the names of Macaulay, Grote, Dickens, Thackeray, and Lytton? [Cheers.] They are our contemporaries, not our countrymen; but we cannot afford to resign our claim to some portion of their glory as illustrators of our common language. And I would fain believe that you take a fraternal interest in the fame of those whom we too have lost, and who were our especial garland--Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, Everett, Hawthorne, and Prescott.